One word? When seven would do…

That’s me, a veritable bumble bee with all my buzzing with busyness today!

Yesterday was nice although I was fairly glad to wave Ady off to work again today. Too much confined space with children being way too clever about playing parents off against each other! 🙄 If he were home all the time I’m sure we’d shake down into more of a routine and plan our time better but when you know it’s only temporary there is a certain frustration about someone getting under your feet while you try to go about your usual business! 😉

My parents came over bringing lunch with them and a joint of beef for roast dinner too (I’m loving the trade off of us supplying the labour and them supplying the goods now we’re officially poor! I’ll happily pour the wine and cook the food for someone aslong as they supply it and I get to share it!). Before they arrived Ady and Davies spent ages in the playroom with Davies doing crazy dancing to ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ (It’s from Shrek 2 y’know!) and Ady videoing him for future embarassing footage to bring out to show potential daughter-in-laws and show on a loop at his 18th birthday party! Scarlett and I made snickerdoodles. I clearly lost something in the translation of Amercian ‘cups’ to UK oz though as the mix was very wet so I kept adding flour until it was doughy enough to shape and we ended up with far more of a cookie far less of a cake texture. Still very nice though and a fair amount were demolished still warm from the oven. I like baking with Tarly, she keeps up a running commentry of what’s happening with is hilarous to listen to and very cute.

We had lunch then the children build an ‘normous biro track, Ady did a fair amount of wandering round appearing to be busy but not actually achieving a great deal, Dad fell asleep and me and Mum played with her new laptop. It’s quite nice although it makes me all the more pleased that I went for a smaller screen this time as it felt very odd sitting with a great big one on my lap! I did some basic stuff with her like setting google to her homepage, showing her round google, setting her up a flickr account so she can view our photos and putting trillian on her machine so we can do IMing. I think that was the thing she was most impressed with actually – she thought it was excellent fun to sit side by side typing messages to each other rather than talking! 🙄

Around 5pm ish I started on the roast dinner and Ady did the kids tea and bath. In an effort to keep the children awake later than 6pm I took them into Tarly’s bedroom and we read through a whole pile of library books. A couple of really nice ones actually such as Danny and the Great White Bear, The Sandman and The Story Tree which was just fab and spawned loads of chat about the countries the stories came from, what the moral might be, some various words explained which were new to them both such as ‘redemption’. We also finished off with a very interesting version of Puss in Boots which Davies adored (Tarly had wandered off by then) and took up to bed for Ady to read to him again.

Davies then managed to stay awake til 10pm which was very frustrating as he kept reappearing downstairs saying he was frightened on his own so eventually Ady took over the dinner and I sat with him til he went to sleep. Hence a very late dinner! Ady went off to bed around 11pm but Mum and Dad stayed for another hour and we talked about what they are going to do with the rest of their lives. Their choices appear to be selling their house and buying something smaller and spending the money on travelling or selling their house and buying two smaller ones, one to live in and one to rent out for an income or finally selling their house and buying something with us where we can all live – some friends of ours did this a couple of years ago and it has worked really well – the grandparents get to spend time with their grandchildren (which is also a help with childcare enabling their mother to work part time) and they know that if they get to a stage where they need more support they are not living alone in their old age. We debated various options such as buying property with holiday home type accomodation built in to generate income for their investment for them or some sort of business which me and Ady could work. We even looked at a few properties on the internet but I think it is an idea which would take a lot of working through to ensure no one felt they were getting the raw deal. Mum was already getting huffy about the idea that in one of the properties we looked at which had a seperate granny flat it would be them that got the smaller bit of the accomodation 🙄 – I could see her point but the idea is that they release some of their equity to live on so clearly they would end up with less space!

This morning I have managed to clear a big pile of paperwork and phonecalls I had to do. Some financial stuff, some bank stuff, writing and printing off a couple of references for some ex employees at Dreamieland, I’ve done a load of washing and been on a mission of mercy to my Dad who’s van wouldn’t start so he rang me to go and tow him to bump start it. I *hate* towing almost as much as I hate being towed – I think I’d rather push a car! We had so many old bangers during our early years together that regularly required pushing and towing it is a very recent thing to not get into a car and turn the key muttering ‘please start, please start, please start’ every morning! Dad had a succession of vans through my childhood which used to dislike cold or damp mornings so from the age of about ten I was the one who had to control the pedals and steer while he pushed it along banging on the roof when he’d decided the van was going fast enough to let the clutch up! It started fairly easily anyway so we followed him to his destination to ensure he got there safe and then came home again, all the while me answering questions about engines, damp, cold and biting points and trying to distract me from asking me any more as I was way out of my depth! 😉

The children have played some complicated game called ‘Dr Davies and Dr Scarlett’ which involves doing something with geomags and a load of soft toys. They are utterly absorbed in it and have been at it for about 3 hours now. I want to do at least one Bob book with Davies at some point today but other than that I think I’ll leave them to it. They are enjoying each other’s company so much since we got home from Melrose it would be foolish to disturb them.

I must just record while I remember something we did at Lynda’s last weekend. She had two identical boxes of Kids K’nex (the chunkier version of k’nex) which Davies spent ages playing with. He also spent ages playing on the nick jr site on Lynda’s computer but he found the dot com site rather than the co dot uk site we normally use and was most amused to note all the different voices of the US Backyardigans and Blues Clues being hosted by someone other than Kevin! Anyway, he made all the various creatures from the instruction book, several creations of his own and we played a couple of games of racing each other to see who could make something first and a competition to see who could make the best robot too. When we tidied up I got Davies to split all the bits into groups of different pieces, count them and then divide them in half to put half of each away in the two cases. He started off counting and then experimenting with numbers (e.g. 8 pieces, took 3 away and then counted 5 so took 1 more away and checked that both piles had 4) but was soon spreading them out and halving them by eye then counting to check he was right. Very interesting to watch and of course an excellent example to Lynda and Stuart of how maths can be done in everyday life and through play at his age which we had only been speaking about the previous evening. When he’d finished I explained to him that it was called dividing and he’d been dividing in half or two which may well have not gone in as such but I felt happy that it was a good foundation for later stuff.

I still have loads of stuff I really should be doing today really. The house is a shambles with two baskets of washing to be put away, both the children’s rooms need a proper tidy up, the playroom is utterly trashed and the lounge has various piles of stuff in places which really need proper homes found for them. I have four CVs and a covering letter sat waiting to be done which admittedly don’t need to be back til Wednesday but as I’m out tomorrow day and evening it would be very sensible to get them done today. I also have three emails from Home Educators wanting local info sitting in my inbox for which I really must sort out some sort of basic email reply that I can tweak for each one and then send and I have at least three phonecalls to friends I should make before I start getting struck off Christmas card lists!

Back later with possible progress updates!