A good day today despite a fair amount of shouting and a very crap night’s sleep.
Spent the morning trying to do financial stuff on the phone and computer and succeeding and failing to varying degrees 🙂 Eventually gave up and went to the beach armed with plastic bags for each child for them to collect stuff for their shoeboxes. A very nice 10 minutes spent beach combing, oohing and ahhing over shells, pebbles, seaweed and driftwood – we drove to Shoreham beach which is quite posh and very very quiet as the beach at the end of the road is currently undergoing all sorts of sea defences made of tonnes of stones and has all sorts of heavy plant machinery backward and forwarding all over it – still only takes 10 minutes to drive to Shoreham and as always when we spend time on the beach I appreciate having it close and wonder why we don’t spend more time there – the sea and sky is so calming and the kids just love it whatever the weather. Infact I pledge to start going there once a fortnight or so and taking stuff to either draw or paint with, or bring stuff home (shh I know it’s illegal to remove stuff from the beach 🙂 ) to do crafty stuff with.
Then we nipped into Lancing to get a few bits to tick off my HESFES list and then on to group.
A nice time there again today. Julie was there with Jack and Maisie which always means Davies and Scarlett have a better time as they have two adults around them and Julie is excellent at bringing really suitable craft stuff for them to do – today it was cut out fishes to stick tissue paper and foil onto which Davies really enjoyed. I cut out lots of ocean life type shapes (fish, starfish, octopusses (should that be pi?) seaweed etc and kids did stick on pictures with that, Davies sat for ages and did his shoebox filling it with all the small pebbles, shells, seaweed, bits of driftwood and so on he had picked off the beach and also added some cut out shapes round the edges – he really enjoyed it and has made a really nice little collage. Then he did some still life of giant shells with some pastels (I started to join in but got all goosebumpy as I have a thing about chalk so I had to stop!). It was another nice group today, won’t be going for the next couple of weeks but I’m feeling much more positive about it again. Jenny and I talked briefly (inbetween comparing how unprepared for HESFES we are!) about some sort of continuing project and something a bit more techinical for the boys to be doing to keep them occupied as ATM we are quite arty and crafty which does not appeal to everyone. Will bring my opitech catalogue to HESFES and we can browse through it for inspiration one evening. Also really liked Sarah / Jules’ groups Pirate theme the other week – that has loads of mileage.
Current fave toys here again today are megablocks and drawing, so I’m letting them get on with it. Tomorrow with the exception of a smear test first thing (sorry to any blokes reading 🙂 ) we have nothing planned which means I will either be totally ready for everything or will have spent the day wibbling about but achieving nothing!