I’ve always had a sort of idea but now I’ve wikiepedia’d and I really, properly know.
And if you don’t follow my twitters you won’t know why I was prompted to find out what a levee is today but I bet you could guess anyway, let’s face it levees don’t come up all that often in your normal UK average day to day lives.
Not at all sure where this morning went really, given we didn’t leave the house until 11am but I’d like to pretend I was occupied with constructive, productive pursuits, even though I suspect I was mostly messing about online while the children ate sugar puffs and made a mountain in the hall using the car mat. I know I did some more of my personal pages for my american chicken forum – I’m loving being part of a whole new community of internet folk who probably don’t really exist outside of my laptop. 😆
We left home at 11am to go to Ali’s house, taking with us the set of fun blox that we borrowed from Freya about 18 months ago. We’ve had two sets of our own since kessingland 2006 but never managed to coordinate visiting Ali’s house at the same time as remembering to take the blox with us. It did mean that we forgot to take bread with us though as we are only capable of remembering to take one thing a-visiting at a time. The roads next to Ali’s road have all recently been made parking meter parking only which seems to have meant that all the cars which used to park in those roads have moved into Ali’s road. Also there is lots of building work going on in at least 3 houses down their road so there were various vans parked about the place, which meant we drove round for about 10 minutes trying to find somewhere to park that didn’t require either paying for it or getting public transport to take us back to Ali’s 😆 We eventually found somewhere at the end of their road and in we went.
Very quickly into initial conversations Davies asked me something which I answered with ‘a long, long time ago….’ which, as I blogged about just the other day, I can’t say or type without breaking into American Pie. So once I’d answered Davies Ali and I indulged that, first with a minor singalong and then with all out 8 minutes 32 seconds of pure enjoyment of all the magic that is Don McLean by Ali putting American Pie on their fancy pc stylee music and video entertainment doobree. Ali knows more of the words than me but we had a great 8 minutes and 32 seconds of singing along and encouraging the children to do so too with lots of calls of ‘Everybody….’ for the chorus. Of course they didn’t join in, they mostly look plain scared but we felt great :). After that I popped out to the shop to get the bread. I opened Ali’s front door and stepped out with a very gutsy ‘the three men I admired the most….’ and realised that Ali’s next door neighbour was standing outside her house chatting with another woman, both of whom had paused their conversation when I exited singing. I had a brief internal struggle as to how to play my next move – I could blush, put my head down and pretend I hadn’t been singing, turn to them with arms open wide and urge them to join in, or lower my voice slightly and murmur the next line into the wind. I went with the third option and walked away quickly humming about the last train for the coast. 😆
We had a lovely afternoon at Ali’s. The children spent a fair bit of time off playing so we got to chat lots, we had lunch, Ali bestowed many gifts upon us and then foolishly, buoyed up by the success of their independant playing and possibly still riding the crest of thinking we were lonely teenage bronking bucks, we donned our pink carnations and drove our pick up truck (well ok we walked) to the P.A.R.K. Now we did the P.A.R.K. about this time last year and frankly it was a total disaster. This time Ali had prepared for it really very thoroughly. She had a rucksack with cornettos in. And water. But no, it was not to be. The very notion that the children would take their ice creams and play on the dedicated play equipment whilst allowing us to sit on a bench and eat our ice creams was so not to be. We had discussion on ice cream flavours available, a tantrum about being pushed on the swing, several handfuls of grass showers, a small body with very big ears squashed inbetween us on the bench (because the conversations of two grown women clearly outrank the conversations of a 6 year old and a 4.5 year old who mainly talk about ponies and princesses). So we gave up on that idea and headed for home, via the local shop where Ali bought them all a magazine each.
The magazine proved a very cunning plan – Scarlett sat and coloured in the ponies pictures in hers, Davies looked at the pictures in his Doctor Who one – mostly the ones of merchandise available 🙄 and we were inspired to put a Doctor Who episode on. My casting vote of one with The Ecccleston and Captain Jack won out so we had lots of ‘Are you my Mummy?’ punctuating our final conversations along with Freya giving me demonstrations in building things with fun blox. 😆
Home for the children to put on Shrek x box and play that together really nicely for about 2 hours. Ady came home and somewhere an evening has disappeared.
I’m working tomorrow morning instead of afternoon so I have a plan to go to bed very soon. I’ve got a list of the 60 odd items we have dotted around the house belonging to the library which I want to take at least half of back tomorrow.
It was a lovely afternoon except for P A R K trauma, thanks for your help with Plan C for current stress-inducing stuff.
Still LOLling at the stepping out singing and kind of wish you had gone for the second option and turned my whole street into a musical.
Educational footnote: Levees did come up a bit a couple of years ago with that terrible New Orleans flood as they had been left undermaintained I think.
Comment by Ali — 04 August 2007 @ 9:20 am