and rather proud of myself for remaining silent on things where ‘people are wrong on the internet’ to misquote a funny cartoon. Not sure if I am coming down with something or just tired and suffering from Clocks Going Back Syndrome which must surely be something known only by its intials and with some homeopathic remedy I could try? 😉
Anyway, today we were off to Paradise Park which we have annual membership for but have not made as much use of as I expected us to, so must rememdy that in the remaining 4 months or so left. I took a fairly sizeable lunch, most of which we didn’t eat but I carted around the place with us anyway. We met Lucy and The Rs there and the kids all got on well and enjoyed each others company, leaving Lucy and I plenty of chatting and catching up time, which was great :). I was proud of both Davies and Scarlett at various points for being considerate and kind friends :).
On the way over I’d said they could each have £2 worth of tokens in the 20p amusements so they were working out how many tokens that would be each. Davies sat there counting in 20s to 100 to get 5 (20, 40, 60, 80, 100) and then Scarlett chimed in with ‘so five and five is ten – ten tokens each, woo hoo!’ But in the end they had less than that and shared them but were promised a small something in the shop for £2 each instead. Scarlett set about finding more tokens under the machines and managed to find about 10 I think 😯 She spent most on playing an air hockey type game with Davies or giving them to Davies to go on a grabber machine game to win soft toys – the deal was he got to operate it but she got to keep any prizes. They didn’t win though :(. She then gave one each of her remaining tokens to the others :).
We walked through the Planet Earth bit which has been tarted up a bit with a big chunk about water and sealife first. Davies and I learnt that ‘if you put all the water on earth into just 100 glasses, then less than 3/4 of one glass would be the water available to humans’. We also learnt a bit more about sea urchins, anenomies and starfish. Scarlett took it upon herself to educate Richard and was telling him about all sorts of things too :). He is honoured really, she so doesn’t normally bother with smaller children.
We went through the dinosaurs, the cacti garden, the various outside bits and finally came to rest in the amusements. We spent some time indoors and some more outside and the kids played the crazy golf for a while before it was time for Lucy to head off. We said our goodbyes in the shop where we spent a fair while looking at possibilities to buy. They talked about pooling their £4 for something joint and then Scarlett remembered they sell books so we went over to look at those instead. She chose an Arctic Animals sticker book and Davies, who had been adamant he wanted something with a dinosaur theme found which was at the bargain price of £2.99. I rarely refuse to buy books so I was happy to add another pound to that. He’s already been using it loads adding pictures and notes, reading quite a bit of it and tells me his plan is to use it in games with Scarlett about Prehistoric Park and pretend they have gone through a time portal to collect dinosaurs for the new park.
Back home for dinner for them and plenty of using their new books. We put on to watch which I’d seen before when it was on TV but totally captivated the children. I think JL is fab anyway so was more than happy to watch it again and I cried when she cried at seeing the lights too :oops:. Predictably both children are now also desperate to see them and Scarlett totally fell in love with the icehotel and it’s little chapel, deciding that she’s never getting married but if she does that is where she wants to do it! 😆
Ady arrived home and we did sparklers in the garden before walking across the road to the pub which had bonfire and fireworks advertised at 7pm. The huge fire was indeed roaring away but there was no sign of fireworks and infact they didn’t start til 8pm in the end. So we had a rather boring, cold, dark hang around for an hour 🙁 When they finally happened they were rather a disappointment too, being the cheap supermarket types rather than decent commercial ones. Can’t complain as it is all free (although they’d have made a killing with all the food and drink and glow in the dark plastic tat they were selling!) but in previous years the fireworks have always been excellent so it was a shame to not live up to normal standards.
Back home for bed for the kids, bath and late dinner for us.