I got chills….

This morning Davies reminded us of the one request he made way back on Christmas Eve when we said how Ady would be off work for over a week, which was to go to ‘the dinosaur place’. We’ve not been for months and infact I’d let the season ticket lapse without renewing it but had intended getting one again as it is less than double the price of normal entry which makes it well worth while given how often we went there last year. So we had an early lunch and headed off to Newhaven.

We rejoined for the year and Davies certainly paid a little more attention to some of the more educational bits of the displays than usual. We still dashed round quicker than I would have liked and I was surprised at how many of the dinosaur names Davies has forgotten given how obsessed he was a year or so ago but I’m sure they would come back given a bit of focusing on them again.

We walked round the cactus gardens and some of the outside area but by no means all of it as it was pretty cold. We played for a while in the playground, possibly more me and Ady than the children who were despairing of us having fun on the ‘get all the way round the wooden bits without touching the ground with your feet’ when they wanted us to be pushing them on the swings! 😉 Davies was disappointed that the sandpit was covered over but they were both fairly philosophical at my refusal to get any tokens for them to play on the amusements or buy them presents in the gift shop (which in fairness to a 3 and 5 year old who have always had such things is probably a fairly tricky thing to accept, I know I’m struggling with it. 🙁 ).

We left after a couple of hours and came home. Davies and I made up a wooden slot together dinosaur that’s been kicking around for ages and he painted it. This was harder work than it sounds as he is tired, whingey and far too used to having Ady at his constant beck and call for over a week so we very nearly came to blows over it. I tried to persuade him to use the skeleton as the base to make a papier mache model which we could then paint but he refused on the basis that yes, we would need to wait a day or two before painting it. Scarlett painted some pictures of dinosaurs – she really is very good with a paintbrush and has totally got the hang of watercolours in a block, which have totally escaped Davies and then painted some pictures I’d drawn of us all using all the right colours. She has been surprisingly mess-free with the art sets they got for Christmas and has done some sort of painting every day, Davies still prefers his drawing really, he is too keen to finish something quickly and move onto the next thing for the patience required for painting something and rinsing the brush out between colours.

While they were doing that Grease came on TV and although we do have the dvd it is one that they have not really watched before so in the interests of completing their plenary of musicals for the festive season we all watched that. The children were most impressed that I knew all the songs and then Davies danced along with the last two.

Davies adores You’ve Been Framed type tv shows so we watched that next, although I stopped laughing at kids picking their noses in the school nativity or idiots pulling the Christmas tree down balancing on the arm of the sofa to reach the top to put the star on after the third example of each he was in fits of laughter!

Right, they are now both asleep, it’s my turn to cook dinner and a bath is waiting for me. Tomorrow we are seeing Lucy, Ady’s going back to work and I have plans to continue with the general tidying. I also have a vague idea that I want to start reading aloud to the children again a bit more. It’s something we all enjoy and I have let lapse somehow over the months so I think we’ll make the effort to get that going again in a nod towards being educational in our home education. 🙂