Monday on Monday

if I type quickly enough :).

A slower start with Ady waking me at 9am when he rang and me then waking Davies and Scarlett. 😳
We breakfasted, they DS’d, I drank a full pot of tea, communed a bit with the chickens, got stuff out of the freezer, planned dinner, processed some laundry and ploughed through some of the emails. Only one week into the new term and I’ve already had two emails from local people deciding to HE and asking for information… I had a minor tantrum about paperwork, the bookcase being used as a dumping ground and then found what I was looking for so put off my intended grand tidy up of it 😆 .

We went into town so I could pay in £3 for a direct debit to get paid (money about to be very tight until I get paid next Wednesday) and Davies could cash his cheque from my Granny. He also got £5 in a birthday card in the post this morning so had £25 so spend and was keen to do so. In the queue at the Halifax we talked about words that were spelt differently and had different meanings but sounded the same when you had them. Davies came up with Hey / hay and to/too/two and I talked about complimentary / complementary when the children asked why some people sitting down had drinks of tea or coffee which was how we got started on it. At the counter there was a perspex sign that had shattered under the surface and we speculated on how (Davies reckoned it was when a screw was put through it and I think he was right). We called into a couple of charity shops as we passed, popped into Game where the children spotted and fell in love with a pack of stylusses shaped as crayons which we later went back to buy and they went halves on for one each.

In Woolworths Davies found a particular Ben 10 character which was amoung the ones he really wanted so despite them being more expensive (£5.29 as opposed to the £3.99 in Tesco and Asda) he weighed up the options and decided to buy it. I found a couple of pairs of trousers for Davies in the sale in there too so we paid for those. Woolies is now the only toy shop in town so we left and headed to Tescos to see if we could get more figures. On the way Scarlett got upset about the idea of spending her money (she had a £1 from the tooth fairy and £1 she had found) so Davies and I tried to explain the idea of swapping money for stuff. I think she is likely to be one of lifes savers really as she seems to enjoy the actual having of money rather than the spending of it. Totally alien concept to me of course but respect to her for it – aslong as she is not expecting me to spend money so she can keep her shiny pounds! 😆

Davies chose 3 more characters and kept £4 to buy a Ben 10 which was what he really wanted but Tesco didn’t have. Scarlett was finally convinced she would give Davies £1 towards the stylus she wanted (he was happy to pay the other £4 ) and spend her other £1 on a stationery kit she wanted in Tesco with kittens on it.

We came home for a late lunch and for them to play with the figures, do some DSing with their cool crayon styluses and Scarlett to do some drawing in her new pad. Her art is really coming along leaps and bounds at the moment; she did some painting with Ali’s paints while we were away and has totally got the hang of colour mixing and is drawing really quite recognisable pictures now. Today she drew a mole under the ground with good detail and some clouds way up in the sky 🙂 . She’ll be displaying at the library before you know it 😉 .

On the answerphone was a message from the council to say our name has come to the top of the allotment list and there was one vacant if we wanted it. A couple of quick phonecalls and I’d arranged to go and view it at 330pm. That made up for my washing machine dying again (Ady has since repaired it again but it is clearly on it’s last legs. It celebrated it’s ninth birthday this week having been a wedding present from my parents and is clearly counting that in washing machine years which must be similar to cat years). We headed up there checking two different routes with the mileometer – one was 1.8 miles, they other a shorter 1.3. I think you could walk it in even less, probably half an hour or so. It is on a big, locked patch at the back of a big local park. There are sea views and it is peaceful and at the edge of the downs. Our plot is number 113 and is the furthest corner of the area with just one neighbour. It becomes ours on October 1st and whilst it looks slightly uncared for it is certainly not overgrown. It’s just £24 for the year so a fairly cheap experiment to see if we can make it work and another small step closer to that Good Life lifestyle we thought we might want but are not in the right place to pull off right at the moment.

Home again and the children did some painting while I continued to battle with flickr uploadr before getting their tea ready. Ady arrived home, having called into a Sainsburys and found the Ben 10 character Davies had wanted, various news of the day was swapped and it was bedtime. I read a couple of books from the Barefoot Stories of the Sea and then the children stayed up for ages in their bedrooms with Davies playing with his Ben 10 stuff and Scarlett lying across her bed filling in a comic activity page. You can take a child to bed but you can’t make them sleep…

And now, because my fingers didn’t quite move fast enough it is actually Tuesday, but I am catching up. Slowly.