Horsey, horsey…

Work all day for me today and it was one of those days that dragged and seemed very s l o w indeed. I did Baby Rhyme time in the morning which is suffering from having altogether too many toddlers and pre-schoolers and not nearly enough, ie none, babies. It’s supposed to be for under 2s but I reckon all of the attendees today were over 2.

At one point we had two of them making a break for it with the maracas, one beating the crap out of the upturned instrument box with a drum stick, dangerously close to the head of another one, one trying to get under the table to get to the turned off kiddie computer, two of the mums having a bit of a chat while me and one of the toddler bravely carried on with Wind The Bobbin Up. I did an awful lot of ‘go and sit on Mummy’s lap then’ songs – Humpty Dumpty, Row, row, row your boat, Grand old Duke of York, Round and round the garden… I was even contriving new actions to go with songs that don’t normally have them to get kids on their bums and Mums to shut up. I could so never be a teacher! 😆

In other news I chatted at length with the keen and enthusiastic young librarian about what I might want to be when I grow up and she was encouraging me to think about being a librarian (for which I’d need a proper qualification so is a real, proper job). I do consider it from time to time but have never got as far as looking into whether I could go straight to a masters degree without access level qualifications and what sort of cost implication there would be. Maybe I should look into it more. I did ask her if she got a teasmade if she recruited me but she denied any ulterior motive 😆

In the afternoon I spent some time drawing pictures of characters and props from fairy stories for tomorrows festival storytime special. Nice work if you can get it ;).

Ady and I arrived home at the exact same time which led Scarlett to ponder on how we’d managed it. I joked that we don’t really go to work, we con my Mum into babysitting and go swanning off together for the day and have lunch in expensive cafes. I’m not sure my Mum didn’t half suspect I was telling the truth! 😆

Everything seemed to have gone smoothly here today and I think the children spent most of the day in the garden playing Indiana Jones. My Mum had ‘thoughtfully’ gone through the strawberries we’d picked yesterday, washed them all and thrown some yucky ones in the bin. I did point out that composting them, feeding them to the chickens, or leaving them for me to make jam with would have all been better options. Sometimes she is ‘helpful’ in the most peculiar fashion…

Scarlett had a speedy meal of eggs on toast which Ady and I made jointly while also making tea and coffee for me, Ady and Mum, weighing out and mixing pizza dough and chatting to my Mum who stood in our tiny kitchen watching us in amazement. We’re such a team! :).

Mum and I walked Scarlett round to Rainbows where she had a wobble about being left – half term last week, bit of a bad time with Rebecca at the park this week and not having seen me all day was enough to have her not sure about being left there. She did get over it though and was fine in the end. Mum came up to the allotment with me to do the watering and have a good look, as she’s not been up there since last year when it had just been dug over and was all empty. I was quite proud of seeing all our hard work through someone else’s eyes.

Back to collect Tarly and Davies came with us as he was in the garden when we dropped the car home. Davies had his dinner and while Ady and Mum chatted I read a couple of books to the children including: which I’d got along with a couple more dealing with your temper type books aswell as and then we read which is good but we’ve read so many similar books that it had a lot to live up to – my favourite of those type remains .

I wanted to read and they wanted the next Charlie Small both of which we have waiting but instead we got sidetracked into talking about What we Learnt Today instead.

Ady learnt that all polar bears are left handed, which I’d heared before. Davies learnt about Painted Lady butterflies which are the most common in the world courtesy of Ady telling us he’d heard about a mass migration of them locally and finding some information and images on the net about them for Davies. Scarlett learnt that there have been times when fish and frogs rained from the sky and how that came to happen. I learnt the alleged origin of the term ‘Tommys’ regarding English soldiers and then we all learnt various factoids from which we happened to have sitting on our bookshelf.

I had a good haul in a charity shop at lunchtime including a top and cardigan for me, a proper decent winter coat for me, a W&G t shirt for Ady, two tshirts for Tarly and an engraving machine all for £20. So we had a go with the engraving machine. It’s a toy one for kids but works well at engraving onto some dog tags and keyrings that came with it. Really impressed with it for £1.50 although I’ve not yet had a play on it myself to see how creative you can be with it.

Scarlett struggled to get to sleep and was pretty clingy to me – I’ve a feeling she won’t take tomorrow with me working in the morning and her at Magic Lantern in her stride.. ah well. She has a really nasty bruise on her side and both knees are bruised and scrapped from Wednesday at the park so she really did hurt herself. I suspect it was rather more of an accident than she let on at the time as she’s already told me Davies got to her first and was stroking her and cuddling her. I’ve expected her to be in plaster since she starting walking so I’m surprised she’s got to 6 without more than 3 stitches in her chin. I had a friend when I was younger who broke both arms, legs, wrists and more all in seperate accidents on rollerskates or other such crazy stunts and I always expected that of Scarlett really.

Another late dinner and I really should go to bed.