Knock, knock

I worked this morning, it was easily the fastest four hours I’ve ever spent there, it just flew by. 🙂 There were only four of us on and the library is only open from 930 til 1pm on Wednesdays so everything needs to be done during the morning rather than stretched out until the normal weekday closing time of 7pm which means it’s always fairly fast paced. The chief librarian was working at Lancing today and I’ve only really spent time working with her at out of work events like the festival author talks and the Orange Fiction Prize evening. We had our tea break together and chatted and Home Ed came up as she was asking if my children had gone back to school this week. She is 30 something and childless so was very interested without feeling the need to defend any of her own choices and very enthusiastic about the idea.

I came home to my usual greeting of four children swinging on the gate yelling ‘Nic’ or ‘Mummy’ in a very pleased to see me fashion, which was nice. They played with the geomags before wandering back off outside to play again while Lucy and I chatted and then moved into the kitchen so I could start baking one of the cakes for Davies’ party (he’s having a dalek and a tardis – the dalek is finished, the tardis needs constructing and decorating but is baked). Then Lucy and The Rs left and Davies and Scarlett stuck on the first of the Doctor Who dvds I’d brought home for them. They hadn’t seen the first few where the Doctor meets Martha (I thought they’d started watching from the beginning of that series but apparently not). Once the first shift of cakes was out of the oven we went along to the butcher to get Septembers supply of meat for the freezer.

Davies and Scarlett had a whale of a time, they chatted non stop to the butcher, who is only too happy to talk to anybody about butchering so they covered all the various meats in our order (sausages, mince, steak, pork chops, chicken breasts and joints of pork, lamb and beef) including where on the animals’ body the meat had come from and how old it might have been when it was slaughtered, why you might die if you got caught in the walk in freezer and whether it would still feel cold to people from the North Pole (Scarlett’s question – she seems to have grasped the concept of relative then 🙂 ), why the little handbell on the side used to alert the butcher to customers presence when he’s out the back had been repaired, whether the butcher washes his hands (Scarlett again :)), how the mincer works and why beef is the most popular meat to be minced, and then I got involved for a couple of questions about how the fly zapper machine kills flies, why Davies had spotted a fire extinguisher there and finally why we call the meat from pigs pork or bacon, the meat from cows beef but we call lamb and chicken meat lamb and chicken. I vaguely recalled an explanation from a lesson on crop rotation in the industrial revolution in a history lesson when I was about 14 and someone asked the same question so I was able to explain that, which impressed the butcher as he hadn’t known. He then commented on how many questions they ask and how interested they are in everything – and how much they’d remembered from last time we went and he chatted to them, which was nice :).

We came home and Davies and Scarlett both drew pictures of the butchers while watching another Doctor Who episode. Davies’ was excellent with loads of great detail, Scarlett’s was very colourful with plenty of blood :lol:. Davies got me to help him with spelling Mick’s Butcher along the top and did a fine job of working most of it out himself – writing is definitely clicking for him more than reading, I guess he places more importance on his own words instead of other people’s 😆 They want to take them to him next time we go, but we might call in there tomorrow if we go to the library as it’s on the way.

Inbetween cake cooking shifts I cooked their tea and then Ady arrived home. They all went out into the garden to clean around the chickens. I got called out to see Davies’ ‘invention’ of a ‘brick rocket’. He’d got a plank of wood, rested it mid point on a low wall around the new bit of lawn so one side was lower than the other, placed a duplo rocket on the low end and then stamped on the high end to shoot it up into space, complete with countdown from 10 (funny how he suddenly was able to do that without ever thinkig about it). No idea where he got the idea from or even if he just worked it out for himself, he was pleased with it enough for it to have come to him as completely his own invention :).

The children came in for a bath while I decorated the (now cooled) dalek cake and then called them all into the kitchen for a viewing. Davies came up to me and gave me a huge cuddle and said ‘thank you so much Mummy for everything for my party. I love my dalek and my cake looks so cool and I really love you’. Which almost brought tears to my eyes and answers the question in the comments a few posts down about why I put so much effort into their birthdays – because I can. I can give my time and be creative and play hostess to 40 party guests and 20 house guests and make Davies and Scarlett feel like the most important person in the world for that one day a year. Watching them thrive and revel in the attention, atmosphere and centre stage of their parties last year was a real highlight of my year knowing that it is my efforts and creativity that have made that happen. I can’t afford to buy them the moon, take them to Disneyland, let them have music lessons, a swimming pool or any of the other things I might like to do in a dream world (hell I couldn’t even afford one of those parties at McDonalds for more than about 3 children 😉 ) but this is something utterly within my reach, something I get pleasure both out of doing and of doing for them and something they really do appreciate and enjoy.