Out on the wild and windy moors

Well not quite a moor perhaps but it’s certainly wild and windy here, and according to the weather forcast and a picture text sent by my ‘friend in the North’ ’tis snowing where we lived this time last year.

Today has been a pretty good one actually. No real education as such, but plenty of socialising, some forward planning and a splash of PE too. This morning Ady worked from home which meant I had a bit of a hand with the whole getting up, getting breakfast, getting dressed bit, and I was able to run round the corner shop to get bread without trailing small people and spending time getting shoes and coats on everyone which was pleasant! I even drunk a whole cup of tea 🙂

Ady left at midday and Julie and the twins arrived shortly afterwards. We started some new ‘house rules’ after friends coming over on Monday and they are : No children upstairs, no children in Scarlett’s bedroom and no running around. I know we won’t always be able to enforce them but for now it does at least mean I am only tidying up two rooms instead of four, and that the bulk of the play is supervised with less chance for mess and destruction to occur. I have also started getting a bit stricter about putting something away before getting the next thing out – little steps, but I feel it helps 🙂 And a bit of a chat with Davies earlier before they arrived along the lines of him helping me make sure the smaller ones obeyed the rules and him being really good and making him and I proud of him seemed to pay off too.

Lunchtime was fairly chaotic as we both seem to have quite set routines for lunch eating – the twins eat all their meals sat a childsized table in the conservatory, Davies and Scarlett eat lunch on the sofa with their laptrays and dinner sitting at their tables and chairs. No room or furniture to acomodate either of these arrangements so we set up a messy mat for them to sit on the floor round and a picnic affair of food with them all having their own plate to help themselves to – the idea is to cultivate good table manners, encourage sharing and eating together – sometimes its more successful than others:-)

Once they had eaten they were clearly needing a way to burn off some of their energy so we took them to the nearby park for a bit. The walk there was quite tricky – Chris and Julie live ‘in the sticks’ a bit and were not very good at the walking along holding hands and not running on ahead that going along roads required so there were a few tantrums from them – I ended up carrying Maisie and holding Scarlett’s hand while Davies was a model child and Julie erm ‘contained’ Jack! Davies and Scarlett are very used to that particular walk and although Scarlett is normally in the pushchair for it we do go out at least three times a week for a walk round here so she is pretty good at holding hands and walking along as long as you are ‘talking’ to her. Davies is very road aware anyway so he is allowed to run ahead to the end of each pavement where he waits for us, or sometimes he holds Tarly’s hand. He had to be stopped from running ahead though which he was not thrilled about 🙁 but it would have caused a tsunami of children so was not an option!

We had a nice time at the park, Davies had a small wobble when he got to the top of the slide, but having Scarlett and Maisie shove past him to go down it soon cleared him of that, Jack would not go down without Julie so that meant we had a little chain of four small people and one bigger one queuing each time 🙂 My two also went on the swings for a bit and then we all played on a train climbing frame affair they have there with Davies being the driver and the guard and telling everyone what station we were at. The park is nice enough, although it is in the middle of the least desirable bit of where we live and all the equipment is much graffitied (I did ponder to Julie on how many teenagers had had sex on the train we were playing on too!), but aside from a couple of pensioners dog walking we had the place to ourselves.

They left for home when we got back and I decided to tackle the playroom again – it’s one of those jobs which I always start off too ambitious with and clear everything out of everywhere, then lose patience, interest or sufficicent time and end up shoving the last bits back in again. As I type the last few bits are still scattered about the floor, but hopefully a black sack and another ten minutes or so and it will be better 🙂 I really want to be sensible about what we buy tomorrow for the kids Christmas pressies (although a text from my brother asking me to get their pressies from him while I am shopping tomorrow, to the value of £50 each is likely to make me less than sensible again!). I know Scarlett is still very small but I think we are done with cheap plastic tat really, I would rather build up more of the things they already play with like the wooden train track, the dressing up box, the toy food and some educational bits. Will report back tomorrow on how well I stuck to that plan 🙂

So Lakeside tomorrow, my Mum rang to confirm it last night (although I admit when caller display showed her number at 9.45 last night I thought to myself ‘I *knew* she’d cancel!’) and we have prepared the kids for spending the day with Granny. Can’t wait for a childfree day of wandering round the shops planning what to buy, meeting Ady for lunch and then going to buy it all – bliss 🙂 We have also planned our weekend with military precision to ensure we get everything done on Saturday leaving Sunday free for some chilling out and enjoying the weekend to avoid a repeat performance of last weekend.