Family Day

We went over to Chris and Julie’s today for Jack and Maisie’s birthday party. They were 4 yesterday. We arrived to find slight bedlam with two lots of cakes cooked and burnt so Julie’s mum sent off to buy one cake with the third and final attempt still in the oven, Chris and Julie barely speaking and chaos abounding. Ady helped Chris get the barbecue under control (for more cooking of bits of Pete) while I helped Julie restore order in the kitchen. By the time the first guests arrived all was calm once more. 🙂

The children had a great time playing with the various other children who came along, which included a boy and a girl the same age as Tarly, so it was very interesting watching her in a group of 2 boys and 2 girls all within a couple of months age of each other to observe how she acted. There was a 37 weeks pregnant woman there who I chatted to for a while, the now infamous woman with her two children from last years willy flashing birthday party incident, Julie’s mum and her boyfriend and a couple of other people I didn’t get to talk to. Ady and I actually sat and talked to each other for a while making up lives for the other guests which is always a fun exercise ;-).

We left after the cake was served as Ady’s mother was due to arrive within the hour and we were not running any risk of an encounter, so we headed over to my parents and spent a very nice couple of hours with them. Last year they almost decided to go on a holiday to South America but the specific one they had chosen was booked up by the time they got themselves organsied so last week I was nagging Dad to get it sorted for next year NOW. He got the brochure and had talked to Mum about it last night so we looked it up on the internet and found the dates they want (January 2007) were already booked up online. They rang and have booked it getting a cancellation which wasn’t showing up online but they are waiting for confirmation tomorrow as to whether they can upgrade to business class for the flights or not. If not they will plan another trip instead and get this one booked up for next Autumn / Winter. It does look really exciting, taking in Brazil, Argentina and Chile over nearly 3 weeks. My parents had never really been on any holidays until we went to Vegas 7 years ago and they came with us. They went off to Australia for a month just 3 months after that, repeating it the following Winter and last year they went to Thailand, China, Hong Kong etc. South America was next on Dad’s list of places to see, followed next by various places in the US. It’s so funny to think that my Dad who is so staid and never did anything crazy at all when we were children (he was 35 when they had me and despite having a slightly wild past in his youth had got it all out of his system really by the time we came along) is now riding elephants and keen to ride cable cars on Sugar Loaf Mountain in his retirement. It gives me hope for years to come and also makes me want to do even more crazy things now rather than wait! The world has gotten a much smaller place even in my lifetime but since my Dad was a small boy of Davies’ age, some 60 odd years ago in a tiny North Wales village with no electricity, TV or telephones let alone computers, internet shopping and dvd rental services he remembers looking at maps on his classroom walls of far and distant lands. When the climate was the extreme opposite to the 20 foot deep snow drifts he’d avoid on the miles long walk to school every morning in his short trousers and the sun shone all year round, where people with different coloured skin to he and all his classmates pasty white welsh colouring spoke different languages, ate different food and wore different clothes. My Dad will readily confess that he is still utterly bemused at the technology behind the telephone – and that’s the one he can see plugged into the wall at home with telephone wires connected to the big pole outside his window, let alone mobile phones which work anywhere by some sort of black magic! So to be able to go to those places and have the pages of his boyhood atlas leap out at him in full colour is something that brings that little boy right back to the surface again. His excitement is a joy to watch. 🙂

We left there and came home for a lovely roast dinner (beef, we called her Shirley!) and we’ve been watching the ‘Steve Irwin, he changed our world’ show on Animal Planet showing the memorial service from last week, which has had me in floods of tears throughout with special sobbing when his little girl came on with her amazing speech.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the weekend!