One word? When seven would do…

We’d arranged to visit Caz and Bid today and had initially planned to go over there for lunch but just as we were slowly galvanising ourselves into being ready to leave the house there was a knock at the door and my Dad was here. I text Caz to say we’d be arriving after lunch rather than before and got the kettle on :).

Both my parents have now accepted that we really are going away next year and are dealing with it in their own ways. My Mum’s is to see as little of us as usual but gush about how she doesn’t know what she’ll do without us whereas my Dad has the rather more measured reaction of just turning up slightly more often and hanging out. He tends to have a new question each time, just the one which he then goes away and processes once I’ve answered. The thing with my Dad is he spends about 80% of his life alone, his days are spent in a fairly solitary fashion, he only has one close friend and he and my Mum don’t seem to even come close to discussing things in a rational fashion so almost by accident he has become a thinker, a ponderer. As such when Dad does say something you know it has been thought through, considered, turned over in his mind before it ever reaches you.

We talked about next year, about living in the south east, about where we would like to live and about the prospect of all living together. I would love that. For all my parents drive me mad I could see massive benefits to having them close. I would love Davies and Scarlett to have them on hand as additional adults who love them, I would love to have their perspective on day to day stuff, I would love to know that as the balance of power subtly shifts and their need and dependance on me grows I am there to take that on board. I have always viewed my Dad as a future incarnation of myself and enjoy having that around to bounce off of. It would not be perfect and I am very cautious of the implications of being close to living with them again and all their fighting and other crap but I think the positives would outweigh the negatives. All a long way off just yet but nice to think Dad is thinking ahead and has a similar vision to me of a possible coexistance one day sometime.

Dad stayed for lunch and then we all left together. We went to the post office to finally post a couple of parcels – they were late in paying (a full week after the auction ended in one case, a full fortnight and a dispute case started in the other) and then I was really late in sending them so fully expecting some sort of negative feedback on those ones 🙁 but at least they have been sent now. Then over to Caz and Bid’s.

I was very brave about the fact one of the dogs appeared at my car as soon as we pulled up – I think trying to get over my dog phobia will be one of my bigger challenges next year, it’s certainly a personal hurdle I am well aware of needing to tackle. Davies and Scarlett were instantly lost to Archie and Eliot and we didn’t see them for hours as they were off playing. Bid commented that A & E tend to get involved in their most imaginative play in the company of D&S and also view the whole living where they are the most positively after spending time with D&S who are incredibly enthusiastic about the place. I often get told what amazing imaginations D&S have and how creatively they play and do wonder if this is a direct result of their lifestyle with still no structured learning or dictating how they spend their time. Certainly I don’t fret that their DSing and Xboxing is stunting them in any way. Davies at ten could still happily spend hours entertaining himself making up stories for characters represented by his own fingers to act out and I view this as a huge positive as I think storytelling and exploring imagination is one of the most precious skills there is. Leaving aside all else, literacy included surely the power to entertain and enthrall is a treasured one?

I spent time chatting with Caz and Bid about all sorts of things and then we began clearing some nettles growing within a disused polytunnel. I quickly got distracted by the possibility of wildlife – prime snake territory I thought although it may have been a little damp and then the wealth of nettles. I have been wanting to have a go at nettle cordage for ages so we all gave up on nettle clearing, grabbed a Ray Mears book and had a bash at nettle cordage instead :).

It wasn’t totally successful and it is very time consuming but I like the idea and will get the Ray Mears dvd out again so I can study it further and have another bash.

Friday has been declared Fire Night round there so they were cooking sausages and potato parcels on the fire along with beers. Ady came and joined us which was lovely but did mean as we were both there in cars we were not able to partake in beers but did manage a sausage or two ;).

We finally left around 7pm with a real feeling of having dragged ourselves away but needing to get back for putting chickens and ducks away before dark. I do love spending time with Caz and Bid, it just all feels so very natural and right.

Back home the kids both had showers as they were filthy, Scarlett hit upon the idea of wearng a swimming cap to prevent her hair from getting wet which I thought was quite genuis 🙂 They went to bed and Ady and I caught up on chatting about all sorts of things.

There is a local Home Ed group that I have been aware of for a while called SHE -Sussex Home Educators. They seem to be a bit freemasonesque in that nobody seems to know quite what they do or how to join them but they posted to the local list recently about a couple of sessions they had spaces on for HE kids over 10, one of which was a green woodworking course. Four 2 hour sessions, held with a professional green woodworker. Davies is very interested in such stuff, so when the email came through, starting just at his tenth birthday and just after the Campcraft sleepout which also involved green woodworking I asked him about it and he was interested.

I emailed the contact to see if missing the first session would be an issue as it fell while we were away last week and she said no, but we’d still have to pay which seemed fair. The price was £7.50 per session, so £30 in total and I thought £10 was a fair price per session still for three sessions so we signed him up.

The sessions started today and are for the next three Thursdays, two of which I am working. Now our childcare is and always has been so very seat of our pants I decided to just book it and work the logistics out afterwards. Which meant I assumed Ady would find a way to work round it if I’m honest. Except Ady had the dentist first thing this morning. This would have been fine normally as he was back home just before 10am which would have just meant Davies and Scarlett either went with him and waited at the dentist, came with me to work for the first half an hour and he collected them from the library, or they just stayed home until he got back. But we knew he wouldn’t be home in time to get Davies there for 10am so I finally arranged to take some of the lots and lots of time owing the library owes me for various things and arranged to start at 11am today meaning I could take Davies myself.

So Ady went off to the dentist, Scarlett and I took Davies over to Woodingdean for the course and on the way I watched him getting more and more nervous in the rear view mirror. We talked about what he was nervous of and what all the worst possible case scenarios were and how he’d deal with them. I promised to stay until he was happy for me to leave, he had his phone to contact me if needed and Ady would be there within an hour of me leaving (I’d already clarified that it was a drop off and pick up again later arrangement which I’d assumed it would be for the older age group).

Luckily the building is one Davies knows as we used to go to Magical Mondays there for several years and when we arrived the green woodwork professional turned out to be Peter, one of the rangers from Forest School. He’s pretty flakey, introducing a piece of wood and going off on one about how amazing trees are, all a bit soppy and spiritual for me but he certainly knows his stuff and it did give the whole session an air of peace and love, which is never a bad thing when you have a load of kids working with knives I guess ;).

Davies was quickly engrossed so I bid him goodbye and headed off home with Tarly. Ady was already back from the dentist so he and Scarlett dropped me off at work and headed back to Davies where they watched the session from afar. Davies made a mallet – they had the choice of mallet or rolling pin – and explained to me in technical detail how he’d done it and all the tools and methods used. I think they idea is they make something each week in the two hour session, next week I’ll go along and the week after Ady will be around again. He really enjoyed it and I’m really pleased to have found something to reinforce the Campcraft stuff, with a tutor he already knows and likes. A wise investment :).

I had a good day at work, finishing off and putting up a display, catching up with what had been going on while I’d been off and ordering in a load of Morpurgo books for a display for next month. There are so many changes at work just now and so much stress at the levels above me that it has really changed from the relaxed, happy atmosphere it used to be. I am already feeling quite detached from it all and glad to have an exit route planned really. I have made some great friends at work who I intend staying in touch with and it has been an excellent working environment where I have learnt loads, been offered lots of opportunities and really made the best of my 11 hours a week but regardless of what we’re planning next year I can feel the time is right to be thinking of moving on.

Ady picked me up and we did an inventory of the freezers as we’ve another month of scrimping and saving and trying not to dip into saved funds set aside for the campervan. Birthdays, Badger subs and holiday always make September a costly month but I think we’ll scrape by. Weather permitting we’re considering one more car boot sale on Sunday.

We finished reading King of the Cloud Forests at bedtime, Ady and I watched Gareth and he is now determined to start reading to the kids 🙂 .

One of those days which remind you just why you have made the choices you have :).

Thanks to at least ten late nights in a row and a real inability to get to sleep early anyway Davies, Scarlett and I were all in need of a late morning. I can’t deny I am to be heard telling Davies and Scarlett to ‘just go to sleeeeeeep!’ at times, but the truth is this is more to do with my desire to be Nic or maybe part of Nic & Ady rather than Mumma for a couple of hours in the evening. Ideologically and philosophically I know that I have a natural sleep pattern which has me awake til the early hours of the morning then sleeping til the later hours of the morning, Davies seems to have something similar going on. He is at his best sitting in bed after he should have gone to sleep, churning out the best drawings, doing the best reading, coming up with the most interesting ideas and questions. In short, he has the brilliant professor about him in the hours when the rest of his age group are fast asleep.

And how great is it that our lifestyle means actually he doesn’t have to go to sleep because he doesn’t have to get up for school in the morning :).

We had arranged to meet up with Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna today so I talked to Julie on the phone and we arranged to meet at the beach for some firelighting. Jack is a bit obsessed after helping light the campfire last week and has been wanting to do it again ever since :). We arranged to meet in a couple of hours as Davies and Scarlett were busily DSing and still in pjs despite it being after 10am, Scarlett had brought her DS up to Davies’ bedroom when she woke up and they were happily involved in some communal DSing while I sorted some washing and checked on the birds. Eventually everyone got dressed and had breakfast, we watched some Horrible Histories and some Deadly 60, chucked some food in a bag, gathered the fire steels and drove to the beach.

We found the others who had already constructed a stone circle to be the fire pit on the sand and were searching the beach for bits of wood. We all joined in and gathered quite a pile of sticks, twigs and a couple of bits of driftwood before laying a fire. Scarlett and Maisie found some crabs which we all had a good look at too. Then we set about making some sparks and getting the fire going. Julie had bought some bread dough to make bannock bread so we toasted that on sticks which was very delicious :).

It was very lovely just sitting on the beach looking out at the sea with family, laughing, chatting and playing, renewing the smell of campfire about us and learning about starting fires, cooking bread and finding wildlife. Love that that is our life 🙂

We hung out there for about 3 hours before Julie needed to get Lorna to swimming lessons and Davies, Scarlett and I needed to get to Badgers. We arrived home with enough time for me to swap some laundry on the line, clean up the kitchen, make some tea for the kids and a huge cup of tea for me while perusing the Badger programme and checking what I was doing tonight. The schedule showed handwashing, kitchen safety and some games based on germs and handwashing. I was supposed to have some disposable gloves and paint for the handwashing exercise but assumed it being SJA they would have disposable gloves on site so didn’t bother.

It turned out they didn’t have gloves either so Tarly and I did a dash to the local garage hoping to nick some of the diesel gloves but they had run out. When we arrived back all of the Badgers had arrived including two local girls who are HEd and were at the picnic on Monday. Scarlett particularly gets on with Indigo so she was pleased. I think the reason she likes Indigo most is because ‘both of us have names that are colours’ 😆

I had seven kids including Tarly in my group today so we all sat on the floor and I got those who were there last week to talk about what they’d done then, then we chatted about Hungry Badger generally and talked about food allergies, dietary choices such as vegetarian and veganism and handwashing. I explained (once again) that I don’t need them to put their hands up to say something, just to respect when someone else is talking – I hate hands up!

We moved into the kitchen and did kitchen safety, looking for danger in the kitchen and then I demonstrated how easily germs could be spread around the kitchen by all the things I touched. Back in the main room again we played a couple of games of germ / handwash inspired tag before sitting down again and talking about food groups briefly which don’t seem to be mentioned at all on the sheet, touching also on healthy eating and why it’s important. I’ll be better organised next week and ensure we have plenty to cover as we almost ran out of things to talk about tonight, but the kids were really enthusiastic when the other half of the group returned to us and were full of ‘we learned about X’ which was nice :).

Back home again I put the birds away while the kids got in pjs and then we snuggled up and read loads of King of the Cloud Forest as we’ve not had any stories for ages. We left the final chapter to finish tomorrow as it was getting late and both kids went off to listen to some HP audio books in bed. Davies also did some excellent HP pictures using oil pastels in bed. Which sort of brings me full circle really I guess.

A good day 🙂

As predicted this morning was an early one. Scarlett woke us before 7am to tell us it was Davies’ birthday 🙂 When Ady said to her ‘yes, go and wake him up then.’ she replied ‘he’s already downstairs, he woke me up!’ 😆

So we all came downstairs and Davies opened his gifts from us – he’d already had the Campcraft Sleepout as a main present, along with a few bits we’d got him to take on the weekend but he had two (second hand) x box games and Lego Harry Potter for the DS. Ady hasn’t found a reliable site to get games for the kids rumblepacks for months so Davies has been desperate for that one since it came out. He also had a box of chocolates from Tarly, a set of really decent walkie talkies (which have been a huge hit, have a 5 mile possible coverage and will be great for taking with us next year and keeping in touch with each other. They don’t know but we actually bought two sets at the time so we will have one walkie talkie each but we’ve put those away for another time) and a little fishing rod and accompanying bits. Davies has said for a while he’d like to go fishing and it’s something Ady used to do and enjoy so hopefully that will get some use aswell as being handy next year when we’re off trapping, hunting and fishing for our dinner ;).

Scarlett got our traditional small gift on siblings birthday of a little toy tiger and some art bits. She really struggled today as she was tired anyway. I distinctly recall hating Frazer’s birthday when we were kids so I always have a lot of empathy for the resenting a siblings birthday feelings. Not to be indulged certainly but to be acknowledged and helped through.

It was made worse when the post arrived mid morning containing a parcel for Davies and a pink envelope addressed to Scarlett. I rather foolishly didn’t compute it could have been an error and assumed someone had thoughtfully sent her a notelet or letter knowing Davies would be getting stuff. It turned out to be a birthday card for her containing a fiver from one of Ady’s friends who had clearly got confused about who’s birthday it was 🙁 She did hand the fiver straight over but was quite teary about the whole business.

I felt so wiped out that once present opening had done and Davies was keen to just sit in a corner with his DS and start playing his new game I went back to bed for an hour or so. Ady had planned to go into work later anyway so he hung around for breakfast and made me a cup of tea when he left and I got up.

Davies wanted to spend a quiet morning at home enjoying his new games, his favourite food of home made pizza for lunch, a trip to the Lego store to spend birthday money as he is desperate for some Lego Harry Potter stuff followed by dinner out at The Harvester with my parents and brother. So that is what we did :).

I sat with both kids snuggled up next to me at various points playing DS, chatting, looking at old baby pictures of Davies and then I stuck the pizza dough on and Scarlett came and helped me make the choux pastry for Davies’ requested birthday cake of a repeat of last years giant chocolate eclair, only this time in the shape of a 1 and a zero to mark his journey into double figures :). Tarly and I also walked (well she scootered) round the shop to get some whipping cream and chocolate.

Pizza constructed and in the oven I set the cream to whip in the kenwood while I washed up but I was distracted by other thoughts and took my eye off the cream leaving me with just about enough whipped cream to stuff the eclairs and a great big lump of seperated butter and buttermilk in the bottom of the bowl. I squeezed out the butter and wrapped it in paper and bunged it in the fridge. I had whipped the cream with a couple of spoonfuls of sugar so it will only be any good for sweet useage but I’m sure we’ll find something to do with it ;).

Just as I had melted chocolate and poured it on my Mum arrived so we had pizza for lunch and Davies showed Mum all his presents including the very excellent one that arrived from Kirsty & James and co of a little compass and a very cool camouflage print wrist band made of cordage that you could use in a survival situation. So very, very Davies 🙂 Another winning gift from The Barts, thanks guys xxxx

Lunch eaten we headed off to Brighton to the Lego store there. We’d just assumed there would be an array of HP stuff to choose from but it turns out they are launching a 2010 range, presumably to coincide with the next film on October 1st and there is NOTHING on the shelves with HP on it until then 🙁 We tried a couple of other toy shops but found nothing also checking a Toys R Us and a local toyshop on the way home and I am wondering if there is a deliberate move to remove all existing HP lego when a new range is about to be launched as I can’t believe there is no unsold boxes anywhere. What happens to out of fashion lego? Does it get split up and melted down, painted over, put into Lego museums? Is there some vintage outlet? Do the wasps at Legoland carry it off somewhere?

Poor Davies was pretty disappointed as it had been something he’d agonised over choosing knowing he needed to get presents that can either be used up, consumed, are really small to come with us or can be stored for a year and still relevant and wanted when we come back. We’d decided lego was perfect to be played with for six months before we go and stored away ready for when we come home again so he’d gone with that. He spent time in the Lego store trying to decide if he wanted some other Lego instead but decided to wait for the HP stuff launch in October. He had a really good attitude of ‘I already had loads of cool stuff for my birthday, I do *really* want the HP lego today but I can’t get it so I can look forward to getting it in a few weeks instead’. I was proud of him 🙂 I was irritated with my Mum who kept ‘aww, it’s such a shame’ ing at him almost goading him to be upset and asking ‘are you *really* disappointed?’ and saying to me ‘isn’t he being good?’ to which I replied he is 10 and I’d be really disappointed if he wasn’t being fairly sensible about it given he’d already had loads of presents and actually birthday’s aren’t just about acquiring as many new possessions as possible anyway!

Once home Davies and I spent some time online and found a set he really likes available from amazon for pre-order so my parents and brother will sort that out for him and he’ll get it when it comes out in a few weeks.:)

We had a couple of hours at home of Davies exploring new x box and DS games, Scarlett did some arty stuff and as Davies had said he’d have liked birthday cards from us (we just don’t exchange cards between the four of us anymore) Scarlett and I made him one each – her’s has an excellent drawing of Harry Potter, I drew a Lego version of Davies 🙂 .

Ady arrived home, we all got changed ready to go out and then Mum, Dad and Frazer arrived over as planned so we could do blowing out candles on Davies’ cake. We all had a small piece (not long before we were going out for dinner), Davies showed everyone his presents and talked to Frazer about the Campcraft Sleepout and then we headed to the Harvester.

Davies and Scarlett were pretty tired (they really haven’t caught up from the holiday yet, we had the wedding reception on Saturday, my parents over for dinner on Sunday and Jax and co here til nearly midnight on Monday) but both ate *really* well and the food was actually pretty good.

My parents invited themselves back for coffee (I was sort of hoping they wouldn’t) but thankfully Frazer ensured they left by about 1030pm. I had ten minutes chatting with Davies and said I’d had the best ten years of my life being his mummy, he replied he’d had the best ten years of his life too 😆 😆 Love that boy 🙂 Will do my usual emotional birthday page for the side bar in the next day or so.

Davies had a fab birthday, surrounded by people who love him, showered with gifts, best wishes from near and far and enters his second decade really excited about his double figure status 🙂

Back with a bump today – poor Ady went off to work, struggling to get up and learning he has yet another new boss lined up.

We were off to the local Not Back to School Picnic. I’d stuck a time and date to suit us personally out on local lists but made it clear that other than doing that and turning up I wouldn’t be doing stuff like contacting press or inviting our MP. As it happens I have maintained contact with him over the year and suspect he would have come along but quite apart from the propsect of it scaring off other attendees I wasn’t feeling up to the scrutiny. For me it was a celebration of another year of Home Ed, a victory that a year on we are still free to educate our children as we see fit without state intervention. A celebration of being free both to HE at all and to be sat in a park when everyone else is back at school.

We pottered about in the morning, I did some online catching up with things including a first bash at sorting out camp balance prices which proved very tricky. I think this has been the touhghest yet to organise with numbers jumping about all over the place with people not sure if they are coming, how many of them there might be and so on. I think I’ve reached the easiest decision at setting a price assuming all confirmed people will come and taking any latecommers money off the food kitty. I feel like I need a Worzel Gummidge ‘Organizin’ head’ to put on for all this, I’ve even been creating spreadsheets for the WWOOFing planning.

I dealt with some washing and made a picnic, took a phonecall from Jax around the time I was half expecting her to arrive and then we headed to Brooklands where the picnic was being held. I felt obliged to be there by midday nominally being ‘the organiser’ but predictably I was the only one there. Davies and Scarlett ran off to play leaving me alone in the middle of the green sitting on my picnic rug and looking like a nutter! 😆 I was soon joined by a woman I loosely know who always insists on calling me ‘+Nicky’ with whom I once had a big debate about smacking children with and then a new and shiny HEor with a 12yo girl just taken out of school. Her and her daughter were lovely and I loved the way they confided they didn’t think they could be doing it right because it all seemed like too much fun and as though life was one long weekend 😆

Other people arrived and we ended up with 10 families which I thougt was a very respectable number 🙂 I chatted to most of them about various things and enjoyed the lack of needing me demonstrated so ably by my children :). Scarlett took some bread off and when I started to miss her and went to check on her she was sat beside the lack with a huge crowd of ducks, coots and moorhens crowded around her while she talked to them all 🙂

Most people drifted off around the same time of 3pm – I was in need of tea so it suited me. Back home I had literally just made my tea when Jax arrived so I made her one too and we had a catch up chat while the older children disappeared upstairs and Soa was cute and smiley :).

Jax and Soa departed and I was very briefly in charge (fortunately no one but me realised 😉 ) before Ady arrived home and we had a proper grown up around again. Phew! Ady was a superhero with the four kids all night, feeding them, smoothing any issues and ensuring everyone was kept entertained and happy. Big and Davies seemed to really hit it off, either having ignored or not particularly gotten on when we’ve previously been together so Ady largely left them to it and concentrated on keeping Small and Scarlett out of their way without them realising it. Our kids have only ever met up in crowds and although there are only a few months between the older two and the younger two they just don’t really move in the same circles. I think they all enjoyed each others company this time and hopefully now consider each other friends :).

I, on the other hand escaped for the evening :). It was a leaving party for L at work who is off to uni next week. She has been a Saturday assistant at the library for just over two years and is off to do teacher training. The other Saturday assistant, J is going to Sussex uni and so will be staying on for the duration of his course. There were 8 of us there and we had a really nice evening with lots of laughs. The food was crap as it always is (Harvester) but it was really good to catch up with A, who works for the neighbouring library service now and has all sorts of crazy life changes going on and then a very interesting discussion with J about nuclear families, state intervention and why the standard mother, father, child model isn’t always the best IMO and is in his.

I got home not long after Jax had arrived to a very noisy house, which was only marginally quieter after Jax and co had left ;). We just about had Davies and Scarlett in bed before midnight and I told Davies his birthday didn’t start until 435am when he was born anyway and no, he wasn’t allowed to stay up til then 😆

Presenting wrapping for me followed by a late night with a certain early morning to follow….

Saturday was an earlier start than I’d have liked really with my Dad arriving just before 9am. Everyone else was already up though I think we’d all have been better with a bit more sleep. Davies was being all pathetic and floppy on the sofa but I decided it was tiredness alone and nothing more sinister so kept insisting he had plenty to eat and drink and refused to let him wallow.

It was raining on and off all day so no chance of reducing the laundry mountain so I sat and chatted to Dad instead. Scarlett did some melted wax crayon art (a bit like painting but with really intense colours) and Davies did some drawing, a lot of DSing and plenty more lolling about.

Dad stayed for lunch and then finally headed off about 2pm. Ady made some potato salad and I made some pesto pasta to take with us then we all got changed ready to go to Tasha and Ryan’s wedding reception. Ever since I met Tasha (over 2 years ago now) she has talked about her plans for her wedding reception and how she wanted it to be like a village fete – in a field, with straw bales to sit on, oil drum barbecues, bottles of drink in ice filled tin baths, food contributions from all her friends, home made bunting, lit by candles as it got dark, everyone camping overnight and a load of mismatched old lady style crockery, bone handled cutlery and an eclectic mix of glasses. She was going to wear a Corpse Bride dress designed by one of her mates and made by another and a big pair of knee high, tartan lined DM boots.

It sounded fabulous, utterly, utterly Tasha and that was exactly what it was. 🙂

The rain didn’t matter as everyone was in wellies or DMs anyway, the music pumped out via a mix tape played on a big old stereo, the wedding ‘cake’ was a huge stand crammed with loads of gorgeous purple iced cupcakes with blue glitter, the kids went off to play in the woods and the tree house, the sound of ducks, chickens, geese and turkeys came across the fields and when it got dark the marquee was transformed by hundreds of tea lights and candles and some friends doing fire and glow-in-the-dark poi and staff displays.

I’ll drop some pics in when they had finished uploading to flickr.

We decided not to camp in the end as we were simply camped out, the kids were really tired and likely to crash and burn and we all felt just one night in our own beds hadn’t quite been enough so we waited until Davies and Scarlett started to edge closer to us and become a bit demanding before calling home time, it was about 930pm. It was a really magical gathering; we’d taken food, drink and many candles and it was lovely to be part of the whole event. Tasha’s dress was gorgeous and it was fab to be at a wedding that was so much about the bride and groom rather than what everyone else expected (rather similar to our own really, I even wore the same bright red shrug I’d worn to my own wedding reception as it matched my boots 🙂 )

Back home the kids had some toast and then went off to bed while I dredged my memory to start blogging the week and gave up and went to bed too.

Sunday was the lie in we’d all needed – even Ady slept til 9am 😯 I was more like 1030am and felt all the better for it.

I finished blogging and then as Ady had invited my parents over for dinner and we had a huge joint of pork I decided to cook it really slowly and got dinner on. Cooking it for so long meant the rest of the dinner took lots of moving about but was worth it.

Scarlett and I went to the CoOp as we needed some butter and she was fretting about not having got him anything for his birthday yet. She chose him some chocolates and wants to pick something else up for him tomorrow so we’ll try and nip into Lancing in the morning for her to do that.

Davies was feeling much better and both kids spent a fair bit of time outdoors. Saying goodbye to the chickens and ducks is going to prove very difficult indeed for Scarlett. I know she will get over it quick enough and we’ll be around plenty more birds but this will be a big deal for her and I’m trying to work out the best way to handle it, whether talking about it lots now so it becomes commonplace or whether to keep quiet about it and let her process it her own way is best.

I also sewed up (loosely, by hand, with tacking sort of stitch) the fleeces we have been covering the sofas with on two of my cushions that keep slipping down and looking scruffy. I have a big long mental list of things I need to get done and they were on it and therefore taunting me while I sat around on top of them not doing other things on my list ;). So that shut them up!

Davies and Scarlett polished and then laid the table (which reminded me that one of my Sunday morning jobs in my parents restaurant was stripping the tables of the place mats, side plates, knives, forks, spoons, sugar bowls, napkins, salt and peppers and fancy glass stoppered vinegar bottles to clean and polish them before relaying them. I used to really enjoy that switching off task, finding quicker and more efficient ways to gather stuff up and stack it and lay it back out again. It was really theraputic and I did it from the age of about 14 to about 18 so covered a lot of teenage angst working through ground – oh how I shudder at the thought of some of the dilemmas I faced then, along with smiling indulgently at the ones which felt like a big deal at the time but turned out to be nothing in the grand scale of things…).

I finished sorting out dinner, my parents arrived and sat down with the kids while Ady came out to help me serve up and we all ate. Mum had brought over a pudding but not looked at the packaging which advised 3-4 hours defrosting at room temperature but she’d shoved it back in her freezer at home. I felt like a bitch afterwards for pointing it out, she must feel like she never does anything right in my eyes :(. Dinner was nice, Davies told my parents all about the Sleepout and then they did their usual trick of staying way past the logical leaving time despite me having said on the phone earlier we didn’t want a late night – dinner was at 630pm, they left at 1030pm. I think it’s really hitting them that we’re going and Mum particularly is trying really hard to be good with the kids, hopefully they will make the next six months really count and we will see them over the course of the year anyway.

So Mum and Dad finally gone, kids finally asleep and me finally caught up on blogging. Woohoo and into yet another busy week.

It was our sixth camping trip at The Sustainability Centre and once again it didn’t disappoint. We really missed absent friends, specifically those who had been before and made it a place of special memories of times spent with them; LovelyEm, Marcus & Michelle, Katy B, Ros, Chris & Helen, Ali and indeed those who had hoped to make it and not managed to do so for various reasons. But it was fab to share it with Kirsty and James, The Babs and offspring and find they too love it as much as we do. 🙂

Sunday Davies and I were obviously already there and Ady and Scarlett joined us around 10am. We had a walk round the whole place showing them what we’d done and where we’d done it. The camping field had filled up during the course of Saturday, having been totally empty first thing in the morning so I was hoping everyone would sod off away again and leave us to it. We eventually wandered up to the hostel to check in and found someone to check in with – Ash, the temporary campsite overseer – and moved our booking, along with Babs and Kirsty to the main campsite rather than the individual bays as aside from a couple of tipi bookings the main site would be empty.

Back down to the campsite in both cars we were about to start setting up in our usual spot when one of the blokes from a trailer tent set up in Marcus and Michelle’s spot came over saying he remembered us from last year and were we here for a whole week again this time? Neither of us remembered him (he wasn’t Fun Dad) but chatted for a while. He said they were off soon so if we wanted to wait for their pitch we could. Knowing we had the canopy with us which makes us en elongated cross shape and therefore quite long we decided we’d take M&M’s spot this year leaving our usual spot and what had been Katy’s spot last year for Kirsty & Babs. So we waited. And we waited. And then we waited a bit more. From being there at 10am ready to go it crept past midday at which point I decided to go to the supermarket for food as I was getting really hungry and we needed to get a roast dinner on too if we were having that. No one else wanted to come so I headed to Mythical Morrisons all alone, sleep deprived, rather stinky and in very ripped jeans for sausage rolls to scoff there and then and roast dinner ingredients for later. When I got back we were still waiting and Ady and I got increasingly bitchy in our whispers to each other about the two families camping together, their parenting and how very bloody long they were taking. We’d thought they were on the cusp of leaving otherwise we’d have set up in our usual spot and now we’d hung it out this long we were determined to go the distance.

Eventually they finally did roll off about 4pm, after a lengthy pasta lunch and very slow packing up. We pulled into their space and it started spitting – the woman wound her window down to say goodbye and said ‘oh look, you should have set up earlier, it was lovely and sunny then…’ grrr.

The plastic knuckle on the porch pole that had broken at Wicksteed and we thought had been sufficiently mended with tape proved to not be mended enough to get the tent pitched and tempers were very frayed indeed as I simply couldn’t work out how to get all the tension right to get the tent pitched square. A petty squabble between Davies and Scarlett at that point resulted in them both being sent to sit in seperate cars having been shrieked at and told to sort themselves out otherwise we’d be going straight back home again. What made it worse was both of them had seperately been pining for the other one for the previous 24 hours with Davies mentioning Scarlett loads on the Sleepout and saying how she’d like bits of it, making a wand for her when he was doing whittling and saying how strange it felt without her that morning to me while Scarlett was bending Ady’s ear about missing Davies at home.

Everyone was saved by Kirsty and James arriving so while Ady guided them in I gave D&S another pep talk and released them from the cars to greet Marcus and Alex. The tent was not so safe and when I tugged rather crossly at the knuckle to try and right it I managed to snap the other one which resulted in several swear words, me ripping the whole pole part out of the tent and flinging it across the field, shearing off one of the pins in the process. I was *very* tried 😳

That out of my system I deduced that the fact both were broken and one was not now compromised by the other might mean it worked better. Whether that actually was the case or whether the flinging restored my sense of rationality I don’t know but we did then manage to get the tent up just fine :). Fortunately my show of temper paled into insignificance in the face of Babs later in the evening ;).

Once we were all installed (and possibly after cars had been returned to the carpark and cider o’clock called) Kirsty, James, Marcus and Alex told us all about their fab time at River Cottage and presented us with what is probably one my top gifts ever in terms of usefulness, thoughtfulness and touchingness. I almost cried :). They had got us the River Cottage diary for 2011 and had it signed with a message from Hugh saying ‘Good luck to the Goddards’ having told him about our planned adventures for next year. So we’ll be off feeling we have the blessing of our of our heroes along with a diary to record all our hosts details in and loads of recipes, tips and seasonal stuff which will all be so very relevant to us along the way. I can’t overstate how much it meant and how touched we are by it xxxx thanks guys 🙂 🙂

A mother, father and daughter arrived to stay in the tipi. The daughter, Ruby was 4 and starting proper school on Tuesday so they’d brought her for a couple of nights away first. I think they were from London somewhere. We had a brief chat with them before they went out somewhere for dinner, arriving back when it was already dark and going straight to their tipi.

I’ve lost track of whether our dinner was ready or Babs arrived first but both happened and our chicken, potatoes, carrots, stuffing, sweetcorn and gravy was delicious :). It was getting dark by 8pm all week which made for easier putting to bed of kids as by 9pm they already felt they’d had loads of after dark time and were happy to head to the tent. I was exhausted so called it an early night around 10ish to recharge ready for the rest of the week.

Monday As with most days involved sitting around drinking tea and chatting while children played as all the best holidays do. We did go for a walk round the site to show Kirsty, James and Babs and left all the children behind on the camping field playing.

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Our tipi neighbours came out asking when the cafe opened and looking very crestfallen when we said 10am (it was barely after 9am) so we donated teas and coffees to them and Ruby joined our kids playing for a while before they headed off to the zoo for the day. Home Ed inevitably came up, as did the question of how we all knew each other. It seems quite strange to think we all met online and at specifically organised camps now and I was struck once again by how incredibly fortunate we all are to be in this amazing circle of friends. Conversations over the week turned to most of the people within our group at some point or another and the connections, affection and support and just how well we all know each other touches me every time.

We were able to do the classic point and laugh response when Ruby’s dad asked how the kids socialise as they were all together in a big group having set up an imaginary shop to play with behind a log. He seemed to know a little about Home Ed and was of the opinion that it was better academically btu I don’t think he’d met any real actual living people doing it before 😆

Ages ago we bought what we thought was a Chris French style tarp for some bargain price at TKMAXX but we’ve never managed to get round to putting it up. We bought it out to have a look at it and see what we could do with it and realised it wasn’t a tarp at all but a canopy for attaching to the front of a tent, very much like the one we already have, but without sides. It was possible to errect it as a standalone so with Kirsty and James’ help we set it up. I had another bout of heavyhandedness (this time not anger induced) and managed to rip the fabric when tightening one of the straps. It was very funny – all four of us were standing at a pole and Kirsty and James both looked utterly horrified then ducked behind a pole presumably to hide their smirks. Ady remained horrified, I just laughed! 😆 It didn’t seem to have any great compromising effect and we taped it up.

In the end the canopy became a bit of a lifesaver as we were able to store all the chairs under it at night, retreat beneath it when it rained and with a real sense of fortuitous timing the night it began raining at about 5pm and didn’t stop until about 11pm which would have made for a miserable evening had we not had the canopy to eat, drink, cook and sit under. We also grabbed a fire basket and managed to retain a campfire even in the rain under it too :).

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Ady and James went off to do the supermarket run as we’d decided to have pizzas that night cooked on the smoke n grill so they headed off with shopping lists. In the end all of our rather comical cobbled together tentage was invaluable that night as Babs cooked her tea under our kitchen porch and Kirsty and I assembled pizzas in the kitchen before cooking them on the Smoke n Grill.

Ruby’s family arrived back from the zoo in the driving rain and said they were not staying after all as it was just so wet. It was sad to see them go, Ruby’s little school dress hanging up inside the car, which was packed with things like sky lanterns and other fun outside stuff. I felt a bit humbled actually, I know I have a private tendancy to feel smug in the face of school using parents and these two were clearly just as child focussed and keen to give their daughter a great childhood as we are. We all chorused goodbye and wished Ruby well starting school (but I don’t think her Dad believed us 😉 ).

As they pulled away we raided the tipi for their remaining firewood and sent the kids in to eat their tea and shelter from the rain, so it wasn’t all bad 😆

After set in rain for several hours our tent decided to take it’s revenge for my stroppiness and the should have been convex but was actually slightly concave flat bit on the porch started to fill with water. Ady realised when he bumped his head walking into the tent that something wasn’t right 😆 It had gathered a HUGE puddle, literally gallons of water so I’m glad it was spotted before it went really wrong. With careful use of a wooden pole topped with a towel to stop the tent ripping and another to stop the groundsheet tearing we created an integral pole for dancing and keeping the ceiling up inside the tent. We had a pillar! 😆 The addition of a pair of plastic wine goblets in the void between the tent roof and the porch roof to keep that proud meant the tent coped well even with the downpours of rain we had.

It became a singing sort of evening, trigged by the children who came out to show us a little snippet of Born Free they’d been working on, with a slight lyric change to include Trevor the toad, the first of many toads found by Scarlett that week, cooed over and held before being returned to the wild. Toadtasic.
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Thanks to James’ ipod and Ady’s phone we had a great selection of music to sing along to, with increasing volume and possibly decreasing talent as the night wore on. 😉 We were confident we had the site to ourselves so wouldn’t be disturbing anyone though. We also had some marshmallow toasting as we’d gone stick gathering and stripped bark off and sharpened the ends as Davies and I had been shown during the sleepout.

Tuesday I was quite horrified on my way to the shower to spot a man in the bay directly behind us on my way to the showers meaning we may well have not been alone on the site after all the night before 😳 I called ‘Good morning’ to him and got a ‘good morning’ back so asssumed we’d not been too rowdy. Kirsty bumped into him at the washing up and learnt his plight – he was walking the 100 miles of the South Downs Way in four 25 mile days and had completed the first quarter leg, ending in that pouring rain from the night before, realised he had no waterproof trousers and on starting to put up his tent also realised he had no torch either. Pretty much everything he had with him was soaked with the exception of his sleeping bag and he was pretty miserable. Kirsty invited him to come and have a cup of tea with us and he arrived as we were settling down for our daily routine of PopMaster at 1030am.

Ian quickly abandoned his plan to carry on and decided to postpone his South Downs Way walk for a couple of weeks time, returning with full and proper kit next time aand ended up staying for another 48 hours with us :). He told us all about being a motorbike paramedic in London and aside from a slightly surreal moment when a newsflash about a man on the run came on the radio and made us all wonder at the wisdom of inviting a complete stranger to share our food, drink and hospitality, particularly with such close proximity to an axe he slotted in really well :). Ady ran him to the station on Thursday morning and he said meeting all of us had really opened his eyes and might well have set him on a life changing path. I think the friendliness of strangers, the group camaraderie and alternative approach to education had really enlightened him about different lifestyles. He was a nice bloke, I hope our paths cross again someday.

Tuesday was mostly dry although it was a bit changable with sunshine and clouds. We wandered up to the hostel and paid, they are so laid back there you almost need to chase them to pay up. The big shock news of the week for everyone who has been there before is that Hazel isnt’ there anymore 🙁 I got the impression there is some sort of back story behind this as she isn’t working at all and Ash alluded to not ‘struggling to cope with it’ which seemed strange given the laid back feeling of the place. Apparently she does the odd shift in the cafe to help out still but I didn’t spot her over the course of the week :(. There is something of a ‘winds of change’ feel about the place which slightly disturbed me. I know it is essentially a business alonside being a place about permaculture and sustainability but at this years Green Fair we felt a commercial edge beginning to creep in and there seem to be lots of the old familiar faces either gone or about to go (a couple who live in one of the yurts are moving to Canada, the green woodworking lad who Davies really likes is leaving to go and work on a farm (ironically one on our short list for WWOOFing so we may well catch up with him again), Sean who we’ve met there several times no longer does the Campcraft stuff and Hazel has gone too.) and lots of people talking about plans and changes and so on. There was even some speculation that the campsite will be split into designated pitches and full payment will need to be made upfront when booking. I’m kind of glad our last definite stay there happened before all of that took place.

Julie rang me during the course of the day to say they would be coming up for the day tomorrow which we had semi arranged last week. We spent lots of time trying to persuade Babs to stay longer but didn’t quite manage to get her passed Wednesday but we did have the pleasure of an evening visit from Stella and co which was lovely :). Plenty of wood whittling and chalk carving from the children along with playing on the rope swing and creating a Woodlice World.
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We also first met J, or ‘little red boy’ as Scarlett called him due solely to his bright red t shirt. He was 5 and on a week long holiday with his parents, half at The Sustainability Centre and half at a sword festival in Cornwall. They came from the Borders where schools had already been back for 2 weeks. His Mum, Alex came over to say hello and chatted with us for a while. She seemed really nice but J was a very challenging little boy, prone to violence and threatening behaviour even to all our much bigger children and I think he was a bit underparented really with him dashing off to hassle our kids as soon as they arrived at the site with no real supervision from his parents.

Wednesday morning Kirsty and I did the supermarket run and I gathered some stuff to make Davies a birthday cake. When we got back Julie and co had arrived.

Babs, Kirsty and I had a look in the shop, which I’ve never actually been in before. It is the home of Permanent Publications which puts out Permaculture Magazine and various other printed titles so had a very comprehensive and interesting book selection in a very small space. They also had some solar powered and wind up energy gadgets, some knives and other tools and various other bits and pieces. I didn’t buy anything but added several books to my list of things to order from the library and am now seriously coveting a spoon carving set like they sell there.

Back at the campsite I started making cake batter. As with last year I’d bought just-add-eggs mixture so Davies helped me mix it up.
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Retrospectively I should have split the mix between two pans as it rose so quickly we lost at least a third over the sides of pan and finally the top actually caught fire 😆 Some cutting, trimming and splitting and plenty of icing soon had it looking good and tasting edible though 🙂

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So we gathered round and did some Happy Birthday-ing to Davies before scoffing the lot 🙂
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Julie and co left, having decided to maybe come back the following day with her Mum and their trailer tent for the last night, Babs and co also left and the rest of us had another lovely evening round the campfire, stargazing and chatting.

Kirsty and James took the kids up to the wildlife pond for a nature walk and batwatch and Scarlett returned with yet another toad. No bats were spotted so we took a walk in the opposite direction hoping to see some but didn’t find any there either. Ash told us there had been bats all around the hostel at about 745pm so we pledged to try being there that time tomorrow instead.

Thursday

Ady and I celebrated 11 years of being married 🙂

Kirsty, James, Marcus and Alex went off to a local attraction. We’d be considering going with them but neither of the children were that fussed, Ady had been before several times (both of us went to the local Portsmouth attractions on school trips countless times as kids) and it wasn’t my thing anyway so we declined and decided to have a quieter day hanging out at the campsite instead.

Ady took Ian off to the station and to get some food, Davies and Scarlett were reconnecting after having been around such a big group and I was enjoying the sunshine (at last!) and reading my book. Julie and her Mum arrived along with their trailer tent ready to stay the last night too. Part of me was a little worried about this, Julie’s mum can be a bit of a liability (she wasn’t too bad but did wander up to the cafe at one point and finding no one about just made herself a drink and wandered off again, sat around asking for hot water constantly and is just one of lifes takers) and I was worried that Jack and Maisie being there would mean Marcus and Alex, Davies and Scarlett wouldn’t get a chance to have a nice last night together as they can be quite demanding of Davies in particular. In the event it all seemed to work out okay and the six children seemed to get on just fine. I was also a bit worried about how early Julie goes to bed and whether that would mean we’d disturb her or feel obliged to be really whisperingly quiet on our last night.

Several of us went for a walk round the woods and I tried to recreate the straddling John with a beard had done of the shelter to show it’s strength. It held me just fine but my legs are a lot shorter than John’s so when it came to getting off again I had to bear weight on one side unequally and the whole thing slowly and gracefully collapsed under me 😆
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Scarlett found loads of toads all week but she also found a slow worm and a newt that day, bringing both back to show everyone and let everyone who wanted to have a hold. Most people declined the handling session offer ;).

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she also found pretty fungi
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a hawkmoth caterpillar
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and took pictures of a dragonfly she spotted
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Marcus was keen to light the fire that night so I took the boys off with penknives to gather some birch bark and they collected sticks and wood chips too. We had some sticks for kindling and the plan was to lay a fire in the fire pit and all create sparks to make a mini fire to contribute to lighting it so we had a communal fire. The birch bark wasn’t really happening for Davies or Jack although Marcus did a great job and got his lit 🙂
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I was also struggling so we bought out the cotton wool and Davies, Jack and I lit ours using that, with Marcus joining in with more cotton wool too.
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We enjoyed a roaring fire that night and the boys were really proud of their part in getting it going 🙂 It was still burning enough the following morning to cook my muffins on it 🙂
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Ady and I managed to be spectacularly bad at getting our dinner sorted, partially due to me consuming the best part of a bottle of pink fizz, partially due to it going on the smoke n grill so late and partially due to Kirsty, James and I taking Scarlett, Alex and Maisie on a bat walk and being gone ages so it was pitch dark by the time we served up dinner; poor Davies and Scarlett had already watched everyone else eat marshmallows and had to eat their dinner wearing headtorches 🙁 it was very delicious though so worth the wait.

The bat walk was good, we did see bats, along with another toad (caught by Scarlett) and did lots of walking slowly and quietly in the dark listening to the sounds of crickets and grasshoppers and hearing the toad before we actually spotted it. I took everyone to the spot Davies and I had slept at the weekend and showed them how dark it had been.

The kids went to bed, folllowed by Julie and Kirsty, James, Ady and I sat up. We had been planning a full night under the stars in our four very reclining chairs, thinking we could bring our sleeping bags out and sleep out properly. It was specifically to enjoy the stars though and while we had a good hour of stargazing it eventually clouded over around midnight and by the time we were ready for going to sleep it was totally cloudy so we did sleep in tents in the end. Definitely a plan for next camping trip though, I think it would be lovely.

We had a great last night, missing those who had already gone home or didn’t make it this time, enjoying all the many in jokes and catch phrases of the week – it feels strange to say ‘ideal’ or ‘to be fair’ or ‘isn’t X….’ and not get a chorus of replies or joining in. It felt like a very communal holiday with loads of sharing, group cooking, supermarket shopping together and so on. We also missed sky lanterns so created our own eco friendly one where the tallest person (James) holds a torch inside a plastic sack that did contain logs and lifts it up high. It certainly has the initial wow factor although doesn’t quite work when you let it go 😆
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Friday The last day 🙁

The weather was a bit threatening so we didn’t hang around quite as long as we’d intended to. I’d also wanted to have one last walk round just the four of us but the kids were really worn out and Davies felt it would be too sad to walk round saying goodbye (we definitely won’t be coming next year and who know’s what our circumstances will be by 2012) so we didn’t in the end.

We’d got everyone to sign our canopy (which by now had a second taped repair covering a hole made by sparks the night we’d had a fire under it) which we think we might take WWOOFing with us and get others to sign whenever we put it up and we put the tent away with the distinct feeling we may have used it for the last time. The kids did some more of their Bug World creation which on and off all of them had worked on all week using bits they’d collected from the wood. It been the source of some squabbles along with the harmony but was quite an impressive creation by the end of the week:
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We had time for a couple of self timer shots by the tipi before Kirsty and James headed off to battle the M25

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and then it was home time all round really. Davies came with me, Scarlett went with Ady and once again we really appreciated being just an hour from home as we were back and bathed and fed all by a very respectable time. I can’t say it was our best time there as we missed people not there too much but it was lovely to file away that memory of sharing it with Kirsty, James, Babs, Stella and Julie and all assorted children, of course including Ian as another chapter in our catalogue of fantastic times camping there. I love it there very much :).

Way, way back in about March or April I told Davies about a Campcraft Sleepout course happening at the Sustainability Centre this weekend. It was pretty much perfect timing given we’d be there from that weekend camping anyway for our annual Everyone-else-has-gone-back-to-school week and just a few days before his birthday. Davies loved the idea as a birthday present so we booked and paid for it.

As the date drew closer I was starting to feel a bit odd about being Davies’ nominated parent – I had in my head it would be more of a ‘lads and dads’ type event. I wasn’t remotely fazed at the idea of being the only female but I was a bit worried that Davies might feel strange having me there if everyone else had their dads. But he chose me for his own reasons and frankly if he’d chosen Ady I’d have been feeling like I was missing out as I am really interested in the Bushcraft stuff too.

We’d packed light – a rucksack each with water bottle, packed lunch, spare pants, pjs and clean top for the next morning, waterproof trousers and jacket, knife, fork, spoon, cup, plate and bowl, tooth brush and toothpaste. We had a roll mat, a sleeping bag, a roll up pillow and a blanket each and that was it. A far cry from my Princessy self of a few years ago who would go nowhere without an en suite bathroom ;).

Saturday morning saw us up early, fed and watered and ready for the off. We’d got my car pretty loaded up with all but the front seats taken out although I later realised we’d not packed very sensibly as we had all the tents, kitchen and so on for the week but none of the spare clothes :rolls: We gave ourselves plenty of time to allow for traffic so we were there a good half an hour early. We had a brief walk around, rang Ady and Scarlett and finally wandered back up to the centre to meet up with the rest of the group. There were 17 of us in all: Davies and I, J (a child psychiatrist) and his daughter E (12, youngest of 3 girls, hates outdoors, bugs, fire etc) there on a bonding weekend because he works crazy-long hours and doesn’t have enough time with his daughters, N (another Nic, there were 4 of us!) and his son J – N was a gas man and J was his 8 year old son, he had another, younger child and his wife had booked the sleepout for him and J, A and her granddaughter A, she was recently divorced and was doing a lot of Striking-Out-On-Her-Own including course in permaculture, spoon whittling and so on and had booked this course for her granddaugher and her, V and his son O, not sure what V did but I had the impression he wasn’t living with O full-time. O was lovely, 15 and really into his bushcraft, told me all about how he’d met Ray Mears once, really knew his stuff and was one of those teens who give you hope for the next generation, a mother and son who’s names I never learnt but were really nice, I think she was a single mum and her son who I think was very tall for his age rather than very old had been failed by the school system and was about to start some one to one special measures teaching with a different school before her last, last resort of Home Ed and two sisters in law (one was married to the other one’s brother) J and A with a son each and an extra friend of the two cousins, all boys. A was very nice, J was nice but had a very annoying habit of doing that Australian going up at the end of each sentence to make it sound like a question which really grated on me after a while. She’d taken redundancy from IBM and set up a dog walking business? Which she really enjoyed? And found very fulfilling? And us. And Sean the Bushcraft man who we’ve met over the years there several times and his new sidekick John-with-a-beard who turned out to be a fellow Home Educator.

All signed in we first went to camp hq to drop off our stuff and then had a bit of a tour of the site. Davies and I know the site really well after so many visits but learnt loads nonetheless with all the little snippets of history Sean threw in. We finished down the other side of the green burial site where John-with-a-beard took over to teach us about squirrel shelters. We were given the tip that shelters are best placed facing east where the sun rises, so warming them in the morning and shown how to work out east using a normal wristwatch and the sun before splitting into 3 groups and getting on with building a shelter while John came round and oversaw how we were doing. We were in the smallest group – Davies and I with V and his son O who had already decided they’d be sleeping down in their self-built shelter in the woods. Possibly if we’d not been working in a group with someone who was planning to do so Davies and I might have considered it ourselves. But it did mean the pressure was on the four of us to really do it properly.

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Once everyone had finished we all went and gathered round each shelter and then John came and tested them all by straddling them with his 18 stone weight. They all stood up to it too 🙂

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Back to camp base for a cup of tea and our packed lunch. There were a couple of kelly kettles which were sufficiently interesting to one of the lads to have him keeping them almost perpetually on the boil and offering cups of tea every 20 minutes or so. Having never refused a cup of tea ever I drank quite a bit! 😆

We sat round the campfire eating lunch and chatting and inevitably learning a bit about each other. Predictably our Home Ed status came up pretty quickly and the whole WWOOFing idea was soon out there too, making me something of a novelty / curiosity / person to come and poke with questions :). Well me and J the child head doctor who was also popular to ask questions of :).

Next we split into two groups to learn some knots (quick release, timber hitch, adjustable AND I can still remember them all 🙂 ) and chop down some sycamore to strip and carve into pegs to create our shelters. Davies and I were with Sean this time. We’ve met him several times before on visits to the centre and he always does a firestarting talk at the Greenfair. He is an excellent teacher, really patient and ready to show you over and over again if you don’t grasp something at first giving you the impression he has all the time in the world to show you. He was particularly good with Davies who struggled with one of the knots, mostly I think due to having such little hands and stood with him doing it again and again until Davies got it right and could do it again.
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We started with knots and then went off to lop some sycamore before bringing it back to make into pegs. We had to cut them to size, check over them to see if there was a logical top and bottom and place for a notch depending on knots in the wood and then taper one end, flatten the other and create a notch for cord to be captured. We were all given very sharp knives and shown the right way to use them to create a small pile of pegs each.
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Next we were issued with a hoochie (best link I can find online to show it is here) which were actually packaged ones with integral guy line and eyelets but could have been easily made if needed. We were shown a variety of methods of pitching including both sides down in a sideless pitch, both sides up propped with wooden poles, or one side up, one side down. Davies and I went for the later with one side pitched to the ground and the front open.

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At this point we had to make decisions about where we were planning to actually sleep later. Davies and I were the only ones who didn’t decide to put a tent up at this point. We did have a little tent in the car but we were already feeling we’d wussed out slightly by not planning to sleep in the woodland shelter so we wanted to get a real survival type experience. We had a small groundsheet with us which covered enough ground to put our roll mats and little pillows on, topped with sleeping bags and blankets. We thought it looked very cosy 🙂
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There were a few hammocks to have a go at putting up and getting into too – Davies really liked it, I didn’t have a go as I was not at all confident at my ability to get back out again with any dignity 😉
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Then it was time to prepare dinner. A vast array of food was brought out including 3 chickens, several packs of bacon, potatoes, sweet potatoes, leeks, onions, carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, parsnips, lentils and tinned tomatoes. We established that no one was vegetarian so there was no need to make anything meat free and then one team took care of cooking the chickens in an ammo box on the fire adding the bacon towards the end of cooking. The rest of us took on peeling and chopping veg to go in the big iron pot to hang on a tripod over the fire. J sidled up to me and muttered about hating lentils, I agreed I also hated them and so when noone was looking we hid them 😆 😆 I was quite staggered to see how little pretty much all of the kids and several of the adults knew about food prep – surely it doesn’t get more basic than peeling and chopping veg? We added some water, stock cubes and herbs and bunged the pot on.

Another hour or so of sitting round the fire tending to the food, whittling wood and chatting or finishing off setting up camp – and of course more tea drinking. Davies wanted to make a wand for Scarlett so Sean lent him a knife as his own was pretty blunt, helped him choose a good bit of wood and cut it and then coached him on some knife skills and showed him some techniques.

Next we did some sensory awareness games and talked a bit about tracking. Sean explained about peripheral vision and using all our senses and we played a game where a blindfolded person stood in the middle of the circle armed with a water pistol with a bunch of keys at their feet. The rest of us had to creep towards them and grab the keys without being heard – any noises made by us resulted in the water pistol being squirted in that direction. We had a couple of games of that before it was time to get ready to serve dinner.

I helped carve a chicken and serve up and we had a pretty good meal of buttered rolls, veg stew, roast chicken and roast potatoes. Someone had brought along marshmallows so we cut some more sycamore switches and stripped the bark off and sharpened the ends to make perfect toasting sticks for those. We washed up (Davies did our plates and bowls, unfortunately his drying up afterwards left something to be desired so they ended up collecting loads of leaf litter and twigs :rolls:) and then headed over to the woodland classroom for some firestarting practise.

Most of that Davies and I had covered before, either at Forest School or at Sean’s own firestarting talks at Green Fairs over the years but he did a really good half an hour or so talking about different firestarting techniques throughout history and handing round iron pyrite, flints, firesteels, various types of matches, maya dust, cotton wool and vaseline and so on. We were then sent off to collect some birch bark and given fire steels to make sparks to light it. We all tipped our started little fires into the main fire in the classroom to have jointly lit it for the night. We were shown charcloth and told how to make it along with newspaper soaked in candlewax and it renewed Davies and my intention to create a tinder kit each ready to carry for fire starting.

We were then taken back down to the burial ground and shown a good place for badger watching as a hide had been created from a wattled fence. Clearly you wouldn’t actually see any with them not being true and all but the sentiment was nice ;).

By then it was nearly 8pm so we walked back over to the camp where Sean and John had a last hot drink with us before leaving us to our own devices. The mother and son made a decision not to stay the night so bid us all goodbye and headed off, the father and son who were staying in the woods left to bed down there for the night and the rest of us settled round the campfire.

As it got dark people gradually drifted off and the children who were still awake were off playing with torches which just left myself and two of the Dads – N and J. J who was very quickly becomming my new best friend then broke out a flask of sloe gin he’d made himself and several shot glasses to share round. I’d not taken any alcohol with me worrying there wouldn’t be a chance to drink it and then I’d end up taking covert swigs from within my rucksack thereby confirming my private worry that I am infact an alcoholic so this was very welcome :). We had a very interesting conversation about what life is all about, I was questionned more about Home Ed and WWOOFing.

Davies was off playing with J, the other smaller boy, who he’d really hit it off with and they were enjoying doing stuff with torches. It started to get properly dark and they came back so we all called bedtime. I was wondering if not putting a tent up or indeed the sides of the hoochie down had been an error as it suddenly seemed very open to the elements, but Davies snuggled straight down and was asleep in minutes.

I predictably lay awake although I must have dozed. All of the tea came back to haunt me and I ended up struggling out of my sleeping bag three times for a wee, the final time managing to wee all over my pj bottoms too which meant I had to get back into the sleeping bag just in my pants 🙁 I laid for a bit longer having checked the time (4am) and decided as soon as it was light I’d get up and dressed, get the fire going and make some tea but I eventually did drop off and next thing I knew it was 730am, broad daylight and several people were already up – which made getting out of my sleeping bag and into some clothes pretty tricky ;).

Davies and I congratulated ourselves on making it through the night 🙂
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and packed up our stuff before going to join the others round the campfire for pancakes cooked on the fire for breakfast. I have serious frying pan and casserole pot for cooking on the fire envy :). We were rejoined by V and O who had managed the night in the woodland shelter and by J and his daughter E who had been freaked out by a spider at bedtime, gotten very upset and so they’d decamped to their car in the carpark for the night instead. We cleared everything up and gradually people headed off leaving just Davies and I. Sean and John were last to leave and said we could carry on the campfire, leaving us some more firewood aslong as we spread it all out before leaving it later.

Davies and I finished our experience with some sitting round the fire, whittling some wands and chatting about everything we’d done, the new stuff we’d learnt and the things we want to try next. It was a really good experience, Davies loved it and has added further to his list of things he wants to learn and kit he wants to acquire. I was really proud of him for being so up for everything on offer, loved having the time just the two of us and would definitely do it again.

Meanwhile back at home Ady and Scarlett had been to Wildlife Explorers in the morning, visited the supermarket for their individual favourite dinners, eaten together, had baths and had a sleepover watching Harry Potter in our bedroom before heading over to meet us which is where we get to 10am on Sunday morning and the beginning of our holiday. But that’s for a whole other blogpost :).

Tasha and I finally had a nice day to try and do our much put off foraging excursion.

Davies, Scarlett and I had time to nip to The Range first as I wanted to get a couple of camping bits (pegs etc.). They appeared to have a 40% off offer on such things and so having left the kids in car I picked up various bits and then had a brief kerfuffle at the till when it didn’t all come up as 40% off and experienced some very terrible customer service while they sorted it out. I *hate* bad service anywhere so was gearing up for a fight but it all came good and I got my discount.

I wanted an aluminium water bottle for me and *thought* I’d bought a really cool one with 40% off, bright red with FUEL written on it, in a ‘your body needs water for fuel’ type fashion until I got it home and realised it genuinely is a fuel bottle for putting flammable stuff in and has printed all over it warnings about not being suitable for food or drink. Grr.

We collected Tasha and Toby – no Vinnie today, I missed him 🙁 – and drove via Tesco Express as neither Tasha or I had actually got any lunch with us before heading to a large green space with a playpark that had elderberries and sloes around the periphery. The kids went off to play, Tasha and sat and chatted and ate and then we picked a few sloes for Tasha as I had realised I really shouldn’t pick anything as we’re off from tomorrow on holiday.

We dropped them home and went in for a cup of tea before they had to head off to take one of their cats to the vet and we needed to get home for pre-holiday prep. As we pulled up David was outside washing his car so he wandered over to chat and then my Mum pulled up having driven past once and then passed us on the road so double backed to see us. She caught up with Davies and Scarlett while I brought in some dry washing and hung out some wet stuff – there is much to be said for staggered going on holiday 😉 and shoved the raspberries we picked on Wednesday in a pan with some jam sugar before they went off.

I made two pots of jam, one of which my Mum went off clutching along with all the current eggs and a pot of strawberry and chilli jam too. Her and I had a chat over a cup of tea while the kids played with geomags and then she went off. I supervised packing for Davies and Scarlett, with Davies packing both an overnight bag and a ‘rest of the week’ bag.

Ady came home and I left him to serve up the kids tea that I’d put on while I went to fill my car up with petrol and grab some bits for the picnic lunch Davies and I need to take tomorrow. When I got home the kids had eaten and were in pjs and Ady was preparing to load the cars. I helped Davies get his rucksack ready and then we had a little pre-birthday present giving. Most of what Davies wanted for his birthday was camping / survival stuff so given we are off on a campcraft sleepout tomorrow followed a week camping with friends we knew he would like to have it for that rather than the week after when we have no camping trips for the forseeable future so having checked with him which he’d prefer he went for early presents now and less on the day and was presented with a new rucksack, water bottle, cooking set, folding shovel, whistle and torch set all of which he was very pleased with. He does still have things kept back for his actual birthday but as this weekend is the main part of his gift from us it made sense for him to have things to enjoy as part of it.

So Davies repacked his new rucksack with the various things he’ll need this weekend, Ady loaded up the cars, Scarlett gathered all sorts of things she needs and I packed an over night survival rucksack for me and a longer term week long bag for myself before having a bath and cooking dinner.

So Davies and I are off in the morning for a 24 hour bushcraft survival campout, with Scarlett and Ady joining us on Sunday. Really looking forward to it and hoping not to be too overpowed by testosterone ;).

Normally my working all day day but I was only working the afternoon as they owed me hours for the bank holiday.

I did some online stuff in the morning and then popped out to the post office to send some ebay parcels. Very annoyingly two people have still not paid despite auctions ending a full week ago so I will either have to deal with chasing them or filing non paying bidder reports / doing second chance offers or they will pay tomomorrow morning and then be hacked off when I don’t send stuff for a week because I’m away. Grr ebay.

Back home for lunch and I wrote the ‘when she was 7’ page about Scarlett for my blog which always takes ages because I go and read the ones that have gone before. It always makes me realise how much they do change over the course of a year.

Ady came home and we all had lunch before heading back out again – me to work and the rest of them to do some store visits. Childcare has been pretty easy for the summer as Ady is happier taking them out with him to work as they give him cover for his mystery shopping type stuff and don’t look out of place in school holidays. It will start to get trickier again from now on.

I had a nice afternoon at work, chatting to two of the Saturday assistants who are off to uni in the next couple of weeks and another who is 5 years through a 6 year medicine course and is very interesting company. I always feel a bit melancholy normally at this time of year when all the youngsters are off about to start their lives with new horizons and adventures and hanker after that for myself, this year I am hugging to myself the knowledge that we’ll be off on our own life changing adventure or at the very least a gap year in six months time :).

An ex work colleague came in and we had a catch up. She is undergoing all sorts of life changing stuff of her own including rethinking some huge areas of her life so we chatted about that for a bit. Looking forward to seeing what happens to her next :).

Ady picked me up and we started sorting out camping stuff, well actually Ady mostly started sorting out camping stuff while I drank tea 😳 We have a bit more stuff to clear from our playroom and then we’ll store all the camping stuff in there and have to make decisions on what we keep, what we take with us and what we won’t need any more.

We read a couple of chapters of King of the Cloud Forests and then Davies and Scarlett went off to bed.

It’s all starting to feel very real now, in a slightly surreal, still half a year away fashion.

This morning we dropped in at Julie-from-Badgers as she had wanted to check in with me prior to the start of term that I was happy with the programme and knew what it all entailed. I have cast an eye over it and will look at it in more detail nearer the time – we won’t be at Badgers for a whole fortnight yet ;). She threw her arms around me in a rather unexpected and slightly awkward hug with an ‘I can’t believe you’re leaving me!’ and then proceded to tell me how wonderful the whole experience will be for the children and how very ‘us’ it was. I always squirm slightly at being told anything is very ‘me’, I remember a work colleague telling me that jetting off to Las Vegas to get married was ‘very you’ and wondering how that could be when even I was slightly shocked we were doing it! It does entertain me the way that slightly more conventional friends are almost selling me the idea of WWOOFing though in trying to convince themselves it isn’t 100% crazy…

I explained that Davies has decided against Cadets. I told her the reasons (he’d miss the first two sessions of term, only be there for one term anyway etc.) and she then suggested he carry on at Badgers for the term, go into her group doing First Aid which he has done before so won’t get a badge for but can brush up his knowledge (it was quite some time ago he did it), be a Follow Me Badger for the final term and assist Julie with the younger Badgers, not be with Scarlett or I and finish the term at the end of the year with Scarlett and I, get his SuperBadger award etc. and be part of the grand farewell to the Goddards. He loved the idea and it will make life much easier for me not to have to plan a place for him to be while Scarlett and I are off.

We left there and headed to PYO, arriving about 10 minutes early, which with Julie’s usual 10 minutes late meant we were sitting in the car for 20 minutes or so. I’d picked up a load of cds to listen to in the car and they all happened to be fairly melancholy ones which had me all reflective and feeling sad. I don’t know if I mentioned but we found out recently that my Grandfather had died – my Mum’s Dad. She had been estranged from him for many years and out of loyalty to my Mum I had had no contact with him either, although it was no big sacrifice as I hardly knew him and certainly didn’t see him as a Grandfather in any more than the biological sense. Mum has rather gone to pieces over the news though, despite me having numerous conversations with her over the years about how she would feel if she learnt he had died and if she felt she would have any regrets for things not said, done or thrashed out then she should attend to them. Frazer has been very consoling of her, sharing her grief and saying he would have gone to his funeral, whereas Dad and I are both rather at a loss as to what the appropriate response is. I suspect all four of us are rather messed up in our responses with Mum and Frazer going for emotional and Dad and I going for rational when neither is probably entirely appropriate.

This year has seen all sorts of evidence of life dealing hard blows to people I care about. I have witnessed a friend lose a child, a friend lose a sibling, a friend deal with health scares, friends lose parents, parents lose their parents, a child deal with losing pets and just been reminded over and over again of my own and everyone I love being mortal and here for a limited period only. I am finding myself grieving for people I never even met and missing people who were never part of my life. It makes me question what it is all about after all – and hardens my resolve to go off and find the right path for us even more.

Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna arrived and we headed into PYO. The four older cousins wanted to be off and about really so we tended to let them while Julie, Lorna and I did fruit picking and chatting. I picked raspberries and sweetcorn – the apples were not up to much. Julie picked lots of plums too. We sat and ate a picnic, all Julie’s as I had not thought to pack anything, but fortunately Julie always over packs and was only too happy to share :). I updated Julie on all our firm bookings for WWOOFing places and we talked about the kids all growing up (J&M will be 8 a couple of weeks after D is 10). I’ll miss Julie a lot while we’re away, I couldn’t wish for a better SIL, it really is like having a sister I chose myself :).

We finally left there at about 3pm ish I think. We came home and I did some laundry processing, Scarlett played with the ducks and then I did some dealing with the fruit on the patio. We had two huge tubs of plums that my Dad had given us but he has been sweeping all of his patio into the tubs and they were filled with fruit flies and pine needles along with a mix of very rotten and okay plums. After a while I concluded it was one of those tasks where the output simply won’t justify the input so I gave up and threw all the plums to the chickens and ducks. I then peeled and chopped the windfall apples we’d collected yesterday, cooked them up and have two jars of chunky apple sauce to do something with at some point.

The kids needed to do some bedroom tidying so they did that and then Davies set up a load of toy soliders in the lounge. I sent Davies round the shop to buy some tinned pasta and he was *ages* prompting Scarlett and I to go after him. It turned out he’d been caught by our neighbour David who was out looking under the bonnet of his car and wanted to show Davies what he was doing and then he couldn’t find the pasta. By the time we’d done all that we were too late to be cooking pasta so they chose some pitta breads and we nipped home for Davies to pack some dinner for them while I got changed before we headed up to the allotment.

We met Ady up there and spent a last hour there digging up the last few potatoes, digging up the apple tree and cutting a load of rosemary. We collected our tools, left the wheelbarrow that someone had donated to us in the area for giving stuff away and said a fond farewell to the plot. We’ll have to pay again for a year in September and knowing we won’t be around to reap the rewards of anything we sow now it seems like the right time to give it up. It felt quite strange as we have loved having the allotment and it is in no small way responsible for our current plans but there is such a long waiting list I want to give someone else the chance to enjoy growing their own. Another goodbye though…

Ady brought the kids home while I nipped to the CoOp for some bits for dinner, I arrived back only to realise I’d forgotten one of the key ingredients so nipped out again to Sainburys. Ady had been held up coming home by a lane closure as a motorbike had crashed and it had obviously been fatal as the whole road was now closed while accident investigation units were on the scene. It took ages to get to the supermarket and on the way home I attempted to dodge the traffic with a long way round diversion which was equally trafficky so I was gone for ages.

Another example of life being so very tenuous.

I cooked dinner, we watched the news and while I still have a bed within a house I am going to go and do sleeping in it.

We’d been invited to GI Sarah’s house today for luncheon. She is a work colleague. She’s not really called GI Sarah, obviously but we have many, many Sarah’s at work so they have had to adopt additional twiddly bits. One of them has a fancy double barrelled name with the intials P-J so she has naturally become Sarah Pyjamas. Another two are both Sarah G so have had to take the second letter of their surnames too giving us Sarah Gi and Sarah Gr. I don’t really work with Sarah Gr but do work lots with Sarah Gi who has long had the reputation of being a bit like an army sergeant so is called GI Sarah. As it goes all of this nicknaming rather pleases me (can you tell) and infact I may have had more than a little bit to do with tagging the Sarahs…;)

Anyway today we’d been invited to luncheon at GI Sarah’s – us and another colleague Sian and her daughter Imogen, who has cerebral palsy and is four. I’d briefed Davies and Scarlett on acceptable behaviour for luncheon at a work colleague’s and we’d taken offerings of eggs and some flowers.

Sarah had outdone herself with a huge spread of lunch, having previously asked what all Davies and Scarlett’s favourite things to eat were and prepared all of them! They have a trampoline (despite the ‘children’ of the house being 18 and 21!) and two rabbits and a cat.

We had a very nice four hours there with Davies and Scarlett doing incredibly well, only starting to irritate each other at the very end. we came away with a bag of windfall apples of Sarah’s tree that I’d tasked the kids to collect and a very sweet follow up text message to say what a credit D&S were to me :).

We had to drop off a folder of paperwork to Julie from Badgers who happens to live nearby so did that, leaving it in her porch before going to the swimming pool for the first lesson of term. Due to me forgetting to give the paperwork to Dad in time Scarlett’s lessons were already full so instead of her being at 430 and Davies at 5pm I had Davies at 5pm and Scarlett at 530pm which I was already cursing about knowing coming out of the swimming pool in the dark and cold later in the term would be horrible. Also the pool closes to the public at 530pm meaning Davies can’t be off swimming while Scarlett had her lesson.

We were there about an hour too early but not early enough to make it worth going home so we had a half an hour wander on the beach before going in. I’d been intending starting my channel swim – as we won’t be around for Swimathon 2011 and I’d pledged to try the 5km I’ve decided to do the Aspire Channel Swim instead. More challenging as it is 22 miles spread over 12 weeks but a great way of ending the weekly swimming lessons I think :). But when I checked it doesn’t start until 13th September so I decided to watch Davies and Scarlett’s first lesson of the term instead.

We were early enough for them both to have fifteen minutes in the pool together first before Davies’ lesson. He swam really well, his breast stroke is excellent and his front crawl is really good. He still needs to work on his back stroke as he tends not to use his arms as much as he should but generally his swimming is strong, stylish and a pleasure to watch :).

Scarlett was rather more haphazard, she can certainly swim, has no fear and will happily leap in alongside me and do a couple of 33m lengths but her strokes are all over the place. The group she was with was full of really little kids though and she was miles ahead of all of them. She did really well, coming way infront of them all every length with Davies sitting beside me saying ‘And Scarlett wins again!’. I wondered if being by far the best would bolster her and maybe be a good thing but when she came to grab her towel and we said how well she’d done she complained it had been babyish so I grabbed a word with the instructor, Carolyn. She has 3 of the same level groups running on a Tuesday and agreed that while Scarlett isn’t quite ready to move up she is very much at the top end of the group and needs to be challenged. I explained we had been late to pay so her usual group had been full and Carolyn said she wasn’t happy with several of the placings in the groups and would be chatting to the swimming lesson manager about shifting some children about and putting them with more equal abilitied children. I said we could manage any of the lesson times on a Tuesday and we left it there. By the time we got home there was already a message on the answer phone to say Scarlett had been moved back to the 430 session :).

Back home the kids had roast dinner leftovers for dinner and then we read some more of King of the Cloud Forest.

Davies has impressed me greatly by appearing at 1130pm to recite the months of the year to me perfectly. He learnt the days of the week earlier this year in about ten minutes and it seems the months of the year have happened in a similar fashion.

Am now Very Tired Indeed and have failed to note everything that happened today including Davies and I discussing an opposite and equal reaction to every action while he was on the trampoline and his very excellent short films starring the rabbits today where Davies went all Johnny Morris and did voiceovers for them to great comedic effect.

Feeling quite back-to-schooly here, I think it is all of the planning I’m doing for the becomming Wondering Wanderers and decluttering the house giving me a taste for being productive, which coupled with the closing in of evenings, and nip in the air is making some deeply hidden part of me yearn for new school shoes and pencil cases and subject dividers in ring binders.

Fortunately I’ve lived through enough Septembers of not going back to school, including the last five with very conscious not back to school-ing to feel fine about the fact I don’t even have a laminator any more – we sold it yesterday at the car boot sale for £3 including a pack of laminating pouches 😆

So I went with Productivity Otherwise (a bit like EO but without all the shady undertones and infighting). The rain has meant we have a back log of washing, which with a holiday coming up needs attacking, so I dealt with some of that and then we headed up to the poor neglected allotment. Our neighbouring plot holder was there so I was even more embarrassed at the state of our plot – we’re going to try and get up there one evening this week and clear our crops then give notice. We have loads of potatoes in there, an apple tree we were waiting to fruit before digging up and bringing home and a tiny bit of sweetcorn, plus any tools we want to bring home.

We dug up two and a half rows of potatoes, Davies and I dug while Tarly collected and we looked at all the differences between the different varieties and looked at the seed potatoes to see how the plants had grown. Our neighbour then called us over to dig up some of her pink fur potatoes (a bit like anya new pots, very nobbly bobbly and comedy shaped – the type of root veg regularly featured on That’s Life!) and gave us a load of those too.

We’d taken one of the OPAL hedge survey kits with us that had arrived last week to do and then realised there isn’t actually much of a hedge there so when we’d finished digging potatoes we dropped them off in the car and went for a walk into the woodland to find a hedge there. We chose one, chatting to some women collecting elderberries on the way – Scarlett told them we’d left plenty of flowers on those trees in the spring so there would be berries to collect 🙂 which had us talking about the difference between elderflowers and berries and what you can make with them.

Hedge survey completed – it involved measuring a 3m length of hedge, identifying the plants using the provided laminate spotter sheets (knew there would be something laminated in there somewhere today 😉 ), doing a wildlife sweep by shaking branches into a container and IDing them too, checking the ground for holes and measuring those and recording any findings on a survey sheet to submit to OPAL.

We came home via CoOp and then Asda (CoOp had no free range chicken) and had lunch. The kids went off to play Xbox and I set about using up some of the many eggs we had by making an orange meringue pie – egg yolks used in pastry and orange curd making, egg whites in the meringue, that brought the egg mountain down nicely :).

Ady came home and my productivity levels dipped as we spent an hour or so hanging out in the lounge all watching tv together. Then Davies got the geomags out and Scarlett asked if she could do some sewing. She started by repairing a hole in Big Dog her soft toy and then wanted to actually make something. She found some material and wanted to make a soft toy cat. So with very minimal guidance she drew a cardboard template which I cut out for her and then cut two pieces of material using it which she then sewed together. I showed her a couple of different stitches she could use and then left her to it which I went to get dinner cooking.

Ady went out to cut the hedges so in a spot of matchmaking I suggested to Davies he took the second hedge survey out and did it with Ady – we’d been talking earlier about how different the results would probably be in a hedge at home in the garden. They really enjoyed doing that and came in enthusing about all the different things they’d spotted.

Scarlett finished sewing her cat, stuffed it and sewed it up. I got her to draw a picture of how she wanted the face to look and she asked me to sew that on although she did sit with me and watch while I did it so could probably have a go herself next time. Her creativity is really flourishing at the moment and she’s gone from being reluctant to try new stuff and asking for help to wanting me to show her all sorts of things and going off and using the new skills to create :).

I served up dinner and at Scarlett’s request we kept the TV off and talked. Subject of choice began as ‘what do you want for Christmas / your birthday?’ and went round the table but quickly became about WWOOFing predictably. We were trying to think of useful and sensible presents for people living off the land in a van short on space but also trying to think what we would most miss about home and whether we could recreate those things.

Dinner was very nice and the orange meringue pie was delicious. I’d bought clotted cream to go with it, mindful of us not looking at any River Cottage Family cookbook stuff for a while and Davies and Scarlett didn’t remember having clotted cream ever before (they have!) which made it even more delicious.

We were all very full afterwards and had to slump on sofas. Davies and I played some of a DS game he’d been stuck on – Christmas Carol and Scarlett flitted about between us and Ady who was washing up. The kids went to bed and we had baths.

Tomorrow I start swimming the channel!

Saturday for no apparent reason I had been plagued by bad dreams all night. One where Davies had gone off from somewhere, not knowing the area and with no way of us contacting him so we were frantically driving the streets looking for him. I woke up before we found him 🙁 Then I dreamt that Ady had not come home from work despite it being really late and getting dark, his phone was doing strange things when I tried to ring him including letting me listen to his other voicemail messages all of which were people trying to get hold of him suggesting he’d been missing all day. Then I’d realised I’d not put the birds away and when I did there was a fox hiding under the hen house. And I was trying to hold everything together and not let the kids know I was scared. And then I woke up. So not very restful 🙁

Dad came over in the morning, which sort of put paid to anything else happening really. He had breakfast with us and then stayed for lunch so my plans to do some baking for the party we were off to never really happened. It was nice to sit and chat to Dad though so baking not happening was a small price to pay.

We all sat and watched our opposite neighbours do something interesting with their roof involving taking off fascias and soffits and lifting tiles and batons and felt and replacing some bits. We chose to create a running commentary of what we thought they might be saying which amused us all greatly :).

Dad left, Ady and I loaded my car up ready for the morning and eventually set off for Caz and Bid’s via Sainsburys for ‘we haven’t made any food but here is some we bought’ supplies.

Caz and Bid were having a Housewarming / Caz is 40 / beginning of a new era type party and we either knew or had heard of most of the people there. Davies and Scarlett got instantly lost in the throng and had a great time from when we arrived to when we dragged them away at the end.

Ady and I chatted, hung out with and generally enjoyed the surroundings, company and atmosphere – it was fab 🙂 particularly some very cool friends who do circus stuff like poi and staff and did it after dark with fire which was awesome, particularly A, their 9 year old boy who does a fab fire staff flames roaring thing :).

We had to leave at 9pm, having been intending to leave at 8pm as we were due to get up a stupid o’clock today. Dad had nipped over to put the birds away for us so I did toast and hosing down of children and got them to bed to be closely followed by us.

Sunday began on what I personally classify as still Saturday night 😉 530am.

I took my pre loaded car over to my parents, with Ady and the kids following behind and we dropped them off with Dad, who was up and had aleady drained his first cup of coffee this time.

We arrived, braved the now traditional light rain shower and got set up. We had the same pitch as before and spread ourselves out nicely. The same bloke sidled up to ask about lego and we recognised at least one repeat customer who came back to buy more educational resources type stuff from us and asked why we were clearing stuff and showed lots of enthusiasm for our planned WWOOFing adventure :).

We sold the Dora house and the Micromachines to people with grandchildren coming to stay, Scarlett’s old dressing table to a little girl who took it ‘dressed’. I’d put loads of beads and bangles dripping out of the drawers, some pink hair combs on the top and sold it for £1 or £1.50 with everything on it :). We got shot of our ‘Spiderman corner’ of a lamp, hat, sweatband and 2008 annual to a little kid in a pushchair who already had about 6 items of Spiderman merchandise and both sets of waterproof dungarees to parents who promised faithfully their children would splash in many, many muddle puddles in them (Ady was a bit sentimental about letting them go :)).

But my happiest moment of all was a woman who had bought a load of dressing up stuff from us two weeks ago that I had found more bits of (hat for one outfit, body for another) in Davies’ room and felt really bad that I’d sold most of it without the rest. She took the remainder for a pound and I am so pleased to think the outfits will be reunited….maybe I’ve seen too many Toy Story films 😆

We got rid of a lot more and made nearly £90 which was just over £80 when we took out the £8 pitch fee. We also brought the kettle, some tea bags, a pint of milk, some mugs and little stove and had freshly brewed tea which made the morning oh so much more tolerable :).

We had one sack of soft toys and one of clothes and three boxes of stuff to give to my Mum for her charity shop, a couple of small boxes to bring home and all the rest went :). Our plan is to do one more before the end of the car boot season and do some more ebaying alongside. Very pleased to have raised £250 already from ebaying and carbooting.

Back at my parents we had lunch, the kids were pleased to see us and rather droopy so we stayed for a couple of hours and then came home. Davies was craving some space so went to his room to Xbox for a while, Scarlett sat with me and learnt how to knit and they both had baths. They ahd dinner and we all watched Countryfile before they went to bed, we had baths and then watched Vexed while eating our dinner.

Ady is working tomorrrow for the morning at least but the rest of us will mostly be sleeping I suspect!

Work for me today. Ady took Davies and Scarlett off with him for the day and they did the rounds of some London stores taking in Ikea and Costco where they particularly enjoyed looking at some crabs and lobster. Ady tells me they also had an interesting conversation about suffragettes. They did come home for lunch but headed off again and were actually home about half an hour after me in the end.

I had a good day at work. We were short staffed which meant I spent the entire morning on the enquiry desk. James, who is 18 and wants to be Prime Minister one day was wearing a skinny tie and I suggested he’d look good with collar tips on. No one else seemed to even know what collar tips were so I spent the first half hour or so googling for images of collar tips. The best one I found showed the cast of Beverley Hills 90210 which sealed it for me as a winning look but didn’t do much in convincing James. We did a bit of a straw poll of borrowers but most of them seemed to either say ‘collar tips? what are collar tips?’ or said unless he was moving to America then no. I suggested it was merely that Lancing is not ready for such trend setting.

I have since been reminiscing about my own western fashion in my teens when I went through a phase of wearing denim shirts (complete with collar tips), a waistcoat and cowboy boots.

A regular borrower came in then with her two children (one of whom came to the last Chatterbooks sessions). I talked to her son for a while and when his mum said he had to ask me a question because we were sitting at the ‘Information Desk’ his question was ‘how many books are there in the library?’ I said I didn’t know exactly but I’d always thought there were more books just in Lancing than you could read in a lifetime and we speculated on this for a while. They went off to look for books and I did some research about reading speeds and average words per book. I learnt the accepted fast average for actual comprehension is between 200 and 300 words per minute, an average word count per book is about 80000 which gives an average read time of just over 5 hours for an average book. If you called that an average of one book read per day it would seem fair.

I then counted the average number of books on a shelf and made it about 30, most of our 4foot fixtures have 4 shelves but often the top shelf is display only so only has about 4 books on it, so I averaged 100 books per 4ft section of shelving. Of which we have 56 of books downstairs in the library, so 5600 before we count books on tape and books on cd, aswell as films and music.

Oh what a productive morning 🙂

After lunch I did several stints on the counter aswell as some more work on a header board for an Arts and Crafts display I’m doing next month.

Back home we’d had a couple of replies to my batch of emails sent out yesterday and have booked two more hosts. Thanksto an interesting reply from one we have asked for a 3 week stay with them which if they agree to means we have almost half the first three months booked up. We have had quite a lot of non-responders though so may have to look at some filling in time or dotting about a bit more.

Eventually the others arrived home and the kids played in the garden for a while before coming in as they’d been in the car for far too long today. We read several chapters of King of the Cloud Forest before bed.

I decided yesterday afternoon when feeling down myself and looking at Davies and Scarlett all shadowed under the eyes and squabbly with each other that a day at home was in order today. We had planned to go fruit picking with Tasha and co but the weather forecast put paid to those plans anyway and I didn’t want to be driving about in my unreliable car with six people so we agreed to postpone that plan.

It’s felt quite unproductive really, but in a non-guilty way. I couldn’t do any laundry as there is still a full line full dripping onto the patio, the playroom is filled to the brim with stuff to be sold with no room for any more to be added to the piles and as we’re away from next weekend it’s not worth starting any ebay auctions as they will be ending just as we’re not here to post stuff.

I did need to post some parcels for things that ended this week though. I should really have posted them yesterday as the auctions ended on Tuesday and most of them paid straight away so to appease that guilt I sent everything first class instead of the quoted second – I’d not been confident about going back out in the car in the end yesterday so had not managed it. After agonising over suitable packaging for all the Barbie I eventually went for the black bin liner with lots and lots of sellotape option which will hopefully be okay.

I was gone and back really quickly – the car did take a bit of turning over to start but was fine once it got going, I found a parking space, there was no real queue in the post office and I think I was back home again within about 20 minutes.
Davies wanted to do some work on a pop up book kit he has and had decided to make a book for Scarlett. He was debating what character to go for and we discussed using some of her favourite toys, particularly as Davies has gotten into sketching the last few weeks and has done some excellent pen drawings of my Dad’s stuffed owl and some of Tarly’s cuddly toys. He decided to go for a story about Day who is a character Davies made up that lives at a landfill site with his friends; a broken TV set, a rusty fork, a sweet wrapper and a chipped plate. He’s done about 5 stories featuring them and they are very charming and well thought out, with a real emphasis on the illustrations obviously. He particularly wanted to use some of the ‘props’ in the kit such as an envelope with a letter to take out and read so was trying to write a story around those, then said he preferred to just draw the scenes and tell the story as he went and then wanted to have a go at writing some of it down. He did a great job of spelling stuff and carefully choosing words, debating for ages over ‘want’ and ‘need’ and ‘must’, working out how to spell words like ‘collect’ and ‘America’ by himself, just checking with me as he went. Was all very lovely and remains a work in progress.

Both Davies and Scarlett have been quite cuddly today which is always lovely. I’d brought home a couple of dvds from work yesterday so I made a big vat of popcorn and we settled down with the curtains drawn to watch films together. We started with Cast Away which had come up last Sunday ay dinnertime when we’d caught the end of a Ray Mears Extreme Survival Stories programme which talked about soldiers stranded on an island and how they lived to tell the tale. I remember Cast Away being quite an epic movie to watch and had thought Davies and Scarlett might enjoy it so ordered it in.

We all really enjoyed it although Ady did ring me twice at crucial moments so I missed a couple of bits of the action and so consequently was not in tears when he loses Wilson as I was talking to Ady about throws. Scarlett cried though. I distinctly recall the first time I cried at a film as a child and now although I rarely cry for myself I am often moved to tears by books and films. It’s tough to see her upset, particularly as like me she doesn’t often cry for herself but nice to see her getting the whole empathy thing.

Then we put on another film I’d brought home called Hachi – a dog’s tale which I sort of dipped in and out of really as I was knitting and it was about a dog but Scarlett got very into and ended up sobbing at the end which was all very GreyFriar’s Bobby and based on a true story. Cue another session on keeping animals and the perils of loving anyone / anything mortal.

Ady arrived home having bought some throws from Ikea which joined together have covered our very disgusting and tatty sofas and made them look all comfy and snuggly and cosy which is good :). Scarlett and I nipped out to Sainsburys for some bits while Ady and Davies made crazy videos on Davies’ phone. The kids had a bath before dinner, then dinner, then we read the first chaper of King of the Cloud Forest before they went to bed.

I’ve bitten the bullet with the WWOOFing hosts and emailed the other 12 potentials on our shortlist for Zone one on the basis that if we do get too many we’ll just stay in Zone one for longer and if we don’t get enough we’ll move onto Zone two quicker. We do have 3 yeses and one who made contact to ask where we were now but hasn’t indicated whether he can take us or not. Hopefully more replies will trickle in over the next few days and I can start making a short list for Zone two.

I felt quite down this afternoon, which is very not like me and I was listing all the possible reasons for it on a BK post when I realised actually there were sufficient little niggles there to be allowed to feel a bit sad, which cheered me up. Suspect I am like the scarecrow ‘I’d like to be unhappy but I never do have the time’ with a twist of ‘I’d like to be miserable but I never do have the justification!’ . Me and my sodding PMA eh? 😉

I worked this morning, it went quick although I did do a double shift of shelving. I helped a couple of 11 year old girls find books about puberty and periods and couldn’t decide if I admired their maturity for coming and asking at the library and finding books, or if they were winding me up. The whole pre-teen, puberty thing has come up a couple of times lately in various small ways, not specifically to do with Davies and Scarlett but at nearly 10 (eek!) and getting on for 8 that’s the way we’re heading here I guess with it’s whole new set of angst and new stuff to learn about them and me and parenting.

I’m doing a display for some Arts and Crafts books so have created a load of squares on which to do different crafty technique letters to spell out ‘arts and crafts’. I’ve done a pretty mosaic C and a quilled F and am planning on knitting at least one letter and maybe needle felting another, a calligraphy letter, a water colour pretty one, maybe something with plasticine or salt dough, something grafitti style and so on. I did have a go at knitting a T with two pencils and some plastic string but just got lots of pencil lead on my fingers really so gave up.

I got an email with my sign in details for the ECDL the library are paying for me to do. I thought they would change their minds given I have told them I am leaving and they won’t get any benefit out of me qualifying but was told they are viewing it as a thank you for all I’ve done so I can get on with that as I am doing it in my own time accessing it remotely from home. I doubt I’ll actually learn anything new but it’s good to have my computer literacy in a quantifiable measure I guess for potential CVs of the future.

I drove over to Julie’s and had a cup of tea with Chris and Julie while the kids all carried on playing. Maisie and Scarlett had walked home from the allotment on their own so had been lectured about that and when I arrived Davies had a flannel on his eye as Maisie had been flicking nail varnish and it had caught him in the eye 🙁 . I think Wet Play Syndrome had hit over there and five kids, three of whom have all sorts of sibling arguing going on and had infected the others meant it was a bit screechy and rampaging over there. Hurrah for Julie being mostly unfazed by it all though, I know I wouldn’t be!

We left and my poor car went through a puddle too many and died just before we had to cross a railway line. We sat for about five minutes, in a really not very safe place with the hazards on debating whether to call out breakdown cover or give it a few minutes and try and get the engine started. We passed the five minutes by going over my potential action plan if the car had broken down on the crossing which had occured to Scarlett about two minutes after it occured to me so I was able to share my very newly formed ideas. I got the car started again and we then debated the dilemma of it needing petrol (not as desperately as the other day but enough that I wanted to put some in before we got home as I was worried a combination of the steep driveway and more damp would create the same issue next time we try and start it so wanted to discount the petrol element) and deciding whether to stop sooner rather than later so petrol was fine, or get closer to home incase it didn’t start again afterwards. We went for closer to home as the petrol station at Sainsburys is opposite my parents house, only a mile from our house and we’re saving our Nectar points for emergency food rations while we’re WWOOFing so are trying to build them up.

We got there, put petrol in and it started first time to get us home. Suspect my car in damp weather is going to be another ongoing issue for the next couple of months though 🙁

Scarlett was feeling pretty upset because we lost a hen last night. We had 3 hens who had gone broody and would bury themselves into the undergrowth each day and squawk at you when you put them away. Two have been broody for a couple of weeks but a third went broody this week and was very pecky when you grabbed her to put her away. All of the other bantams put themselves away at night, heading into the shed to roost as it starts to get dark, but the broody ones will just stay huddled down where they are. We have at times missed a broody hen when putting them away and have obviously gotten a bit blase about them being pretty safe in their area of the garden.

Last night Ady put them away and despite me having said the night before we now had 3 broody ones and Scarlett saying she’d tried to put that one away and it had pecked her he’d missed her and just put the other two away. This morning when he let them out there was a heap of feathers and a trail of them up past the garage and sure enough she has gone 🙁 . I’m not so upset about the escaped quails flying away as I know they are likely to be okay but having lost 3 hens recently – the speckled one that just disappeared, came back a couple of times but has not been seen for a month now, the broken legged one that died last week and now this one lost to a fox has made me feel most sad 🙁 I’m also worried that the fox will be back and hanging around and Scarlett is just devastated :(. She cried at Julie’s when I confirmed I’d headcounted all the chickens and we’d definitely lost one last night and she cried again at home. I think it’s just too close to the one dying last week for her to be her usual resilient self about it 🙁 Hate seeing my children upset over things I can’t make better for them.

So I wallowed for a bit and then made the kids some tea, Ady came home and the kids and I cuddled up and read the end of The Last Wolf (which nearly made me cry 😉 ) before they went off to bed. I think we all really need a quiet day which is my plan for tomorrow.

Before I dash off to work and start today :).

Yesterday was quail handover day. A friend had originally wanted all three, then wanted the remaining two and when we briefly lost all of them and then only regained one I didn’t tell her about the reduced numbers just in case one came back or we lost the last one again. We’d arranged to visit them yesterday and I just forsaw a stream of quail number updates with different numbers each time and a range of excuses so thought once we’d got however many quails were left in the house for the night on Monday I’d send one last update confirming. Despite a brief dash for freedom on Monday afternoon when it escaped from the cage again but just loafed around outside with an ‘isn’t anyone going to stop me then? expression until Tarly caught him and put him back in again, we still had The Last Quail on Monday night so I emailed Katy and confessed and arranged to bring him over the following day.

We’ve known Katy & co for years, they are good friends of Julie and we have lots of other mutual friends but despite George being about Davies’ age and Poppy being almost exactly Scarlett’s age the kids have never hooked up enough to meet up specifically. We have tried a few times this year but always had too-full diaries to manage a date. Katy is lovely, really interesting to talk to so I was looking forward to some time chatting with her.

I called into Sainbsburys (pay day!!!) to get some lunch supplies to bring and we arrived with the quail. He will be specifically George’s pet and much loved so we are very happy to have rehomed him (and very curious to see how long they manage to hang on to him!). We had a lovely couple of hours there – the kids played in various configurations (they also have a five year old brother Herbie too and the five kids all spent some time putting on shows for each other, then various numbers played with instruments or out in the garden with their hens or on the swing, some of them went across the road to a green to ride scooters and then they all settled down to watch Star Wars and took it in turns to hold the quail). and Katy and I did indeed chat – about Home Ed, WWOOFing, intentional communities and communes, autonomy and all sorts of other interesting stuff.

Nope, not going to manage this before I go to work – will return later to it…

Back 🙂

We came home via another supermarket, this time to get pants for Tarly (she is now totally knickered up) and bits for dinner. We rather ambitiously only took a hand basket and then trailed around with stuff under our arms and balanced precariously. Back home again I made dinner for the kids and got that tidied up, put a curry on and did some processing of laundry.

Ady came home, Davies and Scarlett went upstairs to prepare Davies’ room for evening guests and we waited for said guests to arrive. Helen-who-lives-on-a-boat along with her husband Kelvin and Alex and Abbie (all of whom also live on a boat, obviously). I think Helen is now officially my most popular friend’s name although I do know a whole host of Katy/ Katie / Catie / Cate /Kates I am disqualifying them as they are all spelt differently :).

They arrived, children disappeared upstairs with Maltesers and we sat chatting. I served up the curry which was much enjoyed and thanks to chocolate for children and alcohol for grown ups the noise and silliness levels were raised all over the house 😆 Helen didn’t have any excuse as she was driving but seemed to keep up with the nonsense well for a sober person ;).

Scarlett was really tired and ended up falling asleep in her clothes at about 1130pm but the others carried on with Abbie and Davies making a very impressive Slinky Dog from Toy Story using a Slinky and various stuff found in Davies’ bedroom. We tried to compete with a torn up Malteser box but despite best efforts their attempt was far better :lol:.

They left about midnight after a really enjoyable evening – hoping to repeat again soon :). We pretty much went straight to bed, it felt *really* late even though it was still earlier than I usually go to bed.

I didn’t go to bed til 2am last night. I’ve been going to bed earlier and as a result getting up earlier too but havent’ actually been sleeping all that well, waking around 5am, so I didn’t go to bed until I really felt tired last night which seemed to work and I slept much better.

But it did mean a later start all round 🙂 Scarlett was in a stroppy mood and couldn’t find any clean knickers. I thought it was because she’d either not been putting them in to be washed, or not putting clean ones away in the right place but a quick scout round showed she only seems to have about 5 pairs. I know I have been chucking them out as they come through the wash if they are too small or the elastic is going so I suspect I have culled to critical point. She does have a stash from an older friend but they are still too big so she needs some pants! Today she elected to wear none rather than borrow a pair of Davies’ or wear yesterdays again. Fortunately she made it to the end of the day without being hit by a bus. She was also disappointed with the breakfast cereal selection on offer and the sandwich fillings at lunchtime – end of the month seems to be hitting Scarlett harder than anyone else this week… payday tomrrow though, so it’ll be new pants, honey nut shredded wheat and tuna fish all the way for her! 😆

Davies and Scarlett did some bedroom tidying while I did some drafting a biography of us to approach the first 15 potential WWOOFing hosts with. I went for a personalised intro for each farm mentioning what had drawn us to them and we were most interested in, referencing their website if they have one, saying when we were in their area and then a copy and pasted bit about us as follows:

We are Nic, Ady, Davies and Scarlett. We are hoping to spend a year from March 2010 travelling around the UK WWOOFing. We have been hankering after a more self sufficient, greener, simpler lifestyle for several years and have been moving towards it in small ways in our home on the south coast of England. We have an allotment and grow food in our garden at home. We keep chickens, bantams, ducks and quails, most of which we have hatched in an incubator or bred from our own livestock. Our eventual goal is to become self sufficient and have as small an environmental impact as possible. We want to learn all we can about all the aspects of this lifestyle while getting a realistic idea of what it all entails. We are hardworking, fast learning, friendly and cheerful. Our children are well behaved, responsible and keen to learn alongside us.

Below is a little bit about us, the things we have done before and are doing now and what we’d rather be doing more of:

Ady currently works in retail support and merchandising of bedding plants. He has previously worked in all sorts of careers including Retail Management, game keeping, managing an indoor rollercoaster and a spot of TV presenting. Ady wants to leave the 9-5 behind, learn about rearing animals and butchery, spend more time with his family and live a simpler life.

Nic has also worked in a wide variety of jobs from Retail Management, Recruitment and Marketing but currently works part time at the local library whilst being at home with Davies and Scarlett. Nic had done some volunteer shepherding, overseen the hatching of over 100 birds, loves baking, preserving and is learning about wine and beermaking in an experimental fashion! Nic wants to learn more about beekeeping, dairy farming (including milking a cow, making cheese etc.), lambing, calving and growing fruit and vegetables. Nic can crochet, knit and sew a bit, has done some basket weaving, rag rug making and interested in natural crafts. Nic is a qualified Waste Prevention Advisor volunteer with the local council which involved a course learning about composting, real nappies, waste collection and processing, recycling and landfill and other green issues. Nic loves the idea of off-grid living and would love to learn more about sustainable, renewable and alternative energy and building.

Davies is nearly ten and loves bushcraft, survival and being outside. He’d love to learn to drive a tractor and understand how it works. Davies loves animals, particularly sheep. His other passions are film making, drawing and storytelling.

Scarlett is nearly eight and loves animals. She has hatched and raised ducklings this year and is interested in breeding, rearing and keeping animals.

Both Davies and Scarlett enjoy baking, breadmaking, growing fruit and vegetables and learning about where our food comes from. They are interested in nature and wildlife, the world around them and how everything works. Davies and Scarlett have always been Home Educated.

We’d love to come and meet you and work with you and look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,
Nic, Ady, Davies and Scarlett

I wanted to strike a balance between making us sound interesting and useful and the sort of people you would want to meet and have in your home, not too know-it-all but genuinely interested and up for learning not just slogging on hard labour tasks, clear we are a foursome and want to work that way but also getting over enough of who we are that if we are likely to be incompatible then it will be clear to potential hosts from the outset. I sent the first 15 and was gratified to have one almost instant reply:

To you all, thank you for you email, that sounds quite a possible idea: the only thing is I think you will have far more to teach us than
the other way around!! We have done many of the things you mention: poultry incubation, home butchery etc, but have rather streamlined our
life lately to fit in other things we want to do: D photography, J counselling, but we could fill a very happy week with work
together I’m sure. I can not at the moment organise that far in advance as I am now a student & it depends when my essay deadlines are (
no one would want to be around as they approach!)But March is usually a good month for wwoofing for us, so shall we keep in touch & see
what the new brings?
Best wishes from J.

which sounds very promising 🙂 A second reply came a bit later which is also pretty promising too:

Thank you for your enquiry. You have a very interesting lifestyle. We are not organic but a farm that uses little fertilisers etc… We run about 200 cattle and a small flock of sheep. We also have a few chickens and share your interest in hatching eggs etc…Previously we have also had pigs and goats.
I did a butchery course and we are interested in maximising profits from our cattle. I have lots of ideas but they all cost money to get started and running a farm, caring for my elderly parents does not give us much time to set something new up. Especially after a cold spell and then a drought in the first part of the year, alot of my time has been taken up in sourcing feed.
We also run a Certificated Caravan site for 5 units and last year put in electric hook ups and a water tap to each pitch. The jobs ongoing for this project are grass cutting and bin emptying etc.. The current wwoofers have helped us with making steps and a water tap for the chemical disposal point and dry stonewalling amongst many other jobs. They are involved in the routine work which includes feeding calves and cattle and cleaning out the sheds which house the cattle.
Wwoofers generally take a part in the household chores as well, preparing meals and general cleaning, laying and clearing the meal
table etc….
The other side of our farm is where my Mum & Dad live, this is an old georgian house with nine bedrooms and very overgrown gardens and orchards. We are trying to reinstate them, to produce vegetables and fruit trees to include apples etc… It may be that the work might be between the two sites.
Does this sound like what you are looking for?
I would need your membership No, if you want to book in
Regards D

We got our first knockback – a disappointing one as these people had sounded potentially very suitable:

Hi,

Sounds like we have many similar interests. However……..we will be building our roundwood timber-framed house in 2011 and life will be somewhat hectic to say the least and all volunteer spots are taken. If you would like to go on our house-build mailing list you will be kept up-to-date with progress and any possible opportunities to get involved.

Happy WWOOFing,

and we will indeed get ourselves on their mailing list. And finally an outright no:

Thank you very much for enquiring about WWOOFing at Darracott Farm.
Unfortunately we have already placed some WWOOFers over that time.
Best of luck in finding a host.

With best wishes,

which if it is a rejection rather than the truth is a nicely put one at least :).

I can’t share these emails with the world at large on the wonderingwanderers blog and I don’t really intend to copy and paste them all here either but it’s been exciting making the first real moves towards this part of the plan today so I wanted to mark it here, also I thought people might want to see what I’ve written and the response we’re getting. I may think about tweaking our email for the next batch if it proves unpopular.

We had lunch and then were supposed to be going to a localish (driving distance) park to meet up with Mel, Liam and Lily. It had been grey and cloudy all morning so I was expecting it to be quite miserable in the park anyway but we never actually got there. My car had very little petrol in it so the petrol station with my last fiver was first port of call anyway but thanks to all the rain and quite possibly the lack of petrol it didn’t want to start. I spent ages turning it over and finally got it going but it kept spluttering and dying which had me thinking it was petrol related too so I emptied a can we had in the garage into it and it did then start. It juddered and took ages to be happy (quite possibly proving what all Dad’s insist about dragging the crap up from the bottom of the tank and clogging up the carburettor or something) but finally was ticking over just fine so we set off. Unfortunately just as we were about to hit the dual carriageway off a roundabout it died again and I just managed to pull into a bus stop before the engine stopped.

I tried texting and ringing Mel but got no reply so as we were right next to a different park I left a message to say where we were and that if they wanted to meet us there instead we’d hang on and hope to hear from them for 10 minutes or so before trying to get home. The car eventually started again and was fine driving round in a big circle to get to the park car park where I finally got hold of Mel and invited them to our house instead. The car restarted fine there and again at the petrol station so fingers crossed no damage has been done and it was a one off.

Davies and Scarlett had been on Park Mode so felt the need to run round the garden while I was on Sofa Mode so gave in to that and then Mel, Liam and Lily arrived. It’s been an unlikely friendship really, we met online on netmums or some other such forum that I think I only visited the once when Scarlett and Lily were about 2 and the boys were 4 and 5 (Liam is 9 months older than Davies). The kids have been to each others birthday parties and always play okay together although I doubt any of them ask about the others when we don’t meet up. Mel is a VAT inspector and really active in the kids’ schools but somehow we have always got on really well and she really champions Home Education and seems to get it in a way that so few school-using parents do. Liam has a statement whilst Lily is on the G&T register and the two of them couldn’t be more different with their approaches and biases and Mel does a fab job of supporting them both really well in their different strengths.

The kids all played really well today, some of the time all four of them and then the girls spent some time with the birds while Davies and Liam X boxed. Mel and I chatted and drank tea and coffee. I caught up on all her news and she heard all about our planned adventure and was really enthusiastic telling me ‘this just feels like the logical conclusion to everything I know about you and how you have lived for the last five years’. She was very positive and made some interesting observations. She also went into the playroom for a browse and came out with some books, a globe and a toy bin and put some money in the campervan fund pot :).

They left and I sorted out some tea for the kids (leftovers from last night, no complaints from either of them on that count 🙂 ) and checked the status of some ebay auctions I had ending today to find we’d sold another £25 worth of stuff. That brings our sold total to over £150 and we have saved £300 this month too. We have another huge pile ready for carboot selling next weekend and more things listed on ebay ending over the next week and I’m thinking about doing some job lots of books and videos Buy It Now for local collection to see if that sells as a friend has recommended that as a way of clearing things quick.

Ady came home and cooked a ‘random selection of items from the freezer’ dinner for us. I read about half of ‘The Last Wolf’ to Davies and Scarlett. Scarlett fell asleep quite early, Davies has been sending me picture texts from his bed :rolls: I’ve also been knitting today, I have a plan to use up lots of my wool stash by making another patchworky blanket as it will be warm and useful on the journey but I can also unpick it again later if I want to use the wool for something else :).

We had plans this weekend, only plans between the four of us but plans nonetheless. But the weather put paid to them.

Saturday morning I worked. Ady was planning to take Davies and Scarlett to the alllotment. We’ll be giving it up pretty soon so we wanted to dig up the potatoes, harvest the onions and garlic and carefully dig up the apple tree to bring home and replant in the garden here. It also happens to be a perfect location to watch the Shoreham Air Show with a panoramic view over the airfield and the skies surrounding it. I was going to walk up and meet them at lunchtime and help finish getting the allotment ready to hand back.

Ady dropped me into work but the skies were cloudy and grey and although it only drizzled with rain it was far too misty for planes to be flying – both from a seeing them from the ground point of view and a visibility for the pilots perspective. I heard no planes all morning at work (which is even closer to the airfield than home) and people coming in were all commenting on it being so quiet. We’d heard the jets fly in on Friday afternoon, I suspect we’ll hear them leave again on Monday.

I started preparing a display and chatted to the two Saturday assistants who both got excellent A level results on Friday and will be heading off to their respective first choice of universities. One wants to be a teacher, the other Prime Minister. It’s exciting listening to them with all their future plans laid out about to spread their wings and go off into making their own way in the world – both of them are full of questions about our planned adventure too, similar in many ways.

I wasn’t surprised to see Ady pull up outside just before my shift finished having not gone to the air show or the allotment thanks to the rain. Back at home we had lunch and I spent a couple of hours listing bits on ebay while Ady looked at campervans and the kids spent the dry intervals in the garden and the wet ones playing indoors.

Eventually we decided to tackle the loft space. We have a narrow strip of loft void running alongside our and Davies’ bedrooms with access doors in both rooms. There are pipes running along too so we have never stashed too much stuff in there but we knew there were things in there to come out, not least because we’re planning on using the space to store some bits while we’re away – things like Christmas decorations, cuddly toys that can’t be parted with yet, a papier mache dalek, that sort of thing ;). There is also a second space in each bedroom accessed from another door which are both covered by heavy furniture and may be stuffed with all sorts of forgotten stuff or may be empty, they also need checking.

We started with the space in Davies’ bedroom end and had to clear stuff infront of the door first. As before things were piled into ‘keeping’, ‘selling’ and ‘binning / recycling’ with the keeping stuff put away neatly into the now-looking-quite-tidy bedrooms, the selling stuff finding it’s way into the playroom which is now chock-full again of stuff ready for another carboot sale next weekend and the binning/ recycling stuff going into Ady’s car to be taken to the tip.

We cleared loads, had one last read of things like ‘congratulations on the birth of your baby girl’ cards and smiled at the deflated helium balloons people had brought to hospital when I had Davies and then binned them.

Ady cooked tea for the kids while I sorted the playroom out and pulled anything worth ebaying out of the piles.

Then the kids and I watched X Factor before they went to bed.

Sunday was another cloudy, wet day so still no planes (although yesterdays rain would have prohibited digging potatoes up at the alllotment, it will be a mud bath up there).

Ady spent some time outside titivating with the ducks and chickens area to put their food undercover and spread some sawdust in the muddiest areas – we need some more chipped bark to see us through the winter round there. I spent ages going back through the 30plus hosts we’d written down in what we’re calling Zone One – Dorset, Devon, Cornwall regions where we are planning on starting and being March, April and May. We needed a maximum of 15 to make first enquires to so I’ve been looking at their websites (most seem to have one), reading their listings and trying to get a good balance of farming, smallholding, eco-friendly, communities etc. The next stage is contacting them so I have been drafting an email which they others will need to read and approve before I personalise it for each of the 15 hosts. Then the same process for Zone Two begins. Hopefully it will be this level of planning which gives us the best possible experience and takes in the biggest variety of environments and hosts. Hopefully… 🙂

Ady and Davies played some chess and then we all went to the tip, calling in at the supermarket on the way home. I cooked roast beef while the others messed about watching bits of various films including Jaws and Chicken Run.

We watched some Attenborough while eating, then some Simpsons and then Ady and I watched Countryfile. Davies and Scarlett were upstairs playing with lego. They asked for a sleepover and we relented as it’s not been a very interesting weekend but unfortunately they blew it by being asked several times over a couple of hours to quieten down and eventually I got Scarlett to come back down to her own bed at 1100 when the noise still wasn’t abating. They were both asleep within about 5 minutes of me doing that, just a shame I had to get cross 🙁

We’ve had a weather warning for huge rainfall in this area and for once it appears to be very accurate. It’s been pouring for a couple of hours now and the road is quite flooded outside. I’m enjoying it while being grateful we’re not camping this weekend :).