I worked this morning. Bid was having Davies and Scarlett and being car-less and living right next to the beach the plan was to drop them off with him. I’d allowed 45 minutes which given it’s about 3 miles away was plenty of time to get there and back but I’d not factored in a traffic jam down to the coast road, two sets of temporary lights and the just-before-9am-traffic. So when we were still sitting waiting to get on to the coast road at 9.05am with me needing to have dropped them off and driven all the way back to work again I was getting quite stressy. I resolved this by shouting ‘I’M GOING TO BE LATE FOR WOOOOOOOORK!!!’ regularly, drowning out Chris Evans on the radio, making Davies and Scarlett laugh and people in neighbouring cars with their windows down jump. As a strategy it seemed to work though as I was only a couple of minutes late and the amusing anecdote charmed my manager into laughing rather than frowing at me once I did arrive at work.
It was a bit of a free-for-all at work this morning. Brenda, the chief librarian was in charge, back off two weeks holiday and with a very distracted, not quite present air about her. I manned the desk for 2 hours and was on the counter for an hour so I did just fine out of the deal but the rest of the staff were less impressed with their duties. I was planning to talk to Brenda about career breaks today but she clearly had other things on her mind so I left it. I was telling a colleague about a job I worked at for 10 days before they asked me to leave and some of the events leading up to it and realised an event which felt huge at the time has now been consigned to the status of ‘an amusing story’. I was in Bhs with the kids yesterday which was another job I loathed and was terribly miserable at for quite a long time before leaving and had avoided going in there for years but wondering round yesterday realised I didn’t have the tight chest, scared feeling walking round there any more, nearly 11 years after I left. Most of the time I don’t feel like I’ve changed or grown up at all but then I happen upon a memory that shows me I have. Generally this is followed up by me doing something very juvenille to balance the feeling of course 😆
I nipped home to change into my jeans, check on the chicks (two hatched, one egg with pips so hopefully will hatch over night) and the quails eggs in the incubator which were due to hatch yesterday / today – nothing happening. Drove to the beach and walked along to find Bid and all the children. The four children have been pairing off more often these days, particularly on the beach as Tarly and Eliot tend to go nature watching, while Davies and Archie do some sort of Harry Potter / Star Wars game. Bid and I chatted and caught up on each others news and enjoyed sitting right at the edge of the sea coming in :).
We had a couple of hours and then I was getting hungry and so were all the kids, we had Badgers to get to and both Davies and Scarlett had big bleeding scrapes on legs/ knees / ankles which neither of them seemed too bothered by but I wanted to clean up and get a look at (neither that bad, both from scrapes clambering over rocks and barnacle encrusted wood). We all walked back together as I had parked outside their flat, said our goodbyes and we headed for home.
We ate, the kids got cleaned up and changed and we went to Badgers. It was Davies’ last ever. I just looked up his first ever. He’s completed 12 badgers which makes him a Super Badger, he’s been a Follow Me Badger for several terms, been Badger of the Month at least twice, marched in several Remembrance Day parades and laid the wreath last year, had his first big away from home experience last year at Badger camp and generally gotten a heck of a lot out of his time there. I feel quite sad he will miss the last two weeks of term, particularly presentation night and should possibly have borne it in mind when holiday planning given Scottish schools have broken up already so we won’t necessarily be avoiding school holidays where we’ll be, but Julie has asked if he will go along to presentation night in December and have it all awarded then, which we will. She did call him up to say goodbye, thanks for all the commitment over the last 4 plus years and wish him well.
I had a fairly crap time there – we did an exercise with blindfolds where the Badgers worked in pairs with one blindfolded leading the other around the building, then an obstacle course was set up and they had to guide each other round it with verbal instructions only. Except to set it up they shut all of the Badgers in the coffee room with nothing to do except wait, supervised by me. I HATE that, have no skills to keep a room full of 12 rowdy 5-10 year olds, at least two with SEN under control nor any desire to do so really. I tried a few tactics, failed quite miserably and sort of gave up. 🙁 I’m sure the answer is to have a few ideas of things to talk about / games to play / entertaining plans to pull from my sleeve like a magician in such times but I don’t and I am happy enough with the skills I do have in life not to feel a failure in not managing to be great with kids. Grrr.
Still, that’s it til September now and with current plans afoot we’ll only have one term left anyway. Davies will try cadets in September. My personal prediction is he won’t like it, which is fine, I think he has gotten loads out of Badgers but am quite happy for him to leave it at that but I will support and encourage him in giving it a good go and then respect whatever decision he comes to after that. Tarly will have gotten her Gold paw by the end of this year leaving her just 3 more badges to do to get Super Badger so even if we do go away for a year she will potentially be able to pick up when we come back and finish it too, if she decides she wants to.
Back home again for a late dinner for the kids, Ady arrived a few minutes after us. I spent some time sewing bits onto Davies’ costume and then read some Alone on a wide, wide sea. At bedtime we realised 3 quail had hatched so all cooed over them for a while (soooo tiny!) and for once an early start, sea air, running around for 10 hours of the day meant they fell asleep fairly quickly. Ady and I had dinner, watched Outnumbered Christmas Special on dvd from the library and now I’m learning quickly about rearing quail before bed.
In that sort of situation at BB (apart from the fact that we never have one person in a room alone with the children – BB and GB are very hot on child protection, and I’m surprised it’s not an issue at Badgers?), our fallback activity is “sit in a circle, go round and tell us something interesting you’ve done this week”. Does require plenty of telling them to be polite and shut up and listen to each other, but keeps them on their bottoms usually!
Comment by Alison — 01 July 2010 @ 6:52 am
can’t believe it was his last badgers! Alex is pretty sure she won’t do cadets, which is fine as it looks pretty boring to me!! Our unit doesn’t do term times though and go right through the summer, assuming your one doesn’t?
Comment by Kirsty — 01 July 2010 @ 7:17 am
Wow to last Badgers. C will wear her Badger uniform for the last time this week, unless she takes it to camp. She does want to do cadets though – ours is run at same time as Badgers and they take responsibility for stuff which I think will look good on cv.
Comment by Michelle — 01 July 2010 @ 8:01 am
Not at all sure why I was on my own tbh, there were four adults there and I really can’t imagine they needed 3 of them to supervise the obstacle course. I probably have two crap sessions to every one good one. I did try ‘tell me some news’ but the room doesn’t lend itself to any sort of sitting in a circle, some of the kids are really shy and talk so quietly the others lose interest and a couple dominate the whole thing. I hate nagging and repeating myself so I either lose my rag and get cross or give up and let them mess about.
I also tried one word each storytelling but that was quite noisy too. It didn’t help that both D&S were in rowdy moods and just as disruptive as all the other kids.
Next term should be better as I am leading my own badge – Hungry Badger. I’m aiming to have loads and loads to do every session to keep them fully occupied. I have a feeling that actually Julie doesn’t really want to do it any more and she is passing on as much as she can. She needs to be passing it in a different direction tho’
Comment by Nic — 01 July 2010 @ 9:17 am