Weekend

Saturday We had half a plan to visit the allotment and go for a walk along the downs in the morning. Dad arriving just as we were getting motivated to get dressed scuppered that idea. It was lovely to see Dad though, he’s been calling over fairly regularly lately and it’s nice to just sit and chat with him. Ady brought us regular tea and coffee and then did something outside with the chickens. Davies and Scarlett spent some time watching Tom and Jerry cartoons and then joined Ady out in the garden too.

Dad did leave around lunchtime and after lunch we did indeed head out to the allotment and for a walk. It was cold but sunny and it was a bracing walk as much of it was either steeply up or down hill. Ady and I chatted about holiday plans for the year and fantasised about it being warm enough for camping again! 🙂

Davies and I took the woodland way back down the hill which involved scrambling over logs and fallen trees and getting tangled up in holly. I nearly lost my hat twice! Ady and Scarlett took the more sensible field route back down but were not much quicker due to stopping to pet all the dogs they met.

We called at Sainsburys on the way home. Ady and Davies went in while Tarly and I waited in the car. She took the opportunity to sit in the drivers seat and ask me questions about what all the pedals, gears and buttons on the dashboard did.

We then drove over the downs to Steyning which is a gorgeous drive with stunning views. Once we reached the top of the downs there was loads of snow still there. On the drive back the sun was setting and it was just beautiful. The reason for the diversion is that I have a training course in the library there on Thursday next week and I wanted to check out where the library is and what the parking situation was like first.

Back home the kids had tea and a bath and then begged for a sleepover in Davies’ room. As we had nothing planned for today we agreed and it was lovely listening to them chatting and giggling together. They went to sleep around midnight,of their own accord without us needing to berate them once.

We had an incredibly late dinner of tacos and fajitas, accompanied by much wine. It was a very nice evening :).

Sunday We paid the price for tired children with tears for no real reason several times and some stroppiness from Scarlett :(. I’d half planned to visit my parents but we never got there and Ady had half planned to sort out the cupboard under the stairs but that didn’t happen either.

Instead we had our roast chicken at lunchtime and stayed in.

Not sure if I blogged it but the kids got their WAA bronze certificates this week. They’ve already chosen which six activities they want to do for their silver, infact the Big Birdwatch from a couple of weeks ago is the first one. Second on their list was ‘feed the birds’ so we got some yoghurt pots and made holes for string, melted some lard and suet and collected together some seeds, nuts, raisins, grated cheese and the last of the crumbly Christmas cake and they mixed it all together and crammed it in the pots.


They went out with Ady to hang them from the tree where hopefully we’ll get some birds.

The woman across the road, known to us as Dragon Lady (the one who locked her estranged husband out last year) was taken away in an ambulance before Christmas and a couple of weeks ago when I saw her relatives bring all her belongings back I assumed she was coming home. Last week the kids and I got back from being out to see a funeral car dropping off the relations all dressed in black, so she clearly wasn’t coming back after all :(. It’s very sad. It also means the birds, who she used to religiously feed every day on a bird table in her front garden haven’t been fed for a while so hopefully will be attracted to our garden and haven’t already moved on.

Back indoors the kids sat down to write up the bird feeding. Davies started doing a lovely border around his which he then got bored of and just did a scribbly pattern around the rest. We had tears over that as I told him I thought he’d lost interest and ruined it. I’m a bit crap at pretending something looks wonderful when it doesn’t, particularly if I know he secretly knows that himself already. We worked it out and he cut the nice bit off ready to stick on a new bit of paper and finish nicely another time. He wrote out what we did with rather more help on the spelling that he was needing last time we did any writing but I’ll blame tiredness for that. Tarly did quite a bit of writing with Ady helping her, so we just need to do a little bit more on that one and that activity is finished.

They did some DSing and I put on the David Attenborough Darwin programme we recorded last night having not seen it last week. We all watched it with them zoning in and out for the interesting bits. I thought it was fab.

Ady then brought out the big box containing all our home videos over the years. We watched about 4 of them including one where Tarly is 8 months old and crawling while Davies is getting all ratty with her for touching his sticklebricks, a Centerparcs holiday around his third birthday, Christmas 2005 and 2006, Newgale and Oakwood with The Portico, The Clarks and The Ellis-Bones, some odd clips of The Portico kids and ours watching TV and singing and dancing, some of a younger Freya and Davies watching Shrek and eating pizza and quite a bit of Jack and Maisie. Was lovely to watch and see how much they have all changed and grown :).

We had lunch and carried on watching the videos then the kids got the train track out and played with that for a couple of hours building an elaborate track that went under the table and round the chair legs.

They went to bed about 8ish, we had baths and watched Lost and Friday Night Project. Tired stroppiness aside it’s been a lovely family weekend :).