Ady was up at 430am to go to Birmingham. I did wake when he got up and didn’t really get properly back to sleep before Scarlett wriggled into bed with me at 7am ish. She is dreadful for not lying still and wants to clamber all over me and kiss me which is charming and lovely but better saved for when I’m not still trying to sleep really!
So this morning was fairly lazy with the kids watching some TV, playing together on the xbox, connecting on DSs and generally relaxing. Scarlett spent some time looking through a pile of books. She is utterly insistent she is NOT going to learn to read but she does seem to spend a very long time perusing books lately, I wonder if she’ll suddenly announce she can read after all 😆
I spent some time messing about online and then decided to do some baking. We had no bread so I made some cheese scones for lunch and then using my very fancy and expensive cacao I rather loosely followed a recipe from his book borrowed from the library to make brownies. They are very nice, very rich and definitely nicer than they would be with value supermarket chocolate but I’m not sure they are proportionately nice enough to justify the price. I have a second lump of the cacao to try something else with.
We had lunch, while watching Raven with me trying to explain what ‘react’ means which I struggled to do without simply repeating ‘react’. Yesterday over dinner I researched and explained what we have tonsils for, I’m learning loads at the moment just answering random questions.
After lunch we had an hour or so to kill so I decided we should all paint our left knees green. I confess this was partially in reaction (see how I use my words ;)) to writing my latest blog post over on Monster and Teeny and spending some time this morning thinking about how we could integrate what might be required of us at some future point without losing what makes us us.
Davies likes the idea of the Chicken Song Curriculum so we chatted about some of the other parts of it and discussed wisdom teeth in more detail. We can’t extract ours as the kids don’t have them yet, Ady has already had all of his extracted and I only had three to start with – two of which have already been taken out and the last one still isn’t fully erupted. Wise, we are not ;). We did learn the words hyperdontia and hypodontia though and counted all our teeth, debated a full set of milk teeth and a full set of adult teeth and how Ady and I had had ours extracted (Ady, under general anaesthetic in hospital, me under local in the dentists chair). We looked at some youtube videos of string quartets and have a plan for that as our next thing.
Scarlett decided she wouldn’t stop at knees and painted my left foot green too and then made a big production of washing it all off again so we didn’t look mad at swimming.
Swimming was good. Scarlett had her lesson first while I started ploughing up and down doing lengths. I was aiming for 30 today. Davies spent some time on the slide and lower diving board and then just before he had to go to his lesson I spotted him on the top diving board. I’ve been off it once, when I was about 10. I’d gone off the smaller board and so Frazer did that and then went off the high board before me to prove he was braver. I had to do it to match him but it was soooo high I never did it again. Davies had that look on his face at the point when you wonder if you are ever going to hit the water and then he resurfaced with the hugest grin on his face – very proud of him :).
I think I was on 22 lengths by that point so he set off for his lesson and Scarlett came over to the big pool after hers. Technically she’s not supposed to be in the pool on her own (although I suppose I am in the pool too, just not with her) but usually it’s fine as she spends the whole time on the slide. Today the slide wasn’t open so she bobbed about practising jumping in and finding another girl to play with while I did some more lengths. Eventually the slide re-opened and I got to concentrate properly on my lengths and finished up doing 36. A personal best, although I do now have longer to swim. I reckoned that took me about 45 minutes with various faffing. I could have carried on, definitely to 40 so hopefully I will improve my speed and be able to spend the whole hour doing it and achieve my aim of 50 lengths by Christmas :). Quite proud of myself :).
Finally all out, dried, dressed and back in the car. We stopped for fish and chips for the kids tea at our favourite fish and chip shop run by a father and son who seem to provide a comedy and magic show at the same time as cooking chips 🙂 – and at £3.90 for 2 kids cod and chips which more than fills the kids up it’s a bargain too :). The kids ate their tea, I did some washing up, dealt with some laundry and had a cup of tea (resisted a brownie) before it was time to head out yet again, this time to Sea Scouts (Cubs) for Davies.
It’s in a hall close to our allotments so in the summer it’ll be walkable and I can do some allotmenteering while he’s in there, this time of year, starting at 7pm it’s getting dark so feels really late. The leaders were really friendly and the boys all looked nice and friendly too so Davies said he was happy for me to go and Scarlett and I came home. Ady had finally arrived home in the meantime so we caught up with him and then I nipped to Sainsburys for picnic food for tomorrow, collecting Davies on the way home.
First impressions of the Sea Scouts are good. The leaders seem to have it well under control and command maximum respect from the boys. There is a lot of fun and affection and the walls of the hall are plastered with all the camps and trips they have all been on, full of happy beaming faces having a whale of a time. I arrived slightly early to find them in a middle of a boisterous running around game which Davies was right in the middle of chatting and laughing with other boys.
Davies says he really enjoyed it, it was lots of fun and he was even slightly put out that he can’t go on the weekend camp in 2 weeks time :shock:, he definitely wants to join and seemed really impressed with the whole thing. I asked if he’d chatted much to the other boys (it is all boys there too) and he said they’d asked how old he was and when he’d said 9 they’d asked what year he was in. He’d repeated he was 9 and they’d said no, what year at school to which he replied he didn’t go to school. He said they accepted this straight away and asked a bit more about it including whether Scarlett went to school and if I didn’t let them go. Davies said I said it was up to them, if they don’t want to go to school they don’t have to and if they do want to go to school then they can. Apparently they all said he was really lucky and had a ‘really cool Mum’ and wished they were in our family 🙂 🙂 Obviously I took this in my usual modest and humble manner ;).
So that’s that then – sign ’em up! At least they’ll never feel they were denied opportunities to try things, join groups, socialise and participate even if we can barely afford the time or the money! We are definitely at maximum capcacity for ‘stuff’ though but we’ll give it a term and see how sustainable it all is. Also after Christmas Scarlett moves from Rainbows to Brownies, which is also on a Tuesday evening meaning Tuesdays will be crazy but it does cram everything into Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday which makes it feel less tying down.
Oh and one last Davies thing, he claimed to not know the days of the week last Friday so I taught them to him in the car. We forgot about it since and today he remembered them all again so that’s another little thing he breezed through when the time was right to learn :).
So, home late at 830pm ish, toast to fortify them as it was so long since their tea and then bed for the children. Tomorrow is another mad busy day so I’m off to bed to dream of swimming, getting from activity to activity and the magic tricks from the men in the chips shop!