More double-bookededness

I’d booked us into a filmeducation showing today clashing with the monthly Pulborough Brooks meet up. I knew Davies and Scarlett would probably choose PB over the cinema particularly if there were likely to be friends or cousins there but I thought if the weather was bad then we’d get more out of the cinema.

I’d checked the weather forecast last night and pretty much decided we’d do PB so when we were up this morning and I checked with them and they both went for Pulborough Brooks I wasn’t surprised. We gathered up some food to take and headed off.

When we arrived there were only 3 families there – the husband and 2 older children of Katy who usually organises it (Katy and new baby were home resting after overdoing it a bit last week), another Katy and her 3 children who I have been unsuccessfully attempting to coordinate diaries with to get together so that was nice. We admitted we’re both a bit hard to pin down before August so it was good to catch up today 😆 and K and his 2 children who it was nice to see there again. Another couple arrived with a toddler, having found the group on facebook but not having made it along to anything before so we chatted to them for a bit and then all set off.

K (the man K, not the K who runs it and wasn’t there or the K who does’t run it but was there even though she’s very busy) watched Davies and Scarlett for a while before commenting to me on how close they seem and how self-contained they are and happy to be in each others company. He said he’s noticed it about them before and it was really nice to hear. It is true and something I consider to be one of the biggest plusses to HE for us but still nice to have mentioned :).

Initially we were near the front of the group but we kept stopping to look at things and mark stuff on D and S’s spotter sheets so we ended up right at the back. When we stopped to look for newts in the pond and then had a nightingale singing merrily away pointed out to us we lost the rest of the group completely.

This was fine and the three of us had a really nice walk round together chatting and spotting things. Davies learnt his thing of the day about dragonflies and we saw a nightingale again a bit later on aswell as loads of butterflies and rabbits and a heron which flew really low above our heads. They are such amazing birds herons, totally pre-historic looking in flight I think.

We didn’t manage to spot any adders and the water level in all the lakes and ponds was really low so there was a real lack of waterbirds too including ducks and lapwings which are normally in abundance. Lots of young deer to look at though and it was nice to be out and about and chatting.

We passed the rest of the group who had all stopped at a midway point so finished the walk first and had decided to head off home rather than wait for them all to come to the playground but as we went to the carpark so we saw Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna arriving, 2 and a half hours late along with Katy and co who hadn’t done the walk but had found Julie in the carpark just as they were leaving. So we went back in again too and ended up staying for another 90 minutes as everyone else trickled back to the park again.

It was really nice, I got to lay in the sunshine chatting to Julie, Katy and K while the kids all played in a big group together :).

We all started to drift off around 2pm although it took about half an hour to actually pack up picnics and get to the carpark. I suggested moving on to PYO but Julie was doing her weekly food shop and keen to go and get it done. Davies didn;t want to go without friends so we came home. We came via Sainsburys as we had no fruit or veg in the house so Scarlett and I went in while Davies waited in the car and we got loads of fruit reduced to clear.

Back home Davies and Scarlett spent a couple of hours connected on Lego Indiana Jones DS while I read my book and ate a load of pineapple, mango and coconut, faffed around with laundry and put some eggs in the incubator. We got 6 eggs from our bantams today which is pretty good (we’ve 7 hens but you only expect them to lay about 3 eggs a week according to books).

Ady arrived home just as I served up the kids’ tea. I read some Charlie Small and we did some googling and youtubing to answer one of Tarly’s questions before bed. Davies lost his 7th tooth and wrote an excellent note for the ‘toof fery’
‘TO TOOF FERY, IV LOST MY TOOF AND I NID A PAND PLES’ 😆

Davies and Scarlett really did the What I Learnt Today properly today with it being stuff that has genuinely crept up during the course of a normal day rather than a deliberate factoid as we’ve done some days. Davies learnt that dragonfly larvae are called nymphs. He also learnt (as did I) that the larval stage can be up to 5 years but as dragonflies they live around a month.

Scarlett learnt (from her Karen Carpenter curriculum ;)) that a bayou is a pond, lake or slow running stream.

I learnt that although tinned food has been around for nearly 200 years (first tinned food in 1810, common by 1846) tin openers have been around for a lot less time, with the design we use today not invented til 1925. I guess necessity really is the mother of invention 🙂

Ady learnt about Hitler’s alleged visit to Liverpool but after a bit of research I’ll be telling him in the morning that his fact source is dodgy again. He did learn about potato diseases though as the leaves on two of his plants are looking very sad so he was doing some reading on the net and in our veg books about that.