One word? When seven would do…

Friday – I worked all day and Ady was off all day at home with the children. They put Freddie, Wobble and Punzel into two cat carriers and took them over to our friend Bruce’s farm. Apparently they had a great time there playing with the farm dog, cows, chickens, ducks, geese, donkey and horses – the children that is! The chickens were transfered into a big pen together where they’ll stay for a few days before getting let out with the rest of the 30 or so chickens who free range round the farm. We were commended on rearing good looking birds and the children are very happy that they have gone to a good home. They came home with a load of fresh eggs and the promise they can go there as often as they like. Of course what they actually want to do is live on a farm all of their own, but this is a good compromise for now :).

I had a good day at work. In the morning I did Baby Rhyme Time . We had about 12 babies with their parents /carers and I’d prepared a schedule of nursery rhymes. Yvonne introduced me and said it was my first time and away I went. We had ‘warm up’ songs, some action songs, we had the instruments out (shakers, rattles, bells etc.) for some noisy songs, then some ‘calm down’ songs followed by the goodbye one. It went really well and I introduced ‘Five little men in a flying saucer’ to the Lancing Library repertoire as a new ‘track’ which went down well 😆 The rest of my day went well, I’m really feeling part of the team and get sought out for lots of the in jokes to be let in on etc. which is really nice :). Can’t believe it’s getting on for a year since I started – I’m so not the new girl anymore really.

Ady and the children picked me up at 5pm and we headed straight to Reading to Chris and Alison’s. We made really good time arriving while it was just Alison at the house. We waved Ady off to London and Alison went off to collect various children from brigades. We had a lovely evening – the children went off to bed around 930pm, sleep around 11pm (most of them) while Alison and I had our patented Perfect Pre-Party Evening (as tried and tested at Halloween 2005, Freya’s Pool Party 2006 and possibly other events). It entails staying up very late drinking wine and chatting the night before a very busy day with lots of children to be entertained in a party type setting. 😆 We find it aids productivity the next day to be operating on very little sleep and plenty of adrenaline ;).

Saturday – consequently did feel like really rather a long day. We were up early readying ourselves for Ady’s tv performance. He was staring in the Richard Jackson Gardening Hour
and had a slot sometime during that hour. The others wandered off to do pre-party preparation but I was a dutiful wife and sat through the full hour of people selling items as diverse and useless as a collapsible bucket with tools in the lid and a garden groom hedgetrimmer (complete with extra large garden bag retailing at nearly £30 on it’s own!) before Ady was finally on at about 945am. We all gathered on the sofa to watch together and it was nice to be watching with other people. 🙂 Ady did a fab job, was very comfortable, at home and confident, he came across as really knowing his product and at ease with the camera. I was very proud of him and it felt really quite odd to see my husband on tv rolling out the spiel he and I have sat around every night for the past week working on at home :).
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After that we had a very productive few hours preparing Chris and Alison’s house for many, many houseguests. I made myself useful with the hoover (it’s the second weekend running I’ve found myself helping clean a mate’s house, it’s starting to become something of a hobby – Babs you might want to get some brasso in and I’ll do your silverware when we’re up in a couple of weeks and if anyone else wants to book us to come and visit just make sure you have new rubber gloves ;)) and after a fluffy of efficiency we were able to collapse with tea again. We then made several towering piles of sandwiches, Ady returned and their guests started to trickle in. Alison and I set up a rather good pizza processing system and the Ros arrived with wheat free, dairy free, pizza free pizza ingredients to assemble so I helped with those too (hey my houseguest skills don’t begin and end with drunkenly howling along to James Blunt songs at 3am you know ;)) before finally being overcome with tiredness and deciding I really couldn’t do another thing. So we had some wine :lol:.

I spent some time admiring my favourite babies – Jasper and Anna, delighting in having them in the same place at the same time and then we all convoyed off to the swimming pool. Both Ady and I were not really up for swimming for various reasons so decided we’d both do it and suffer together. I’m really glad we did and so was he as it was really good fun. It’s a lagoon-stylee pool with a flume slide and a wave machine and plenty of floats. We swapped over children a couple of times so I got to enjoy Davies’ all but swimming and filled with utter water confidence japes including going on the slide together, messing about in the huge wave machine waves and a game we created where he had to leap from one float to the next one with ever increasing gaps. And I got to play with Scarlett and her no fear of anything attitude too. I’m looking forward to her name coming to the top of the swimming lessons list, I think she’ll take to it quickly and really enjoy it. :). We had an hour there and then had a wide variety of articificially coloured fizzy drinks and various other party foodstuffs before doing the birthday cake and goody bag thing. Alison had put glowsticks in the goody ags so lots of the children ran around in the dark playing with them outside. 🙂

We went back to Chris and Alison’s briefly but the children (and us) were very tired and we had the promise of curry and a quieter environment back at Si and Layla’s so it wasn’t long before we headed round there instead. We quickly realised we’d left Davies’ pjs and Scarlett’s milk recepticle there though so Layla and I, wine glasses in hand, wandered back round there to retrieve them :lol:. Aside from Claudie being ill and Scarlett wandering back out of the bedroom to go on the rocking horse out on the landing and seeing no issue with that at 1130pm it was otherwise peaceful and we had a lovely curry, wine and chatting before calling it a night slightly earlier than the night before. 🙂

Sunday – up not too early this morning to a lovely array of morning goods and teas. A nice slow start with the children playing, flopping or watching Baby Einstein while we all gradually came to before we gathered ourselves together to head off.

We’d planned to call in to Tilgate Park on the way home if the weather was nice. It’s about 90 minutes from Reading to home and Tilgate Park is about 2/3 of the way home so I reckoned on it being about an hours drive. We used the sat nav and on Ady’s recommendation we went for ‘shortest route’ rather than ‘quickest route’. After over an hour and a half we gave up on that rather crazy idea and reset it to quickest 🙄 but we arrived there before 2pm and had a lovely couple of hours there following much the same route as earlier in the week but showing Ady everything. We had tea and cookies at the cafe and wandered round the animals and trees. Scarlett found a very impressive looking caterpillar so we looked that up in our British Wildlife Book and decided it was an Emporer Moth caterpillar, we also looked up various fungi and then Scarlett found a raven in the book just like the one we’d just seen. We walked through the woods for a while, then round the lake before ending up in the playground for the last ten minutes. Plenty on pics over on flickr.

Home for french cinnamon toast for the kids tea followed by a bath. Davies was very keen to play with his Doctor Who toys as he was given two late birthday gifts this weekend of more daleks, which means he now has a proper army of daleks for his game – he’s thrilled :). I cooked Nigella ham in coke, which coupled with a bath, plenty of wine and the promise of my own bed tonight has meant the perfect end to a really lovely weekend. 🙂 Thanks to both sets of hosts, we had a ball, and it was lovely to see various friends there too. 🙂