D’Oh!

Smacks own forehead in exasperation!

We were supposed to be going to see The Gruffalo today. Well in my world we were. We’d booked the tickets last week and I’d seen the show advertised as Friday, Saturday and Sunday and just assumed it was therefore Easter weekend. Therefore our Friday tickets would be for today -Good Friday.

Except that somewhere deep in the back recesses of my mind something was tickling my ‘something’s not right’ button. Sure enough when I checked the tickets this morning it is actually next Friday :roll:. Next Friday I’m working but fortunately Ady is off with the children in the morning anyway so he’ll take them. It does of course mean they will be the only children of school age in the audience as it’s a schoolday next Friday and it also means I’ll have that same strange feeling I had last week when Ady took them to a filmeducation screening while I was at work that someone else is living my life while my back is turned but Ady is pleased :).

So that rather put us at a loose end this morning. Davies and Scarlett had had chocolate mini eggs to find this morning and a present each from Ady and I of a Primeval character so they were hyper on before 8am chocolate 😆 They spent some time in the bathroom playing with the raft Davies built earlier in the week from lolly sticks in a sink full of water. They were floating Rex on it and experimenting with polystyrene to see how much weight it could take. I explained that polystyrene is very light and therefore not the best material and suggested coins instead so they continued armed with loads of coppers and silver. The experimenting finally came to an end when the water based glue Davies had used to fix the lolly sticks together dissolved in the water and the raft fell apart! So Science and Maths all jostling alongside water play there :).

Meanwhile I spent some time looking at smallholdings on the internet, googling for the normal range of heights for a seven year old boy (he’s well within range, phew!) and then breaking – and trying to fix -my spacebar. It remains broken and is looking likely to require proper technical help to fix. Arse 🙁

Davies and Scarlett then moved on to some stair surfing. This dangerous activity is entirely my own fault, having showed them the mattress trick a couple of weeks ago. We have this rather mental, and classic IKEA rug made of green fur with two enormous air filled lumps in it – it looks like something from the Teletubbies! So they were toboganning down the stairs on that together. I let it go on for a while, admiring their imagination, daring, courage and so on before starting to fret about just how I’d explain two lots of multiple injuries in casualty from stair surfing related injuries to two children still in their pjs after 11am! 😆

We finally got dressed and organised and headed over to my parents for lunch. Granny was there too with a classically unsuitable gift for the children each for Easter. She’d got them a large tin of Quality Street each! Which would be too much even if it were relevant to Easter, suitable to give to a child considering it is mostly foil wrapped toffees or coffee creams or clearly purchased reduced to clear after Christmas! I was proud of the children for being grateful and thanking her while whispering later to me that they didn’t actually like those chocolates! She also brought them a small gift each from Thailand where she’d visited earlier this year. Scarlett got a lovely little bag with embroidered elephants while Davies got a woolly mammoth which she was adamant was a ‘Thailand Elephant’. Davies insisted with one glance that it was a mammoth and then (poor child) got into a convoluted discussion with her about what made it a mammoth rather than an elephant and what the difference was anyway. She genuinely didn’t know so Davies and then Scarlett rather incredulously explaining the physical differences, then the whole Ice Age, extinct, possible evolving into elephants had both comedy value and shocking reality to it. I enjoyed mentioning to Dad about Home Ed 5 year olds teaching 80 year old schooled women a thing or too – and Davies joined in too ;). Further hilarity was had when the ‘elephant from Thailand’ was upended to show ‘Woolly Mammoth, Made in China’ printed across it’s underside :lol:.

Ady joined us for lunch which was very pleasant. Frazer made an appearance and we had interesting conversations about all manner of things, most of which escape me now. All very commonplace for me and the children type stuff but equally excellent evidence of D and S’s wonderfullness, intelligence and amazing capacity for knowledge. At one point Davies pointed to four pork pie halves and told me that the four halves made two wholes. Rather surprised as we’ve never really touched on the idea of fractions much I asked him what eight halves would make and he instantly said ‘four’. I caught Dad eavesdropping and looking impressed at that one :).

Ady had to go and visit one last garden centre so I went along with him. Davies and Scarlett were happily installed with Granny, Grandad, Uncle and Great Granny and didn’t bat an eyelid although my parents managed to look quite disapproving :roll:. It was nice to have a couple of hours uniterupted chatting time, we talked about loads :).

Back to my parents and we’d called into Sainsburys to get the children some tea, Dad wanted to see a property I’d found online this morning and we actually had quite a nice couple of hours there before coming home.

I read the end of the first Famous Five book – leaving the children desperate for their next adventure and then while cooking dinner managed a spot more baking to bring this weekend. Time ran away rather and it was nearly 11pm before dinnner was ready which meant my intended packing hasn’t happened, so I should probably go to bed now in order to be ready for the early start in the morning.