One word? When seven would do…

Poor Scarlett was awake in the night with nightmares, one of those horrid ones that remains clear and continues to haunt you through the day. Reading back over my blog she tends to have the odd episode like this every so often. Yesterday both kids were tired after two very late nights in a row, they listened to Ady and I talking about Eira and of course they are about to leave family, friends and home behind so can be forgiven for wibbling a little. I stayed with Davies for about an hour before he fell asleep last night and then Scarlett spent half the night in our bed. Whilst I wish they were not feeling sad / fretful / otherwise wibbly I know the years of wanting me to sit beside them as they go to sleep are coming to a close so I don’t mind at all and almost cherish them a little. Like those poignant middle of the night feeds with tiny babies where it’s hard and tiring and you wish someone else could borrow your breasts and do it instead but know onw day you’ll be looking back and feeling all nostalgic.

So a slower start to the morning and surprise when I looked out of the windo to see one lone chicken out while all the others were still locked up, he must have been out all night. He is the youngest cockerel and this morning found his crowing voice. I wonder how long the tenants will be pleased they have cockerels…

My task today was to sort the insurance out before it got cancelled and I was hit with a hefty £75 cancellation fee. It’s been a bloody nightmare, spanning several weeks and including at least 8 phonecalls, dealing with automated dialling systems, talking to people who don’t really understand English, trying to remember the phonetic alphabet to spell out my email address, countless emails (none of which have actually been responded to) with one company and many, many emails with the other as they are solely online and have no phone number other than a technical help line at £1.50 per minute if you are having trouble with their website and tend to respond to all emails with ‘thank you for your email. Please note we need the no claims discount proof by 8th Feb or we will cancel the policy and charge you £75’ rather than paying any attention to the actual content of the email.

So today I found an 0800 complaints telephone number on their website and was quite taken aback to be talking to the Chief Executives Office. The woman listened to my tale of woe, took my email address again along with my phone number, gave me her name and promised to sort it out and call me back. Which she did within about half an hour, followed up with the promised email. I sent that to the new insurers who sat on it for a while before emailing back to say actually it wasn’t what they wanted but they had rung my old insurers themselves and gotten verbal clarfication from them. Why on earth they couldn’t have done that in the first place I don’t know. There was further toing and froing but I am so bored of the whole tedious episode now and it would appear to finally be sorted that I can’t bring myself to type it out,

That done I looked at a flag set with Davies that I’d promised to do with him last night. It was one we picked up from the EH bargain shop at FoH a couple of years ago but has sat in the Emergency Present stash in the back of our wardrobe. That got cleared out over the weekend so as there were two flag sets Davies and Scarlett got one each. They happen to be from a company that the kids were looking at gift items from in a shop recently and cooing over the very cool packaging on some ship in a bottle kits. They have the nautical flag for each letter printed on tiny flags and a spool of thread all in a lovely little box. Davies made two flags to hang in the van; one saying Wondering and the other saying Wanderers. We talked about wonder and wander, the difference in spelling and meaning and then the two different word endings ‘ing’ and ‘ers’ and how they can change words.

Scarlett was doing some more painting. She had laid in bed last night and copied out loads of animal names into a notebook from one of her books. I’d told her what they all said and now she has memorised them. She had interestingly managed to make all her letters upper case despite the ones in the book not being so and her claiming to not know any letters so clearly she does, but perhaps doesn’t actually realise that herself yet. Her painting and drawing really is getting very good – all very wildlife, animal, landscape themed but with some really interesting attention to detail and definite desire to make it look as lifelike as possible. This is a big contrast to Davies who has a more caricature type style, picking one or two attributes to something and focussing on those, or making his drawings very much in his personal style, rather like a childrens book illustrator (I’m thinking Nick Sharratt, Quentin Blake, even Lauren Child although she is more about the mixed media). I’m so looking forward to seeing the artwork that this year will inspire in them both :).

I was rather distracted this morning with the whole insurance thing but did semi watch Shrek 2 and then Shrek Forever After with them and we did have several conversations although the contents of them totally escape me now.

We had lunch and in the process of making it Scarlett told me we had 8 tins of tuna in the cupboard. They are in wrapped stacks of four tins so I asked how she knew and she said ‘two fours are eight’. I asked how she knew that and she said she knows two fives are ten so she took off the two extra ones to get down to eight. I tested her reasoning with two twos, fives, threes, sixes and sevens and it appeared a very solid way ot mental arithmatic for her :). We ate and were cuddled up on the sofa together when Ady came home. He’d printed off various information about H&S on farms and children on farms including an activity type book each for the kids so they had a go at some of them. Scarlett sat with me and Davies with Ady and we looked at some anagrams, some farm yard produce based sums and a few other bits. Not the sort of thing we’d do often but quite relevant at the moment and the kids enjoyed them. Davies did a fair bit of spelling and writing, Scarlett was more word recognition. We then both showed them how to add numbers together on paper in columns which led to subtracting too. Scarlett and I also looked at estimating and multiplying using addition. I’m always surprised at how quickly they grasp these concepts without the need for hours of lesser going over it again and again in reception and lower age classrooms when I know what a big deal is made of numeracy from preschool upwards.

We all brushed our teeth and walked across to the dentist. We waited ages in the waiting room (about 25 minutes I think) although I was very happily reading a very interesting science based magazine which had all sorts of interesting facts and a couple of short articles including one about rebellion and whether we are prorammed to be someone who stands up and speaks out or just goes along with things referencing the Milgram experiment and later replications of it and another about cults both of which were really interesting and the sorts of things I read loads about while doing A levels and found fascinating then.

Ady needs some hygenist work so we booked an appointment (and paid a deposit – not at all sure of the mentality of that but at least there will be less to pay after the actual visit) for that. Davies is fine, teeth nice and clean and all coming through okay. He will definitely have some overcrowding in his mouth and so the dentist was explaining to me how that might be dealt with in years to come. I have pretty straight and very small teeth with just one slightly crooked one to the right of my top front teeth that sits just behind, almost the identical set up to my Dad but Ady has very wonky teeth and has had various problems with them and I think both children are set to have his smile but of course these days corrective work is done rather than leaving the teeth to their own devices. Scarlett’s teeth seem fine, the protective fluoride coating that was painted one seems to have prevented any decay and her brushing is good :). Again she has teeth coming through with no real room and she also has quite big teeth – both the kids top front teeth are bigger than mine! But the dentist was unconcerned and said it should all be problem free for a few years until orthodontist work kicks in. I have two fairly old fillings that I’d already thought might be coming to the end of their lives, they pre-date children certainly and are pretty big fillings, I suspect done by an over zealous private dentist in my past. I was due an x ray which showed a small amount of decay underneath them so the dentist wanted to consult with a colleague about whether they should be replaced now or left until we come back. She’ll ring me tomorrow with an answer. I think I’d prefer to leave them alone, both from a financial point of view and because we have a lot going on in the next couple of weeks and I’d almost rather not mess about with them as they are not causing any discomfort at the moment.

While we were in the surgery the kids were asking questions – about Ady’s x rays, why there was an electric point in the floor for the dentists chair, what a plastic bag of liquid hanging on the wall might be, why patients wore goggles etc and I was replying and the dentist commented on how curious they were and how able I was to answer (hardly rocket science ;)) and then it came up that we were going away so she asked about the kids and school. I explained they are Home Educated anyway so they’d just be Van Educated for a year. She said that she was Home Educated herself for a time although didn’t elaborate further – nice to know a medical professional clearly wasn’t held back by it though, I imagine she may even have been to a Russell Group uni 😉 .

Back home via the chemist for prescription mouthwash for Scarlett and then we all settled down to watch Elephant Man
Ady had been telling the kids about John Merrick the other day and they’d asked if I could get the film from work so I’d brought it home. We all watched together and although it made Davies sad and Scarlett cry they were both really glad they’d watched it. We talked for ages afterwards about appearance, what people are like inside and how humans treat each other. With Scarlett a bit wobbly it was perhaps not the best film to watch although actually there are uplifting parts to it too but I think it will definitely be one that stays with them.

They had dinner and we did bad, good, learnt:

Davies:
Bad: The way people treated John Merrick
Good: Enjoyed a lovely weekend with friends
Learnt: About adding a column of figures on paper – he later showed me and then we took it to three columns of numbers, looked at subtraction in more detail and then I showed him a whole column of numbers to add up and gave some examples of times when you would need that skill.

Scarlett:
Bad: Had a bad dream last night
Good: one chicken got left out last night by accident but was fine
Learnt: About the life of John Merrick

Ady:
Bad: Dentist today 🙁
Good: All watched Elephant Man together
Learnt: There is a market for growers of edible flowers sold to top restuarants in London (thank you Countryfile last night and a prompt from Davies when he was struggling to think of something :))

Nic:
Bad: Very stressful sorting out insurance this morning
Good: Finally did sort out insurance
Learnt: About orthodontic work on children and that our dentist was Home Educated.

We read for bedtime and then began a round of bath, long conversation with my Mum on the phone, eating dinner, sitting on Tarly’s floor til she fell asleep, going back up with Davies when he came down for a glass of water and then asked to be tucked in and watching The People’s Supermarket that we had taped last night. That provoked some interesting discussion between Ady and I and after one too many ‘well we’ll see won’t we’ type responses from him I rather went off the deep end with a rant of self promotion about how I do indeed see through things I say I am going to do, I do stand up for stuff I am passionate about, I do stick to my beliefs and put myself out for things and I do not just pay lip service to ideas. I think having known me since I was 16 and been with me since I was 19 Ady can have a habit of being a bit like my parents and clinging to an idea in his head about who I am and what I am like that is now rather outdated and not at all true. There is something of a notion that I am lazy, spend a lot of time on the sofa ‘messing about on that laptop’ and not doing a lot else, spend money on nail varnish and drink too much wine. He does keep mentioning things about the coming year and saying ‘well I’ll be fine but I think you’ll really struggle with X, Y and Z and I just hope you don’t take it out on me’ which may be fair and would certainly have been true 15 years ago but I like to think I have done enough to alter that idea in recent years really. He did back down but I’m never sure if that is because he has conceded I was right or he just doesn’t do conflict ;).

I guess the trouble with marrying someone 10 years younger than you is that younger sibling syndrome where for you they are always a bit childish and need looking after… maybe I should put that to him 😉 😆