Saturday I worked in the morning. My direct boss has been off sick (with something similar sounding to what we’ve had with added sore neck complications, poor thing 🙁 ) so the Childrens Librarian was covering for her. She is precisely what you would imagine when you picture a Childrens’ Librarian and peppers all of her happy, happy, joy, joy speech with words like ‘lovely’. She’s a lot like that Philadelphia advert character of a few years ago. We speculate that she is either a complete bitch or a dominatrix secretly as surely no-one can maintain such a nice persona 24 hours a day?
My Dad came in to the library during the morning and gave me a heart stopping moment when I saw him as my first though was ‘oh my god, what’s happened?’ but it turned out he was there to do some photocopying. Whilst I did it for him I looked at him and was struck by how old he was looking. He is 71 (you know), which I guess is old or certainly getting that way but it shocked me to look at him and realise not only could he not pick me up and toss me over his shoulders any more he couldn’t even do it to Scarlett these days. Last year was was exactly double my age, meaning he was my whole lifetime older than me and yesterday morning he looked it.
It turns out he has managed to break his little toe, from stubbing it on a chest of drawers when coming home after a night out on Friday. He was also coming down with a sore throat and feeling rough, in pain, the wrong end of a sleepless night and possibly slightly hungover. So I am sorry for all that but slightly relieved there was a reason for the sudden appearance of ageing rather than me not looking at him objectively before.
Ady tells me I have looked old and drawn this past week too. I’m choosing to ignore him for that of course ;).
Back home again I’d not long missed Dad who had spent the rest of the morning here with Ady and the kids. The plus side of the whole car and boiler debacle has been the amount of time spent with Dad this last week, which has been really enjoyable :). He was talking to the kids about rations earlier in the week thanks to a taped programme we’d watched about food rationing and had also been talking to them about birthdays and Christmas and how they celebrated them when he was a boy. Now Mum is working full time again it’s Dad who has Davies and Scarlett for an afternoon each week while I’m at work and it’s lovely to see them enjoying each others’ company and hearing that he’s telling them the same stories about his childhood that so enthralled me when I was little – they seemed a world away from my life then 30 odd years ago, even more of a vast change for Davies and Scarlett to hear about and better than any history book.
We had lunch and then headed over to Ady’s work to collect some logs. A huge row of trees has been cut down on their land and is being slowly cut into small logs for staff to take away. Ady brings home a bag or two every time he is in the office but we’ve been sharing firewood with Dad aswell as getting through vast amounts this last week without the heating so wanted to top up our supplies of logs. We called in to Dad to drop a couple of bags off and have a cup of tea with him and Frazer came home while we were there so we had a catch up with him too.
When we left there the moon was just amazing, hanging low in the sky and the biggest I have ever seen it. It was like a sunset and for a brief moment between thinking ‘what the hell is that?’ and realising it was the moon it felt like one of those disaster movies or Doctor Who or something. We chased it to get a better view and drove up to Truleigh Hill (or just over the bridge over the bypass at least) but by then it had moved up and was much smaller. Still large but not as amazing). Mars was also clearly visible so we star gazed for a while and then got cold (and slightly spooked, the bridge has a reputation locally for suicide jumpers and it was very dark and isolated up there despite looking down over the main road and the airport and lights of Shoreham and Brighton) so came home.
The kids had tea, Ady and Davies watched The Simpsons and Scarlett came and chatted to me while I had a bath, then they went to bed and I cooked pizza for us. I started to feel rough while cooking and then Scarlett got all clingy and refused to go to sleep so I went and sat with her for a while. I finally came out about 11pm, ate my by now just warm pizza and then started falling asleep on the sofa so decided to go to bed. I fell asleep almost straight away and woke up this morning feeling much better for the early (for me) night.
Sunday Ady cooked pancakes for the kids’ breakfast and then went outside to do some shuffling around with the cars. We realised one of our hens was missing so a hen-hunt was undertaken and we found her in the pile of logs trying to lay an egg. She used to lay there last summer but we thought we’d stopped her and she’d have forgotten by now but no. She has always found hiding places to lay and we often have a week or more of trying to work out where she has moved to next and finding her stash of eggs. She’d obviously been deeper in the logs than we’d realised last year as there were at least 4 eggs down there that had smashed (not sure if they’d exploded from being rotten or perhaps frozen and expanded and shattered?) from back then. She’d been down there all night we think but seemed fine and was most reluctant to come out and kept trying to get back in again. We finally shut her in the little hen house til she’d laid her egg and then she was fine and happy to rejoin the others.
We went over to Ady’s work again, this time in my car which is far bigger and also hadn’t had a decent run since getting fixed so we thought it would do it good. We all helped load up logs and now have a nice big stash again.
On the way home we called in to the allotment to check all was well and have a bit of an on site planning session about what’s going where this year. Will blog about that in the relevant place.
Back home Ady unloaded the logs while I got dinner on and Davies played Xbox and did some excellent reading of instructions. He is really doing well with it and tackles all sorts of big words quite happily. He’s not fast and tends to read each word then go back to the beginning of the sentence and repeat the whole thing but he is there. He has many short words ‘under his belt’ so to speak and reads them without having to spell them out and tells me he does do a fair bit of practise looking at things like top trumps cards aswell as the books in his bedroom.
Ady took over dinner and I did some sewing with Scarlett. When we were in the fabric shop during the week she wanted to buy material to make a soft toy fox and I refused saying she needed to practise and show me she could do it before I spent a tenner on material just like Davies did before I bought him the stuff to make his Ewok. So I got her a foam sewing kit at the pound shop and showed her how to thread the needle, knot the end and do running stitch. She was all self-doubting at the beginning saying ‘I don’t think I’m going to be any good at sewing’ but she got the hang of it really quickly and enjoyed it. Need to get her some binca so she can practise some more and then we’ll get the fox material for her.
Davies and Scarlett started playing some game upstairs which they had to be called down for dinner from and disappeared straight back up to again after dinner. They came down about an hour later ‘please don’t send us to bed, we’ve come down for cuddles’ 😆 and then about half an hour after that ‘please can we have a sleepover?’ which we foolishly agreed to and the talking, albeit it quiet and happy talking has only died down in the last half an hour or so after Ady went to bed.
We watched Mo, which I thought was very good. Tomorrow we have nowhere to be but I do have various stuff to do, such as catch up on washing, finish my WPA course stuff as I am having an interview on Thursday, find out the prices for the ice rink which opens tomorrow and see if they do group discount and various other such tasks.