In your own time

A far too early start this morning as Ady was taking Davies and Scarlett over to Julie’s for the morning and so we all had to be up before 7am. Much stumbling around in the dark struggling to eat breakfast and drink tea way before our bodies were ready to be upright and I waved them all off with carseats and wellies before 8am. Which left me nearly a whole hour to potter about letting the chickens out – I took the time to rinse out their water troughs and had another cup of tea and watched Breakfast TV which is something I have never ever done having always only ever scrambled out of bed with sufficient time to get dressed and out of the house. I am not a morning person ;).

I had a nice morning at work, finished off a display, did some preparatory work for Chatterbooks and generally caught up. I had a bit of a chat with Y, my direct boss who said she has noticed how disproportionate the amount of jobs I have is in relation to the hours I woke and that she intends lightening that for me a bit freeing me up to do displays and spend time in work hours on Chatterbooks rather than my own time – which is good :). Chatterbooks is now oversubscribed with a waiting list longer than the original 12 places and the word is that there may be another session run later in the year. There has also already been talk about rolling *my* model out across the board and tailoring it for older and younger groups aswell as SEN groups. I have made it clear I am only up for the volunteering in my own time for this first trial run. I am gratified that it is so clearly something that there is call for and that all my ideas and planning have been so well recieved but am adamant I will get credit for it and turn it into an opportunity for me. I feel I am doing more than enough voluntary stuff and enhancing the lives of other people’s children was never on my list of things to do in my own time ;). All that said I am really looking forward to the sessions and think Davies, Scarlett and I (who are the people I am doing it all for) will get loads out of them

Left work and headed over to Julie’s to collect the kids, staying for a cup of tea and catch up chat with Julie who was feeling rough with something similar to what struck us all down last week. They’d had a really nice morning including a trip to the stables to feed / muck out Honey and were all in very good form :). Jack and Maisie have just got into Star Wars so light sabers and other such stuff had been much in evidence for the morning. It’s so lovely seeing Lorna starting to join in with playing too, the five cousins have such a lovely relationship :).

We came home and Davies and Scarlett did some Xboxing before dinner, then it was Badgers.

I had a much better time tonight, probably helped by only 3 of our group of 11 turning up tonight meaning I got to spend some time with each child individually. I quite like individual children, it’s just a collective gaggle of them I am less keen on. A very enlightening conversation with one particularly precicious 5 year old girl and scarily mature 7 year old boy about boyfriends and girlfriends of the sort that makes me glad my kids are not in school ;). We did some decorating photoframes and my suggestions to the children had Julie saying ‘Davies and Scarlett are so lucky to have you with them all the time doing stuff like this’ which made me smile. Then we took some photos with Julie’s fancy camera including some perspective shots which the kids didn’t really get their heads round but Julie and I enjoyed setting up. Then we rejoined the rest of the group who had been working on puppet shows making use of a fab electronic puppet theatre one of the Badgers had brought in from home with an electronic sound effect set and some glove puppets they’d all been making. Davies and Scarlett had worked together and what their show lacked in script or preparation it certainly made up for in entertaining the rest of the Badgers, which sort of set the scene for the rest of the group really. But they are doing Entertainment Badge and they certainly all achieved that :).

Home for stories before bed and for once everyone was fairly speedy to sleep. Maybe there is something in this getting up at 7am after all…