One word? When seven would do…

This morning after I had made my first bucket of tea of the day, let the chickens out, turned the eggs in the incubator, poured cereal into bowls for children who are capable of navigating worktop clambering, milk pouring and microwaving and spooning hot chocolate powder into mugs to make their own warming, sugar laden hot drinks but seem to struggle with boxes of cereal handily placed at kid height, checked my emails and discussed chilli chocolate with Scarlett I was channel flicking to find something better than cartoons and happened upon Boogie Beebies on Cbeebies. Now Boogie Beebies started on Cbeebies just ever so slightly before we stopped watching Cbeebies so I am familiar with it but never watched lots of it. As part of ill fated, failing quite miserably at Move Around More April I decided to get up and boogie along with it.

I expressed this intention to the children. Davies literally rolled around on the floor laughing. He even waved his legs around a bit in the style of an upturned woodlouse. Scarlett looked amused and stuck her legs out from the sofa so she could rest her feet on my bum. Not sure if this was a physical sign of her support, an attempt to hamper and ridicule me or simply some aerobic form of offering more resistance to enhance my work out.

So I did it all. Davies continued to be amused, Scarlett wondered off for a while and then came back to join in. It was good, I felt energised and alive. And every one of my 34 years plus, yet with a quirk of oddness that my reminder of the age of my bones was due to bopping about to pre school age workouts on daytime telly :lol:.

Davies is being tricky at the moment. Or maybe I’m being tricky or intolerant or something. Fortunately I am older and more cunning so am able to place all the blame squarely with him ;). We seem to be having an average of one Serious Talk per day just now which is tedious and probably diluting the message to him anyway. I can never decide how much of it is me being crap at letting him act like a child and how much of it is potential serious issue stuff that I should be leaping on and stamping out. At the time it always feels like I need to deal with it but restrospectively I am always able to attribute it to normal 7 year old behaviour which makes me think a lot of it gets clouded by my own reactions and intolerance rather than objective reasoning. Ah well…

He read about half a book to me earlier. It was stilted and took me back to learning to read myself which I didn’t think I remembered that clearly but actually I realise I do and suddenly had a very clear mental image of sitting outside the classroom reading to someone (teaching assistant / parent drafted in to listen to readers?) from a Peter and Jane book and stumbling over words I had only read the sentence beforehand. We stopped when he got bored but he said he’d really enjoyed realising he could do it if he tried. We talked about reading again tonight and I said it was one of the best things I ever learnt to do because of the amazing possibilities it unlocks. I think of it a bit like learning to drive or learning to walk I guess, it suddenly opens up so many new areas to discover, places to go and gives you so much autonomy too.

I’ve been being hassled at work by several people to get Davies to enter a competition to design a new children’s library ticket. He’s had various ideas which we have discussed the feasibility of when scaled down to credit card size and he finally sketched an idea today of various characters coming from the pages of a book which he was pleased with so he transfered it onto paper and coloured it in so I could take his entry to hand in tonight. 🙂 Scarlett did some drawing, copying a picture of a fox and her cubs from a book. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen Scarlett actively copy something like that. She’s also doing lots of random letter writingtoo and today managed to spell CARSTEL out of nowhere which she was very chuffed to learn pretty much spelt the word CASTLE (well for southerners anyway ;)) although I think it was a complete fluke :).

We had lunch and then headed out to meet up with Mel, Liam and Lily at the park. They played hide and seek for a while and then we walked up the park towards the trees. Lily often complains that she is left out as the others tend to suggest a game and then get on with playing it between them while she either wants to be the one to decide the game or at least have it played her way but is not so good at talking to them so tends to whine at Mel until she intervenes. The others tried really hard to accomodate her suggesting characters she could be and offering to let her decide the game but she remained silent while they asked her and then moaned at Mel about them again when they got bored of her and went off to play again. I felt sorry for her and Mel as she was obviously struggling rather than trying to be annoying and Mel tends to tell Liam off for not including her or insisting he plays what Lily wants which doesn’t seem very fair. However Davies got a bit over enthusiastic waving some leaves around and Liam got hit in the face. It was a complete accident but Liam decided he didn’t want to play Ben 10 anymore after that and Davies and I talked about thinking things through before doing them (like waving plants around near other people) and possible consequences of actions (like Liam not wanting to play any more). Liam and Lily started playing with a football then, clearly something they play together a lot, Davies didn’t want to play that so went to explore some clumps of bushes and Scarlett went off to make friends with dogs and their owners.

Lily and Davies ended up with Scarlett talking to an older lady and her dog for ages. Mel and Liam went to the coffee shop to get teas and icecreams while I went over to collect the children and also got chatting to her about chickens. She was lovely with the children, really patient but properly listening to them and answering all their questions sensibly rather than in that patronising way people sometimes talk to children in. :)I did feel a bit like my mum, or Ros talking to strangers in parks though as both of them always seem to make friends with people wherever they go :lol:.

We had our drinks and ice creams and then finished up in the play park which was heaving. Davies and Liam finally seemed to have sorted themselves out, while Scarlett and Lily sort of paired up in playing on the same things although I don’t think much talking was going on between them. Scarlett got the hang of a scary looking piece of equipment which is a bit like a hamster wheel with a ball type revolving middle bit you stand and run on while holding onto the side frame. She loved it but has black and blue shins from the tumbles she took getting to grips with it. Ady says she looks like little kids should look full of scratches and scrapes from being outside and having fun. I am trying not to use this rationale as an excuse to beat them and leave visible marks ;).

We said goodbye after a good two and a half hours and promised to see them next halfterm – we both have loads of afterschool stuff in term time that means getting together then is all but impossible. But it was good to see them :).

Home for a bath and hairwash for my grubby, grubby children including a hairbrush for Tarly who has suddenly decided she likes having her hairbrushed. I am not totally buying this after years of huge fusses about hairbrushing and suspect it is some cunning reverse psychology she is trying to pull on me :lol:. They had dinner and then Ady came home so I could head off to reading group.

I knew it would still be light enough to walk home and feel safe afterwards so I did fairly brisk walking there and then super brisk walking home again when I knew I could get straight in a bath and wouldn’t need to excuse or explain the 20 minutes of asthmatic wheezing I knew would follow :lol:. Book group was good, opinion was divided on the book – Salmon Fishing in the Yemen– I was one of the not impressed group. It did lead to an interesting discussion about consumerism, western society, the loss of awe and wonder in simple pleasures and nature and so on. I felt really quite enlightened for once sitting there with my smallholding dreams and cherishing my adder experiences of yesterday :lol:, see I can do deep!

A couple of bits I didn’t manage to squish in in the right places:

Davies wanted to know about nettles and their stings today so we did some googling and found microscope images, descriptions of the cocktail of poisons they inject and more.

We watched Avril Lavignes ‘I don’t like your girlfriend’ on youtube as I’ve been singing it. No idea where I’d heard it to get it stuck in my head but they wanted to hear all of it. That prompted some ‘what does ‘she’s so like whatever’ mean?’ stuff 😆 Yesterday Scarlett wanted to know what ‘bust your balls’ meant, as heard in Mean Green Mother from Outer Space. We discussed both the literal and the figure of speech meanings before promising we wouldn’t threaten anyone with such things nor indeed say it to another living person outside of the car 😆

Davies made the observation that pregnant women are a bit like timelords having two hearts inside them. We talked about foetus development (well as much as I could with my slightly sketchy knowledge from my own ultrasound scans, Emma’s Diary Day 47 and your baby is the size of a grapefruit’ type stuff and a bit of half remembered biology.) I promised I’d find a book or film to show it better. There was then discussion about eggs and seeds and how the seed came from the same hole in a man as wee so we did a bit of internal male plumbing descriptions too including talk of tubes, testicles (again!), kidney, bladder and so on. Davies enjoyed throwing in random collected facts such as ‘sperm look like tadpoles but are infact smaller than a pencil dot individually’.