Friday was a bit of a wash out really. Davies had been suffering on and off all week with some sort of cold / cough and having been quiet on Thursday for most of the day suddenly announced he felt sick when we left the cinema in the evening. He went straight to bed when we got home but was awake still at midnight and coughed himself sick :(. I had to get Ady up to deal with that (hurrah for the Ady machine) while I dealt with Davies. He wasn’t sick again and it was clearly a mix of his own coughing, too many sweets at the cinema and maybe not enough sleep but he was very off colour on Friday morning and was up from about 6am wrapped in his duvet.
I’d not slept at all well and spent much of the night agonising on whether I also felt sick, whether I should take the day off work and if we should be going to the Bean’s party or not. In the end we decided that Ady would stay home with the kids in the morning and I’d come home in the afternoon so he could go off and do some store visits. I felt increasingly crapper through the morning at work and was actually very thankful to have had a reason to have already arranged to leave at lunchtime. My previously perfect attendance record has been shot recently with my allergic face reaction followed by being sent home early on my first day back from holiday when my ankle swelled up and now having to work half a day due to an ill child 🙁 .
I did Baby Rhyme Time (the last for a while as we’ve decided to have a break of it through the summer holidays – hurrah!) and sat on the desk for a bit then came home. By the time I got home Davies was feeling better, was dressed and had eaten lunch which was a relief. But I was feeling really ropey so all my intentions to bake stuff to take to Chris and Helen’s were shelved and I curled up on the sofa with my blanket in Davies’ place. I’d not intended to go to sleep but I was woken an hour later by the phone ringing and no one else around! I tracked the children down to Davies’ room where they were playing having not wanted to disturb me when I fell asleep.
I had some lunch and read a book feeling slightly better from the sleep but still not 100% and the kids went out into the garden. I think that the stress and lack of sleep from the past month of my ankle had all just caught up with me at once and I just felt utterly exhausted and wrung out :(. Ady rang me at 5pm to say he’d be home in an hour or so and I told him I was going to bed and to wake me when he came home. The kids were settled playing something and promised to be quiet (they lied ;)) so off upstairs I went.
I finally woke at 830pm when the kids came to say goodnight having been fed and bathed by Ady when he got home. Ady had run me a bath and was about to start cooking dinner if I wanted it. I felt much better having slept and we decided to make a decision about Chris and Helen’s in the morning depending on how everyone was feeling. Unfortunately when Ady put dinner infront of me I simply couldn’t eat it and within a couple of hours of being up I was ready to go back to bed again.
Saturday morning though I was awake at 7am feeling much, much better. I had a cup of tea, got dressed and headed up to Sainsburys for food to bring in lieu of what I was planning to bake. I gathered french bread, cheese, grapes, olives and pink fizz – much more expensive buying than baking! Back at home everyone else was now up and feeling fine too so we gathered together clothes, bedding etc and headed off.
The drive wasn’t too bad – it is feasible to do it in 2.5 hours but it was closer to 4 on the way up although we were still quite early arrivers. We met Marcus and Michelle’s French family, admired the new conservatory and just enjoyed being with all our friends.
The day passed in it’s usual haze of children playing on the swings and the climbing frame (which was an elephant this time) and in the paddling pools, adults eating, drinking and chatting and plenty of people taking photos :).
We presented Jan and Jonathan with the photobook of their party – nice to hand it over with lots of the people around who it was from, and for everyone else to get a look at it too :).
The afternoon turned into evening, some of us moved indoors, we got the children into pjs and set up bedding but I’m not even going to pretend we got them to bed because I think most of them were awake after most of us. Scarlett was particularly troublesome which I guess is fair payback on me after all those times I used to feel smug / annoyed about other people’s toddlers still around after my kids were in bed in youth hostel camps over the years 😉 .
We sat round the fire which was just lovely and laughed about dragonboat racing and lard mostly as I recall. Having been up since stupid o’clock I was pretty tired though so didn’t live up to my usual reputation of last-to-bed, although it had already become August by the time I did turn in!
Sunday At last the children are getting better at sleeping in themselves in the mornings so it was after 8am when I woke to the sound of children rollerskating round the hall, plink-plonking on the piano and discussing DS games. More waterplay – largely started by Bob and a bucket in response to the ‘it’s a flying cat’ song, which sounded like it was being sung by cats but was infact Scarlett, Alex and Rachael. Threatening a soaking is actually never an effective way of taming Scarlett (infact I’ve yet to find anything that is really) and she was only too delighted to be drenched and took it as her cue to go back into the pools again 😆
Breakfast merged into lunch, the church bell chiming midday was deemed alcohol o’clock (for once not by me first although I did join in 😉 ) and people started to drift away slowly. We left at 3pm and for once the journey was so smooth we did arrive home 2.5 hours later.
Bath and food for Davies and Scarlett and we spent some time perusing potential hosts on the WOOFing website and began marking some on a map to plan a route and start plotting our year. More on all that later.
Flickr is uploading pictures of the weekend, so will drop some into this post later when it’s done. Thanks to Chris and Helen for a fab weekend and thanks to everyone else there for being such great company :).