Daviesomatic

Ady was home this morning as he was supposed to be taking some photos of the allotment and getting me to update the blog about progress there and making a mini-film about seed potatoes. I feel a bit like the allotment is being hijacked but I am resisting it and ensuring we meet our own evil aims without being dictated to!

Basically Roundstone (the company A works for) are producing an ‘allotment pack’ of veg, sent out at the right time for planting throughout the season, which should fill a standard allotment size / provide veg for a family of four. This came about when they heard about our allotment and they wanted to know if we’d test it out for them. The deal was to be free plants in return for our feedback. I explained that I was already keeping a blog and they could take their feedback from that and the powers that be at A’s work read the blog and fell in love with it. However I think the allotment pack is crap. It is totally salad-heavy, lacking in variety and full of too many of the same thing (eg loads of varieties of tomatoes and cabbages, very few roots, peas and beans).

I’m feeling quite overprotective of the allotment as my project, to do with the kids, introduce me to both gardening and vegetables, help me with a more active and healthy lifestyle and increase my self-sufficient dreams and eco-aims. I liked the idea it would be a family thing too with Ady around at evenings and weekends. I was quite looking forward to planning what we’d grow, predominantly wanting only stuff we know we’d eat with the odd foray into experimenting with other stuff. I’m not particularly precious about *my work* but equally if my blog is going to be read and my ideas, words and thoughts lifted from it I sort of feel like I should get some recognition for that.

Ady thinks we should just take and grow what we want from the selection, be pleased that we have yet another opportunity for him to get flexibility in his hours by taking time back from work in order to do allotment stuff enabling him to do more childcare. And he is right. There is just something about the idea of it being used as a marketing tool for someone else that just isn’t sitting very comfortably with me though.

So, having looked at the blog post I wrote last night and seen the pictures I took at the weekend when I was at the allotment with the kids he decided he didn’t need to do any more of that and just focused on his mini-film. I went out in the garden to help with it and he set up a little O/B in the chicken area and did some to camera bits about planting up seed potatoes and then some close up shots of chitting potatoes. It all looked really good when we played it back. I think he is really looking foward to QVCing again soon. He has lots of dates lined up so fingers crossed it will all start again soon and he can get back to it as he clearly enjoys it a lot.

The kids were up to various things; some DSing, some watching Star Wars, some playing a crazy game in the bedroom which seemed based on DS platform games and involved them talking in Italian accents and calling each other ‘Mario!’ 😆

Ady headed off to work, I made some flapjacks and as I was rather redundant (no one wanted to sit at the table with me and ‘do stuff’) I read some of my book and did some knitting.

Two very exciting deliveries arrived during the morning – the first was my new wellies :). I have been wanting a pair of wellies that fit since our first HesFes in 2005 when I bought my first wellies since childhood. Along with various other parts of my body my calves are rather larger than nature intended them and I struggle to get boots to fit. I’ve found Evans can meet the needs of smart boots that fit but hadn’t managed to find wellies that fit. This means all the Autumn and Winter Walks we go on, all the allotmenting in the mud, all those ‘summer’ camping trips in muddy fields and even walking along the beach at low tide happen either in my poor long suffering DMs (which then take poor Ady ages to clean up again ;)), crocs (which then means poor Ady is scrubbing my feet clean for ages) or wellies which reach my ankles and then refuse to go any higher resulting in nasty welts around my shins and poor Ady having to tug them off with all sorts of lubricants where they have got stuck on.

I’ve googled and asked other large women in wellies and last year finally found a company selling just what I had been looking for. I have cyber stalked these wellies for months, going to the website at least once a week to ogle them and fantasise about how my life would be transformed it they were only mine. At Christmas I considered getting Ady and the kids to buy them for me, for my birthday I hoped I would be asked by my parents what I wanted so I could direct them to the website but it was not to be. So I decided last week I would make them mine myself. They would be my gift to me. And I shakingly placed the order.

This morning they arrived. I heart them. They fit. They are comfortable and roomy and adjustable. They look cool. I can’t wait to go and splash in puddles wearing them. To kick up the leaves on Autumn Walks, to trudge through snow drifts on Winter Walks, to plod across sodden campsite during the summer months. Just one woman and her wide calf wellies :).

Also in the post today was my other small token of self affection 😉 bamboo knitting needles. I also heart them. They are so nice to hold, so easy to work with. I am six rows into my first knitted garment (a hat).

Anyway, back to things not related to me spending money (and probably making rather a mockery of my earlier moaning about the allotment really 😉 ). Davies was playing a new DS game called ‘Crazy machines’. I don’t think it’s been released as a game to buy yet – A spends his evenings scouring the upcoming DS game releases and downloading them before they are in the shops. Bloody pirate! It’s just like Fantastic Contraptions and D loves it. And is very good at it 🙂

We had lunch, the afternoon passed and then it was time for swimming lessons. Davies’ goggles had come apart round the eyes where the foam bits were so we bought him a new, better pair from the reception desk. Probably not the cheapest place to get them but we always forget until we’re back at the swimming pool again each week and it would mean a trip into town to the sports shop so would cost petrol and parking even if we did remember. He was very pleased with them :).

Scarlett had a really good lesson, the class is still too large with 10 children in it, there is still way to much of a scale of abilities but Scarlett is so desperate to move up to Davies’ class she is concentrating and doing really well anyway. Today she was focusing on being first across each time, and managing it easily :). The teacher was telling the children that next week she is being assessed on her teaching so I wonder if that is to do with any complaints that may have been made.

Davies had an excellent lesson too – his swimming is now starting to gain some style rather than the frenzied ‘must keep moving to stay afloat’ technique of a new swimmer. The instructor actually came over to comment on how well he’s doing :). I sat there feeling lazy and guilty that I’d done bugger all today and should really have taken my stuff and gone in too – both for exercise for me and for having done *something* with the kids.

We came home for tea – beef stew in the slow cooker so already ready for them. They both ate it all and we watched some Cbeebies while they ate which was a show I’d not seen before called Mister Maker – a bit like Art Attack. He was making aged treasure maps using tea bags to age the paper and the kids were enthralled and asked if they could have a go at it. I laughed and said I’d been doing it only last week for a display at work. They were really interested and I said we’d call into the library tomorrow to see if and then realised the library will be closed tomorrow afternoon when we go passed so said if they wanted I’d take them there now instead.

They were both really up for that so they finished their tea, we gathered up all the stuff which could go back to the library and we headed there. They said my display was ‘okay’ but grudgingly which made the women at work laugh as they all think it is one of my best 🙂 I’m so underappreciated by my children, but I suspect that is sort of their job ;). They chose some books, we looked at the display space they’ve got booked soon, I collected various things that had come in for me. Scarlett went up to ask about reserving the OSTs for Star Wars and placed a load of reservations, then she asked if she could get a new library card as her’s is the My First Library Ticket Kipper one. We went back over to the enquiry desk to do that and Wendy was tied up with something else I did it for Scarlett and let her write her own name on it with the special pen 🙂 She was very chuffed. Wendy finished what she was doing and there was some debate about whether actually everyone else could go home and leave Davies, Scarlett and I to run the library. The kids were all in favour of that idea :).

We came home again and they had dessert while I started my hat. Ady arrived home and we read a pile of books Scarlett had chosen followed by the first couple of chapters of The World According to Humphrey which I’d seen come up on my ‘recommended for you’ page on Amazon so ordered in. We’re enjoying it so far :).

The kids went to bed but Davies was still obviously active-brained as he came back downstairs with a pad full of drawings of machines. One to serve your dinner using a balloon triggering scissors which cut a rope which released a weight which banged onto a seesaw which catapulted your dinner onto the table for you. Another with two trampolines positioned opposite each other on their sides which when a ball was rolled (minimal human effort) started a chain of events using the trampolines to dig holes with a shovel and scatter seeds into the holes to be used at the allotment. He is so going to be a mad professor with sticky up hair and bubbling test tubes while he has flashes of genuis and brilliance but forgets simple tasks like eating or paying the electricity bill! I’ve told him when his writing gets clear enough to label them we’ll send them to Aardman to enter some of their competitions they are always running for cracking contraptions. We also talked about the mother of invention being necessity and discussed thinking of jobs that were time consuming, hard or not enjoyable and creating ideas to help with them.