A day of SATs or should it be sitting?

Either way we did very little or none at all of either!

I think we were all paranoid about oversleeping so all ended up way earlier than we needed to be. Still managed to scramble to Pulborough Brooks five minutes late though although I blame myself for not factoring in time taken to all get into the car when I decided what time we’d need to leave by. Seven in Ady’s Touran does go but it’s a bit tight and doesn’t really allow for anyone to be deciding (Scarlett) they don’t want to be sitting where they are sitting!

Davies and Scarlett had Wildlife Explorers. Last month’s was cancelled due to the snow so they’d organised for this months to be 90 minutes long rather than the usual hour and for the older and younger groups to have a half hour crossover to celebrate that Pulborough Brooks had won the club of the year award. The kids came out with a certificate each (although it said they had ‘taken part’ rather than won) and a really nice little book each with loads of wildlife information and blank pages for writing notes / drawing sketching of wildlife they spotted while out and about. They’d also had cake :).

When the kids joined I was really pleased at the idea of Ady and I having an hour on a Saturday morning once a month to wander round the reserve without the kids and maybe have a drink in the coffee shop there too. We managed it once and I think it rained, last month it was cancelled and of course yesterday we had M,M and C with us. They were a very welcome addition though of course :). Davies and Scarlett went in and we headed off round the reserve. Not very far into the walk Marcus and Chloe broke off from the rest of us to head down a public footpath that bisects the reserve which had a geocache down it. Michelle, Ady and I continued round the rest of the walk. We went in 2 hides and saw deer and a few birds although it was fairly quiet on the waters but we did see two adders :).

We’d just said to Michelle that we were coming up to where we’d seen adders there before but didn’t expect any this early or this cold when we’d had a heavy ground frost 2 nights previously when we tried to overtake some slower walkers who shushed us and told us to wait and look. And there was an adder! 🙂

A bit further on we saw a group gathered round a second adder too. Very exciting 🙂 I love Pulborough Brooks :).

We got back in plenty of time to collect D and S and had a brief break in the play area as the sun was shining. Michelle and I showed our age (35 years apiece!) by both making old women taking the weight off their feet with relief type noises as we sat on a bench 😳 Scarlett took her shoes off to play barefoot as one of her boots was falling apart. She was in stark contrast to a very overmade up woman berating both her smaller children for what appeared to be no more than playing. I later walked behind her husband, well spoken in a sports jacket and slacks telling the boy not to walk through a puddle despite him wearing wellies. I had a big splash in the puddle myself but sadly wasn’t close enough to get any on the back of his slacks ;).

We left as we were all feeling hungry and decided to make the most of the sunshine with chip shop chips on the beach for lunch. Scarlett had announced she was desperate for the loo in the car and we were stuck in Saturday heading into town traffic for ages. Then as she’d taken her shoes off, against my advice we had to wait for her to put them back on so her and I dashed through the chip shop restuarant to the loos with Chloe in fast pursuit. Fortunately we were at the beginning of what ended up being a very long queue in a very small corridor and I think the others probably thought we’d got lost!

Eventually we did indeed manage to sit on the beach, eating our chips watching seagulls and crows swoop around. It was lovely down there if a little cold and my enjoyment of what are very lovely chips was tarnished by me realising I was sitting with my boots in a pile of vomit. I managed to ascertain it was only on my boots, kick some stones over it to cover it up and wipe my boots with some napkins without alerting anyone else and causing mass turning off chips which was good. We did end up spending about 10 minutes discussing at length who might have caused the vomit afterwards though. From now on all silly questions from children about who did something when we can’t possibly be expected to know the answer will be replied to with ‘Charles Johnson’ thanks to Marcus. Davies managed to get most of the gist of this but did substitute it with both Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin which might cause confusion if he tries to use the technique himself 😆

Back home for restorative cups of tea (and sitting down complete with ‘ahhhh’) and to check on the progress of the pipped eggs. A second pipping had started but neither was getting very far and indeed the first pipped egg seemed to have stopped altogether. 🙁

The kids played outside for a while but I was being horrible (in much the same way as annoying parents at Pulborough Brooks actually :oops:) and wouldn’t let my two put waterproofs on and play with mud and water (cold, not completely over being ill, didn’t really want to go and find waterproofs or clear up after them for what I guessed would be a five minute wonder) so they came back in again.

We decided to go and visit St Mary’s church which is very local and has lots of historical value with parts of it over 1000 years old with a saxon tower. There were two nearby geocaches too. We failed to find the first one in the carpark but had a wander round the graveyard and then went inside the church. Scarlett installed herself in the children’s corner with a pile of books about ‘Baby Cheeses’ and happily sat looking through them. Davies walked round with Ady and I and we were joined by a very friendly woman who I now suspect may even have been the vicar who wanted to tell us all about the place pointing out various bits of saxon carving, a grave which had been uncovered and the font which Davies and Scarlett wanted to see as we’d been talking about Christenings the other day while reading the Humanist book.

Davies asked what the wooden boards on the wall were for – the ones they slide numbers into for psalms and hymns so she went off and got the box of numbers and the list of hymns for Sunday’s service and said we could set them up. The irony and humour of this did indeed strike me ;).

Back outside again we managed to find the geocache we’d not found and then headed off along a footpath which leads steeply uphill to find a second one. It’s a path we took on the start of a very long walk over the downs we did a couple of years ago with my parents:
2006

2009

weather is bleaker (March vs July) and kids have grown but otherwise landscape is identical.

It was however through a field of cows which seems to have been the case with about 50% of the caches we’ve done with M and M so there was already a bit of diversity within the group about whether we should carry on or not. Ady, Marcus, Davies, Scarlett and I carried on assuming the cows would move away from the corner we needed to get to as we got closer. We were telling Davies and Scarlett the story of the cows who killed as we went and then realised one was a bull who was squaring up to us and making a low moo rather than going away. We still intended to carry on until we noticed a very small dark thing in a group of cows huddling together and realised it was a calf. A very new calf. That was probably only minutes old and hadn’t even got up yet (although it looked fine). On that basis – giving them respect as it *is* their field and they are supposed to protect their young and we didn’t want to either risk getting hurt or them abandoning the calf and not returning to it – we retreated instead.

Back home again for wine c’clock, pheasant for tea and assisted hatch delivery. The egg which had been pipping and stopped really had stopped and the egg which was pipping seemed to be labouring really badly and not making much progress. I’ve never intervened before with the incubated eggs but having lost one already I decided it was worth trying to give a chance to the one still going and helped clear the eggshell that it had broken but not hatched from. The membrane was still fairly intact around it’s body although it had broken through it around it’s beak. It seemed very weak so I took a decision to carry on and moistened it until it came away. The chick did carry on breaking out itself, it was very much a joint effort.

Unfortunately it didn’t pick up as I’d hoped it would once hatched and despite drip feeding it some water when it seemed to be struggling to breath and making a clicking sound I am fairly sure it wasn’t properly formed and one of it’s legs wasn’t set right. I didn’t really expect it to last the night and sadly it didn’t :(. All of the online advice about such things strongly recommends against intervention but I’m still confident under the circumstances we did the right thing and it would have died regardless. What we did get was an interesting educational experience and a reminder of the precariousness of life I guess.

The kids had a dvd up in Davies’ bedroom – Scarlett fell asleep, Chloe came down to go to bed and Davies fell asleep soon afterwards, again with no need for us to deal with any of them :).We saved our intervention for hatchlings rather than our own children this weekend ;). Before they went to bed though Michelle had mentioned a sketch with Ronnies Corbett and Barker and John Cleese about class so Marcus had found it and we’d watched it which inspired the children to have a go themselves with very funny results 🙂

Another very nice evening of chatting, drinking wine and enjoying M and M’s company. Michelle and I sat up later (but still not terribly late) chatting about mothers and daughters and being both ourselves and the relationships up and down a generation.