One word? When seven would do…

Another day, another free event in the Goddard household! 🙂 I think I may have mentioned this before, but as I’m only repeating myself for which I cannot be sued and it gives Chris something to snigger about I’ll do it anyway, but it really is amazing how much free stuff is laid on when you care to cast around and look for it. Working at the library has been a massive source of information for me about what’s happening locally, and not so locally from the Pagham Harbour beach beasties event to the Noisy Kids concert – and a month or so ago I spied a poster about Green Diggers – the children’s wing of the local, council run gardening club so I sent off the application form for Davies and Scarlett and in the post came a kids fork and trowel, some seeds and membership cards and an Usborne gardening book. Last week I got an email from them to say the first Green Diggers event would be held today at a local garden centre.

I was talking to my boss yesterday about how different people view the library service in different ways. Some of our borrowers are full of praise, filled with awe and wonder at this FREE service open to all for borrowing 20 books for three weeks, all the top titles, reservations that you can be emailed or phoned to say are in, very cheap dvds, cds and the unabridged audio books on cassette and cd that you simply can’t buy anywhere else. Other people are aware that in the same way as streetlighting, the police force, state education and refuse collection this is a service that we pay for, in our council tax and whilst all this may be great value for money and it’s a bit odd that more people aren’t making use of these services, we are the consumer of these services rather than a recipient. I sort of sway between the two really – I’ve always been a user of the library service, since childhood – one of the first things I did when we moved to Manchester along with registering with the local gp was to join the local library. But I still think it’s a great service. Bloody hell, I’m almost a socialist! 😆

Anyway, back to today. We did our usual trick of scrambling out of bed with moments to spare to get dressed, fed and out of the house but managed to be bang on time arriving at the garden centre at 930am. It is a garden centre my Mum used to go to lots when we were kids so it brought back all sorts of memories walking across the carpark, as I’ve not been there since I was probably not much older than Davies but it didn’t appear to have changed much. We were ushered into an area with cacti where there were already about 10 children waiting – I guess there were 20 or so children altogether in the end. Odd how most of them were in the 3-5 age range even though the green diggers is for under 12s. I would say with the exception of two older boys Davies and Scarlett were the oldest children there. What a shame that parents of 3 plus children seem to lose them to the education system and become so less involved with them, even in holiday time :(. I’m slightly kicking myself now for not responding more enthusiastically to the friendly approaches of one of the other mothers, but I’m a bit out of practise of making friends with ‘normal’ people 😆 I was also amazed at the couple of parents who dumped and ran, despite the literature being very specific that no childcare would be on offer and parents would need to remain on site at least 2 mothers dropped their children off with a cheery ‘we’ll be looking round the garden centre – see you in a couple of hours’ :shock:.

We started off with all the children being given two terracotta pots (clearly I couldn’t touch them 😉 ) and loads of brand new paintbrushes and lovely acrylic paints to decorate them. Davies took time to plan his first one and did a lovely blue rim with various flowers and plants around the pot including daisies, cacti and so on. He took so long that he was the last one left to complete his second and most of the paint on our table had already been artisically mixed by the small boy sharing it with us, so we came up with the idea of a ‘splodge pot’ with dabs of all sorts of marbled effect paint and then he wrote ‘Davies’ on it with his finger mixing it further – it looked fab and was second prize winner in the competition!. Scarlett did one pot with various blocks of colour and was then taken with the different colours the water on the table kept changing to as brushes were washed out so we made a rainbow pot (I thought of you all as I encouraged it 😉 ) with the whole ‘between red and yellow comes orange, between yellow and blue comes green’ type stuff mixing the colours on the pot as we went.

Splash fm radio (local radio station down here) arrived with a keen young woman and her furry green mic and they homed straight in on Davies. She asked his name, how old he was, complemented him on his pot and then asked how he felt about the end of the school summer holidays, to which he replied that it didn’t matter to him as he didn’t go to school and was home educated! 🙂 I was also interviewed with a soundbite ‘oh I love the end of the school holidays – it’s a real relief! I home educate my two children and we get everywhere back to ourselves again when all the rest of the children go back to school!’. Davies took his first pot off to leave to dry and got chatting to one of the volunteers helping with the event who then came back over to me to tell me what a wonderful child ‘your Davies’ is. She said he was telling her all about his pot, describing in great detail what all the pictures were and what an intelligent and charming boy he is. She said she’d gone to the radio woman to tell her to talk to Davies and sure enough there he was, back with furry mic thrust back in his face, in his element with his hands gesticulating and his face alight with whatever he was talking about (turned out to be home education and his pot when I asked him later.) – was very proud 🙂 🙂 :).

While they painted their second pots and Scarlett and I were discussing colour mixing the photographer turned up and also homed in on Davies asking him about his pot and snapping away as he talked, then he asked if Scarlett was Davies’ sister and asked if she’d like to have photos too – which she did, so they posed for ages in various ways for him. He made sure I’d signed one of the consent forms for their pictures to be used and said it would almost definitely go in the local council colour newsletter next edition (ooh which we hold at the library 🙂 ) and that it would probably be picked up by local press too. They finished painting their second pots and spent ages washing their hands as one of the older boys had worked out he could blow bubbles with the washing up liquid water and they all spent a while doing that. Then the photographer came back over and asked if Davies and Scarlett would please pose some more for him so they went off to a roped off area and had a load more pictures taken 🙂

By this point the rest of the group had already set off on their guided tour of the nursery so we were escorted speedily to join them, catching up as they reached shrubs and were looking at lavendar – which clearly Davies and Scarlett know all about, given it is something they sell from our garden 😉 :lol:. Then we moved onto herbs and the photographer appeared again, snapping them sniffing herbs and naming several (fennel, thyme, mint etc – always amazes me how they pick this knowledge up :shock:). We then walked back to the aquatics department with Davies making me laugh asking about ‘the refreshments’ he’d heard mentioned. I said to him ‘Refreshments!? You really are turning into Milly Molly Mandy!’ which was when another mum turned round and struck up a conversation with me about MMM and the charming words it had put into our children’s vocab. 😆 The fish area was fab with various amazing tropical fish to coo over and then back to the coffee shop for the much promised refreshments. Fruit juice, water, chopped up fruit and chocolate brownies. 🙂

Then it was back to the pots. They had laid out about 12 types of compost in big tubs for the children to feel the difference and really get their hands dirty, they learnt about various types of bulbs and then got to plant up their pots with compost and bulbs to bring home.

Then we had a tour of the cacti while they waited for the local newsteam to arrive so it could be on tomorrows evening news show. Davies and Scarlett were both really interested and by now lots of the children were getting bored or restless so they really stuck out with their asking intelligent questions and showing lots of interest in what was being said. Lots of the cacti there were night flowering and in the wild would be pollenated by bats, and one example by hummingbirds. This amazed me as I had no idea creatures other than bees (and birds by way of eating berries and then the seeds being spread in their poo) pollenated things.

Finally it was time for the prize giving – the local news team had not yet arrived but anyone wanting to appear was welcome to hang around to be on tv – we decided not to bother, thinking that radio and newspaper pictures would be sufficient ;). The first prize for best pot was either a fork or a spade – child sized – donated by the nursery. Although very nice and probably very expensive it wouldn’t have been much use to us here, so with great relief and pleasure Davies collected his second prize for 2nd best boys pot decoration of a worm world 🙂

But in true Bullseye fashion, no one went away empty handed and everyone got given a seed planting kit to bring home along with their two handpainted pots planted up with bulbs. Davies and Scarlett went off to thank the woman from the council who’d organised it all and the manager of the nursery and we headed off with our bagfulls of stuff. An excellent event, hope they organised loads more, it was fab. 🙂

We left the nursery and headed straight to Lucy’s for lunch – and as it turned out a whole afternoon and tea for the children as well. None of the children were on top form – Davies and Scarlett had clearly used up all their wonderfulness for the day in the morning, but they all muddled through for a couple of hours together – all wailing if we simply offered to go home instead of play together :roll:. Lucy and I managed some good chats about dream lifetstyles if we won the lottery though which was nice :).

We came home and Ady had just arrived home to find all the chickens in the front garden – we opened the front door and Punzel made a dash for it and ran clucking round the lounge for a few minutes like, well a headless chicken I guess, before Scarlett grabbed her and evicted her again 😆

they are funny creatures 😆

Then Davies and Scarlett sat on the doorstep and assembled the worm world with layers of soil and sand before going off worm hunting round the garden and finding 8 lucky worms to come and perform a sort of Big Brother style period of time living in Worm World and being observed every day – maybe we should set them tasks to complete and offer them a diary room space to rant 😆

That done, I finally persuaded them in for a much needed bath and then we all listened to an old Doctor Who cd I borrowed from work before it was bed time for them. I’m working all day tomorrow, with Julie here in the morning and my mum in the afternoon so they’re looking forward to a good childcare mix for the day before we all enjoy a long weekend. 🙂