EOFF Off!

Off to Drusillas today to meet up with C, E and M and Ali & Freya of EOFF fame. The plan was to meet at 10am which was always overly amitious for the likes of us and indeed it was 950am by the time we finally left home despite all good intentions to the contrary :).

Tracy Chapman and They Might Be Giants were in car music of choice. We’ve talked about the whole ‘soundtrack of your life’ idea before I know but I do wonder which will be the songs that shape D and S’s musical taste, which will take them back to sitting in the back of my Sharan and driving off on another adventure with just the opening bars long into their adulthood. Yesterday Once More by The Carpenters takes me straight back to my Mum, young and happy singing along at the top of her voice in our old house that we left when I was just four, so way younger than Scarlett already is. Status Quo and Billy Joel were played a lot in my Mum’s car in my older childhood – Status Quo while I still travelled in the back of the car, Billy Joel when I had graduated to the front. They Might Be Giants actually reminds me of my own first car; a bright yellow mini with furry seat covers. It had a cassette playing stereo that was wired in to play but unsecured to the dash board so you had to hold onto it when driving round corners or roundabouts otherwise it would slide along the dashboard and disconnect itself :lol:. I listened to lots of Simply Red, Elton John and Phil Collins in that car, aswell as a fine mix of 2Unlimited, The Shamen and KLF. On Wednesday we drove past my old sixth form and popped into the bakery and newsagents in the parade of shops I used every day to buy my Malboros, The Times and for days when I wasn’t pretending to be a grown up Rowntrees Fruit Pastilles ice lollies :lol:. Relatively speaking I probably had fairly few ‘freedom years’ as I only did A levels while still living at home and I left home at 19 to move straight in with Ady to mortgages and gas bills. My two years at sixth form were fraught with more than the usual share of growing up dramas and heartbreaks too but that bright yellow mini and it’s errant cassette player blasting out Birdhouse in your soul through tinny speakers embodies the freedom I did have and I love hearing my children singing along to it now and knowing it will be one of the musical hooks they hang childhood memories from one day.

Drusillas was good. We have only 2 more months of our membership to run and I will try and make the most of them and get over there more regularly. There were lots of pushchairs and school trips, both of which – utterly irrationally – set my teeth on edge. As we walked in and met up with Ali and C we walked past a woman saying ‘let’s go and see the moo cows and the piggywiggies’ to her child. I’m sure it’s just me, I’m sure I will have done all sorts of therapy-requiring-unravelling deep seated, emotionally stunting damage to my children by not calling animals moo-cows, baa-sheep and horseys, not to mention vroom-cars, choo-choo-trains and talking about myself in the perpetual third person but whilst I might not be great at taking myself very seriously I do seem to have afforded my children the respect to take them seriously and not felt the need to dumb anything down for them. Worse still those who adopt childrens’ mispronounciations as new family vocabulary and are still calling helicopters ‘olly-ollys’ when their children are 28 and have left home!

All that aside it was a nice day, the sun shone, the children had a ball and it was good to see Ali and C and their offspring. It was great to have Freya be receptive to some help with a tricky bit of clambering which she very tenaciously stuck with and managed (yay F! :)) and great to watch Davies and Scarlett run off into the play area and just get on with it. I regretted not bringing the book it had half crossed my mind to bring when I ended up sitting in the sunshine along for an hour as we were all being quite literally child-led today which meant we spent much of the time scattered from each other. I also managed to get my arms, face and (this will surprise noone) my cleavage sunburnt today too. I feel a bit ashamed about this not least because it is the one thing I am almost paranoid about for myself and the children and rant about lots but simply hadn’t crossed my mind yet this year to think about sun protection – infact I was feeling neglectful that Tarly didn’t have a vest on 😆

Scarlett brought her toy lemur and a pink puppy with her and introduced the lemur (yes, it is called ‘Lemury’) to the real life lemurs in Lemurland. Rather hilariously they seemed to recognise it as one of their own. Scarlett propped it up on the fence and one came over to investigate and grabbed at it and knocked it into the enclosure (the lemurs are semi-open in that you can walk around their enclosure with complete access to them). I’ve been looking around at ‘keeper for a day’ type things for Tarly including the one at Drusillas and I think it might well be something we have a whip round for her next birthday for as she’d just LOVE it and most of them are for six plus ages.

There are some new play bits in the play area so we made full use of them (and the fact D is still little enough to get away with being in the six and under areas :)).

and they both had loads of goes on the zip wire including Tarly who was intially cautious (in a completely out of character way she has a slight fear of heights)

What else? I did managed a bit of time chatting to both Ali and C which was nice. I was also approached by an ex-home educator who I’d had two meetups with several years ago – Ros, you’ll remember Lisa with K and D, who was there supervising her daughter and others on a school trip. I spent about half an hour chatting to her which was nice and whilst feeling very sorry for her left me feeling very happy with our decisions about HE and stuff generally.

We started to leave about 330pm as we needed to be home for Tarly to have tea before Rainbows and I knew leaving would be a prolonged affair. Ady used my car to go to QVC last weekend so filled it up with petrol on the company so my petrol was free and we have season tickets,so all I spent was ice creams for us which meant I was happy to splash out on a packet of popping candy for all three of us on the way out (at a whopping 15pence a pack :lol:) which is another blast from the past for me straight back to childhood and our summer holiday babysitter who was all of 14 taking us to the sweet shop for space dust popping candy and penny shrimps. It doesn’t appear to have increased in price much in 27 years but I imagine the packs are smaller and less full.

The drive home was fine having left just early enough to avoid traffic. Scarlett had tea and Davies elected to wait for Ady to come home, which he did just before Scarlett and I left for Rainbows.

We didn’t take a chick this week but Tarly took her pink dog and lemur in a little suitcase on wheels which I’m fairly sure came from Ros filled with make up at one of her birthdays (3, 4, 5?). The chick last week did the trick though and she was greeted with a chorus of ‘Scarlett!’ from the other Rainbows, plenty of ‘I LOVE your hair’ (currently in 8 tiny plaits) and she was generally held hands with, fawned over and adored this week. The activity was making a crown which involved sticking foam coloured circles to pre-cut crowns which were extremely hard to detatch from their sticky backing paper. This meant as permanent fixture adult who once brought a very cute child I was the one every girl queue infront of to remove the sticky backing and Tarly stood in attendance basking in my reflected glory with occasional ‘that’s actually MY mumma’ comments :). They then played a blindfolded prince and princess game in which Tarly was regularly chosen as a partner before moving into the other room for circle time where she happily chattered away about going to Drusillas today. Now she has their attention I have no doubt in her ability to utterly charm them and show them how fab she is but I’m so pleased we had the prop and me as ‘cool mumma’ to help that spotlight shine on her so they’d notice her given she lacks the usual intro of being in their class at school.

We came home and popped straight back out again to Sainsburys for a couple of missed off our big food shop items. Tarly came with me and was lovely :). Davies has an ulcer in his mouth which I would put down almost entirely to his failure to be asleep before about 11pm for weeks yet still being up at 7am – he exists on little more sleep than I do that boy. A couple of chapters of FF and then off to bed for them.

Ady was supposed to be QVCing in the morning but it’s been cancelled so we have an unexpectedly free Saturday afternoon when I finish work although we don’t yet have plans to fill it.