Ady is working tonight – he’ll be on telly shortly so he wasn’t at work today on account of working until about 3am tomorrow morning. This meant he didn’t need to be at his desk but he did get about six phonecalls from work and QVC and had to go into work to collect a last minute addition to tomorrow night’s show :roll:.
So we’d decided weather permitting to go out for some sort of walk today and our options were Pulborough Brooks, Woods Mill or the location for Julie’s too early for bluebells annual walk now that bluebells are actually out :lol:. We went for Pulborough Brooks as Ady was keen to do some adder spotting after our impressive sightings last week. So we packed up lunch and headed off.
Davies felt car sick on the way which he hasn’t suffered from for a couple of years so he and I got out of the car and walked for part of the way which happened to coincide with a traffic jam so although Ady and Scarlett did drive ahead, park up and wait for us it wasn’t for very long. Pulborough Brooks was busy though including a school trip on a coach. The visitor centre is staffed by volunteers so it is sometimes a bit of a lucky dip as to the service you get but today it was a very enthusiastic and cheery woman who issued spotter sheets and took Davies and Scarlett over to peek out of the window at a moorhen and her chicks.
The children were a bit needy as they often are when Ady is around and after a truly text book visit last week where we saw newts, lizards, adders and all sorts of things we didn’t have quite such a successful time although we did spot one newt and Ady did get to see his first ever adder. It was a fairly small female, basking in the sun who slowly slithered off when she realised she was being watched so nothing like the display we were treated to by the two males last week.
We had lunch in the playpark area and then drove to Ady’s work where he had to collect some plants and pictures for a last minute addition to one of tomorrow’s shows. We were halfway there anyway being in Pulborough. The children have been there before on the nursery open day but they’d not really met any of Ady’s work colleagues who came pouring out of the office once word got round they were there. I was quite gratified to be very warmly recieved too (Ady slightly grudgingly told me the other day how the big gossip from the party we went to the other weekend was what a ‘good laugh’ I am :lol:) and I was pleased to see my most favourite of his colleagues for an extra bonus chat ;). The children finally got to meet Tom who they have spoken to at length on the phone over the years and supplied us with our bantams, the incubator and half the hatched eggs so they had plenty to chat to him about and were generally cooed over by plenty of others too :).
We got home and I dashed off to Sainsburys for a couple of food items and petrol for my car while Ady loaded his car up, the kids got their swimming things on and Ady got some pizza dough on for the kids’ tea. None of this happened as I managed to leave having closed the front door behind me thus locking them all out :oops:. So there was a bit of a chaotic dashing about when I got home to do it all.
Off to swimming where they are still a class of 8 but with several new children. Davies has moved along the line to number 2 in the ability and height order while Tarly who was the smallest and least skilled now has two smaller, lesser abilitied children the other side of her. We don’t often get chances to see our children moving up the ranks but this was a rather visual and pleasing example. Davies took a while to get back into it but did fine. Tarly was a bit of a random splashing kicking flailing dervish and then suddenly right at the end managed to have a couple of flashes of getting arms and legs all doing the right thing at the right time :). Woo hoo!
Home for pizza for them, shirt ironing for A and a ‘see you on Thursday’ for him and then a very protracted bedtime for the children. I think Tarly finally went to sleep around 10pm and Davies has wandered about for ages, tried to go to sleep in my bed and is currently sitting beside me waiting for Ady to be on telly so we can ‘go to bed together’ 🙄 – a bit typical when we need to all be up and out just after 8am tomorrow!
Questions today have included from Scarlett ‘how could the most wonderful thing about tiggers be that he’s the only one of his species when he needed a mummy and daddy to make him?’ and from Davies (about 2 minutes ago) ‘what was the first flower?’ so we googled – (cue ‘ooh gooogle’) and discovered the answer then google image searched for that.
lovely photo 🙂
Comment by Sarah — 23 April 2008 @ 5:38 am