A quietish morning here with plenty of chick hanewndling and some making of birthday cards for my brother who is 31 today. I can’t quite believe that actually, I know that I’m 33 so clearly Frazer must be 31 but he still feels like my ‘baby’ brother. 😆 I read something once that talked about how our siblings are our history, how no matter where we go in life they are the ones who truly know and understand where we came from. Growing up Frazer and I were not especially close, our age gap was the wrong way round for our friends to mix in the same circles and heading off to single sex secondary schools meant we didn’t even know each others mates but there are good and bad memories that I have from childhood which Frazer could share with me and no one else alive could. We still have in jokes, he is still the person I think of every Christmas Eve when I watch Davies and Scarlett get all excited about Christmas and remember how Frazer and I had our little Christmas Eve rituals. I remember the things about him that used to wind me up when we were tiny, which counter he would choose when we played Monopoly, how it was only daring each other to do try harder that spurred me on to jump off higher diving boards, swing higher on the swings and run faster, jump further and climb higher. So many of the ‘when I were a lass’ stories I tell D&S feature ‘Uncle Frazer’ and I recall the times when it was him and I against the world, my parents, the mean kids at the park, the babysitter. I watch Davies and Scarlett replay all the old sibling games that I remember doing with Frazer and know that that relationship is one of the trickiest, most precious and special ones there is. I’ve not actually talked to him in person today, we did call round to my parents twice but he was out both times. His birthday will have been marred by United not winning the FA cup but I hope however he celebrated it he has had a bloody good day.
We’ve been doing lots of handling the chicks and lots of letting them have free run of larger areas of the lounge today. They are really fast when they run and flap their wings. 🙂 I had some cuddles with all of them on me which resulted in them pecking at my freckles which initially tickled and was amusing but actually quite hurt after a while and one of the moles on my neck was almost bleeding after several well aimed pecks!
Ady did a couple of runs to the tip which means we now have a lovely big clear space in our garage and we all went to collect a freecycled hamster cage with the intention of making it the chicks next home. Upon collection we realised it wasn’t actually any bigger than the storage box we’re using so we’ll refreecycle it and keep looking for something bigger for them.
We had lunch and went over to meet up with Chris and Julie at a localish village fete. It was not fantastic to be honest with very little there in the way of things to do / see. It was held in the grounds of a posh private boys boarding school so I amused myself by looking at the proudly displayed work of 10 year olds studying life cycles of caterpillars and butterflies and thinking that we covered that two years ago :). The children mostly amused themselves with the long jump pit. Ady has a new camera (for work, when my one broke he told them he needed a new one so I now have his pretty purple canon and he has a new Olympus one which has this nifty little six photos in quick succession so you can choose the best one, which means we have filled flickr with very slightly different from the pictures before and after shots 🙂 ) .
We left there and had a bit of a walk into the downs before coming home again, via Mum and Dad’s (still no Frazer so we didn’t stop) with more chick free-ranging in the lounge, tea, haircut for Davies, bath and Dr Who before packing children off to bed.
And now I’m off to bed too – swimming lessons first thing followed by some carbooting and a fairly lazy rest of Sunday.