Another day, another media appearance!

When I got to work this morning I checked out the copy of the local council freebie paper as Lucy had told me Davies and Scarlett were on the front cover. Sure enough there they were. And two of my colleagues had spotted them too so were laughing at me over how Ady’s pictures had been on the front page of the two local papers last week and now the children were on this one this week. So when they asked what we were up to this weekend and I said Ady would be on TV they almost weren’t that surprised really :lol:. It’s a nice picture of the children actually, you can see the top of it here on the council website. And the whole thing here on pdf.

Last week Lucy introduced Davies to Zoo Tycoon. When we first got a pc I had Rollercoaster Tycoon which I spent many happy hours on before we got the internet and I’ve never really played games since. It obviously had an influence as when I came home that afternoon the house and garden had been set up into a zoo, which I think I blogged about at the time. Today when I got home Scarlett, Rebecca and Richard were in the garden, building an ‘adventure playground’ with various garden furniture and toy props while Davies was sat glued to Lucy’s laptop creating what seemed to be a rather successful zoo. Lucy would be the one to tell you more about it as I’ve never played it and Davies, once he’d greeted me and had a cuddle returned to it and only really spoke to Lucy to ask her advice on various things, other than to tell me a bit about his marketing plan of free entry so more people would come and then they’d spend more money in the zoo on other stuff like refreshments. I explained that was called ‘marketing’ – the idea of using cunning to get people to spend more money and buy stuff you wanted them to. We mentioned how the museums are free but have lots of cafes and gift shops in London and I said that that was what my job was when we were in Manchester – thinking up ways to persuade more people to visit and to spend more when they came, giving the example of the various ‘ride for free’ type offers I’d done on Dreamieland which meant more got spent on photos and in our gift shop. He seemed to get that idea rather quickly so I suspect it will be something we come back to in more detail.

The others came back in and carried on playing and then Lucy and The Rs headed off which left Davies and Scarlett an hour to play before tea so they got the toy animals out straight away and created a zoo. There was some discussion about whether a killer whale would be in a zoo which I clarified by explaining about marine zoos. Then they stuck a Doctor Who dvd they’d been watching this morning on while they had tea. Ady got home in time to leave Scarlett here while I took Davies off to Badgers. They are doing junk modelling small scale models of their bedrooms at the moment so we’ve been taking in cereal boxes for that and also family trees so they’ve had photos of us all to cut up and stick on. Looking forward to seeing all the fruits of these labours come the end of term. 🙂

As often happens when I don’t seem to have spent much time with the children they found a way to be with me and both crept out of bed while I was in the bath to come and chat to me. Yesterday morning they’d both come up to my bed and got in with me for cuddles and story making loosely based on Allie’s story generator with me supplying the ‘once upon a time there lived a ____’ and then filling that in. Tonight it was general chit chat and plans for tomorrow and the rest of the week and the weekend which we’re all looking forward to.