It’s like bloody April!

I’ve been sorely neglecting my online duties in favour of ragrugging. I suspect this gives me many, many muffin points but the rug is lovely :). It’s past halfway point now and I hope to finish it tomorrow. I’ve put out a plea for rags or stuff to cut into rags on freecycle so I’m hoping for more material to continue indulging in it.

Of course given my short attention span and all what will probably happen is I’ll finish this one, get halfway into a second one, join loads of ragrugging forums, borrow stacks of books on it from work, start up a ragrugging blog and then lose interest :lol:.

So when I’ve not been cutting old pj tops of Scarlett’s into long strips, knotting them together and weaving them onto my peg loom we went out to brave the elements. We’d arranged to meet up with Julie, Jack,Maisie and Lorna at PYO and she had invited along her 2 best mates – they have a little trio going on and often look after each others’ children. One of them is hoping to buy a house in Julie’s road. I like them both and all their children (one has 3, the other has 2) are nice so it was good to catch up with them too. Davies was less pleased, I think he’d wanted to see just Jack and Maisie so he hung out with me for a lot of the time but that was nice. We had one of our surreal and ridiculous conversations at one point in the pouring rain as he was telling me what he could taste in the rain and using winebuff terminology (as interpreted by a 7yo) – it was hilarious! We had top notes and nose and qualities 😆

There was a classic photo opportunity moment when a dead rat was spotted and they all gathered round to offer ideas about how it died 🙂

Elaine and I amused ourselves by saying we’d not seen PYO rats up on the price list and pondered whether there would be a discount price if you bought in bulk like there was for sweetcorn 😆

We picked blackberries, raspberries, sweetcorn, apples (cookers and eaters) and some of the others picked squash and pumpkins. We had a couple of rides on the tractor, ate loads of fruit and got drenched in the rain and then totally blow dried by the wind and warmed by the sun.

We then went on to Highdown Gardens where due to various events Julie and I ended up with our children picnicking while Elaine and Katy ended up seperately, so Davies got his wish in the end and had some time with just Jack and Maisie. My hip was playing up and Davies was keen to get home so we left around 4pm. I carried on with my rug while Davies and Scarlett played ‘parties’ upstairs in his bedroom which involved talking loudly through the microphone on the karaoke machine and being very bouncy and exciteable. No idea where he gets the idea that constitutes a party ;).

They had tea, Ady arrived home and then at 630pm, as arranged the fire brigade arrived!

At the open day at the local fire station recently we’d signed up to have a free fire safety check. Now Ady is (unsurprisingly) very diligent about fire safety and not only do we have 2 wired in smoke alarms we also have 3 additional ones and normally (we hid them today) we have several fire extinguishers too. Thanks to the Safety Day earlier this year and the demonstrations at the open day Davies and Scarlett are both pretty fire aware too. But I thought it was worth having them round just for the novelty value and for the children to get to talk to them here at home.

One of them walked round the house to check our smoke alarm provision. He had brought two free ones with him to fit but there was no need. The other one sat and chatted to us and worked through a fire safety questionnaire with us. There was a section just for the children to answer which they did perfectly. They were here for half an hour or so and were very happy that we are doing all we need for fire prevention, evacuation plans and fire safety. Which is what one would hope given Ady and I spent nearly a year doing training sessions in offices on fire safety and his current role of H&S manager at work but nice to know anyway.

After they’d gone we chatted a bit more about the leaflet they’d left and discussed which was the best upstairs window to jump out of and how we’d do it. Then it was bedtime storytime and bed for D and S. I did more ragrugging, Ady cooked dinner and we watched ‘Over her dead body’ which was crap.

Work tomorrow.