Nighttime excitement, wild partying and the like

I was woken at 4am by Ady hissing ‘Nic! Nic! There’s a fox!’ at me and then dashing, naked out of our bedroom down the stairs. I hung (also naked) out of the bedroom window and sure enough although I couldn’t see it (dark and no contact lenses) I could hear all sorts of screeching and scuffling around the chicken houses. Really weird noises – something being seriously attacked which at the time we thought was one of the chickens. I leant right of the window, naked bits a-wobbling and yelled ‘OI! NO!!!’ very loudly which caused an end to all the noise. By then Ady had rushed outside, still naked and came face to face with a fox in the hedgerow. After a brief stand off the fox ran off. Ady opened the first chicken house and the 3 chickens who live in there all clucked at him in a sleepy fashion and when he checked the other henhouse there was no signs of entry there either.

He came back upstairs and we discussed what could have happened and decided it must have been the fox being very excited and making according noises as it tried to dig into one of the houses. Of course such excitement means it is all but impossible to get back to sleep, Davies also woke up and asked for a drink (although he claims not to recall that today) and it was a good hour before I think I eventually fell asleep again.

This morning a look around the area shows signs of a big scuffle and we assume that the fox was attacking some other intruder such as a rat which was what did all the screaming. An odd sort of irony there in nighttime battles being played out between two unwelcome visitors – hopefully neither will return tonight for a rematch.

I went off to work this morning where it was very busy and my four hour shift went very quickly.

Back at home the children made birthday cards for Jack and Maisie and Ady did about 6 loads of washing which means we now have not a single item of dirty laundry in the house but three towering mountains of clean stuff to go away. Bah! I came home and we headed off to Jack and Maisie’s party.

Chris and Julie got married when Julie was pregnant with Jack and Maisie (and I was pregnant with Scarlett) and we came down for their wedding reception from Manchester, which was held in their huge garden. Hard to believe that was over six years ago now as we stood in their garden today and we’ve gone from having just the one child between us (Davies) to the five we have now.

There was a good turn out of people there, most of whom I know from Home Ed circles. The children all went off and did their thing, Ady caught up with Chris and I flitted between groups of people chatting – all very nice and sociable in the sunshine :). There was a pass the parcel which Chris and Julie asked Ady and I to run (Chris is very social-phobic, Julie was tending to Lorna and also feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all) so we rounded all the children up (I think there were 16) and I micromanaged the pass the parcel while Ady was in charge of the music. It was one of those prize in every wrapper, perfect number of wrappers for every child to win once parcels which I personally have huge ranty issues over and was very vocal about – to my amusement I was not alone and several of the parents were joining in with the fun :). We liked the idea of autonomous pass the parcel where you just chucked the paper, pressies and sellotape in the middle, gave them the components to make a cd player or some instruments to play the music and left the children to it 😆

I got to put a couple of faces to names that I’d not met before and Julie had mentioned and Davies got on really well with George (the annoying one from Butser) and I had a really good chat with Katy too who was saying that she struggles to find same age boys for George to spend time with and maybe we should get them together more often. Having spoken to Davies he seems to be up for that idea so perhaps we’ll give it a go and see if George being a git was one of those situations that Davies sometimes finds himself in where he gets pushed into a role that does him no favours and isn’t really how he normally would act.

There was a bouncy castle at the bottom of the garden where Ady tried to assemble the children for a group shot and just as he had them all lined up and smiling beautifully the front collapsed under the weight of so many little bodies – it was very funny and probably made for a better photo opportunity than the posed one 🙂

We left there around 5pm and on the way home called up to the allotments so Ady could have a peep at our plot through the fence as he’d not seen it yet. We can’t wait to get started 🙂

Home for tea for the children, X Factor watching and a late dinner for us.

Tomorrow we have blissfully nothing to do – and indeed no money to do anything with! Guess that washing mountain might get dealt with after all!