Yesterday Ady and I were both back to work. My day was pretty manic, with the morning being extremely busy. We do Storytime on Thursday mornings every week for under fives, with it extended to pretty much all ages but mostly suitable for youngsters during school holidays. It tends to get quieter normally though with lots of people on holiday or otherwise busy, but yesterday as part of the Big Wild Read we had Zoolab to take over storytime with a tale about Speedy The Snail with a real live African land snail to help the story along. Oh and a toad, a rat, hissing cockroaches, a small snake and a couple of tarantulas! And it was packed with children! The adults all had to come out of the children’s library and stand outside to watch. Meanwhile the library itself was busy anyway, loads of the children combined a BWR visit with coming to storytime and we had several Important People from the library service along to attend the event too. I didn’t get involved in any of that (thankfully – it all looked pretty full on and whilst I don’t mind any of the creatures on show I wasn’t exactly desperate to meet them either ;)). The afternoon was a bit quieter but it still felt very much like I’d done a full days work by the time I got home.
Lucy and The Rs had been here in the morning and Frazer in the afternoon – which meant the children had been taken to the shop for chocolate and had him pandering to their every whim – he is a very indulgent uncle :). Frazer left, I tidied up and got some pizza dough going and then Em, Eve and Rei arrived. 🙂
The children were rowdy and crazy in the garden for a while, then came indoors and were rowdy and crazy in the house for a bit. Ady came home and we settled the children down with Aristocats and a variety of pizza based foods. Ady sorted Davies’ bedroom ready for a sleepover and did stirling work reading bedtime stories while Em and I sorted food for us and drank wine and chatted. 🙂 After a typically late Goddard hospitality dinner, a move for Eve back downstairs into Scarlett’s bedroom and more chatting and wine drinking the last child (Davies) finally fell asleep about 1130pm, followed by Ady and Em and I sat up til about 2am. Em headed off to bed and I sat for another half an hour or so before going to bed myself.
This morning was a predictably slowish start with tired children. They created a ‘lifeboat’ with all the sofa cushions on the floor and had a game with plenty of sealife creatures, followed by some dancing by Rei wearing a new and very pretty and suitable for flouncing dancing flowery dress :), Davies and Scarlett ate their way through half a packet of weetabix and then the children dug all the sea creatures out of the toy animal box and made an ocean of the lounge floor complete with ‘Scorpion Land’ :lol:. Everyone finally got dressed, I hung some washing out, the children went out to play in the garden, Em tidied up the ocean floor and we all headed round to Lucy’s.
We had a nice couple of hours round there given the amount of children and the amount of sleep they’d had 🙂 with Em heading off to deliver Eve and Rei to Weymouth and us staying for an hour or so afterwards to properly catch up after our holiday with Lucy. Ady was home for the afternoon as he’s headed off to QVC this evening to dress his first set for a 1am show, followed by another one tomorrow lunchtime before coming home – so he has a very expensive hotel room booked which I doubt he’ll actually spend much time in tonight, so we came home to spend a couple of hours with him before he headed off. Davies and Scarlett played low key games with betty spaghetti and geomags while I googled for Doctor Who party game ideas as it’s suddenly dawned on me that Davies’s party is only 3 weeks tomorrow and aside from booking the hall and buying a few bits for party bags I’ve not done anything about it. I’ve also realised we have a NicCamps type situation with more families staying here than we have rooms but having read about precise numbers I think we can squish everyone in 🙂 and as I’m working the whole day the day before I need to make sure I don’t leave too much last minute stuff to do.
D&S have just finished watching The Magic Roundabout (the movie – the bits I was aware of looked every bit as random and loony as I remember the cartoon being :lol:) so are being packed off to bed early while I have pasta for tea, drink the last of Em’s pink wine and have an early night myself. Another whole day at work tomorrow followed by a day up in London on Sunday lie ahead so no time for slobbing on the horizon for a while yet!