Hope the today to hope once north

Today’s blog post title is brought to you by the following random generated method:
First word : seventh word of the seventh brightkite post down on the current front page
Second word: seventh word of the seventh facebook news feed item on my personal feed
Third word: seventh word on the seventh post down on my own blog.
Fourth word: seventh word on the seventh tweet down on my friends twitter feed
Fifth word: seventh word on the seventh feed on my sage
Sixth word: seventh word on the seventh listing I currently have on ebay
Seventh word: the seventh word on the seventh piece of paper down on the table beside me.

One random word? When seven would do…

Kind of glad it didn’t make sense, would have been rather freaked out it it had! And prefered Jan’s Badger title really. And this took about 7 minutes so probably a one of method of title-ness too.

Up and out this morning as we were off to our only film week screening this year – How to train your dragon. A couple of friends were already at the cinema but were sitting in the back row and Davies and Scarlett insist on sitting in the front row so we said hello and made our way to the front. We all enjoyed the film lots, thought it was really good. We’ve never topped our best film week experience of having a tour of the projection room in a little independant cinema and I read about Kirsty getting a talk about film classification with envy. I do think they miss a trick in not doing more around the films that are screened really, even it was just showing some of the sorts of things that make it to the dvd extras about ‘making of the film’ type stuff.

We left and hung around to have a quick catch up chat with Tasha and Toby before checking the change in my purse to see if we had enough to add to the luncheon vouchers I had found this morning to have lunch at McDonalds. We did so we headed there and the kids had a happymeal each.

We then had a slight limbo of being about 45 minutes too early for Ali’s, not worth going home and no one really being up for walking round shops. So we drove to Ali’s, parked up and sat in the car and I read a book to the kids. We read the Roddy Doyle kids books (Giggler Treatment, Rover Saves Christmas, Meanwhile Adventures) a while back but had been trying to remember some of the details from them the other day so I’d got them out of the library again. We’d brought The Giggler Treatment along with a Morpurgo with us as examples of books we have enjoyed, so we read that.

Writing Group at Ali’s was ace. There was us, Ali and F, C and her two girls E and M and another boy T. We did several creative exercises, the kids had some break out time and everyone shared something they had come up with which varied in style and delivery but were all excellent. We had some really beautifully written descriptive word, some lovely illustrations, some great performance based stories and some really imaginative work. Davies struggled rather with the unwanted attention from one of the group but Ali laid down some ground rules which should prevent that from reoccuring and we spent the drive home practising being assertive about asking people to stop doing something. Something Scarlett and I seem to be pretty good at but Davies lags behind in skill in ;).

Some supermarket hokey cokey with me dropping the kids off at Tesco and Ady and then going back out again to Sainsburys before eventually everyone was home and fed. We all watched Autumnwatch and Scarlett fell asleep on my lap meaning I had to carry her to bed, quite tricky with a nearly 8 year old…

Am now very tired from staying up til nearly 3am (I did watch the QT thing in the end) and anticipating a couple of late nights ahead, so off to bed while it’s still today.