I got me them January blues

oh yeah.

It’s rained pretty much all day today.

I’m cold and although we can’t really afford the bill I’ve had the heating on all day, I could put more clothes on but I need to dry the washing.

The house is full of washing, dirty washing that I can’t get washed and wet washing that I can’t get dry.

I’m sooooo tired. I meant, really meant to go to bed early last night to recover from Saturday night, but online car crash rubbernecking kept me up way later than I meant to be. And then the kids were both up at 7am when Ady went to work, so I had about 5 hours sleep – not nearly enough for one night let alone to play catch up from the night before.

Kids are really tired too and have ‘wet play syndrome’ which in Tarly comes out as acting as though the world has ended over the tiniest little event. In the space of ten minutes earlier she cried because I wouldn’t buy her anything in the charity shop at group (she couldn’t find anything to buy), because I made her go back into group (she didn’t want to go back to group, she thinks group is horrid), she didn’t want to go home (as she sat wailing in the corner and said to Kate ‘NO!!!!’ when Kate asked her if she was ok and did she want her Mummy? so I decided to take her home) and that I hadn’t let her play enough 🙄

So I’ve no idea where the morning went given we were up so early. I realised it’s my friend Miranda’s 40th on Wednesday at the weekend so we decided to make her a calendar with some of the photos of her gorgeous house, so I spent ages setting that up and emailed it across to Ady at work which made us 40 minutes late for group (and when I got home it had bounced back anyway :roll:).

The hall that MM is held in has been all Changing Rooms style makeover done up over Christmas and now has gorgeous bright coloured soft play style shaped bits of multi purpose style furniture and a posh floor and a special ceiling. Which looks fab and makes it the sort of place people who are pretensious would call ‘a positive space’ but they’ve taken away all the tables for drawing at and the stools for sitting at the worktop, drinking tea and chatting at. I assume they are hidden and will be returned but it meant leaning against the worktop to drink tea instead and it’s at completely the wrong height for leaning. And I got called Nikki again, and I was so tired I spent most of the time I was talking to people concentrating really hard on not yawning in their faces instead of paying attention to what they were saying and was utterly crap at talking to the couple of new people just smiling vaguely at them and saying ‘my name’s Nicola’ which will confuse things even more as I never call myself Nicola normally but I’ve got into the habit from being at work and meeting new people. So now people will be talking about Nic, Nikki and Nicola and not knowing they all mean the same person. 😆 I paid for the years membership though, me and Tarly not being in the right mood today aside it is a good group, I’m glad we’ve found it and it feels like the right place to be making our local HE contacts, the children seem really happy with the mix of people there and although it isn’t actually in our local town it takes no longer to drive there than it did to get across town to some of the venues I hired for the Worthing group. And oh, how lovely it is to just turn up each week instead of worry about whether enough people will come to cover the rent 😆

Came home for late lunch (must get more organised at sorting out lunch to take with us to group, it cocks up the whole day eating lunch at 2.30pm) and more drudgery with wet and dirty washing, washing up and getting dinner on. Kids played and it all calmed down to normality again. Sometimes I forget that most kids their age wouldn’t be up til midnight with a houseful followed by a birthday party on Sunday and Home Ed group on a Monday – if they keep our socialising hours I guess they do need downtime. Poor over socialised HE kids! 😆

Ady came home in time for me and Davies to walk round the corner to the Beavers group. Predictably the Beaver Leader fell over yesterday ice skating so it was being run by the Cub Leader and the Quartermaster instead – ably but without any ability to tell me stuff I needed to know as a new person. However it did contain 15 little boys aged 6 to 8 who all live within about a mile radius of our house so that’s a bit good 🙂 There was one other new boy but at least half the others already knew him from school. I didn’t find out anything like where to get the t shirt from, whether it’s better to buy the sweatshirt through them (they might offer discount, if not I’ll get it where I used to work), whether he has to be invested before he gets a woggle and scarf, what the subs are and so on. But I did get asked, before they even took Davies’ name if I’d be able to help out once a term and when I said ‘er ok I guess so’ was told they’d bring a CRB check form for me next week. And my library one won’t be any good. So they can do one for Ady too and he will do a session a term as well (which he is already excited about :lol:). They did some ball games including heading and catching, some general running around, some drawing and some circle time type stuff all of which had me inwardly cringing on one level but I won’t normally witness it and Davies was fine with it. He integrated straight away actually, easily with the adults and fairly effortlessly with the boys. He’s a real people pleaser and watches how others act and then emulates them, just like Ady, so he quickly blends in and looks like he belongs. He initially said he didn’t want to come back as it was lots of running around and that had made him really tired, until I pointed out that it was practically bedtime so he was *supposed* to be tired. So he’s agreed to go back next week and I’ve already won a Beaver sweatshirt on ebay (it’s a colour that suits him anyway so if doesn’t get worn for Beavers it’ll get worn) so I’m pretty pleased about that. Got him sorted I reckon with Beavers on Monday and Badgers on Wednesdays. Scarlett can start Badgers too when she turns five and I’ll look into the girls version of Beavers at the church hall – Rainbows? And also gymnastics for her for a future date. I don’t think dance will be her thing as much as gym and unless she begs me to be a ballerina I’m avoiding that one like the plague ;). I also signed Davies up for swimming lessons a while back so must chase those up for him but those are a 12 week only thing. I reckon 2 nights a week is more than enough for ongoing activities but both have healthy doses of running around being sociable rather than anything structured so they should be exactly what he needs.

I finally made full use of my two big baskets crammed with lush stuff by having a bath bomb in my bath, using a face mask, shampoo and conditioner which was all lovely :).

And now look, it’s 11.30pm again already. Grr. Tomorrow we have absolutely zero things planned other than the dentist first thing in the morning so it’s a no laptop day and we’ll see where the day takes us.