just as well it’s a slow, lazy, rather random one ;).
‘Back to school’ yesterday then. Dad was having his van MOT’d at the industrial estate down the road at 11am and had asked if I’d go and pick him up so he could wait at our house for it to be done. The car took a lot of de-icing and I even had to use the ice scraper as the spray just wasn’t working.
Before going out I’d done some laundry, tried to bake some bread but not been able to find the recipe booklet, made some phonecalls (I thought I’d sorted out Scarlett starting Brownies last year having spoken to the leader, confirmed they had a space for her and she’d promised to ring me back late December to let me know times, start date and so on but I’ve not heard from her and I know Brownies is on a Tuesday so am assuming it restarts this week. I couldn’t find the woman’s number so had to ring the Rainbows leader and get it off her, have left a message on the woman’s answerphone but not heard back. I think we’ll just go round there later tonight when it’s on and see if we can sort it out in person) and cleared off the bookcase of everything that isn’t books. I may have kept the table clear for a whole year but there are certainly other surfaces in the house that collect crap and clutter. The bookcase is one. It mostly had paperwork on it so I filed all of that in the relevant places and have found a folder to keep all the children’s various certificates in – it now contains tickets from all the various shows and places we went to last year, swimming certificates, Badger certificates, Summer reading challenge certificates and various other things like that. I’ve no plan to do anything more than that with them really but if we do find ourselves in a situation where evidence is required at least I have a sheaf of papers to throw at someone. Which actually, in my opinion is pretty much all they are useful for anyway ;).
I also sorted out the kitchen wall that contains a pinboard and white board and is therefore another place that things seem to get put – and removed all the old artwork that was pinned to the kitchen door so Davies and Scarlett have a new blank space to put the next load of pictures they present to us. I listed some saucepans and a baby bath seat on freecycle that I had kept out of the cupboard under the stairs when we found the breadbin (yes, we do still own the breadbin after all, it is now in the kitchen containing bread – I know, how radical are we?!). My plan is to declutter a few small steps at a time until that cupboard is empty of stuff.
So that all felt very efficient.
We collected Dad, he came back here and we sat and drank tea / coffee and chatted about chickens while Davies and Scarlett played outside in the ice testing how thick it needed to be before they could stand on it and how easy it was to break. They came in after about half an hour (at least 25 minutes longer than I’d expected them to last) and I made them hot chocolate to warm up.
They went upstairs to play and wanted to stay here while I ran Dad back to collect his van again so I left them to it and was back in ten minutes to find them singing along to Queen songs at the tops of their voices.
I put a loaf of bread on using an old recipe and then battled with the computer on various tasks. My laptop is on it’s way out and I suspect I had too many windows open and was just asking it to deal with too many processes and tasks at once, so it protested.
More laundry, lunch – a pic n mix from the children with all the various Christmas foods we have left over; twiglets, mini chedders, babybels and finished with a fresh fruit salad meaning they had all their five a day at lunchtime :), more battling with the computer, I read some of my book No Impact Man: Saving the Planet One Family at a Time: Saving the World, One Family at a Time
Davies and Scarlett did some drawing, watched Transformers (Toby apparently loves Transformers so Davies asked if I could get the films so he can watch them and know what Toby is talking about :lol:) and played with the geomags (old faithfuls). Davies and I did some more research on Greenpeace and went through the list on their website about their campaigns and Davies wrote a list out, read it back to me and explained all of the issues and campaigns too. We both learnt stuff there :).
Dinner for the children was more leftovers, this time of roast dinner with more vegetables cooked fresh. I’m determined to get them eating better this year and might try hot lunches rather than dinners for them on the days we are home for lunch.
Ady arrived home and I read the children the first couple of chapters of which were very good and even Ady hung around to listen to. We do love Ted Hughes. Told Davies it was by the same author as Iron Man and Iron Woman and he said ‘oh no wonder it’s so good then!’ :).
Both the children have been dreadful at bedtime for the last couple of weeks with all the late nights and lack of ‘routine’ so they were both packed off to bed at 8pm. Scarlett was asleep by about 930pm (which is fine, actually if they were both asleep by 10pm I’d be quite content with that really) but Davies was still awake when Ady went up to bed just after 11pm. I woke them both just after 8am today though and with more garden playing, swimming lessons and Brownies / Sea Scouts I am hopeful tonight will be even earlier :).
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!
Comment by Michelle — 06 January 2010 @ 1:35 am
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!!!
Comment by Ali — 06 January 2010 @ 2:37 am