New normal

Ady was off to Birmingham today to a gardening trade show so he left the house at stupid o’clock. He didn’t get back home again til stupid o’clock either but at least he’s already now worked his hours to have Friday morning off. And he’s taking Davies and Scarlett over to Liza’s for me in the morning too – hurrah :).
Davies spent some time on Fantastic Contraptions this morning. He got past a couple more levels. I’ve not real idea what he’s doing with it and have to confess to not having got anywhere with it the couple of times I’ve looked – my brain just doesn’t seem to work in that way. His does though and whilst I’ve not idea if there is only one right or wrong way to get through each level he was doing things like building rolling platforms to carry the ball across earlier, then managing to explain precisely how he’d experimented and come up with the ideas for them all. Amazing – and slightly shaming 😳 .

Scarlett was playing with a yoyo and messing about with some needles and threads. I so need to get some binka for her to play with so she can actually do some proper sewing.

We had to pop out for bread and petrol and in the car on the way Davies managed to delete all his progress so far on the DS game Ali got him which he’s been playing solidly all weekend – Viva Pinata. He was devastated and it took lots of jollying along from me to get him to be accepting of it and start again. He’s fine now and has already made inroads into catching back up again, poor boy 🙁 .

We’d arranged for a new HEor and her two boys to come round for lunch. She was one of several people who emailed me while we were away camping to say she was thinking of / was about to / had already started HEing a child within a week of it being back to school. She is local (very, just along the road from my parents) and has a 7yo boy who did reception and Y1 and Y2 before finishing and July and not going back and a 1yo boy too. We’d exchanged a few emails and along they came today.

She arrived on the doorstep bearing cake which is always a good start, with her very small 7yo (another very good sign, I can’t be doing with children towering over D ;)) and her dreadlocks and facial piercing all of which had me thinking ‘oh great, she’s normal’ rather than the ‘oh god, she’s a weirdo!’ like it might have done 10 years ago! The children disappeared off together and aside from dashing past between playing inside and out and coming back for sandwiches we didn’t see them for the whole 3 hours they were here. Her and I sat and chatted and had loads in common; she was delighted with the chickens when she saw them through the window and enthused about the idea of an allotment, has very similar ideas on parenting and indeed education to me and we generally had lots of ‘really? me too!’ type conversations.

Of course you never really know what someone else is secretly thinking about you but when I mentioned a meet up at the local soft play later this week for a few HE folk she was quick to agree to come along so I’m very hopeful this could be a regular meet up for us as Davies loved having another similar aged boy to play with. It also firmed up for me that it is perfectly possible to have other children over that they can play so happily with that there is no need at all for adult intervention every five minutes – and how nice that is. 🙂

They left and we had to go to swimming. Scarlett’s lesson is first and when I told Davies that he is officially old enough to go in the pool alone now he stripped straight off and headed for the big pool on his own while Scarlett had her lesson. He spent most of the half an hour jumping in, swimming to the side and climbing out but appeared to be loving it. He did look very small out there all alone but also what a fab feeling that was to let him go off and do it :). Scarlett did well in her lesson; I am hopeful she will get moved up for next term so they are in the same group again.

Davies’ lesson went well too. Scarlett sat and played with my phone while I watched Davies. There is a sliding puzzle game on there she likes and we worked out how to make the puzzle a picture of something from the camera so she was doing sliding puzzles on pictures of herself which kept her nice and quiet 🙂 .

Home for their tea, a bath to get all the chlorine out of their hair and then a load of bedtime stories. Ady collected my new bike from a lovely freecycler on his way home so I’m looking forward to testing that out tomorrow – and also hopeful it will spur both children onto wanting to ride their bikes too. We have got a new one for Davies for Christmas and would get one for Tarly too if we could get her interested in the idea. I’m sure we could pick up a freecycle one for Ady fairly easily and then it would be something we could all do together. There is an excellent cycle path all along the seafont which is of course safe and traffic free so it would be a nice thing to do.

Tomorrow is pay day and also work for me in the morning with a whole list of things to get sorted in the afternoon before Badgers.