Bloody hell it’s cold!!!

Last night we were the house of the amazing non sleeping children which is always wearing 🙁 Davies had clearly decided that Scarlett had had too much attention during the day so he stayed awake til nearly 10pm wanting one of us to sit with him because he was scared – not even scared of anything specific, just generally scared! So we managed to have baths and cook a dinner with one of us sitting with him and then he stayed in his room while we ate it and then I sat with him until he went to sleep. Bleurgh!

Tarly then woke in the night and Ady just deposited her in bed with me – she sleeps on top of me but I can just about handle it aslong as I am not fully awake and can get straight back to sleep – and buggered off to her bed. Both children were up at 6am though 🙁 Seemingly fully recovered from yesterdays maladies so our planned trip to the newly refurbished soft play could indeed go ahead.

Dad turned up for an hour before we set off and retrospectively probably had a reason for his visit although he is in the habit of appearing at least once a week during the day, normally around lunchtime 😉 which I think could be due to our threatened possible move away at some future point, which he is very vocally opposed to. So we had some general chats before he headed off home again and we headed off to soft play. We’d arranged to meet Lucy there and Julie as well and Lucy had also invited a friend of hers so we pretty much took over the place. Lucy had her two and her nephew with her, her friend had an 18 month old boy and a 3 yo girl and then Julie and I had our 4. So there were 4 three year old girls which was a nice little pink posse running around together. Davies found a little gang to be the leader of and spent time happily ordering the helper teenage worker around and getting her joining in with their games on the slide.

I had a chat about HE with Lucy’s friend who thought it was a cool idea but her 3yo is very happy in nursery so it is not for her… Lucy and her left around lunchtime and then Julie and I gave the children lunch before heading back in for a final play. Scarlett had had enough by then so spent some time on my lap while Julie and I talked about Education, Autonomy and Trusting The Process. We’ve never really talked about educational approach much so it was nice to have a chat about such things and I gave her my views on reading and writing etc so at least she has another persons viewpoint to help with starting to make decisions about appoaches from here. We also talked about nursery generally and specifically for our children and I explained how our approach works with a few examples of being a bit cunning about shoving education into day to day life without actually having a curriculum.

Then we headed over to the main Worthing library. Julie wanted to return some books and it is literally across the road from soft play so we joined her in our quest for books on film making and puppets. There was a computer set up with some alphabet games and some version of paintshop or similar which Davies commandeered and then had a little audience of Jack, Maisie and Scarlett gathered round him while I gathered up a large amount of books including a couple of Dr Seuss we’ve not read yet, the required books for Davies, an Eric Maddern we’d borrowed before but not read and chatted about as much as I’d planned to at the time, Brittania which leapt off the shelves at me having read others raving about it so I thought I’d better grab, a book about ‘where babies come from’ as we’ve been getting dangerously close to that question with both children so this might be a good way to ‘do it’ once and for all with a nice introduction rather than waiting til we’re in the queue at Sainsburys or somewhere else with a large audience. 😉 Also gathered up a couple more story books and in my continuing but truly accidental trend for reading upsetting books I picked up Richard Peltzer’s book (brother of a boy called it) and a book about the girl who was kidnapped by a paedophile (name escapes me, will come back and edit later when downstairs). I also said Davies could choose a film and then when all of them just seemed too Disney princesses or too Tweenies we sort of jointly agreed on Five Children and It which he’s already sat through once and I plan to watch with him in the morning as it looked pretty good. He’s really into his films atm and much though I am not after him sitting watching the TV all the time he really does seem to be getting a lot out of them so I am happy to encourage it, I might have to think about taking him to Blockbusters or somewhere though rather than the library’s limited selections.

We came home where the film went straight on, Scarlett played some odd game involving laying loads of dolls and soft toys around the room and then covering them with paper as sheets to put them all to bed – dormitory stylee, no idea where she gets such ideas from! Ady arrived home from work feeling rough and the children had a very long bath with every bath toy in the room in there with them.

Tomorrow I am getting a Very Important Phonecall at 3pm and my Dad isn’t able to be here as previously planned so the children have said they’ll be quiet in exchange for playdoh ;-). I’m planning some baking and some reading of all these library books in the morning and the phonecall in the afternoon.