Tuesday – For once it wasn’t raining! We packed a last few bits in the car and set off for Nuneaton where we were staying at an online friend’s house for a Feminist Parents meet up. We took Ady’s car, sang along to music, laughed at the robotic voice of the sat nav when it talked about the A444 and had the clearest run on 3 motorways I think I’ve ever known. We were at Heathrow within an hour and in Nuneaton within 3. Once I’d readjusted to driving on roads with traffic lights and roundabouts about 170 miles of motorways we found a Sainsburys and got supplies of Pimms, fruit and snacks, used the loo and then found the house we were staying in. We had one false start where we were on the doorstep of a poor man faced with a woman and two children carrying bags of alcohol and asking if he was Cally’s husband. I knew she had a husband who’s name I couldn’t remember, a son who’s name I couldn’t remember who was an age I wasn’t sure of all with a surname I didn’t know! 😆 Luckily I had a phone number so was able to ring and find out the right house number (I’d written down a housenumber which was part of her postcode for some odd reason!). So we pulled a bit further down the road to where we were supposed to be and joined the three families already there.
Three more families joined us over the course of the afternoon and a wonderful day / afternoon / evening was had by all. 🙂 The children had a whale of a time, although Scarlett amused me the next morning by saying to me in hushed, incredulous tones ‘Mummy, some of these children here GO TO SCHOOL!!!’. They really enjoyed the company of the various children there (16 altogether) and adults with Scarlett making a beeline for the token bloke there as a substitute Daddy for the evening 😆 Completely overindulged in alcohol leading to a very delicate state the next morning. 😳 We camped in the garden, along with two other families, which was something of a novelty to put the tent up in sunshine. It rained overnight though and we took it down again wet, much more the sort of camping I’m getting used to :roll:.
We had a chilled out morning until eventually we roused ourselves to leave around 230pm. The satnav originally gave an expected arrival home time of 1710 which we remained on track for until we hit the M25 and stopped. 🙁 There were queues when we joined it, massive queues around Heathrow and further queues for the final two junctions before we left it, when I turned the satnav off on the M23 because it was starting to irritate me with its dinging noise every time I went over 70mph it had changed to expected arrival time of 1815 and we didn’t actually make it home until closer to half six in the end. 🙁 Davies watched films all the way, Scarlett slept most of it. I dropped the children home to Ady for bathing and feeding and headed off to Sainsburys to hoover all the rice cake crumbs, opal fruit wrappers and general crud out of his car. I was utterly exhausted, well ok, hungover, so I just about saw in 1030pm having eaten very little and enjoyed watching Nigella making comfort food on tv before heading off to bed.
Unfortunately Scarlett was up half the night being sick, which lovely, lovely Ady dealt with. She is much better today, has eaten and other than being a bit warm is perky enough. Davies seems fine so I’m assuming it’s a Scarlett-specific thing but to be on the safe side I’ve taken tomorrow off work so as not to need childcare from people bringing their own children along. As long as none of the rest of us show any signs we’ll still be at C&H’s for Castle Day though as that will be well over the 8 hours cut off time and we’re all really looking forward to meeting up with everyone :).
Today has been slow and cosy. I’ve made some chocolate chip rock cakes as we all felt in need of comfort food, Scarlett is still in pjs, we’re on about our fifth Doctor Who episode of the day, children are playing with geomags and jigsaws. I had a couple of cards which needed posting (thank you card to hosts, sympathy card to mate who’s just lost her mum) which Davies volunteered to run round to the postbox with. It’s across the little road outside our house, to the end of our road and on the corner of the next, perhaps a two minutes walk. Following his wanting to buy the cream earlier in the week we’d talked about him going round to the shop on his own now so this seemed a good first try. Scarlett and I watched him til he was out of sight from his bedroom window upstairs and a couple of minutes later he was back, crossing the road really sensibly. He was really thrilled at the independance and wanted to post something else so decided to finish his letter to Marcus so he could post that. With fairly mimimal help he managed ‘To Marcus, My chickens are very big, love Davies’ which is hardly groundbreaking correspondance but goes to prove he is getting there 🙂 His letters are not very consistent in size but all very well formed. So he went off to post that aswell.
It’s very grey here although it hasn’t actually rained I can’t quite believe it won’t at some point but I’m hanging out washing just the same. The chickens are out of chicken food (Ady’s getting some on his way home from work) and when I last opened the back door to take washing out they were all outside it waiting and came dashing into the kitchen and started eating Candle’s cat food 😆 The latest on the chicken forum seems to be they may well all be hens, which will be great. I’ve got used to them coming and pecking at my toes and needing to wear shoes outside due to chicken poo everywhere and it will be lovely to have eggs soon. 🙂
go hens!
Comment by claudia — 26 July 2007 @ 4:56 pm
lol Claudia, have you seen Davies’ film about them? And did you hear your name being mentioned? 🙂
Comment by Nic — 26 July 2007 @ 6:40 pm
just watched the chicken video, its brill -well done davies!!
Comment by Liza — 27 July 2007 @ 1:49 am
Can’t you turn the sat-nav speed warning off?
I liked the chicken video too – Davies did a splendid job. Did Davies know you were going to go the cut frame editing afterwards when he was on camera (egg pictures)? He handled that pretty well! Camera work was a bit dodgy though but I fixed it by turning my monitor on its side about halfway through the video!
Comment by simon — 27 July 2007 @ 12:25 pm