One word? When seven would do…

I worked this morning. Dad stayed here with Davies and Scarlett. Apparently he mostly teased Scarlett while having a conversation with Davies about how people who climb mountains ‘because they are there’ are suicidal idiots. Oh he’s all about the tolerance and respect for the views of others is my Dad ;). My car wouldn’t start again (heavy rain overnight) so he did run me into work and come and pick me up again afterwards though.

Work was fine. It’s a very curious atmosphere there as they have all known for months that I am leaving but now when I should really be giving a firm leaving date and can’t due to the ongoing ‘when the bloody hell will we get a tenant’ debacle it’s thrown things rather into chaos. Knowing I *will* be leaving means for long term planning’s sake they are getting me to hand over tasks I do, train other staff in things and try to put a plan into place for covering my hours once I go. Not knowing when that might actually be makes everything really rather tricky. Added to that the big boss (who I do Reading Group with) is also leaving at the end of Feb as she has taken voluntary redundancy in the latest round of cuts and restructuring so she is also torn between being professional to the very end and that whole end of term yipee feeling of leaving a job.

I got home and we had lunch. Dad had dashed off to look at a job but rang me shortly afterwards for a favour. I love the way he asks for favours, he’s just like me and hates asking but is clearly incredibly grateful.

Davies and Scarlett had their plasticine out and were watching a video of a load of Morph episodes so were happily engaged with just the odd admiring comment at their creations. Scarlett is obviously rather animal-centric in her creativity but is just as imaginative and talented as Davies at creating pieces of art and I am often in awe of both of their abilities to visualise something in their heads and commit it to paper or 3d sculpture the way they do. Davies remains very Aardman inspired with his plasticine modelling but I guess he would really with it being such a strong early influence. Today he was creating a whole farmyard of animals and started with a sheep and pig. I love the way all his characters get full biographies when he makes them.

I was flicking through some online stuff and stumbled upon a link I’d mentally made a note of going back to look at again from a local HEor – the flushtracker to see where your poo (and other waste water) goes to. We loved it (and very entertainingly started a whole poo tracking trend too :)). Once we’d seen where our flush ended up we then tracked a flush from my parents to see if our speculation that it would go to the same place was correct. It was. Both the children were quite fascinated with the google earth stuff and the ability to zoom in and out, get aerial views and street views so we played with that for a while, looking into our neighbours back gardens and talking about the vans that went round getting all the images.

Further speculation on waste water thanks to the worthy message from Domestos meant I looked at our water suppliers website and found some interesting information on how waste water is treated and how tap water is treated so we also spent some time looking at that.

There was more plasticineing, putting chickens away, lighting the fire, cooking kids’ tea, looking at zone two and adding a few more potential hosts to it and emailing them, going through the zone three list and finishing that off ready for an email to be composed and sent to them maybe tomorrow, checking again to see if my car would start, looking at the WWOOFing forum and discovering a HE family about to do something very similar to us and making contact with them and talking to Scarlett about her very valid and non hysterically made point after watching Newsround that there are so many natural disasters happening it’s like the end of the world is nigh.

Ady arrived home having had a long and all too much driving day at work so once he had had a restorative cup of coffee we did bad / good / learnt today:

Davies
Bad: Can’t get favourite dvd to work on downstairs dvd player
Good: Making plasticine farm animals made me feel really excited about WWOOFing
Learnt today: car windscreen glass cracks at 300mph (from Blast Lab earlier, unseen by me so unchecked statistic!)

Scarlett
Bad: Grandad teased me
Good: watched some good animal programmes
Learnt today: where our flushed water (poo) ends up after leaving our toilet

Ady
Bad: had to go to Cambridge (not specifically Cambridge, just a long drive – 408 miles in total driven today)
Good: England won the cricket
Learnt today: worldwide a child (under ten) starves to death every ten

Nic
Bad: Bloody car won’t start!
Good: organised a swap of my shift at work so I can be off for our Bye Then Party.
Learnt today: that although all the water that comes out of our tap is drinking water quality only 3% is actually consumed as drinking water or in cooking, the rest is sent down the drain as waste water from toilet flushing, hand washing, baths and showers, washing machines, dishwashers etc.

Before bed Scarlett and Ady looked at the RSPB magazine together while I showed Davies a youtube clip I’d told him about ages ago but not got round to showing him about a weather balloon being sent up into space.. Davies went off to bed as he was actually feeling quite tired, although he did come back down again to enquire as to whether I thought he might have an intenstinel worm as he was hungrier than usual at the moment! 😆 I assured him it might just mean he was finally growing!!! Scarlett and I looked at the Insect Lore catalogue which had come in the post and she was about to go to bed when I ran the hoover round and discovered it was all clogged up with hair and cotton threads so spent some time unpicking all that from it’s brushes. Scarlett decided this was just her sort of project (she loves picking and fiddling) so her and I had a very satisfactory half an hour or so doing that (similar to the wool untangling at camp!) while half watching a programme about seriously overweight teenagers which just happened to come on after whatever we’d been watching and was interesting if rather sensationalised.

Scarlett went to bed, Davies seemed to actually fall asleep at a respectable hour, Ady and I watched Hugh (and I cried 🙁 ) and I exchanged messages with the Also-WWOOFing family.

I love days like this when we come across educational and interesting stuff by accident, one question leads to another and we are all fascinated and learning alongside each other. I love that everyone is in the room together doing their own thing but interacting and saying ‘hey look at this’ every so often. It reminds me anew of why we do what we do, how we do it :).