One word? When seven would do…

Ady’s been working on clearing a triangle of garden just infront of our house. Years ago our front lawn was split by a stepped path from the front door down to the drive, we took the path away leaving steps up to the front door and a flat path across the lawn but left the raised bed to one side and grass to the other. Ady’s planted many shrubs and bushes in it over the years and although it looked pretty it was a big chunk of garden which we couldn’t use. So this week he’s been gradually digging out all the tree and shrubs leaving just earth there. There is too much earth to be removed without a skip or loads and loads of trips to the skip so we’re going to rebuild the three bricks high little wall and have a raised bit of lawn there instead and put the barbecue and some chairs and a table up there instead. It will be nice :).

So yesterday morning he did a couple of trips to the tip with the shrubs he’d dug out and finished digging out the rest. Scarlett played outside while he did it and went to the tip with him while Davies sat indoors with me and we played gamesgarage and miniclip games on my laptop. We had lunch then Davies joined the others in the garden for the afternoon while I walked to work.

It was quiet, hot and pretty boring in the library so the four hour shift dragged a lot. I’m really not enjoying working the every other Saturday afternoon through the summer as it so hampers any weekend plans. The almost full-time member of staff is about to leave and often they ask if anyone wants to change their hours when that happens, before they recruit for a new person, so I might ask if I can swap to working every other Saturday morning instead. To be honest, I might as well work all day if I’m going to work an afternoon and I can’t do much in a morning when I need to be at work for 1pm anyway. Between my working and Sunday morning swimming lessons all our ‘free’ weekends have filled up for the summer already.

I walked home again to the scent of many barbecues in the air and found the children eating their tea in the garden before coming in to wash all the dirt off them from a day in the garden. They took ages to go to sleep, Ady and I both started drinking very early and were very merry indeed before 9pm with both children still awake and laughing at our antics. I’d brought home a cd of 60s songs which proved popular with everyone. We felt like real proper parents hearing the children singing along to the songs knowing them from them being featured on films or re-recorded with us muttering about ‘remembering the originals!’ 😆 I peaked very early and having knocked over a half full glass of wine and then had a riotous phone chat with Julie, Ady served me a huge dinner which I ate and promptly fell asleep on the sofa by about 11pm 😳 – I’m so wild! 😆

This morning, as seems to happen every Sunday we were woken by the alarm rather than children and had our usual Sunday morning mad dash about gathering things together for swimming, getting dressed and breakfasted and out of the door by 9am – we so couldn’t manage a school run :lol:. It was such a lovely morning and the sea looked like a mill pond as we drove alongside the coast to the swimming pool so Ady and Scarlett elected to go and walk along the beach while I watched Davies swimming. They had a different teacher this week that has not been there before and she was excellent. A real old fashioned, no nonsense, learnt all the children’s names within a couple of minutes and had them all really putting loads of effort in with no messing around type teacher. Two of the children could manage to swim a width unaided so they were kept behind presumable to be put up into the next class now. Out of the other six Davies probably is making the least progress in terms of actual swimming, but certainly is one of the furthest ahead in terms of sheer effort put into it and enjoyment of it. He really, really, really tries and actually he does swim, just not with any style, grace or panache. But he is utterly prepared to go underwater, float, do whatever he is directed to do and puts 100% into it. What’s also great is he appears oblivious to how the others are doing and so is not comparing himself (in this case, unfavourably) to others and then feeling down about it. I did think it must have been just like watching me when I learnt to swim at a bit older than the age he is now though, in that same pool. I tried and tried and it just didn’t come naturally. I can swim, but not strongly or very well and I still wouldn’t dream of going underwater or even having my face splashed, so I’m very pleased that he doesn’t share that with me. Only two more lessons to go and then summer break anyway and I’m going to attempt to change his lesson to a week day evening rather than Sunday morning too.

We met back up with Ady and Scarlett and went off car boot sale shopping. It was a good haul today with about 50 small animals, mostly cats and dogs. for about 2 quid. I did have to rein Ady in from buying stuff we really don’t need such as figures from Scooby Doo which although the kids like the cartoon of would simply not get played with sufficiently to warrant the house room or the pound he’d had spent. Infact I had a tantrum tonight about the amount of crap in the house generally (I’m in one of my mimialistic phases, I have them every so often and declutter all *my* stuff then get depressed about how much stuff everyone else has and stop again), so I think we might give car boot sales a bit of a break for a bit. But then again we might be over that by this time next week and back there again anyway. 😆

We left there and went over to Chris and Julie’s for a barbecue lunch which was very nice. The children played, the adults ate and chatted and looked at a selection of photos of all of us about 12 or 13 years ago. We’d brought over some pictures of Ady and I when we were first together and Chris and Julie had dug out some of theirs, so that was a nice ‘fill in the blanks’ exercise for us all. Chris and Julie had spent some time living in a squat and also some time travelling and living in vehicles, ironically about the same time we were buying this house so that was an interesting parallel. Then Ady and Chris washed their cars (they have a far better hosepipe arrangement than we do, more suitable for washing cars) while Julie and I walked with the children across some fields and through a church yard to a play park for an hour or so. Various pushing small children on swings, cheerleading them down the slide and over the climbing frame interspersed with odd bits of chatting and sitting on a bench kept us occupied and then we walked back again. By now it was gone 5pm so we slowly got ourselves ready to leave and came home for toast for the children before bed and roast dinner for us.

That all feels very brief and I’m sure I’ve missed out loads, but I’ve got two blogposts in draft, it’s already long gone midnight and I’ve got another busy week ahead, so it’ll have to do for now.