Care in the community

The wind and rain that started yesterday did indeed continue all through the night. I decided barely recovered from bad colds people shouldn’t be out and about in wind and rain so our plans to go to Drusillas were called off. (Hope you are feeling better soon too Ros X). So after a quick vote from the children on a couple of options we decided to take up Liza’s suggestion of The Plex of Fun soft play, or as the owners like to call it., Funplex. We’d not been for a while and a quick online chat with Ali confirmed that she and Freya would be there along with a couple other EOFF families who we’ve failed to keep up with lately so we went with that option.

We drove over listening to music and chatting and arrived to find not just the EOFFs and Liza there but a couple of other friends from MM who we’d not seen this year so that was great :). In all there were 7 families there and it was just lovely to sit and chat to all the adults while the children all just got on with it. Scarlett came and got some money off me to go and buy some water for herself at one point, which was just fab – I am so loving having older and more independant children 🙂 :). I drank lots of tea, fed the children coke and chips and just loved falling back into the sorts of conversations that I so enjoyed back when we were at MM every week. We talked HESFes, parenting, childcare, working, camping and ended with a smaller group after some had gone home having lovely vague and meandering chats about condos, apartments and complexes :lol:.

I barely saw Davies and Scarlett. D was playing the whole time and was in his element with a little group of smaller children who adore him and then with 2 same age as him boys which was fab to see, particularly as they two of the very boys I always hoped he’d play with at MM but he never seemed to. Scarlett played with various people at various points but there was a lovely ten minutes or so when her and Freya were playing on the slide hand in hand which was also nice to watch :).

We left about 330pm before the afterschool rush happened and got home just after 4pm. Sadly it was to discover Spatchcock the lame chick was dead :(. There is no visible reason why, he’d been fine when we left this morning and didn’t have a mark on him. His crop was full of food and aside from being small and scrawny he was otherwise fine. In the same way as we’ll never actually know what happened to the little chick while we were away I guess this is another of those unexplained things. I do know from hanging out on poultry-keeping forums that chickens do just die for no explained reason sometimes, particularly chicks so I’m guessing out of the 14 chicks we’ve hatched losing 2 isn’t so very rare really, and we always knew Spatchcock’s life expectancy would be short. The children were ok about it, sad obviously but very accepting that he had been lucky to live as long as he did given the state of him when he hatched. When Ady got home he dug a hole and we buried him in the garden. As with all our dead animals so far the children have decided his ghost will come visit them and are looking forward to seeing him with Malice et al very soon :).

I’d rung Ady at work to tell him and his boss had been there so he’d explained one of the chicks was dead and he’d be coming home to dig the hole. His boss aparently said ‘ah yes, you’re not a proper dad until you’ve buried a pet’ which struck a bit of a chord actually – it’s definitely something of a parenting rite of passage isn’t it, comforting a child and knowing there is nothing you can do to reverse things or really make them better. Quite often the first time you are not able to fix something for your child.

I made a big vat of popcorn and we settled down to watch the Bee Movie which I thought was pretty good actually. Scarlett didn’t watch all of it – it takes a pretty amazing film to hold her for 90 minutes, even in the cinema without any distractions but Davies and I watched it all, with an interval when Ady got home to bury Spatchcock.

We had bedtime stories – a Barefoot book of tales of wit and wisdom that we’ve been enjoying. I went through the library catalogue on Saturday and ordered in all the Barefoot books we have so we’ll be having a bit of a barefoot bookfest over the next few weeks I imagine. I was also telling Davies about a storytelling competition they are running which I thought he might be interested in.

Tomorrow if the weather is not too dire I might take the children to Drusillas, if not we’ll stay home and watch some more films. Today has been ace, a real reconnection with them for me – a nice cosyness about being together rather than the missing them for working too much but not wanting to actually be with them when I was home because I felt too ill of last week.