One word? When seven would do…

A very long but excellent just the same sort of day 🙂

Scarlett slept through the night (insert whooping and applauding emoticon here!) but Davies was in our bed from mid way through the night instead!

It was a lovely spring morning so we happily walked to the train station to get our train for what is rapidly becoming my regular weekly trip to the smoke! On the way we debated how we knew spring was coming. They came up with daisies on the lawn, daffodils everywhere, the sun was shining but it was still a bit cold so not summer, they could hear birds singing and ‘it just feels like Spring today Mummy’ 🙂

Train journey was fine there – new train, had a seat, kids ate the first half of their packed lunch (despite it only being 10am and not much more than an hour since breakfast!) , they got a bit rowdy at one point but I had shoved one of the new Dr Seuss books in the pushchair for just such emergencies so the new favourite is empty green pants 🙂

Into a taxi (and even had a shared eyes to the ceiling moment with the person behing us in the taxi queue about the person infront of us not knowing that as soon as the next cab pulls up you walk down to it instead of waiting for the one infront to pull away! I’m such an experienced London daytripper now, me!). The museum was having some sort of entire ground floor refurbishment going on so we took a convoluted up one floor in one lift to walk to the other lift to go down two floors exercise during which I had a phonecall from Dani (Hi Dani 🙂 ) P & L. We managed to find each other through the throng of school children and made a good attempt at conversation but it was so busy and noisy and loud and I think all four children were fairly overwhelmed by the vast amount of children in uniform milling about so aftery trying again in another slightly quieter area Dani and her two left to find quieter areas while we hung about so my two could finish their very complicated game with bean bags and a toy digger. Luckily Dani and Ali are only down the road from us in Brighton so I didn’t feel too cheated at not managing a proper chat as I am sure we can arrange a meet up more local to home soon.

A while later we decided it was too loud for us too (after I had given some school kids a good talking to for their treatment of Scarlett – it was in a 3-6 years old section, which they were clearly too old for and they were just expecting her to get out of their way instead of having some consideration for the fact she was smaller than them. I let it pass for a while as she is more than capable of fighting her own battles but when she was halfway up some steps and one of them decided they wanted to come down so tried to tell her to go down too , quite forcefully – enough to make Tarly cry – I stepped in and told them to move out of her way in a low dangerous voice, then also went on to tell them, within earshot of the teacher they were with that she was half their size and they should all know better!!! Grr!) so we went upstairs too, hoping to possibly catch back up with Dani if she was still around. Scarlett had a tantrum about going back in her pushchair, we opened our sandwiches and someone appeared from nowhere to ask if I was Nic! It was Sally (waves at Sally!) who said she recognised me from my blog (!!!!!) and her DD – we had a brief chat before they went off too – also live very local to us so have agreed we must arrange a more local meet up – and we were left wondering whether to call it a day, go on somewhere else or face the schoolkid hell downstairs again. Then my phone rang and Ros was there asking where we were 🙂 We stayed put and they came to find us, Buzz and Davies instantly bonded which was very amusing given that they have previously met twice – one of which was a whole week at Melrose – and never paid any attention to each other 🙂 Scarlett fell in love with A (sorry Ros forgotten if it’s Pea or Boo again! 😉 ) who was wearing pink and sparkly attire which left me and Ros to have a good old chat 🙂 We had some refreshments during which the kids ran around and bonded then went back to the 3-6 play area again which was much quieter and the kids had a great time.

Hilariously Davies was adamant that Buzz was called Dylan – no idea why! and persisted in calling him it all afternoon. I kept correcting him until he then called him Buzz and I said ‘no darling, I keep telling you, it’s not Buzz it’s Dylan!’ at which point I gave up. Even funnier was that Buzz then started addressing Davies as Dylan 😀 So there they were the two Dylans loving it! We have arranged to meet up again next week closer to home so they can continue with their mutual Dylan-ing!

We left at about 3.30pm, still in the same clothes we had arrived in (which is something of a novelty for us when visiting London 😉 ) and hailed a cab. I sat having a conversation with the driver about what happens to his cab when he finishes work (does he drive it home? where does he park? does he pass it onto another driver? I need to know the answers to these questions!!), Davies sat interrupting us and Scarlett sat playing with the switches to turn the internal lights on and off 🙂

Arrived at Victoria just as the all the way home train was about to leave so leapt on it and aside from a platform dash at Haywards Heath to ensure we were on the right end for the short platform at Lancing it was a fairly uneventful trip home. Ady met us halfway along the walk home from the station and took Davies home in the car -I was able to walk briskly with the pushchair the rest of the way so we were all home before 6pm – result!

Which makes it all the odder that we only managed dinner at 10pm really! I had three phonecalls to make – one to friends we are seeing this weekend to confirm arrangements, one to my parents to invite them for dinner tomorrow night before their trip and one to Karen to return her call to me from this morning. In the middle of all those calls Ady was talking on the landline to the friend who was about to split up with his partner. They have split and he is coming over on Friday night to drink and talk about it…. long night ahead methinks!

Have not even started reading round the blogs yet – and tomorrow we are off to a brand new soft play place which sounds really good fun. I’m such a busy bee!