Strategic planning and getting stuff done only second to a Chilean mine rescue operation

A backdrop to our day, as I suspect has been for many others has been live and replay footage from the mine rescue. Tear jerking stuff. Utterly loved the second man up who brought stones up as gifts for his rescuers. 🙂

We waited in this morning as some dvds I’d sold on ebay were being collected by a local buyer. She arrived on time and gave me twice what she’d won them for as she felt they had not sold for enough. Bless :). I made some bread dough for Badgers later.

Once that had been done we headed into Lancing for a few small tasks – we had a big bag of ebay parcels to post, some stuff to take back to the library and we needed some cream for butter making. All that done we headed home for lunch.

Davies and Scarlett had been a bit squabbly today but disappeared off this afternoon to play something together. I did some online stuff, read some of a book I’m enjoying about living on wild food for a year and sewed loads of Badger badges onto uniform.

Ady arrived home early which meant we could use his car for Badger (saving petrol, hurrah), the kids had tea and then we left for Badgers. Today I did bread roll shaping and baking and butter making. We started by talking about our favourite sandwiches, which food groups bread and butter are from and then moved to the kitchen to wash hands. I had 8 in the group this week including two pairs of siblings and one girl I find incredibly trying. She does a lot of fussing, shrieking and generally being attention seeking.

We shaped bread rolls and put them in the oven, talking about the ingredients in bread and the process of rising and what each ingredient does. Once that was in we split a tub of cream between two tubs and became two groups of four sharing the shaking between the group. The tubs were transparent and we kept checking inside to observe the changing of the cream to butter, tasting and describing the changes. We then drained off the buttermilk and tasted that before splitting the butter between the children and shaping it into pats to wrap in greaseproof paper and put in the fridge.

I had to do way too much reining in of the children who seem to struggle when they are not being directed every single second. I got so fed up with it this week that I mentioned it to the leader and got her to lecture them all. I have no interest in trying to instil discipline as I frankly couldn’t give a monkeys if they want to engage or not. It’s interesting to watch Scarlett’s frustration with them.

Back home again Ady had got the fire lit and dinner on so I had a bath while the kids ate some toast spread with Scarlett’s portion of the butter.