And to Sunday

More rain 🙁

Just recently the children and I were talking about the beach in windy and rainy weather and how Ady and I used to go down there whenever there was a storm back before we had children as it was such an exhilarating place to be when the elements and nature were whipping themselves up. Nothing to make you feel quite so insignificantly small and powerless yet so very alive all at the same time :). I’d promised to take them there next time we were around and the weather was doing something exciting and today it all fell in to place.

It was the one year anniversary of the wood washing ashore at Worthing beach from the Ice Prince and so Worthing Arts Council, who seem to be chucking money and resources at some kind of regeneration programme currently (all good as far as I’m concerned, more events like the torch procession last summer and the intended Ice Prince festival are very welcome and we’ll go along and support them all. It’s nice to feel proud of where we live and it’s not often the opportunity arises ) had lined up a one week ‘festival’ of various things. It was ending with n unveiling of wood sculptures and an orange and lemon tossing into the sea by children.

We had a fairly low key morning and then as the rain had mostly stopped we headed out to the seafront to see the wood sculpture. Except it didn’t appear to be there :(.No idea if it was cancelled due to weather or other reasons or if I’d somehow got confused about what was happening but there was nothing ocurring. That was fine as we were there, the car was parked, we had nothing else planned and we found ourselves on the beach, at high tide, in increasing amounts of wind and then rain just as the kids had been asking for earlier this week :). So we beachcombed for about an hour, took loads of pictures, got cold and damp and found all sorts of interesting shells, crabs, clams, seaweed and other stuff getting washed up.

Finally when we’d had enough we headed into the town centre with half a plan to find a coffee shop for hot chocolate before going to the orange and lemon tossing. I managed to get the couple of bits I’d failed to get yesterday when we walked round Shoreham and we spent some time in the cookshop drooling at bakewear and kitchen gadgets. We decided we were too cold and wet to hang around for much longer so walked back to the car, via Iceland (the shop, not the country) for squirty cream to make our own hot chocolate at home.

We did drive past the hotel where the registering for the orange and lemon tossing was supposed to be happening and there was no indication of it taking place so either I had the dates wrong or it was cancelled due to the crap weather.

Back home the children and I did the birdwatch – not a lot about :(.We decided to watch from our lounge window and count anything we could see land clearly enough to identify within our results. The strip of garden we could see wouldn’t have had anything landing in it, the back is full of chickens which rather hamper other birds from landing and while in the front we often get starlings, blackbirds and robins it was far too cold and wet to be outside viewing that area. We saw loads of birds flying over – specifically gulls of which there were loads and several large flocks of starlings too.

Davies and Scarlett made some backgrounds for the fimo wildlife creatures they’d made earlier in the week and then I got them to dictate what they’d done for that WAA – ‘Get Creative’ and typed it all up and added pictures. They have finished the first 6 activities for their bronze award so Ady will print them all off and I’ll get that send off for them tomorrow. The Big Birdwatch is going to count towards their silver as we’d already done a lot of birdwatching stuff for the bronze. The next set of activities are rather more indepth and we’re out-and-aboutting again as normal next week so we may not get started on them just yet.

Ady cooked roast dinner – chicken with stuffing etc. so we sat and ate that and chatted about various things. We got onto the subject of ‘worst thing you ever did as a child’ so Ady and I regaled them with tales of our youth and various escapades which all seemed quite funny in the re-telling but made me realise just how much angst we have ahead as parents ;).

While we were out earlier Scarlett has said ‘it’s a crap day today isn’t it?’ loudly in Boots. We’d talked about acceptable words in different places and I’d said that while I had no issue with her using that word in context I wanted her to appreciate it could cause offense to others and to be aware of that while using it in public. She then wanted me to tell her some other words which were similar and I declined – saying that she would learn them soon enough and I didn’t intend being the one to teach her 😆 . My parents were fairly liberal about swearing and I intend to be the same but I don’t intend sitting a six year old down with a list of them! Instead I said if she wanted to learn words I’d happily teach her some to increase her vocab. in a positive way so we talked about various words and their definitions including: tintinabulation (which was one of Ady’s word of the day words this week), audible (which led to visual, tactile, odour and aroma) and more which I have already forgotten. We also talked about dictionaries and thesaurases. Cunningly moved that one away from in depth discussion of the word ‘fuck’ and all it’s uses I thought! 😉

After dinner the kids played with lego for a while and then Ady put on Return to Neverland which we all watched before the children got ready for bed. I read them the first chapter of Heidi (inspired by Jan) because I have been singing the theme tune from the 70s show all week since reading about it on her blog and we happened to have a copy on the shelf. They listened to the first chapter but didnt particularly get caught up with it – wonder if there are retellings of it that would be more appealing? I then found the theme tune on youtube for them to listen to as Ady and I had been murdering it (and doing bad impressions of the bad dubbing) and then it was their bedtime.

We’ve watched Lost (not getting any clearer really!) and it looks like I might just make it to bed before it’s tomorrow!