Monday Musings

I had a brief phone chat with a friend this morning as he’d emailed to say he’d changed his mobile number so I texted him to test it and he rang to see who I was texting him as he’d lost all his stored numbers. It was brief due to him being on his mobile phone and calling from Ireland so was very much a sort of bullet point catch up, with him asking specifically about Home Ed, finances and my work, which seem to be very much the hot topics for people I don’t see often enough to have general day to day catch up chats with really. Which of course set me thinking about all those things myself during quiet moments for the rest of the day.

Both children have been really tired today – not at all surprising given they had an 11 ish bedtime on Saturday and a not much earlier one last night and are both still fighting off the tail end of colds. So we had great wailing shows of misery from Scarlett on several occassions and more low key tears at small incidences from Davies a couple of times too, which was rather wearing :(.

Off to Magical Mondays, collecting Ali and Freya on the way. Both the children got stuck straight into painting with Davies (who I’d told we’d be doing Halloween decorations) painting a pumpkin and a witch which got at least two compliments from others when was left on the side drying :). He then did some junk modelling and made a fishing boat from a shoebox with some orange net and a cut out fisherman and a loo roll tube for the chimney thing – very good and totally recognisable. I love the way he approaches junk modelling; he looks at the available resources, decides what one single thing reminds him of or inspires him to create and then builds everything else around it. Other children I watch tend to have an idea of what they want to make and then find the right stuff to do so, he approaches it from such a different starting point.

Scarlett combined the two and made a collage and paint picture with her big bit of paper, sticking various bits of material to it and then painted a box and stuck that to the paper making the box ‘a little cottage’ and the paper ‘the garden’. Davies came to show me his boat and asked me to make another fisherman to go in it so I did that and ended up sitting with Tarly making a family to go in her little cottage. We cut out cardboard people and then stuck on fabric and stuff to make a mini Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett complete with mad hair in appropriate colours. Davies had wondered back off by then but I was called upon by another child to reprimand him for calling a couple of the boys ‘poo-heads’, which I did. The same child shortly afterwards came in to complain a different child had called him a ‘fucker’ which made me think that either he was doing something to deserve this litany of abuse or at the very least made Davies’ word sound less harsh :lol:. Interesting child politics at that group sometimes…

I had an interesting chat about the purpose of HE groups, which I’ve been pondering on further but will save blogging for another day, a chat about feminism and motherhood with someone else with was equally interesting and a silly chat about Christmas carols which had us all leaving singing ‘oh come get in the car now, oh come get in the car now, oh come get in the car NO- OW, so we can all go home’ across the carpark to each other. It was all there today really, frustration with my own children, tricky involvement in kids stuff, pondering the meaning of life, the universe and Home Ed groups and a bit of singing too!

Davies, Scarlett and Freya were failing to take my in-car safety chats seriously on the way back to Ali’s so I got a bit ranty (and did an emergency stop to demonstrate seatbelt and car seat usage – Ady would have been proud but I fear I may have scarred Freya’s relationship with cars over busses far more than Ali and J would have managed :lol:). I expanded on it further on the way home from there with D&S until we all got distracted by the very powerful looking sky (black and grey with a strip of yellowy pink over the sea, promising great storms which never happened) and talk over naming of chickens.

Once home we had some playing with toy animals and then some Zoo Tycooning with them both snuggled up with me. We had cinamon french toast (similar to Katy’s but with added sugar and milk in the egg mixture) and then Ady came home with the bantams.

Tomorrow Ady is away overnight and we’re planning a whole day at home to get to know the new additions and I might do some baking (hoping we’ll be getting a backlog of eggs anytime soon :)) and I have a few other bits and pieces to sort out too. Wednesday we are also plan-less but might try and get together with Julie as all out usual haunts are to be avoided for half term. Looking forward to NicCamps now and want to sort a few things out in preparation for that.