After a really bad night’s sleep (Scarlett awake, Davies in our bed, Ady deciding he’d just get up and do the washing up at about 4am – noisily!) I spent ages trying to fit into some new boots that had arrived in the post yesterday in the style of one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters and finally gave up :(.
We needed to go to the Ticket Office to collect the tickets I reserved yesterday and I wasn’t entirely sure where it was. I google mapped it and decided it was sort of on the way to Ali’s so rather than my original plan of going to Brighton on the train to collect them on Friday I decided we’d get them today and hope for some parking outside (always highly unlikely in Brighton).
We headed out, with a request to collect cows milk on the way, a need to stop at a cashpoint before arriving at the ticket office for cash with which to pay for the tickets, and our stash of Halloween themed cakes and biscuits and the kids’ DSs with us.
The route was indeed easy and straightforward and singing loudly to Crowded House songs we managed to park in a loading bay just round the corner from the ticket office so I could dash in and collect the tickets, having got cash and milked a cow (well okay, popped into a garage) too. We arrived first at Ali’s NotParty while it was just still Ali, Freya and Ali’s Mum.
The children all disappeared upstairs to DS and I was put to work with a frankly bizarre request to draw a room plan of a 5 roomed house and room cut outs to go with it. With my own humble abode very much in mind I included a parlour, drawing room and library 😆 Ali’s Mum kept confusing me by calling Ali ‘Alison’ and the children interupted their DSing to come and eat copious amounts of sugar.
Lucy and the Rs arrived, shortly followed by Cintha and her girls and another local-to-Ali HEor and his two children. Ali’s Mum left and further sugar eating commenced. Ali did a game with the floor plan stuff which included various tasks and went down really well with the children. Davies and Scarlett deigned to participate in very small ways every so often but really just spent most of the time DSing (Scarlett on Freya’s Viva Pinata and Davies on Ali’s Spore Creatures). They did have some bouncing on the trampoline time and some Wii time too but aside from their early time with Freya before anyone else arrived seemed very unfussed about joining in. In fairness it was a large amount of young girls dressed in pink and wanting to hold hands with each other which is never really their scene and I was very proud of Davies for avoiding a potential situation that could have been a recipe for disaster for him. They had a great time though and clearly got exactly what they’d wanted from the day :).
I seemed to spend a large amount of the time sitting with one or other or both of my children draped across me with Ali and Lucy swapping places at fairly regular intervals to sit next to me, so I had a nice varied chat and drank plenty of tea and ate way too many cakes (those boots would never fit now!). It was really nice, thanks again Ali :).
We came home, the children were very excited to witness the cockerel mating with one of our hens (good, maybe he’ll unplug her a bit for laying again!) and they had tea and both chose to forgoe pudding deciding they’d had more than enough sweet stuff for today ;).
I recently signed up to transfer across to a different plan for our gas and electric and part of the deal was a ‘free’ energy meter so you can see what you’re using and that had arrived today. We set it up and experimented with turning off lights and TV etc. to see how much power everything uses. I am forever going behind everyone turning off lights so hopefully the more visible reminder of cost might aid some of the other occupants of the house’s memory. Davies made me laugh after me telling him that they say it is small changes like turning off lights and not leaving things on standby that make the big difference by wanting to know exactly who ‘they’ are. We decided ‘they’ are ‘experts’ and would maybe quite like to be ‘they’ ourselves about something someday.