labour of love

that bloody dalek! I can’t say I wish I’d never started as I am enjoying it and I do think it will look pretty good when it’s finally finished but if I’d known just how long it was going to take before I started it I may well have had second thoughts. Thankfully it’s only cost the price of 2 sink plungers (that’ll be £2.76 then) and 2 bags of Tesco value flour to make the papier mache paste (about 50 pence) as the boxes for the frame came from Ady’s work, as did the plastic circles which I cut out of plant trays, it’s taken an old Thompson local directory and several free copies of AutoTrader in newspaper and a borrowed space hopper to frame the domed top. Hopefully the domed top will be dry tomorrow so I can take the space hopper out and put the second sink plunger in for the eye piece, add the final few bits of embellishment tomorrow and Friday and spray paint it all over the weekend. If I were to tot up my hours spent on it though, even on my current rather modest (in comparison to hourly rates I have commanded in years gone by) library wage it would already be heading towards the £200 mark 😯 I have rather enjoyed getting my hands all messy, wearing the same vest and pair of jeans which by now are multi-layered with paste dried on and having smears of flour all over me though, in a different life I could have quite gotten used to the artistic way of life having an airy studio covered in paint splatters and dried on clay. It’s acting as a curiosity for the neighbours and people walking by anyway – that and the chickens who have worked out how to get onto the front lawn and wander around the dalek clucking 😆

I had an interesting conversation with Scarlett this morning about heart attacks and death. She is a funny mix that child. She does not worry about physical pain and is very ambivalent about death – when we lost Malice and Feathers while Davies went into full on black armband wearing, weeping wailing mourning Scarlett was very philosophical saying she ‘was sad but wasn’t going to cry’ and showing great interest in what happened after death. She is always brave in the face of hurting herself and doesn’t think twice about lashing out at Davies with a slap or a kick but rarely goes out to hurt someone’s feelings. She told me last week that ‘I don’t care about you!’ (I was trying to get her to shut a window she was hanging out of by telling her I was cold), then dissolved into floods of tears almost as the words left her mouth sobbing that ‘the word came out wrong, I do care about you Mummy, I do’. One night over the weekend we let the children stay up late watching a sort of Baby Einstein style animation on one of the kids channels on tv with basic cartoons set to music and she was in hysterics about a baby chick who was lonely and didn’t have his mummy or daddy or any friends – she’d got that from her interpretation of the cartoon as there was no real plot line as such and was devastated about it being a sad story. It took several nice books being read and lots of cuddles to get her over it so she could get to sleep, bless her. Anyway, she was asking about heart attacks and what happened while I was doing the washing up and she was sitting on the worktop getting her cereal so I did a little diagram of a heart, talked a bit about ventricles, chambers, pumping blood and oxygen and how it can go wrong. She seemed really interested and I realised that so few of the things she gets to talk about are original Scarlett ideas – her general knowledge is very wide but mostly Davies-initiated. Feeling inspired by the Skylark book I’m reading I’ve pledged to follow their interests a little more and try and follow up on conversations with books if I can to supplement my often sketchy explanations. This was a good example of something I’m sure Scarlett would be happy to hear more about – although I was saved from having to do much by Supervets being on tonight with a dog having open heart surgery so plenty of her questions about what a real heart looks like were answered very conveniently by that. 🙂

I wanted to finish a blog post on Monster & Teeny this morning so Davies sat with me for a while I started that and then wanted to look at his Monster Movies Blog which led to watching his chicken film again. This led to Scarlett hearing some music in the background of the movie from the barbie.com website (she must have been playing it while Davies and I were videoing) so she used Ady’s laptop to play on that and Davies spent some time on the xbox – it’s been ages since he played, I’m so glad we’ve not invested loads of money in a game consule and games as although he enjoys it for an hour or so whenever he does play it’s really not something he does often enough to justify any more money than we spent on it. Also while Ady and I will sit transfixed at the amazing life like graphics on xbox games Davies expects that level of quality on games as it’s all he’s ever known and is more happy on gamesgarage logic games that playing some fast paced action x box one.

The washing machine did overtime catching up on yesterdays backlog and then we spent some time outside. Davies and Scarlett played with the chickens while I daleked. We came in again for an early lunch before heading down to Brooklands for the circus skills have a go workshop. It was packed with a mix of really small toddlers who’s parents wanted to have a go and some unsupervised but not much older than Davies boys who tried to nick a load of juggling balls at the end. Scarlett and I threw balls to each other, they both span plates and Davies went to chat to the woman about her trapeze act and how she has callouses on her hands and just how her dad does the trick with the cups and balls and lemons (she said she didn’t know :lol:). It was too chaotic really to talk to them about workshops so I’ll email them for more details. The children both wanted to stay and play at the park and then go to the show starting at 2pm again but I persuaded them to come home as Ady was due home early and I thought if we were going to go to the circus again it would be nice if he came with us.

Davies and Scarlett played with some wooden blocks and toy animals (specifically a kangaroo which has a removable joey in it’s pouch) and I made some tardises while we put Superman on. I thought they’d really enjoy it but actually 20 odd years on I found it quite slow paced and plot rather than action heavy and it just didn’t hold their attention, so we listened mostly to the music (which they both recognised from the Noisy Kids concert) and carried on with our pursuits.

I did some more daleking while the children did some more playing with the chickens and then spent some time creating little graves for Malice and Feathers complete with headstones, crosses (‘for Jesus’ apparently) and flowers – bet the chickens eat the flowers and scuff all the rest up tomorrow 🙄 Ady came home and helped me glue some bits on to the dalek then very kindly bathed and fed the children while I continued to wrestle with a tricky bit and then tidied the garden up. I came in and hoovered while Ady washed down the chickens area, then I watched Supervets with the children before they went to bed.

Ady and I have been watching back to back River Cottage programes because when we grow up we both want to be Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (yes, I am aware there are several glitches with that vision 😉 ) and now I must go to bed, I’ve got work in the morning.