Ady’s been off for four days now and it was very noticeable today that he’s been with Davies and Scarlett for more prolonged time than normal ❓ I wonder if some of why I’m a bit ratty and intolerant by 7pm most evenings has sunk in at all…. 😆
Yesterday morning I worked, which went very quickly. Saturday mornings are probably the single busiest period at the library, direct contrast to Saturday afternoons which have always been pretty dead. It was my first AM shift after my hours have been changed and flew by :), I’m soooo pleased they offered me the chance to change my hours, it feels like I’ve actually had a weekend rather than a rushed Saturday morning and just one real day off.
We have these two old men who come in every single day, Monday to Saturday, to read the papers. They are waiting outside when we open at 930am and take the Times, Telegraph and Guardian to get first read of them, sit chatting over the news stories at one of the tables, photocopy all the crosswords and then head off about 10am every morning. They are a sort of cross between Waldorf and Statler from the Muppet Show and Harry Enfield’s Sad Old Gits. 😆 The Saturday assistant, Tom must have mentioned them to his nan as yesterday morning she must have arrived at the library at about 9am to be sure to be waiting outside the door first and nabbed the Telegraph before they could. There was uproar – raised voices, huffing and puffing and all sorts of elderly men style tantrums! 😆 It was ace. We all congratulated her on it before she headed off puffed with pride with Tom looking on at his Nan with renewed adoration.
I came home for lunch and I’m pretty sure we did something although quite what escapes me and then we headed round to see our friends Matt and Clare. We know Matt from B&Q days and their son A is 6 months younger than Davies so Clare and I have bonded over motherhood although we don’t have a great deal else in common. They had a daughter back in May, followed just a few weeks later by Clare’s mum dying, so they have had a very dramatic year, with Clare right in the middle of her finals to become a chiropractor. So although they only live a couple of miles away we haven’t been to see then since L was born. Clare and I have exchanged texts a few times so have kept in touch but we finally met baby L and had a proper catch up with them yesterday and it was lovely. The children fell straight into playing with each other – Davies and A always get on well whenever we meet up despite not seeing each other for very long intervals and Scarlett joined in their rather riotous game with A’s full arsenal of toy weapons :shock:. Clare and I chatted while Matt and Ady cooed over baby L (Matt’s done a lot of the early fatherhood stuff with Clare away a lot in the week for her exams) and looked at stuff online. I was berated once again for not being on facebook and finally convinced that I should give it a go, if only so Matt can bite me or something?! We had some interesting chats about parenthood and education (A is at a private school, paid for by Matt’s parents, which as Matt and Clare are not in the financial league of most of the other parents there has it’s own set of issues) which was interesting; Clare was pretty convinced by the idea of autonomy, I was less convinced by her talking about homeopathy ;). We left with plans to try and persuade them camping with us sometime next year and promises to not leave it so long next time.
We came home via Sainsburys where we put all the coppers we’d got lying around the house into their coinstar machine and paid for a fivers worth of shopping with them :).
Today has been a lazy morning with a brief burst of activity in sorting out the cupboard under the stairs. I was looking for the clothes airer and a tupperware contained big enough for the Christmas cake. Neither of them were in there but we did clear yet more crap from there which had been stashed, and another pile ready for ebaying. After lunch we headed over to Chris and Julie’s and on the way popped into a discount shop and got a new clothes airer and cake box very cheaply, which of course means both the lost items will turn up somewhere this week!
We had a lovely couple of hours with Chris and Julie. The weather was gorgeous today so the children played in the garden really happily and nicely with each other in various combinations and sometimes as a foursome, while we drank tea and chatted and laughed. They have some exciting and life changing stuff going on which was talked about a lot and we generally just enjoyed a nice easygoing afternoon while the children entertained themselves. I’d put roast lamb in to cook while we were out but had it on too high so the potatoes were cremated, so we fed the children something else for tea and I cooked some more potatoes for us. Ady and the kids watched a Ray Mears programme while I was in the bath, which kept them all captivated learning about eating fungi and cooking wild boar spit roast style.
We’ve another busy week ahead which kicks off with another film in Brighton tomorrow morning meaning we need to leave home at an unheard of hour before 9am so I guess I should get some sleep.