Wet on Wednesday

We has this plan, Julie and I, for today. It involved her not having given birth yet and the weather being nice. Given her due date is Friday and Goddard babies seem to birth early and we are at the end of May with record lovely weather for the last few weeks I thought the nice day was far more of a given than her not having given birth yet.

But no, this morning saw us, with Julie about as pregnant as a woman can get, marching around in the rain :(. The plan had been some pony riding this morning – Julie is at the stables daily right up to the birth and will be again as soon as she can be to feed and groom Honey the pony anyway, followed by a picnic lunch at the open air swimming pool (lido) which opened today for the (ha!) summer. A quick phone conferance this morning meant plans were rejigged for a pony ride followed by a woodland walk with picnic instead.

Having spoken on the phone we both admitted we were unlikely to arrive on time so the fact we hit heavy traffic on the way and were even later wasn’t too much of an issue. The rain had really set in though by the time we headed off on our walk. Davies went first and as always enjoyed it and showed signs of progress and improvement;

Scarlett was next and her lesson for today was proper rein control so she was holding them tight and learning how to make Honey respond to her tugs, which she did with a look of complete concentration and a small tongue poking out (Scarlett, not Honey) 🙂

Scarlett also enjoyed helping to mix up Honey’s feed, go and fetch in Smokey, another pony who Julie was feeding today and rinse out the food bowls afterwards:

By the end of the ride and the feeding of Honey and Smokey we were all drenched and Davies had really had enough. The lure of dry clothes, picnic and then a walk in woods just didnt’ appeal to him and then Scarlett admitted she’d rather just go home for hot chocolate too which was enough to convince me really. In fairness they had been the first two to ride Honey and had spent the remainder of the walk splashing in puddles so they were both totally soaked and starting to chatter teeth, plus Tarly and I had fallen out over road sense (or lack of!). So we bid Julie, Jack and Maisie goodbye with deferred plans to meet at the Lido on Friday should Julie still be pregnant and the weather be nice… 🙂

Davies and Scarlett ate their picnic in the car and it was just as well we’d packed it as the traffic was dreadful and what is usually a 25 minute journey home took well over an hour. There were roadworks on the coast road which seemed to have created heavier traffic on the top road as everyone tried to avoid it and actually made the coast road slightly quicker. We wrote notes to each other on the misted up windows and talked about whether Tom Jones did the singing in Little Shop of Horrors, why the Sesame Street version of James Blunt’s Beautiful is so much better than the original and just what Mika is singing about in a couple of his songs.

Once home I made the promised hot chocolate which they polished off very quickly and then made a giant traintrack. My input was not required for any of it, which was nice :). Davies remembered his three weather reports today including rainfall recording so his chart is building up nicely.

Ady came home as they were finishing their tea and caught and boxed up the cockerel. We had him in his crate in the lounge for a while and were fully expecting him to be slightly stressed and very meek – not at all, he carried on crowing, continued all the way over to the farm in the car and when we got there and his cage was surrounded by turkeys, other, much bigger cockerels and geese he carried on being mouthy and cocky. Right decision – and I feel good about it :).

Ady and I had a chat with the smallholder couple about various things while Davies and Scarlett played with the turkeys – they do a great ‘whats the time Mr Wolf’ as they sneak up behind you looking all menacing until you turn round and take a step towards them then they run away again 😆 We can visit him whenever we like and we may well get some of the eggs he fertilizes once he’s settled there. We got home with time for a couple of chapters of story while Ady put the remaining birds away. It’ll be nice not to be woken with crowing in the morning :).