One word? When seven would do…

I could do it, I could. I’ve done all the thorny ones today, how the seed from the daddy gets to meet the egg from the mummy (been fudging that one a while with large amounts of descriptions of menstruation but I was pinned down with a very direct question today 😉 ) whether I personally believe in Father Christmas (infront of a captive audience of children), trying to diplomatically answer a question about whether a birthday in March is before or after Christmas when one child was talking about ‘during a year’ and one was talking about their specific birthday in relation to the next occuring Christmas, oh and Where’s Wally?! 😆

Ady and I have just been watching 8 out of 10 cats too where there was a question about Britains being offered one wish and only 7% asking for world peace. Ady says he’d choose to meet God which I pointed out could prove rather disappointing given both our religious beliefs. We decided that as his intention had been to prove to the world at large the existence or not of God then he’d need to amend his wish to ‘meeting God on live television’ 😆 Although frankly if wishes were genuinely being handed out and granted I might need to rethink my stance on God and Father Christmas :lol:.

This morning started at about 630am when Ady kissed me goodbye, but that was something of a false start as I went back to sleep until about 7am when Scarlett came and started talking to me, which was another false start until just after 8am when Davies gotg into bed with me and then Scarlett joined us. Rather like that Grand National a few years ago. We finally got up around 830am and the children sat with me while I put make up on and got dressed. I have no idea how we got onto the subject but we ended up talking about family size and how come we had one boy and one girl and wouldn’t be having any more. I explained that Ady has had a special operation that means he can’t have any more children, which led to them asking if I still could and me explaining that yes, I could, but would need a different man to help me as it takes a man and a woman – or at the very least seeds and eggs from men and women. Which took various turns via puberty but ended up with a direct question from Davies about precisely how the seed from the man met the egg from the woman. I answered it without actually going into graphic details about intercourse and promised to get a book from the library to explain it better with pictures.

We had breakfast and watched the stair rod rain falling and the road swiftly turning into a river outside the window. We waited til about 1030 watching Sorcerers Apprentice and Stitch Up on CBBC until there was a break in the rain then we headed out to the library taking our four read books with us. We parked in the library staff only parking spaces in the car park, driving past the row of queuing cars, nice to have a perk ;). Both the children were SUPER confident about telling Yvonne about the books we’d read which was nice, as last year they both hid in my skirt when it was time to talk about the books. Scarlett went first with her The Dog That Dug book and would probably still be there now retelling the story, and then Davies talked about Felix the fast tractor and the new building remembering all sorts of things I hadn’t realised he’d taken in such as words like ‘trench’. They got scratch and sniff stickers, their reading game wallets and various activity sheets. I have tended not to take the children into the library much lately, seclecting a huge pile of books for them once a week whilst at work and then taking them back again the following week but actually the fact that they feel at home there knowing I work there, that everyone knows their names and that they treat it like they own the place is probably one of the benefits of my job that I’d slightly under-rated looking at them there today. I am the only member of staff with small children – all the others are childless or grandmothers with grandchildren with other libraries more local to them, with the exception of one of the Saturday staff who has same-age-as-Scarlett twin boys who also treat the library like a second home, knowing how to issue and discharge books themselves, walking behind the counter as though they work there and not being fazed in the least by the air of shushing which adults cannot help but respect, just like Davies and Scarlett. 🙂 They also got a packet of seeds for their first ‘gift’ of the reading game (the next one is a bookmark followed by the medal for completing it) so Scarlett wanted a book about seeds for one of her choices, which we found a suitable one for in the Early Information area, then as they were both rather randomly grabbing whichever book was at the top of the kinderbox for their choices I directed them to the Picture Books For Older Readers section where I usually select books for them from and they found five Where’s Wally titles so that took care of that :). I grabbed two books on reproduction and bodies for them too and we left.

Both childen made me a plastic container of perfume yesterday using crushed flower petals from the garden which are currently residing on the kitchen windowsill waiting to be decanted into spray bottles so I’d planned to get a couple from Boots. Boots in Lancing was shut due to flooding so we walked round the pther shops for a while before heading up to the big Boots on the local Retail Park only to find they are £2.15 each. EACH!!!! Which means it must surely be cheaper to buy some Tesco value beauty product for a quid, tip the contents down the sink and use the spray bottle for the kids perfume really. Will do just that tomorrow.

We came home and as we had no bread defrosted I made some cheese scones for lunch and we read some of the very excellent Lets Talk About Where Babies Come From which means they now know what bodies look like from every age from babies to ‘older grown ups’ having spotted the changes throughout a life, what a period is all about, where girls / women wee from (previously we’ve gone with vagina, now we are specific about how many holes we’ll be talking about urethas!) and the internal organs of a woman. We looked at the bit about what happens when a sperm meets and egg but didn’t get into how it gets there but no doubt that will come. Somehow the whole reproduction chat doesn’t feel as much of a challenge as I’d anticipated. probably to do with a very open attitude to body parts and functions since day one, lots of questions to this point leading to it being asked and the fact they are so young it will be a very basic chat about reproduction rather than sex for recreational purposes – for now at least. I’m torn between feeling pleased they seem to be together for most of these conversations therefore I’ll only be covering it once and worrying that in doing so I am leading them towards a natural ‘you have X, I have Y, let’s see if we can make a baby brother’ type scenario! 😆

We consumed cheese scones and then went to pick Lucy and The Rs up. We drove through rain, chatted about flying lessons having driven past Shoreham airport just as a plane was coming in to land and happened to be one of the ones that Ady and I both had a trial lesson in a few years ago. I’m sure there were further conversations but I can’t recall them and then we arrived at Monkee Bizness soft play. Ali, Freya and Ali’s Mum who is called some name beginning with the letter J were already there, swiftly followed by Eira, Lulah and Tialys from Magical Mondays so we all went in. Davies and Scarlett were instantly swallowed up by the soft play only resurfacing occasionally for drinks, ice cream (provided by Ali – thanks mate 🙂 ) and cuddles or declarations of love for me. Ali’s friend K was there with her two children once they’d been released from school and she was nice to chat to aswell, particularly when she exclaimed about how gorgeous and beautiful my children are, with particular reference to their amazing eyes – none of which I can take credit for either as a result of parenting or genetics but is rather lovely to hear just the same. I think they’re gorgeous too :). It was a very nice couple of hours being largely childfree without any real need for my parenting and whilst observing others who were called upon rather more than me it was also a reminder of how far we’ve come. Once upon a time the idea of sitting in a soft play would have been inconceivable. First of all I wouldn’t have been sitting, I’d have either been coaxing a child into the soft play area or following one round, simply sitting with the occassional glimpse of one of my offspring, out there, making friends of stranger, having a ball and enjoying themselves was very much an alien concept. It’s a bit nice to be sitting back and enjoying the fruits of going through those days. 🙂

We left and had a very good run home, traffic wise. Conversations included birthdays and before / after Christmas status, birthdays generally, age gaps and how they continue to be static even while ages might change, whether I believe in Father Christmas and the varying prices of soft play places in and around Sussex. Thanks to Polar Express and my relunctance to shatter my childrens’ childhoods coupled with no wish to outright lie to them either we have reached a compromise that they both know I don’t believe in Father Christmas but they both do, which we agree is fine. This is very much our stance on God too actually, although I do hope to at some point get across that God is rather more accepted as a genuine belief and indeed following to worship rather than the big bloke with the beard in the red suit :lol:. Apologies in advance to any Santaists that offends ;).

We dropped Lucy and The Rs home and came back arriving a short while after Ady, I cooked D&S some tea then went to clean out the chicken coop. I’ve been enjoying watching the debate on my US chicken forum since I posted some pics of them taken last weekend as to whether they are roos or hens. I have a couple of people convinced they are one and a couple convinced they are the other. Everyone seems to think Wobble – the only one I was fairly sure was a cockerel – is a hen though. I think it is a case of waiting for the egg or the cock a doodle doo to be honest, but I’m pretty relaxed at the idea that there is probably three or four hens there actually and am even pondering where to get a rooster from in due course should we decide we’d like one.

The children looked at Where’s Wally for ages while Ady and I got stuck into Friday night beers and then they finally clicked onto the idea that if they were quiet and out of sight we would be less likely to send them to bed, so they headed upstairs to play in Davies’ bedroom for ages playing with micromachines. We finally packed them off to individual bedrooms about 9pm and have had dinner and watched Torchwood since then while continuing to consume alcohol. See, there’s another reason we’re not at a bookshop about now – we’re too drunk to drive and our children are asleep ;).