Home and away

We were away this weekend, staying with Layla and Si on Saturday night where Ady and the children stayed with Si and Claudia while I went out for a meal with Alison, Layla, Ros and Sarah. And very nice it was too 🙂 I was still suffering with my cold and stiff neck/back/shoulder and feeling very tired at the end of a long and busy week so I failed rather to live up to my usual wild reputation but it was a very nice evening just the same. Sunday morning we had bacon sandwiches back at Chris and Alison’s before rushing home to get back before the supermarkets shut so I could do the food shopping for October – yep, a frantic and fast paced life we lead. 😉

Today we dodged the downpours to head out to Magical Mondays. We were running slightly late due to a variety of things, mostly me failing to motivate myself! 😳 It was a really good couple of hours again and despite it only being week 2 we all already felt part of the group so that is lovely. 🙂 Tarly painted her air drying clay worm from last week a rather lovely gold on top and yellow underneath with the acrylic paints – she did it really carefully and precisely. Davies directed me to paint his snowman but didn’t do any of the rest of his. They both did some general painting on paper – Tarly made me laugh by painting a whole sheet really slowly and carefully with a really methodical approach fading from yellow to orange to red, then mixing all the colours together on it and creating one orange sheet! 😆 She does love painting though. They did more than their fair share of running around too including going out in the rain and the sodden ground, having first taken their wellies off 🙄 – they slightly redeemed themselves by making interesting observations about the footprints they left on the floor with their wet feet before I removed Tarly’s tights though 😆

We then got them to join in the end of a protracted attempt to make a milk bottle suck an egg in through it’s neck by having a flame inside it trying to get oxygen when the egg blocked the neck. We had a vast array of material to try and burn to create the flame but Davies observed that we would probably run out of matches first 😆 I think most of the adults had a go, folding things like newspaper, paper towels, bits of stick etc and speculating on whether to go and syphon some petrol from one of the cars until finally one of the group demonstrated her skill as The Firestarter with the correct folded newspaper shred technique. So we called all the children in and most of them had a go at popping at egg on the top of the bottle and cheering when it got sucked through. Excellent fun!

In the morning at home Tarly had gathered a bag of carrots, the veg peeler, a sharp knife and a small bowl and brought them to me to peel and end the carrots for her. She adores raw carrots and could easily sit and munch through a bag in one sitting. I chopped the ends but she tried to peel them herself and was delighted to find she could do it, and do it pretty well. Which led to a conversation about peeling fruit and vegetables and naming as many things as we could that you peeled. So it was very happily coincidental that someone had brought along a load of fruit, some juice and milk and a blender for making fruit smoothies and shakes. So I peeled a kiwi and a banana for Tarly and she chopped them up along with a couple of strawberries, while Davies chopped banana and strawberries. They added them to milk in the blender and whizzed it up to make shakes which they both loved – something to try at home again for sure. 🙂 They both seem to feel very at home at the group and happily chatter away, ask for and accept help from the other adults there and I heard Davies even teasing one of the other mothers today which is great, I love that they are specifically happy there and that they are so brimming with confidence to talk to adults – I notice most of the other children are the same there with a 3yo little girl happily chatting to me about paints and clay. Ali, Allie and I managed a brief chat about phobias and quirks in children and how so many behaviours when finally explained have such obvious and normal roots in their beginnings – which led me to ponder whether conditioning in the way of positive phobias could be a good thing 😉 If someone had drummed into me a morbid fear of the credit card maybe things would have been very different! 😆

Finally Allie brought out some of those blank jigsaws to draw your own picture on. I listened to Ali and Freya draw one for each other, explain it and talk about what might be behind the scene on the picture and then go and make their puzzles. I coloured all the pieces (I think there is about 20 bits to it) a different colour in felt tip, then coloured over it all in black crayon and then scratched my name off to show the rainbow below. Davies had come over and drawn Wallace for Scarlett on one and she had done something fairly abstract for him on another. Davies loved the effect of my one so he coloured five horizontal strips of colour and then I blacked over it ready to make something later at home as we’d run out of time. I remember sitting in the classroom the year I was 7 doing firework night pictures like that and then writing poems about fireworks – hard to believe I was only a year or so older than Davies is now…

We left there and as Davies has been saying for 4 weeks that his black Badger shoes are hurting despite them being the right size (I think they are too shallow as they appear to be pressing the top of his foot / toes) and Tarly’s wellies are a size too small too although as she always wears them bare foot underneath she is getting away with it at the moment. I’d also had a few items missed from the month’s food shop yesterday so we called into Asda which was on the way home – no shoes or wellies in their sizes but we did pop to Brantano and got a tenner pair of black shoes for Davies and some purple sparkly wellies for Tarly, so that’s them sorted. 🙂 In the car we listened to some Vicious Vikings and Rotten Romans with plenty of singing along for the songs.

Home briefly for some Xboxing for Davies and some jigsaw puzzling for Tarly and then I took Davies back out again to Badgers. He came out having sat and listened to a talk from a bloke called Terry who is there a couple of times a term and apparently all the children think he is an alien! 😆 He’d been telling them about St George and walkie talkies according to Davies, but as he refused to elaborate any further I have to assume that is what he did! 😆 We got home to find Tarly playing some sort of Barbie game on Ady’s laptop.