Shockingly despite three days at home last week we ended up at home again today. I had planned to go out but the weather looked grim again (in the end it cleared up but it certainly didn’t look promising at 10am when we were chatting about what to do today), the children were both up for staying home and as we have otherwise got a fairly full week it seemed like a sensible plan.
A local freecycler had posted about a bag of girls clothes and I’d got in first so I nipped round there to collect them this morning. Davies and Scarlett stayed home. I was only gone 15 minutes and it is nice to have that sort of small dose freedom all round I think. I had to drive past the sea to get there and it was very high – high tide anyway and a very grey and foamy looking sea. If it hadn’t been high tide right then I might have suggested we go back to the beach later but I knew the tide would be out again by then and it’s not nearly so dramatic.
A mini fashion show ensued when I got home with the bag of clothes as Scarlett fell on them. In the end she only accepted about 1/3 of the black sack-full as okay. Pretty much everthing fitted her as she is a very standard age 7-8 years size in most places but she is *very* picky. She doesn’t much like labels and isn’t keen on tight waistbands. She won’t wear skirts, *hates* those tops with pretend vest tops and off the shoulder looks (which is all good by me, I’m not keen either on a Little Girl), doesn’t like shorts (even in the summer, I know she wouldn’t be wearing them in November anyway) and flatly refuses to wear pretty pastel shades, frills, flounces or anything with a slogan she doens’t like – today she liked a top but rejected it because it said ‘Girls Academy. No Boys Allowed’ which she said was just stupid and didn’t want to wear – feminist she might be but she’s all about the equality! ;).
This rather limits her to jeans and trousers with soft waistbands and tops in bright bold colours with no slogan or one she deems acceptable. Despite all this she also claims to have ‘a style’ and was deciding things were ‘not my style’ or ‘are my style’. It would appear her style is rather tatty jeans, lots of black tops and materials that are soft and tactile. She did accept about 3 pairs of trousers, a couple of tops and a fleece though. The rest all the stuff all put me in mind of pretty much every other little 6/7 year old girl I know – Maisie, Rebecca, loads of those coming to camp but Rebecca sprang to mind first so I send Lucy a text asking if she’d like to cast her eye over the rest of it to see if anything was suitable. We arranged for them to pop round later this afternoon which seemed like a good compromise on not doing anything today.
Davies got out the 3D drawing kit and did several 3d pictures and checked them out with the glasses. His drawings were great – one was a lizard which was fab, but his appreciation of which bits should stick out 3D wise was a bit off and he had middle bits of things coming out and looking wrong. We talked about perspective and which bits of your face would be the ones to stick out most, looked at profiles and he started to grasp the idea of creating natural looking pictures rather than flights of fancy (which are also fine and great of course). Scarlett got out a window sticker kit and spent ages doing outlines of things to be filled in later, and mixing colours and trying different effects. She is really into her craft kits at the moment – will definitely be getting her more of that sort of thing for birthday / Christmas, but making stuff rather than beads and bracelets.
I did online stuff and then made some flapjacks – baking therapy is top. You feel productive, it smells gorgeous, you have real life evidence of your efforts and you get to eat stuff too! 🙂 I also did several loads of washing including the accepted freecycle clothes which came from a smokers household.
We had lunch and caught a clip on TV – I think it was Nick Jr with some little kids singing nursery rhymes and shaking instruments while a fairly patronising adult says things like ‘well done, you sang that beautifully. Shall we sing that one again?’ Davies asked me if that’s what I did at work and I agreed it was just like that. Scarlett asked if I said the whole ‘well done, let’s do it again’ stuff too and I agreed I did then asked them if they thought that sounded like something I would do. They both said it didn’t and I confessed I don’t much feel like me when I do that bit 😆 We talked about whether I liked that bit of my job and I said I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it either. Scarlett asked which bits I did love of my job and Davies said ‘oh that’s easy, it will be meeting new people and helping them find the right book!’. He’s either reading my blog, listening to my conversations or knows me very well. I suspect it’s the latter!
Lucy and Rebecca arrived and stayed for a couple of hours. Whether it was the altered dynamic of no Richard, or whether we were just lucky the three children played really well together (Davies had put some effort into thinking of games and ideas that would go down well, flushed with the success of Friday when Ali and Freya came, which must have also helped) and Lucy and I got to chat and chat and chat, which was just lovely :).
It did mean I was rubbish at getting the kids tea ready on time so they were rushing to finish it, get changed and get out to gymnastics and we were a few minutes late. They both said they’d had a great time tonight and progressed with their cartwheels.
I popped to Asda – bread rolls for 25p and loaf of nice seeded brown bread for 25p, then Co Op, fair trade oranges for 10p per net bag, British apples for 10p per bag, big lump of braising steak for £1. Planning on beef stew for me and kids tomorrow and some carrot (from the 25p bags last week glut) and orange cakes which I might freeze ready to bring to camp.
Ady was already home when I got back so I put the shopping away and we caught up on each others days before heading out to collect the kids from Gymnastics. I read a chapter of Littlenose
Ady and I looked silly eating our dinner while watching Derren Brown in 3D wearing our glasses 😆