One word? When seven would do…

Woke with no tea and no missing animals this morning (although that didn’t remain the case sadly). Our plan had been to visit Caz and Bid at their new home (on a farm) this afternoon but an email from them with a change to their plans for the day meant we were able to go over earlier.

I went out to feed the birds (as in our birds, not birds generally) some leftovers from dinner last night and found the hen with the bad leg looking rather dead. Infact I thought she was dead so went to feed the others before coming back to deal with her. I realised she was still hanging on but was close to dying but she didn’t seem in any pain so I left her to it. I’m not remotely emotionally attached to any of the birds, except perhaps the cockerel but I’ve never really viewed them as pets.

Back inside we watched some Horrible Histories and then Scarlett went out to the birds and came in with the hen to say she was looking really bad now. I agreed she was close to death and said that if Scarlett wanted to she could bring her in the house for the end so she did. She took her in her bedroom and sat with her. Suddenly all of the other birds; chickens and ducks went a bit mad, in a slightly freaky premonition way and Scarlett announced she was dead. I went out to check on the other birds and Scarlett appeared with the hen who wasn’t quite dead after all but doing that gasping for last breathe thing. She finally did die and we put her into the cat carrier she’s been staying in to bury later.

Back inside Scarlett had a little cry and we talked about lifetimes, losing animals and whether it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. We decided loving people and animals is worth the risk of getting hurt and talked a bit about Candle and Malice and how we still miss them but now remember the happy times rather than the sad ends. That had all of us crying a bit.

We galvanised ourselves to action at that point and headed off to see Caz and Bid, stopping at a shop to grab some food to bring. They are in their first week settling in at a land / living space sharing type venture on an organic farm which has plenty of work to do and a long way to go before it’s ideal but is very exciting and has stacks of potential. The kids went off to explore with A & E and declare it ‘amazing’ and ‘awesome’ while I went off to drink tea and chat with Caz and Bid and exchange ‘where we’re at in changing life’ stories. Fully up to date with all each others news I got the grand tour and was able to visualise all the potential ideas – very exciting stuff :).

I then rather lazily sat and chatted to Caz while she planted up tons of seeds ready for the first crop of winter greens. Another friend and her two boys arrived so the boys joined the other children while O joined us (and shamed me by joining in with seed planting rather than sitting like I had done :oops:). We needed to leave as I had to be back for Reading Group.

Thankfully the traffic was kind to us and we’d already rung ahead to get Ady to run a bath for the children, who were so filthy they ended up having a bath to soak the grime off and a shower to wash the dirty bathwater off. I left them in the bath to go to Reading Group. We had an interesting discussion about the book which had very mixed reviews from the group with some really liking it, some really hating it and some inbetween including a couple who had not finished it. I really enjoyed it and would recommend it for a ‘different’ type of read (Scarlett Thomas, The end of Mr Y).

Back home I caught up with Ady, saw now clean and fed children who were in bed but not asleep and then Ady and I had dinner while watching Heston do disgusting macabre things with food. And now to bed.

I was woken this morning by Ady telling me the last two quails had escaped and flown away. They have been nothing but trouble really and the friend who wants to buy them has been tricky to pin down to a date and time to hand them over as their numbers have gone down rapidly from 3 to 2, to zero as of this morning. Apparently a gust of wind had caught their pen and opened it enough for them to escape. Ady had spotted one in the garden as he went to leave for work and thought it was the original escapee back, went to check and realised none were here and then watched that one fly off over the rooftops. He came to tell me and left for work.

Davies, who has in the last two days come close to mastering tea making brought me a cup of tea in bed. This was both lovely (Tea. In bed 🙂 ) and not so lovely (way too milky) but hurrah for not just big kids but big thoughtful lovely ones 🙂 Even if they are still on the small side and put too much milk in.

I broke the news to the kids about the quails, sorted their breakfast and we debated what to do with the day. I needed to go to the post office to send the book I’d sold on Amazon and Scarlett had wanted to visit the library to order the next HP audio book so we decided to walk into Lancing and do those things. I wanted to blog the weekend first so we watched some CBBC while I blogged, Scarlett did some drawing and I got impatient about being interupted. I’ve been quite intolerant today, wonder if it’s hormonal?

Finally at about 11am we left the house armed with some books to go back and the parcelled up book to send. We walked along the alleyways we’d done the litter collecting in last year and were disappointed to see them filled with rubbish 🙁

I struggled a lot with the walk, which is not far at all (infact less than a mile each way) and realised just how unfit I am at the moment. I guess a combination of no swimming, staying off my ankle for 6 weeks and generally avoiding exercise has taken it’s toll. I’ve never been fit but I would have at least classed myself as reasonably active. I’d planned to do Swimathon next year and aim for the 5km but as we won’t be here next April I’ve been toying with the Aspire Channel Swim instead from September – December which would be 22 miles, or 1073 lengths over 12 weeks. It will be over twice my usual swim while the kids have their lessons and I appreciate it is a big ask of people not that long after badgering them to sponsor me for the Swimathon but every penny I do raise will be great and it will hopefully kick start my fitness again ready for the likely more physically demanding lifestyle I’ll be living next year. To make it real I’ve set up a Just Giving page this evening and will put it ‘out there’ nearer the time once I’ve actually started – so apologies in advance for the likely over-mentioning of it once I get going.

My walking was not helped by getting about 5 phonecalls along the way – one from Caz and about 4 from Ady (who won’t know what to do with himself once I am actually with him all the time next year :lol:). The line was dreadful both ways with Caz but we managed to communicate enough to arrange to get together tomorrow, so hopefully she will send me her new address and we can visit them.

Finally in town we visited the post office first. It was mad busy in there and they even had a ‘queue manager’ there talking to people. We spent the queuing time guessing which cashier we’d be seen by (cashier number five please), what the prize would be (they voted for a cuddle from me, then I offered a consolation prize of a cuddle to anyone not winning and said a cuddle from them would have to be my prize if I won) and discussing wishes (Davies suggested ‘infinity wishes’ would be his first one and the woman infront asked for a wish for her if he got his then 🙂 ). They were the only children in there but I’m always really proud to be with D&S in situations like that where they are certainly bored by the length of the queue but able to stand and chat with me rather than play up like many children do.

We left there and nipped to the Co Op for some food supplies, frowning at the fact the onions all the way from NZ were loose but the ‘British Produce’ ones were packaged. We walked past Yvonne from work on the way back to the library on her lunchbreak so she walked back with us. We returned books, Davies joined the reading game (grr, now they both have and I suspect neither of them will actually finish it), Scarlett chose a couple of books with cds and ordered the next HP and I popped my head round the door of the office and introduced myself to a new girl who started today. Our paths will not actually cross as our rotas mean we never work together but as I was there I thought I’d say hello.

We walked home again, me talking to Ady several times and Davies and I having an interesting conversation about employeeing road sweepers versus installing bins and emptying them. He has a good grasp of the ‘investment purchase’ concept but possibly too much faith in human nature…

Back home I made lunch while the kids collapsed, which seemed quite the wrong way round given I was worn out and they weren’t. They spent time outside with chickens and ducks, drawing, watching TV and X boxing aswell as rather noisily playing and then Thank You Neighbour David and whoever-his-sister-was-being-today knocked at the door to ask if we’d lost a chicken. The short answer is yes, the long answer is yes, but weeks ago now so unlikely she’s still around but for speed and knowing they possibly meant a quail I said yes and they said they’d spotted it and could show me where.

Feeling slightly like someone who’d been offered the chance to look at puppies and lured away I went with them about 10 houses down the main road and stood feeling embarrassed as they both got down on hands and knees and peered in bushes in someone’s garden (thankfully there was no one home, they’d already knocked to see). Then I spotted a quail, dived at it and managed to catch it and we all walked back home again, me carrying a squirming little body and giving an impromptu promenade road side lesson in identifying captive birds, waterfowl and poultry. So back up to one quail again.

I listed some stuff on ebay and then decided to list Scarlett’s Barbie stuff and went to start sorting it to photograph. I realised none of the clothes were there so went to Tarly’s room to find them and got involved in sorting out some of the boxes under her bed with her as a reluctant helper. She is so funny – all of the stuff which once cost money, is branded and theoretically what ‘every little girl wants’ she chucked into the car boot sale without a second glance. But she hugged to her chest stones collected from various beaches, some cut out snowflakes from Helmsley Christmas Camp when it snowed, pictures Davies has drawn for her ‘when I was four and poorly’, McDonalds Happy Meal toys she can’t identify the character of but can tell me what the day out was that the visit to McDs was part of. I guess her treasures really are what treasures should be – about memories, people and places rather than marketing, money and branding.

We cleared two out of four boxes we went through, some to the bin, some to the car boot sale pile and a little for ebaying. She declared herself exhausted and retired to the lounge to do more drawing while I quickly photographed some more bits and then made their tea. While they ate I listed on ebay and now have 11 items up with 10 already being watched a couple bid on :).

Ady arrived home, the kids went out to play in the garden after tea and then came in and we finished reading Why the whales came – oh we how love Morpurgo :). Bed for them, dinner and some crappy tv watching for us. Hoping for full strength tea and no news about wildlife to wake me in the morning.

Ady had to do a bit of work on Saturday morning. He had needed to do a photo shoot of some plants all week and as the consequence of managing to take Davies and Scarlett along with him on Wednesday morning and all day Friday so I could work meant it hadn’t gotten done. So he popped along Saturday morning and did it then, which only took a couple of hours so he was back for lunch. Which actually he made ;).

I had a lie in, in preparation for Sunday morning :).

Ady was in a productive mood and spent lots of time in the garden where he edged the earth borders around the patio with some roof tiles. We have a big stack of roof tiles in our garden from when we had the loft converted. We initally kept them as we anticipated using them when we had further building work done on the house, but planning permission was turned down for that and the tiles have just sat around, being moved about three times from one location to another. They are currently in the driveway infront of the garage where they at least have a low nusiance value in terms of being in the way, but a rather high scruffiness count whenever my car is not in the drive hiding them. We did have a bloke who was going to have them as he was doing building work on his bungalow along the road but despite us saying he could help himself for nothing he never took them. I guess they are another thing to add to the list for getting rid of (and potentially raising funds from). Anyway, Ady used a few up creating path edgings which look really good and should prevent the chickens from their habit of dust bathing in the soil and flicking it all over the patio, creating a mud bath whenever it rains.

Davies and Scarlett did lots of Harry Pottering in various guises, watching, creating, drawing, running around with sticks carved into wands, that sort of thing. I am very reluctantly getting dragged into this by osmosis from being in the room when the dvds are played so often :(. It has merely served to convince me that my initial idea that it is Not For Me is accurate. I really don’t like fantasy, witches, wizards, dark underworlds and magic spells, it just doesn’t do it for me at all.

I wasn’t feling great so spent much of the day on the sofa drinking tea and reading the book for book club next week. It was a book that hardly any of the group seemed to want to read (a recommendation from one of the group that we had enough copies of an no waiting list for so was selected on that basis) but I have actually really enjoyed reading it and the two other members of the group I’ve heard from in the last week or so have enjoyed it lots too. It was Scarlett Thomas’ ‘The End of Mr Y’. I tend to have an irrational feeling of not liking anyone called Scarlett (it was supposed to be an unusual name, now everyone’s using it! :lol:) apart from my own of course. Quite looking forward to discussing the book at group.

I rang my Dad to ask if we could borrow some paste tables for the car boot sale and popped over to collect those, stopping to have a bit of a chat with him. I’m getting quite conflicting stories from my parents about their feelings over the whole WOOFing plan, I know my Dad doesn’t approve but he usually wishes us well and will try and help even when he thinks we’re being foolish (most of the time then!) whereas my Mum talks a good talk while whispering in the ear of all four of us at seperate times and trying to do that divide and conquer thing by finding out the bits each of us might be worried about and then saying to the others ‘well X is not happy about it are they?’. So far though she is maintaining she will miss us lots, doesn’t want us to go but ‘won’t tell you you are making a terrible mistake because it’s your life and you have to do what you want to do’. The best I think we can hope for is a blessing, regular contact and a warm welcome at Christmas and them not feeling the need to report us to social services really! Mum suggested that it has been the cause of many rows between them so they are just not talking about it any more. My private feeling is that any fodder for rows which isn’t actually about them is probably a positive thing ;).

Back at home I sorted out the freezers to see if we have enough food to keep us going until payday (just about), cooked an eclectic mix of things from the freezer for the kids dinner and then read them some more Why the whales came before packing them off for an earlyish night.

Ady and I packed up my car having removed all but the front two seats which leaves a HUGE space to fill. We just about had room for the paste tables and a chair each and then we were also in bed before midnight too.

Sunday morning started far, far too early with the alarm going off at 530am. I’d had a restless night anyway, not helped by Scarlett’s HP audiobook getting stuck and the sound of Stephen Fry repeating the same syllable drifting up the stairs from her room. It didn’t rouse me quite enough to wake up and go and switch it off but it was there drilling into my dreams. Everyone got up, no one wanted breakfast, I made a flask each of tea and coffee and chucked a couple of chocolate bars into a bag (next time need to bring proper food supplies) and we were off. We took both cars so we could leave Davies and Scarlett (and Ady’s car) at my parents. Dad had said he should be up but to just let them in and he’d be up shortly afterwards so I went in with them and got them settled with the TV on, curtains opened, some lights on etc and Dad appeared.

Ady and I were at the car boot sale by 615am, it officially starting at 630am. We were told we could park anywhere between certain markers so we chose a pitch at the top of the second aisle. It was a perfect choice and we’d definitely aim for a top end of an aisle pitch again. I guess there were about 50 cars there at that point, although we reckon there were about 400 cars there by the peak (which at £8 per car and £10 per van is a pretty good revenue for the field owner every Sunday!). We set up, a duvet and two plastic sheets for books, clothing, shoes and bags laid out on the ground, the two paste tables for stuff worth highlighting and a load of plasic crates for things all along the front of the stall. It did rain briefly at about 7am which was a bit of a nightmare as we’d not anticipated it and didn’t really deal with it quick enough but nothing got spoilt, it just stopped us from setting up and meant we had to wipe things dry again afterwards. Next time we’ll have some more plastic sheets to chuck over stuff quickly if needed.

We’d heard all sorts of horror stories of people rummaging through your car while you try and set up, but we didn’t have any of that. Possibly because we were there so early there were very few buyers there yet, possibly we looked like we’d not have anything of value anyway and possibly the rain stopped it but aside from one bloke in a mac coming over with a furtive ‘you haven’t seen me, alright?’ type manner asking ‘got any lego?’ we didn’t get any hassle at all.
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Ady and I spent the whole morning moving stuff around the stall, keeping it tidy, rotating things as the morning went on and different sorts of people were around – first thing we sold things like adult shoes and householdy things to people who didn’t have English as their first language. There are a lot of people over here at this time of year working at fruit and veg picking, plant growing etc and living in caravans / mass housing on farmland. Next came the collector types – we didn’t really have much to interest them but we did sell all our electrical stuff then, some headphones, a computer printer, several travel / multi-use plugs (I think we got them when we did the Terminal Five trials), some wireless router type bits.

The next wave of people all seemed to have dogs, I guess if you are up early walking your dog you might as well peruse a car boot sale as you do it. We started selling books, toys and games then, lots of my handbags went along with more shoes and a few clothes. There were a few people who were clearly looking for specific things – a woman with several bags of jigsaws came and bought a couple of ours, presumably to resell, and a boxed pair of champagne flutes went to a woman with a collection of glassware already nestling in her basket.

We now started to move stuff around a bit more, we worked out IT / electrical stuff was selling well so we created an ‘IT corner’ which seemed to have one particular spot that every single thing we put on it sold, I laid out all the clothes for sale and spread out the books, we displayed pc games nicely and opened up a few things so you could actually see what was in the boxes. We also began a little challenge to see who could sell certain things – I won hands down, selling that hideous knitted skirt doll that my granny gave Scarlett for Christmas, a hotwheels style car set Davies has had for years and years by running it off the edge of the paste table, and that tall doll Scarlett got for her second birthday and has ‘experimented’ on with make up and nail varnish. Ady and I both gasped when a rather seedy looking bloke on his own picked her up with a leering grin and agreed we’d have felt really weird selling it to him but thankfully he put it back down again. I dressed her up and finally someone bought her for using in an art display she is doing on the effects of war on children using dolls to give war injuries to. Sounds slightly creepy but a good home for that doll to go to having been abused here all these years – Scarlett thought it very fitting when we told her 😆

We did plenty of active selling – a woman (who Ady said afterwards is destined to HE her little daughter even if she doesn’t know it yet) bought several crafty things and nearly bought our marble run when I drew her attention to it, a man who showed lots of interest in my educational books so I asked if he was a teacher and then showed him various other things suitable when he said he taught adults with learning difficulties bought loads from us, a man with a small daughter on his shoulders took away loads of stuff we pointed him in the direction of including a pair of sparkly pink baseball boots similar to the shoes she was wearing but in a larger size.

We made people laugh ’50p and it could save your life!’ to the person looking at a high-vis top and just chatted to people if they looked like they were in the mood for it, or smiled and moved away so they could browse without us standing over them if they looked like they’d prefer that.

At about 11am the families and children came round so we moved stuff around again, created a box of ‘girlie crafts’ with knitting, weaving, beads, mosaic kits etc all in pink and purple boxes, set up a Thomas kit so you could see what it did, made a little science and experiments area on the table, piled up board games together and laid out all the dressing up stuff.

The final phase at midday was people looking for stuff going at real bargain prices so we moved the crap to the front, offered it for 20p and affected the air of ‘we don’t want to take anything home!’ while quietly debating the things worth packing up to have another try at selling next time, the things worth maybe ebaying, the stuff we’d give straight to my mum for her charity shop. Having moved stuff around into areas with that in mind when we called it a day and started packing up at 1pm it took just half an hour. We put the stuff to bring home again in first then packed all the things to give to Mum in boxes and bags ready to drop straight off at her charity shop. It’s a project which helps homeless people back into housing and employment so is an excellent cause we are only too happy to support with our stuff that didn’t sell.

We had a count up and after the £8 pitch fee we had cleared nearly £70 which is an excellent start for our first time and makes that big empty space in our house feel even better :). We very much had the attitude that we didn’t want anyone to show interest in something and walk away without buying it because we priced it too high so there is every chance we priced too low but that’s fine, I’d apply the same idea again next time. We need to bring suncream, more food and things to chuck over stuff if it rains but other than that I think we did really well for our first time and we actually really enjoyed it too :).

Back to Mum and Dad’s for lunch – Mum had rung at midday to see how we were doing and been really upbeat and nice on the phone saying the kids were having a good time, had already had two breakfasts and so would be fine to hang on for us to get home about 130pm for lunch and she would go and get some bits from Sainsburys.

Mum and Scarlett had gone to get lunch and when we arrived everyone was in good spirits and very happy having had a nice morning together. Mum was very up for having the children again in a couple of weeks when we do another boot sale so that is good :). She was a bit like this last time before we went away, suddenly keen to spend lots of time with us and being lovely – hurrah :).

Frazer and his girlfriend Cat had been around in the morning so the kids had got to properly meet her and they came back while we were eating lunch so we were properly introduced too. She seems very nice and had been quite taken with D&S apparently and had returned with a little present each for them of a little bird on a clip which they were quite delighted with. 🙂

Mum and I dropped all the stuff from the car boot sale down to her shop and then we came home. Everyone was pretty tired and we’d had a late lunch but I decided to do a roast dinner as we had the meat defrosted ready, so Davies and Scarlett walked round the shop for me and got some stuffing mix, Ady emptied the car of the few bits we’d brought home and the kids had a bath. We enjoyed dinner and I was glad I’d bothered as it meant Ady and I had eaten early and we’d had some time together the four of us.

Davies and Scarlett went to bed and were asleep in record time, Ady and I had baths and watched Vexed which we both thought was pretty good and then also went to bed and were asleep in record time. A very productive day and another step along the road to becoming Wondering Wanderers :).

Ady had a Special Assignment for B&Q today which was covertly going round Homebase and Focus and checking whether they have equivalent lines to B&Q on about 100 products, noting down the price and barcode and trying not to get caught, entering all the info in a spreadsheet and then emailing it back to B&Q. It will then be used as part of an ad campaign, presumably to show how much cheaper they are on comparable lines.

He was hampered by this in several ways a) having Davies and Scarlett with him, although in many ways they help his cover by making him look less suspicious b) getting Davies to read out barcodes to him, he likes Davies to help but is not 100% confident of him reading out the right numbers 😆 c) across the array of laptops (3) in our house all have different versions of spreadsheet programs, he didn’t want to send it from our email address so wanted to forward it to his phone first and send it from that which would show up at B&Q as his work email – a trial run with various laptops last night proved tricky in this manouvere (that doesn’t look like it’s how you spell manouvere).

But I was off being Nicola and wearing a skirt to work (I also wore a top and leggings, not just a skirt although perhaps a topless library service is the way forward to drum up issues?). I got them to drop me off on their way to Homebase and Focus and was rather launched into the fray.

Now I really, really don’t believe in the whole Friday 13th thing, infact I don’t hold with any superstitions and will deliberately walk under ladders to prove it but several of my colleagues do and for once it would have been nice to have an explanation for all the stuff going wrong today. We started with the banking, once we’d found the safe key and that was all pretty straightforward. Except C, the childrens librarian was the senior on duty this morning and she can be a bit Famous Five and need to Deal With A Crisis in an efficient way, although I saw a rather different side to her today.

As I was about to go to the bank with the cash the doors were opened to the public and it became clear things ‘out the front’ had not happened, such as the papers being taken out of the letterbox and stamped with the PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE FROM THE LIBRARY stamp. C was all for giving them straight out but I insisted, much to the amusement of the two old boys who read them every morning on stamping them as I am sure that is the only thing preventing them from doing a runner with them. They agreed :lol:. Then there was an issue with the photocopier so I also dealt with that, all with the last two days takings in a bag on my shoulder.

I finally escaped to the bank, paid in the cash, had a brief chat with someone I used to work with at ScoutShops 10 years ago (10 years! Really?! She assured me I don’t look any older at all 🙂 ) and got back to work to find the systems had all crashed and gone down. Some phonecalls to other branches ascertained this was a county-wide issue and with some faffing we got the system into fallback mode which means we can issue and discharge book and that’s about it. While we were struggling with that the gardener (older woman, has very attractive Sarah Connor from Terminator arms which always have me drifting off slightly into lesbian tendacy fantasies) managed to flick up a stone with her strimmer (see, she even has power tools) and shatter one of the main foyer windows. Cue almost mass hysteria from C, childrens librarian, while nice T who works on relief was still struggling with the very concept of the whole Fallback mode. GI Sarah and I went for tea and decided as we were there all day til the bitter end and had an early 12o’clock lunch we’d go to the pub to compose ourselves for the afternoon :).

Which we did. And it was most pleasant. GI Sarah had a half a bitter shandy, I had a white wine spritzer and I strongly suspect that fortification saw us through the rest of the day with glaziers, further system disruptions and general stressiness.

I had a chat with Big Boss Brenda who told me there was no possibility of a career break as I’d simply not been there long enough but that I was a really valued member of staff they would be very sorry to lose, if there is even a library service when we come back a year later I would walk straight back into any vacancy and she hopes I have gotten something out of my time there as to her it has felt very one sided with them getting a really good deal out of me with all my extra commitment, ideas, Chatterbooks, Reading Groups etc. I felt quite cherished :).

Finally 6pm rolled round and Ady was outside to collect me. D&S were pleased to have me home and I sat and read several chapters of Why The Whales Came to them once they’d finished the HP game they were playing and I’d showed them the OCD way of putting the geomags away (seperating into different coloured rods 😳 ).

Once home and sitting down I felt my cold making an re-emergence so in the interests of Not Giving In to it I drank lots of wine instead :lol:. Ady and I were chucking a plastic claw (I think it is from a Ben 10 figure) at each other with impressions of the aliens from Toy Story who worship the claw so when he fell asleep on the sofa I sellotaped it to his head. This made me laugh so much I almost woke him up and when he did wake up I laughed until my tummy hurt and tears were rolling down my face as he in his sleep addled way was saying ‘you’ve done something haven’t you? have you drawn a moustache on me?’ until he finally reached up to his head and found the claw 😆 😆 And fun like that won’t be hampered by living in a small space next year 😆

And now bed is calling.

We could have met up with friends today but I have no petrol in my car and am trying to preserve funds this month having transferred all extra cash into the Campervan fund. I was also aware of tonight being a planned late night and had things I wanted to crack on with at home. So we stayed home.

Davies and Scarlett are still on a HP kick so much of their day involved watching the dvd, playing in the garden with sticks carved into wands, playing upstairs pretending to be characters, sitting on the stairs connecting DSs on HP games and in Davies’ case completing the big marauders map he’d been working on last night. He showed it to me and I asked whether he was going to colour it in. He patiently explained it wasn’t coloured but would be yellow and aged so I suggested they use my teabags still waiting to cool down and go into the compost to age it. Which they did, with great glee 🙂

I listed some items on ebay – higher value things that we reckon we’ll get more from selling that way than at a car boot sale. Already have people watching most of them so fingers crossed for more funds raised for the Campervan account :). I then went through the book case and declared 4 out of 6 shelves books to go. A quick check on Amazon Marketplace showed most of them would be worth a penny so they are back on the bookshelf with hopes of raising slightly more for them. I did list about 5 books including 100 easy lessons which had a saga attached to getting in the first place many years ago, was used for about 12 lessons with Davies and has sat on the shelf ever since untouched. For some reason I had a slight pang about that and sure enough it’s been the thing to sell instantly. No idea why I would think about keeping it really and infact now it’s sold I won’t be.

I cooked a quiche Ady had brought home cheap yesterday, rummaged in the freezer and took out some lasagne for Ady and I for later and packed up waterproof jackets and a picnic rug and waited for Ady to get home. He was running late but thankfully traffic was light and we arrived not too late to meet some friends for a pre-show picnic in the grounds of the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum before heading off to the main event of the event which was a promenade production of The Firework Makers Daughter, adapted from Philip Pulman’s novel, performed by the local Chichester Festival Theatre Youth Group. We knew at least five of the children appearing in it, all HEd and it being the last night of the run of shows a Home Ed trip had been organised to see it. We’d not got discount on the tickets which were not cheap (£15 each for adults, £7.50 for children) but I’d been feeling flush at the time the event was first talked about months ago so bought tickets. There were at least eight families there we knew and we kept bumping into people which was lovely.

I did start taking photos but got told off and asked to delete them all so I can’t share them 🙁 I’d not realised it wasn’t allowed and still think it’s slightly mad when in an open air location and it’s on the grounds of child protection when all the kids involved are performing infront of an audience, but still…

The first scene was inside, in a room lit with hundreds of red paper lanterns. The story starts with Lila, daughter of a firework maker experimenting and creating. Her father comes along, praises her skill but tells her she will never be a firework maker as she needs to find a husband and marry instead. The story follows Lila after she runs off to prove him wrong – followed and accompanied by her best friend Tulac and Hamlet, a white talking elephant. Incase you have not read it and intend to (and I do recommend it, it’s very good) I won’t tell any more of the story, but as Lila ran off so the whole audience followed her, down the hill to the market square section at the museum.

There folllowed about 12 different scenes with us folllowing the actors and musicians around the place, marvelling at the fabulous effects, props and costumes. There was an interval during which us HE folk gathered as it was the 9th birthday of one of our number so cake had been brought to sing and light candles on for her.

The show ended, in the dark by now as it was gone 9pm with a firework display. As it was their last night plenty of the cast were emotional and it was a truly excellent production and performance. Really enjoyed it :). Davies and Scarlett stayed together but were mostly apart from Ady and I as children were urged forward at each scene. We caught up with them at the end and they were both full of how fab it had been and how much they’d loved it, how glad they were to have had the book read to them beforehand and which were their favourite characters and scenes.

We headed for home, watching out for Percy-wotsits but seeing none. The kids went to bed, Ady and I had a very late dinner and now I am feeling a bit rough and hoping it is tiredness rather than anything else lingering so I’m off to bed.

I worked in the morning – Ady took Davies and Scarlett off with him so I was home alone for an hour or so, always a slightly strange situation given how infrequently it happens. Ady had picked me up an ipod shuffle (*tiny* little thing) for £15 in one of the supermarket staff shops so I was battling with installing itunes and then battling with getting all the songs off an external hard drive back onto the laptop via itunes which needed to convert them all. It has worked but it seemed to be taking real time of each song to do :rolls: And I can’t work out how to get songs back off it again so it now has every piece of music from the hard drive including a load of sci-fi sound effects (used for Doctor Who party) and a load of classical music. Which is likely to prove quite annoying when listening to it and getting Daleks saying ‘EXTERMINATE!’ in the middle of my Amy Winehouse songs 😆

I enjoyed my morning at work – saw F, who I’ve not seen for ages as I was on holiday and then she was, so we had plenty to catch up on. And the Lucy came in so I had a chat with her while R&R chose books and joined the summer reading game. It was a busy morning too with a big delivery, storytime and loads of borrowers coming in so the time just flew – the days I get fed up there are the slow ones.

Back home at 1pm the others had already got home and eaten lunch. They’d had a good morning visiting stores and also popped into a charity shop. They had bought a HP dvd which was one they’d not already got and had a second disc full of extras so that was the afternoon taken care of for D&S. I let the fact we’re supposed to be not spending and getting rid of stuff rather than acquiring more go – it was only 2 quid and we will be taking some dvds with us.

All of which left me free to finish going through all the hosts that will accept children – there are 198, narrow down all who sound suitable for us and plot them all on a big map. The narrowing down process clearly hasn’t been strict enough though as we have 114 plotted on our map. We discounted hosts only when one of us vetoed them – usually for something like ‘we like to celebrate the turning of the earth and her moon phases and seasons by dancing around the fire’ – Ady. ‘We value all life and live on raw food only, a fully vegan diet with no caffeine, alcohol or cigarettes’ – Nic. Basically anyone we deemed potential weirdos 😆 😆 We’ve tried to get a good mix of large and small operations, some fruit and veg, lots of animals, some organic. We have got remote crofters on Scottish isles, people who are being self sufficient, people who sell their produce, people who are living off grid, several intentional communities, a handful of Home Educators, some who are all but city dwellers, vineyards, beekeepers, cattle, dairy, sheep farmers, those who grow herbs to make medicines, those who keep sheep for their wool and spin and dye and knit woollen garments for a living.

We will clearly need to hone the list now as we have three times as many hosts as we need for our year. I’m sure there will be a sort of natural selection process whereby we won’t suit what they are looking for or they won’t be open for WOOFers at the time of year we will be in their location. But I suspect we will do an initial cull as our next step to bring the numbers down a little to maybe double what we need.

Our next step therefore is writing out the months of our year away and picking 3-5 for each month working our way around the country. We have some things we want to do at certain times including my own personal wish list of seeing the northern lights. I’ve been looking at various websites talking about sightseeing in the UK too and trying to find other things we’d like to make a point of doing as we go round. I’d quite like to see dolphins again so that might be a target for JUly / August next year, we’d like to see as many friends as possible on the way round, attend as many of the regular get togethers as we can so if we can be in the vicinity for parties in roughly the right time that would be good. I’d still like to do a Christmas camp in 2011 so if we could be near a right-sized youth hostel in early December that would make sense and I guess we’ll probably come home to my parents for Christmas. It looks like the sensible route would therefore be off to the left into Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, round and up to South Wales and North Wales, across to the east of Scotland, up into the highlands and islands, down via a hostel, back to the south for Christmas and then off to the east and midlands early 2012 in a sort of spiralling fashion. The biggest concentration of hosts is in that first chunk of the south west and Wales so I think we’ll need to go back through all the ones we’ve marked in that area and be more choosey with our selection.

We also need to write a biography type email about ourselves and get it sent to try and convince hosts to have us. Then start sending them off and coordinating responses.

So that was my afternoon 🙂 I also managed to write my first blogpost over on http://wondering-wanderers.blogspot.com/ which will be the public face record of the journey, complete with back story, planning the whole thing and what happened next. Still not entirely sure what I’m going to do with that but enough people have told me it’s a story worth telling and might even bring in some money but I need to work out how exactly. Tasha suggested listing all the various kit we’ll need for the year starting with the campervan and working downwards to gas, solar panel, working boots, good outdoor gear and a good supply of tinned goods and contacting companies to see if they want to sponsor us and supply them in exchange for plugs on the blog. Which seems reasonable but I’m conscious of making it relevant and not spamming readers :). I think I need to write a fair bit more and have a blog with a bit of proper content before I do anything else with it. I’ll also be getting some advice from Jax about ways of making money from your blog.

The kids had tea, while watching more HP and Ady got home. I read some ‘Why the whales came’ and the kids went to bed. Davies didn’t actually make it to bed as such as he is creating a huge marauders map but they were in bedrooms at least.

My mate Tasha has taught me new words today 🙂

Everyone was up really early this morning – I woke with Ady’s alarm at 6am, Davies got up too, then Tarly did and I never got back to sleep so Ady brought me a cup of tea and I got up. The weather was crappy so our planned foraging day up on the downs with Tasha, Toby and Vinnie had to be postponed and I sent Tasha a text asking if she had a Plan B in mind. Her reply of ‘come to your house if you’re happy to have us? and what the hell are you doing up at this hour?!’ made me quite literally lol 🙂 😆

Ady went to work, the kids and I watched some ‘How it’s made’, I stuck some bread dough in the breadmaker and made some flapjacks and my mate Jay’s rather fabulous recipe for Chinese Chews (which are neither chinese or chewy) and used a chopped up mars bar for the ‘cup of something nice’ in the recipe then nipped out to collect Tasha, Toby and Vinnie.

Back at ours the older three played – inside and out, Vinnie joined them every so often between yabbering away at us in the the way only a two year old can. His current favourite phrase is ‘cool dudes do that’ which I love and may just make my own new catchphrase 😆 I heart Vinnie – toddler boys are ace :). Tasha had brought some crochet to do so I took the opportunity to gather a large amount of my wool stash together and go through it. I seperated it into two large bags to sell – one nasty acrylic, one nicer stuff and one bag to keep and knit into something to take with us. I decided on another blanket like my patchwork one on the basis it takes no skill, looks ace, is super warm, everyone I know wants one so it will be great to take with us, easy to unpick if I want to use the wool for something else and be both decorative and useful on The Adventure :).

So we chatted and knitted and crocheted, learnt about what cool dudes do and listened to the ducks quacking, the cockerels crowing and the quails doing their new sound which sounds rather like a Leslie Phillips ‘twit twoo’ type wolf whistle 😆 And ate, breadmaker bread, flapjacks and chinese chews :).

I ran them home, Davies and Scarlett did some room tidying and then spent ages connected on some DS game until Ady came home. They had tea while I finished going through all the potential hosts on the WWOOFing website. I now have about 30 to plot on our UK map before we can start contacting them with requests to come and WWOOF.

Ady continues to peruse campervans on ebay, I’m battling with itunes on one of the old laptops and we’re watching Heston do something mad with liquid nitrogen.

says Ady perusing ebay 😆

Off to visit Helen, Alex and Abbie today on board their boat. I didn’t allow enough time to take the horrid school summer holiday traffic into account, particularly through hotspots such as Arundel, Chichester and the Witterings so what could be a half hour drive in light traffic or an hour in normal traffic turned into 90 minutes 🙁

The kettle was on when we got there though and while the kids fished off the side of the boat with nets, Helen (who is rapidly becomming my existing in a small living space consultant 😉 ) and I caught up and chatted.

We had lunch and then after a tour of their campervan – very cool, all now even more excited about living in one next year 🙂 – we walked down to the beach. Scarlett and Abbie crab hunted while Alex and Davies did ‘extreme coastal climbing’ as designed by Alex which involved working their way along the coast wall face through trees and undergrowth without touching the ground. It had eight levels and they made it to level six apparently. Much scratches and exhaustion later they assured us it was fun and worth it :).

Back to the boat for a cup of tea and some on board hide and seek for the kids (not at all sure it is the right location for that game) before realising it was nearly 5pm and time for us to be going. The drive home was not so bad and I made dinner for the kids before Ady got home.

A faffing about half hour between me asking the kids to get into pjs and clean hands, faces and teeth and then actually doing it led to a lecture from me about bedtime behaviour and then I read a chapter of Why the whales came before they went to bed.

We’ve spent the evening browsing ebay for camper vans, hence the title 🙂

Scarlett ended up sleeping in our bed last night. Solely because she wasn’t asleep when we went up to bed, infact neither was Davies, and she doesn’t like being left downstairs on her own. This meant it was only a matter of time before someone gave up trying to sleep three in a bed and went downstairs – it was Ady around 3am :).

We bimbled about a bit this morning, Davies had a bath, we all watched TV before galvanising ourselves to go and tackle the cupboard under the stairs. Davies and Scarlett would not have been at all helpful, infact would possibly not have fitted in the room so they kept themselves busy and out of the way while Ady and I got on with it.

It was fairly boring but we now have an empty cupboard under the stairs with the exception of camping stuff which has gone back in there ready for Sustainability Centre camping next month and will face a cull before being put away. We now have way more than one car full of stuff so will be doing at least two car boot sales if not more and a heap of stuff deemed worth more than we’d get a car boot sale and therefore needing to be listed on ebay. It feels good to be doing it all though – a step closer to the plan and theraputic to be shedding stuff we don’t need. I still have about 4 bags full of wool and fabric to make decisions on so will either have to get busy making stuff to give / sell /use or get shot of that too.

We finally reached the back of the cupboard, sorted through everything into piles of keep, sell and dump and then Ady did a run to the tip. I got dinner on and stood and peeled the whole of this years garlic crop into individual cloves. Last year I stupidly let loads of them go rotten so this year I have peeled them all and put them into jam jars with olive oil which will keep for ages and ages – tedious thing to do but worth it to look at them all ready to use and preserved til I want them :).

A lovely roast dinner, followed by raspberries and cream from PYO the other day while watching Countryfile before the kids went off to bed. I had a very frustrating phone conversation with my Mum who I am sure if being particularly stupid about the whole thing and was asking questions like ‘what will you sell clothes for – I can get £5 a bag for rags for the charity shop’ and ‘what about books – I can get £1 each for books, don’t sell them for less than that!’ and still didn’t seem to get it when I pointed out this is not just about clearing the house but is also a fairly serious fund raising operation for *us* for our camper van :rolls: Did do a rather canny telling her the kids would love to spend the morning with them next Sunday while we’re doing the carboot selling rather than asking her though which I was proud of :).

And that was the weekend :).

Thursday was my all day at work day. I’ve been struggling with work since we got back from holiday for various reasons. I think one is that it is just hard being on my ankle all day really. It is far, far better at nearly 5 weeks in and although it is stiff first thing in the morning and gets slightly swollen throughout the course of a day if I am on it too much I am no longer needing painkillers or the support bandage. I’m not really limping any more and whilst it is still puffy you wouldn’t really know without looking closely that there was anything wrong. But I am very cagey about doing something to it, still struggle a bit with steps and stairs and can’t see me wearing anything other than very flat shoes for quite some time to come.

Partially I am already no longer working for the library in my head. I have been there nearly four years now which is about the longest I’ve ever held any job and nothing is new or exciting any more. I am highly thought of and I like my colleagues but I feel bored and restless really. Knowing that we’re off next year so I’ll be leaving anyway has meant I am no longer trying to find new challenges and things to get involved in, just biding my time.

I actually had quite a good day in the end, despite having three hour long sessions of shelving which is my least favourite task. I learnt the not particularly surprising news that one of the supervisors is leaving and despite everyone else being a bit doom and gloom I actually felt quite relieved that I have my escape route already planned.

Ady had been home with the kids in the morning and then Dad had come along for the afternoon. Davies had rung me during the afternoon to say they’d lost one of the quails so I’d told him to get my Dad to help him – not sure whether to feel pleased they thought I’d be able to sort it out remotely or frustrated that they don’t think anyone else can deal with it. Frustrated would have been the right response though because I was really fed up when I got home and found the house in utter disarray, loads of toys out strewn across the floor, a chicken sitting on the sofa (on a blanket!), the quail still missing, cups, plates, empty crisp and biscuit wrappers all over the place and TV and radios blaring 🙁 .

I waved Dad off and then had a bit of a rant at the kids about the state of the house, livestock remaining in the garden, not eating junk all day just because I wasn’t around to stop them and clearing up after themselves. They sorted the house out while I cooked them some dinner and then Ady arrived home with the news that his boss had handed his resignation in that day too!

I read some story (why the whales came) and enjoyed the last hour or so of the kids day with them. I hate being ranty and lecture-y with them, particularly when I’ve not actually seen them all day.

Friday We were seeing Tasha, Toby and Vinnie for the day :). We had a slow start with Scarlett and I starting the slow process of going through our en suite bathroom and digging out things to go into a car boot sale box. I have stacks of lotions, potions, lipsticks, powders and paints which Scarlett not being a girlie girl isn’t really interested in having them so they need to go and hopefully raise some funds. While we were doing that Ady appeared home, in a state because he thought he’d lost his camera and had been ringing me and getting no reply (because I was upstairs).

Ady found his camera at home, Davies got up, Scarlett and I came downstairs and then we all left the house together – Ady back to work and off present hunting for my Dad. Davies, Scarlett and I nipped into town to get birthday cards for my Dad and then to Tasha’s. We also got him a mug, a helium balloon and some birthday banners because he absolutely hates a fuss so I love to make one 😉 😆

We had a lovely few hours at Tasha’s admiring the kittens, cooing over the wedding plans, the kids played and we chatted. It was good :). We caught up on each others’ news and have planned to get together again next week – we keep leaving it far too long inbetween meeting up.

Ady had beaten us home and we all got ready to go out with Mum, Dad and Frazer to a local steakhouse which they have visited before but we’d never been to. The food was excellent although the service was a little slow and we probably had at least one round of drinks less than we’d have liked. Mum monopolised Ady and Dad chatted to Frazer so I ended up talking mostly to Davies and Scarlett across the table which is fine but always seems an odd thing to do when out for a meal with people they don’t spend all day every day with.

Meal over we all came back here for coffees. The kids were a bit hyper so after a while they went up to Davies’ room to watch a video and ended up having a sleepover while we chatted. We had a slightly morbid conversation about what happens to them when they are too old to look after themselves, triggered by talking about my Grandma (Dad’s mum) who they put into a home. Frazer is of the opinion that Mum and Dad are wealthy enough to pay for the best of care if the time comes, I am of the belief that aslong as possible they should be cared for by us as I think even the most expensive care is shoddy in most cases. I think Dad was touched by what I was saying but I’m fairly sure all three of them think I am some sort of cuckoo child and really don’t belong to them 😆 None of them really believe we are off WOOFing either I don’t think with Mum and Frazer sharing smirks while looking at our plotted map of the UK and Dad repeating again that ‘there’s no money in farming’ as though we are on some sort of get rich quick scheme with the whole idea…

It was nonetheless a very nice evening talking about birthdays of the past and remembering times gone by.

Saturday Another work session for me, just for the morning. I spent some time on the desk, some on the counter and some working through a training website for the nhs website as the intention is for all council workers to be able to assist on various things (probably so half of us can be made redundant, I think the idea is that if libraries continue to exist they will be combined with council offices and probably doctors surgeries and schools aswell :lol:) which looks quite impressive.

Before I went to work Ady ran me a bath and put a cup of tea ready for me, when I got home from work he had made me tea and a cheese toastie for lunch, he is such a good wife – can’t wait to have him around full time :).

This afternoon we had agreed to commence Operation Crap Clear – part of phase one of getting ready for WOOFing – reducing the amount of stuff we have both for storage reasons and to raise some funds. The playroom was first port of call and Davies and Scarlett were really good at being ruthless about stuff. We are keeping some things and are hoping to stuff our loft space with as much as possible to reduce the amount of stuff we have to have at my parents but large amounts of the things we have need to go on the basis we simply don’t need them anymore. So board games, puzzles, art and craft stuff that can be replaced if needs be when we get back are all in the pile of things to be got shot of.

We now have 3 out of 4 shelving units in the playroom stacked up with stuff to go. Tomorrow we tackle the cupboard under the stairs :). I’m hoping to clear the two bathrooms of anything to go too ready for next weekend when Ady and I are hoping to leave D&S with my parents and do a car boot sale on Sunday, weather permitting.

Ady took D&S off to Sainsburys with him while I finished off the playroom and that about brings me up to date.

We’d arranged to meet up with Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna at PYO today although Julie and I had failed to speak since to actually arrange a time but we managed it this morning and as Julie has a cold and I was worried about doing too much on my ankle today we planned a short meet up from 11ish with picnic lunch afterwards.

The weather was looking potentially nasty but I’ve started to wonder if we’ll ever have proper rain again (yes I know I will regret saying such a thing 😉 ).

We arrived a good five minutes early and then Julie arrived dead on time which rather shocked all of us – we are so rarely ever on time for anything so to both be there promptly was amazing.

We only really wanted raspberries so we walked slowly there, picked loads and then walked slowly back. This took a good hour mind you as the kids were off playing and we were chatting. We paid for our raspberries and then sat in the field outside on the picnic benches eating lunch and then chatting while the kids played. The rain did put in a half hearted appearance but not enough to drive us away.

We came home and I got some beef curry in the slow cooker for Ady and I for dinner later and we watched Princess and the Frog on dvd a couple of times (the second accidentally, Davies pressed the wrong button but we left it running anyway) which had some good songs but was otherwise unremarkable.

I did the kids’ tea and Ady came home then we headed back out to Pulborough Brooks as we had booked for the ‘Night time wings and other things’ event this evening. We went to it last year and enjoyed it and this year was just as good. We looked at moths they had trapped and caught last night from small to huge, common to rare and then released them, watched some owl chicks in the nest box cam and then walked round the reserve. We watched deer, a fox, various birds, saw evidence of badgers (faked, obviously 😉 ), saw green woodpecker poo and rook pellets (they make pellets just the same as owls, although with different content, these were mostly beetles). We lifted corrugated metal sections to reveal any reptiles but saw no snakes this time, just one small slow worm. They got the bat detectors out and we listened for and saw plenty of bats, shone our torches into the ponds to spot newts and waterboatmen and finally saw the fledgling barn owls out learning to fly (from a distance and more flashes of white than anything clear enough to photograph but exciting nonetheless).

As happened last year they over ran and despite it supposedly finishing at 915pm it was gone 10pm when we left and there were still people there. We were conscious of getting home to close up the chickens and ducks and I should probably have arranged for Dad to nip over and do so but the kids were tired anyway and we were hungry too. It was a really good event though, very impressed with how much of the information about various animals the kids had retained.

Back home I made toast for the kids as they were hungry again having gone so many hours past teatime, put the rice on for our dinner and had a quick bath. The kids were asleep pretty quickly, we had a very nice curry and watched the last episode and all the dvd extras on Outnumbered.

Today Davies and Scarlett were signed up for a workshop at the most excellent Making Space. It’s not that nearby, a good hours drive but is reasonably priced with enthusiastic, friendly staff who really put on a good event so is worth the travelling for occassional events. We would have had to leave well before 9am for the 10am start time so when Ady was able to plan his day to take us with him we decided the slightly earlier start was worth it and were all up at 7am and out of the house by about 730am.

We passed Frazer on his way to work and all got a glimpse of Cat, his new girlfriend. We were all very sensible while talking to them through opened car windows but as soon as we’d driven off we all burst into a chorus of ‘Frazer’s got a girlfriend!’ – reminded me of that bit in Notting Hill when the door closes behind Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts and everyone screams 😆

We visited a couple of stores on the way and then dropped the kids off at 10am for their workshop. It was NZ Maori inspired pendant making using carved cuttlefish moulds to cast pewter. They were greeted with recognition from last time and didn’t bat an eyelid at me saying goodbye and heading off 🙂 .

I did a couple more store visits with Ady before it was time to collect Davies and Scarlett. They had had a great time planning their designs, carving them and then pouring liquid pewter in and waiting for it to set. Davies had made a dragon standing on a rock and Scarlett had made a dolphin. Both are excellent and I’ll get some pictures of them tomorrow in daylight.

Ady had to meet up with his boss so he dropped us off in Havant while he went off to do that. We walked through the town and looked in some charity shops but it was crazily busy and lunchtime so we took a vote and McDonalds was decided on. I was reluctant but went with it and they found seats while I queued up and got lunch for us. It was really packed in there and filled with people looking quite terrified at the prospect of another five weeks with their kids. We sat and ate and chatted and I was really grateful that this isn’t my life normally – getting up early and dropping them off somewhere else, sitting in a packed fast food joint and trying to think of how to kill the next hour. Roll on September 😉 .

We left there and had another roam through the town before deciding to brave the nearby park. Davies and Scarlett ignored the playgroundy bit heading for the skate park instead. This was filled with boys, probably of their own age or a bit older all running up the ramps and slopes. I stood a way away to observe and watched as Davies failed totally to clamber up and got pushed down by a littler boy while Scarlett managed to get cheered on by some of the other lads and pulled up while being offered advise and then managed to do it herself. One boy was nice to Davies although I did hear him ask ‘so are you a boy or a girl then?’ and showed him a different way to clamber up which Scarlett had a go at and couldn’t manage. She was full of ‘Davies could do it one way I couldn’t do and I could do it one way Davies couldn’t’. Scarlett hates it when Davies doesn’t manage to do something she can, it really upsets her for him to fail, almost more than if she fails herself. Davies did fall and bravado meant he didn’t show he was hurt until later but I think he was quite dented by the whole thing. I was really proud of both of them for sticking together and sticking it out though.

We left when Ady rang to say he was on his way and I asked Davies if the other kids had been nice. He said sort of sadly ‘no, but they never are, are they?’ and expanded on this when I asked by saying that most schooled children were mean straightaway as a default. he did cite some exceptions but said that most Home Ed kids are friendly to strangers and most schooled kids are the opposite. I’m not sure if he has a skewed view or if this is true but it has to be said he certainly is pretty popular in HE circles we mix in and yet never quite manages to break through in schooled ones so it is definitely accurate of his own experiences. I think 10ish is the age of most not wanting to be different for most kids whereas he is at the age where he is most proud of being different so I suppose this was always likely to be a tricky time. I understand why a lot of HE kids choose this period to think about school though, the stepping away from your family and wanting to belong elsewhere must be some sort of natural urge. I think both Davies and Scarlett are secure enough in who they are, coupled with a fairly strong genetic ‘sod you!’ attitude to anyone who takes against them and plenty of friends locally and nationally, for that not to happen here, but of course you never know.

Ady picked us up and he had to visit a Morrisons and the nearest one was the Mythical one on the A3. Scarlett actually recognised it when we pulled up and said ‘this is Mythical Morrisons!’ which meant she had to explain the whole story to Davies who seemed not to have registered it last year. Being so close to the Sustainability Centre by then we thought we’d call in so drove there and had a very lovely hour walking round the campsite, down to Sue’s bench and through the first part of the woods, back to the pond and past the centre. We found a toad and saw a huge dragonfly along with Sean who runs the Campcraft stuff and hailed us as we walked by. Looking forward to being there for a whole week next month :).

Away again via just one more store, to my parents where we had to drop off some paperwork and arrange some childcare help for later in the week and how to celebrate Dad’s birthday with him on Friday. All done, along with a cup of tea and a chat and then home.

I read a couple more chapters of Why the Whales came while D&S ate dinner before a not particularly early to bed but certainly earlier to sleep night for them.

I decided to let everyone sleep til they woke naturally this morning – Ady aside of course. So I woke at 9am, Scarlett at 10am and Davies at 1030am. They had breakfast and got dressed, I did lots of laundry.

Davies finished off the last bit on an xbox game which means he’s completed it while Scarlett spent time with the ducks and chickens and quails. I forgot to mention in yesterdays blogpost that when we got home yesterday afternoon one of the bantam chicks was missing. I searched for quite a while before finding it, on it’s side, trapped and looking dead behind a bit of mesh in the garden. All the hens had abandoned it and left it for dead and I thought it probably was. We brought it inside, forced some water into it’s beak and put it under a heat lamp. It went from probably minutes from death to alert and chirping within the hour and against all odds we stuck it back outside with the others where it rejoined the gaggle of hens who all think they are it’s mother and is now totally fine. It is a cockerel so won’t actually be one we want to keep but is a very pretty bird and it would have been a horrid way to die.

Ady appeared home at lunchtime having been passing so he joined us for half an hour or so and when he left the rest of us decided pancakes were in order for lunch – partially as we’d got the taste for them thanks to SB’s petition yesterday and partially because they are an excellent way of dealing with egg gluts. Also Scarlett had specifically requested a ‘family night’ as she calls them when we all eat together so we’d planned dinner late for them, early for us which meant a decent lunch was in order for the kids to tide them over.

In the afternoon I spent ages plotting WOOFing hosts we’ve decided to approach on a map of the UK and then the kids and I read out some more and gave them yes and marked them on the map or no votes – we have 198 to get through and plot before we can even start contacting them to see if they would accept us as WOOFers on the dates we are hoping for. Will blog the whole process in greater detail in the relevant place soon.

Scarlett and I did her lipbalm making kit which involved melting some vaseline type stuff in a bain marie, adding colour and flavour and putting it into little pots. Quite fiddly but quite pleasing results :). She then did some drawings of dolphins and spent loads of time colouring them in and adding detail such as underwater fish and seagulls getting up to stuff in the sky.

Davies got out a maths set with protractor, set squares and compass etc in it and I showed him how to make a flower picture with the compass and talked about angles and degrees. We cut a circle into various fractions and tested them with the protractor until I felt a bit uncomfortable and he looked a bit bored so we stopped 😆 He then created a marble run style assault course for some Wallace and Gromit figures similar to the Xbox game he’d been playing and I went back to uploading photos to flickr.

Ady came home and we all did some more adding potential hosts to our long list until it was time to head out to a localish venue for Ady and I to give blood. It was my tenth donation and I got given a ‘bronze award’ of a certificate and a little pin badge. It was Ady’s 9th donation so he’ll get one next time. They were running late despite us having appointments and we realised it was going to be far too late to get home and start cooking dinner for the kids so we called into the chippie for fish and chips for them instead.

Davies and Scarlett ate while I read the first couple of chapters of Michael Morpurgo’s ‘Why the Whales Came“>’ which had both kids entranced. I think we’re in the Morpurgo Zone at the moment :). Meanwhile Ady had a bath and then cooked our dinner. I had a bath and finished reading my latest book which I’ve really enjoyed – What Alice Forgot

Dinner while watching a couple of episodes of Outnumbered. My diary has filled back up again nicely after our few weeks of hanging about the house so I’m looking forward to lots happening again in the next couple of weeks :).

Friday was a bit of a wash out really. Davies had been suffering on and off all week with some sort of cold / cough and having been quiet on Thursday for most of the day suddenly announced he felt sick when we left the cinema in the evening. He went straight to bed when we got home but was awake still at midnight and coughed himself sick :(. I had to get Ady up to deal with that (hurrah for the Ady machine) while I dealt with Davies. He wasn’t sick again and it was clearly a mix of his own coughing, too many sweets at the cinema and maybe not enough sleep but he was very off colour on Friday morning and was up from about 6am wrapped in his duvet.

I’d not slept at all well and spent much of the night agonising on whether I also felt sick, whether I should take the day off work and if we should be going to the Bean’s party or not. In the end we decided that Ady would stay home with the kids in the morning and I’d come home in the afternoon so he could go off and do some store visits. I felt increasingly crapper through the morning at work and was actually very thankful to have had a reason to have already arranged to leave at lunchtime. My previously perfect attendance record has been shot recently with my allergic face reaction followed by being sent home early on my first day back from holiday when my ankle swelled up and now having to work half a day due to an ill child 🙁 .

I did Baby Rhyme Time (the last for a while as we’ve decided to have a break of it through the summer holidays – hurrah!) and sat on the desk for a bit then came home. By the time I got home Davies was feeling better, was dressed and had eaten lunch which was a relief. But I was feeling really ropey so all my intentions to bake stuff to take to Chris and Helen’s were shelved and I curled up on the sofa with my blanket in Davies’ place. I’d not intended to go to sleep but I was woken an hour later by the phone ringing and no one else around! I tracked the children down to Davies’ room where they were playing having not wanted to disturb me when I fell asleep.

I had some lunch and read a book feeling slightly better from the sleep but still not 100% and the kids went out into the garden. I think that the stress and lack of sleep from the past month of my ankle had all just caught up with me at once and I just felt utterly exhausted and wrung out :(. Ady rang me at 5pm to say he’d be home in an hour or so and I told him I was going to bed and to wake me when he came home. The kids were settled playing something and promised to be quiet (they lied ;)) so off upstairs I went.

I finally woke at 830pm when the kids came to say goodnight having been fed and bathed by Ady when he got home. Ady had run me a bath and was about to start cooking dinner if I wanted it. I felt much better having slept and we decided to make a decision about Chris and Helen’s in the morning depending on how everyone was feeling. Unfortunately when Ady put dinner infront of me I simply couldn’t eat it and within a couple of hours of being up I was ready to go back to bed again.

Saturday morning though I was awake at 7am feeling much, much better. I had a cup of tea, got dressed and headed up to Sainsburys for food to bring in lieu of what I was planning to bake. I gathered french bread, cheese, grapes, olives and pink fizz – much more expensive buying than baking! Back at home everyone else was now up and feeling fine too so we gathered together clothes, bedding etc and headed off.

The drive wasn’t too bad – it is feasible to do it in 2.5 hours but it was closer to 4 on the way up although we were still quite early arrivers. We met Marcus and Michelle’s French family, admired the new conservatory and just enjoyed being with all our friends.

The day passed in it’s usual haze of children playing on the swings and the climbing frame (which was an elephant this time) and in the paddling pools, adults eating, drinking and chatting and plenty of people taking photos :).

We presented Jan and Jonathan with the photobook of their party – nice to hand it over with lots of the people around who it was from, and for everyone else to get a look at it too :).

The afternoon turned into evening, some of us moved indoors, we got the children into pjs and set up bedding but I’m not even going to pretend we got them to bed because I think most of them were awake after most of us. Scarlett was particularly troublesome which I guess is fair payback on me after all those times I used to feel smug / annoyed about other people’s toddlers still around after my kids were in bed in youth hostel camps over the years 😉 .

We sat round the fire which was just lovely and laughed about dragonboat racing and lard mostly as I recall. Having been up since stupid o’clock I was pretty tired though so didn’t live up to my usual reputation of last-to-bed, although it had already become August by the time I did turn in!

Sunday At last the children are getting better at sleeping in themselves in the mornings so it was after 8am when I woke to the sound of children rollerskating round the hall, plink-plonking on the piano and discussing DS games. More waterplay – largely started by Bob and a bucket in response to the ‘it’s a flying cat’ song, which sounded like it was being sung by cats but was infact Scarlett, Alex and Rachael. Threatening a soaking is actually never an effective way of taming Scarlett (infact I’ve yet to find anything that is really) and she was only too delighted to be drenched and took it as her cue to go back into the pools again 😆

Breakfast merged into lunch, the church bell chiming midday was deemed alcohol o’clock (for once not by me first although I did join in 😉 ) and people started to drift away slowly. We left at 3pm and for once the journey was so smooth we did arrive home 2.5 hours later.

Bath and food for Davies and Scarlett and we spent some time perusing potential hosts on the WOOFing website and began marking some on a map to plan a route and start plotting our year. More on all that later.

Flickr is uploading pictures of the weekend, so will drop some into this post later when it’s done. Thanks to Chris and Helen for a fab weekend and thanks to everyone else there for being such great company :).

Davies and Scarlett did some animation station and playing with the toy animals this morning. We looked at a very cool animation that Jonathan had showed Davies when we were last staying with them, which is all the cooler for featuring Worthing pier and seafront. Davies had made some plasticine dinosaurs the other night and he wanted to do an animation with them so he made a rather cool mini film featuring a lego man and a plasticine pteradactyl.

We have several vouchers for free films at our local theatre – Davies won a family of four ticket at the Alice gala event and we got two sets of two free ticket vouchers in the goody bags we won at the Shrek event. I had looked at the T&Cs on the vouchers and noticed something about ‘new release’ films being exempt though so suspected we wouldn’t be able to trade them for Toy Story 3 but as we all wanted to see it we’d planned to go this week. Ady was supposed to be out tonight so we’d tentatively planned tomorrow for the 830pm show. So we drove into town to the box office (you can book online but the vouchers needed redeming in person so I thought we’d try) to get tickets. On the way Ady rang and spoke to Davies (who was answering my phone as I was driving) and said he wasn’t going out tonight after all so we decided to go for the 6pm show tonight instead (far better all round – not after a full and therefore potentially hurty ankle day at work for me, not too late home the night before we’re off to Chris and Helen’s and not right in the middle of when Ady and I would be eating dinner). Sure enough we couldn’t use our vouchers but Toy Story is a bit of a special film for us and on the basis we won’t be doing stuff like cinema visits next year we went for it anyway and got tickets for tonight.

A quick trip to the nearby pound shop for fishing nets so we can do the OPAL pond survey sometime next week and then home via Morrisons for popcorn and fizzy drink supplies to take to the cinema with us later.

Back at home we had lunch and watched Gimme a Break, a show I’m sure I’ve mentioned before where kids in the family get to decide on a family holiday and make up rules and punishments for their parents. We love it, mostly because we like to laugh at how mean the kids are to their parents 😆 This was one we’d seen before where the usually sunbathing mad mum gets forced to do absailing and jetskiing. Scarlett said to me ‘you’d love that Mummy, you’d do *everything*’ and Davies agreed. So we talked about what sort of rules they’d come up with (limited tea for me and limited housework and tidying for Ady while he spent time with the rest of us instead 😯 ) with both kids making me all teary-eyed with their absolute vision of me as an up for it, seize the day, try anything type of person who loves life. That’s very much who I like to think I am but of course I also see the side of me that sometimes resents being a grown up and pairing socks, worrying about making lunch and gets all shouty about tidying. Am very chuffed the kids see me as the person I like to think I am 🙂 .

I then spent a very happy hour listening to / watching MTV which had on a ‘classic 90s mixtape’ which took me right back to being 17 /18 /19 and in nightclubs dancing til the early hours in my miniskirts and DMs with my heavy eyeliner and wrists full of bracelets, drinking snakebite and black and stinking of cigarette smoke and dry ice. Then it moved onto me being 21/ 22/ 23 and living with Ady, working in fairly responsible jobs but still spending many evenings sitting round drinking with mates while a fug of cigarette smoke hung about 4 foot above the ground and enjoying playing grown ups. Happy days. The songs that really took me back were Mr Wendal, Arrested Development (me and the kids talked about that one and how we can learn something from everyone we meet, often the most from the most unlikely sources – Davies asked if that song was what made me decide to Home Educate :lol:), Two Princes, Spin Doctors (reminds me of a holiday Ady and I went on with my parents to a B&B in North Wales where we got my Mum really merry and all played pool with a load of scousers and had a fab night playing that and an Alanis Morrisette track on the dukebox on repeat), Rhythm is a dancer, Snap, reminds me of dancing on the stage in the club with my friend Polly and then staggering back through dark streets to my then boyfriend Matt’s flat – we had to leave the club seperately as we were secretly together… oh the memories :).

I saw in 1990 in Italy with the first person I ever kissed, I was about to turn 16. I saw out 1999 with my new husband of 3 months, quite possibly concieved Davies that night in the house I’d owned for nearly 6 years. 26 to 36 doesn’t feel anywhere near as dramatically life changing.

Ady arrived home in time for us to drive to the cinema and park and be installed for the 6pm show. They were playing music from past TS films so I was already welling up behind my 3d glasses at Jessie’s song long before the film started. Toy Story was Davies’ first real passion and he used to watch the films several times a day when he was 3. He had dressing up outfits of Buzz and Woody, the toys, the pjs, his first pairs of pants were Buzz Lightyear ones. I remember Ady being on a mission for weeks to get him an Evil Emporer Zurg toy for a birthday or Christmas or something.

Gratuitous Davies as a little kid in Toy Story stuff pictures follow:

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We all really enjoyed the film, quite the best sequel to a sequel I’ve seen. It beautifully ended the story and was poignant and touching. The 3d was quite good, not the best I’ve seen and I think it would have easily been as good without it. Scarlett and I both cried – for different reasons at the same bit but won’t elaborate incase people haven’t seen it yet and are planning to.

Back home for bedtime for the kids and curry for us.

Work for me today. I had planned to get up with everyone else and I heard them all up and being noisy and getting ready but then suddenly it all went quiet and I realised they’d all left! Ady dropped Davies and Scarlett off at Julie’s. This left me a very leisurely morning to get dressed and ready for work. I still nearly blew it and was almost late though when I realised Michelle had blogged about five minutes before I was supposed to leave.

Work was fine, everyone is being very nice to me about my ankle (although to be fair it is still very visibly swollen so I have an obvious ailment) and making sure I don’t stand for too long. This meant I had an hour on the counter and then two hours sitting down on the desk where I could even kick my shoes off :).

I nipped home to change into jeans before going to collect D&S and the hen was back, looking fine and just scratching around with the others. She’d gone again by the time we all got home later and was not put away with the others at night. She is either sitting on or has hatched eggs (possibly while we were away?) and will appear with chicks at some point, has some sort of weird double life like Six Dinner Sid – and lives with other people the rest of the time, or she has infact been killed and eaten by a fox and is just haunting us as a frequently sighted ghost chicken. Need to fit a tiny webcam to her ankle or something next time she’s here.

I drove to Julie’s which is the longest drive I’ve done since I hurt my ankle and it was fine. I took the longer but less trafficky route so I wouldn’t have to do so much using the clutch. It has definitely turned a corner from waking me at night and constantly nagging at me to aching a bit by the end of a day and reminding me if I’m doing too much on it but being an odd whinge here and there rather than an all the time hassle. A bit like going from a toddler to a 7 year old ;).

Julie was surrounded by wet, half naked children as they’d been to the allotment, gotten dirty playing there and then been playing in the sprinkler in the garden to get clean. Jack and Maisie are big into Sarah-Jane Adventures at the moment and were desperate for Davies and Scarlett to watch with them so we stayed on. Julie and I drank tea and caught up with each other, then Chris came home, followed about 10 minutes later by Ady appearing for half an hour dropping some plants off. So all the Goddards were there which was nice. The kids were really funnily blase about it too – Scarlett and Maisie wandered through having not realised either Chris or Ady had arrived and just casually went ‘Hi Daddy, Hi Uncle Chris / Uncle Ady’ like they are transported there like that all the time 😆 There are no Davies’ other than my Mum, Dad and Frazer (Dad’s an only child and both his parents had died by the time I was 9) and my Mum’s family all already had different names and new spouses so I’ve never been part of a ‘clan’ before. I know there is only 9 of us but it was lovely to sit there being a big group of Goddards like that 🙂 I love that the five cousins have such a great open, lovely relationship with each other :).

We came home and I got myself changed then Ady dropped me at Lancing station before coming back home to feed Davies and Scarlett and get them to bed. I met up with GI Sarah (work colleague) at the station and we travelled to Brighton where we met up with Sarah Pyjamas (another work colleague) and Abi (ex work colleague) and all went to a very nice and cheap Italian for pasta, pizza and wine before going to the pub next door to watch Katy & Rach do their improvised comedy show and then stayed for the Q&A session afterwards.

It was a good night 🙂 We walked back to the station, got on respective trains and GI Sarah and I walked from the station to the library where she was parked and she dropped me home.

Not something I get to do often, and my ankle is rather protesting at all the working, driving and walking I have asked of it today but it was a really enjoyable evening.

The hen hasn’t appeared at all today. One of the other hens has a poorly leg and is limping, coincidentally her left leg the same as me but I’m guessing hens don’t do empathic cracked ankles so it probably is genuine. I hope the hen does reappear, she is one of our favourites. I assume she is either off doing ‘hen who wouldn’t give up’ type stuff and will reappear with babies in a couple of weeks, will have gone for good or will be a bit like a dodgey east end trader of a hen who you appreciated while she’s around with her suitcase of rip off designer watches and fancy perfumes but know not to mention when you don’t see her for a while. It was suggested today that she was off on a ‘hen night’ by one of our visitors which made me laugh lots picturing her wearing L plates and drinking cocktails while wearing a T shirt with a picture of one of her hen mates 😆

In other non-fowl related news we watched some Horrible Histories this morning, Davies re-tidied his bedroom after I’d highlighted some of the flaws in his previous tidying attempt and Scarlett helped him (as it was Ady who tidied her room I suspect she was feeling lucky rather than smug and she has a good sense of karma that girl).

Helen, Alex and Abbie arrived mid morning and Helen and I chatted while the little two spent the entire five hours or so out with the birds and the older two spent some time hanging round us, some playing chess and then battleships, some lurking with the birds and then the remainder watching a Harry Potter film in Davies’ room.

Helen and I spent the whole time chatting. It’s funny how people seem to come into your life at just the right time to inspire or support you and I really feel meeting Helen has been a small catalyst for us deciding to embark on the plan for next year, coming across someone doing something outlandish and loving it.

When they left I hung some washing out, brought some in and was looking for the hen when Ady arrived home. He stood and chatted to me while I made quiche for dinner, the kids had free choice each on videos – Davies chose James and the giant peach which he has been speculating for ages might be Tim Burton and he was proved right – love that he can spot a director ;). Scarlett chose Walking with Dinosaurs which spawned a whole load of dinosaurness at bedtime with Davies appearing with plasticine stegosaurus, t rex, pteradactyls and diplodocus for me to identify while I was trying to have a bath 😆

I finished reading ‘not bad for a bad lad’ by Michael Morpurgo and the back story information stuff on the back pages before we began the now ritual we’re off to bed, oh no we’re not, okay we are now, not really pantomime routine that is 9-11pm in our house currently. Fortunately this is also prime alcohol consumption time for Ady and me so we get to be softer and ever more easily entertained parents while Davies and Scarlett get a really good public information type education about why drink is bad for you. Or something.

We had dinner while watching Heston and his Willy Wonka creations – never quite sure if he is mental or genuis and suspect a mix of the two.

Davies was up early this morning with a nose bleed. He went through a phase of having them pretty freqently when he was littler and has always been good at dealing with them in his usual unhysterical manner but he’s not had one for ages. Yesterdays not-quite-right-ness seemed to have left him other than that though although he did have another nose bleed, this time in a very spectacular, bled for ages fashion at bedtime which necessitated a changed bed and pjs and soaked quite a lot of a towel. I’ve never had a nose bleed but my Dad used to have them as a boy apparently.

We all spent time this morning looking for the lost speckledy hen – she’d been around in the afternoon yesterday and just disappeared. She then reappeared sometime during this afternoon and Scarlett came into the house with her tucked under her arm saying she’d just found her scratching around with the others in the garden. She disappeared again this evening though and was not around at bedtime so is obviously going elsewhere to roost. Not at all sure what to make of that and fairly sure she won’t be anywhere near as securely away for the night as she would be in the shed so will endeavour to prevent her from doing the same thing tomorrow, assuming she comes back.

So, plenty of time out in the garden, the kids played together lots, I finished a book I was reading about a bird flu pandemic (*really* need to select a far cheerier few books for my next couple of reads) and Scarlett and I made pastry and orange curd for an orange meringue pie for pudding tonight (was delicious 🙂 ).

We watched some documentries on Nat Geo Wild about giant fish in the Amazon and I finally filled out the tax credits form that has been kicking around for weeks AND walked to the post box and sent it too. And I spent way too long dreaming up a name for a blog for our big adventure. Several people have asked if I’ll be blogging it (including a couple of real life friends who don’t read this blog). I don’t know what our online arrangements will be yet but it is my intention to keep this blog up to date for my own records. However it had occured to me that writing about the whole adventure might prove to be some sort of revenue stream in some capacity – blogging, column for some out there hippy magazine etc. as confirmed by Jax. So in the interests of making it a complete story in one place I thought a blog from this point on talking about the idea, the planning and the execution of the whole plan before following us on the actual WOOFing itself would probably be a good idea. Hence the need for a name, and if I’m going to try and make money from it apparently twitter and facebook and stuff too. So be warned, you probably won’t want to be reading any of that stuff 😆

I’d come up with the idea of using a line from the theme tune to The Littlest Hobo, partly because I like it and partly because it seems like a good bit of music – ‘every stop I make, I make a new friend’ and ‘maybe tomorrow I’ll want to settle down, until tomorrow I just keep moving on’ all fits in very nicely with the rather romantic idea I have of how it will all pan out. But it seems many a person has had similar ideas and you can’t get a ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ anything online anywhere. Then I thought of ‘wanderers’ which naturally led me to ‘wonderers’ if for no other reason than I always have to stop and remember which one I mean and it seemed most appropriate. I have been known to be filled with wonder ;), the reason we are doing this is because we wonder if we’ll like it and it will certainly entail us wandering about. Infact we could as easily have been wandering wonderers but I’ve gone for wondering wanderers. I like it, it has far too many syllables, is confusing and could have several meanings and it doesn’t sound like anything else other than itself. Yes 🙂

Maybe tomorrow I’ll do a first blog post on it (see what I did there? 😉 ).

In other news I cooked a roast beef and yorkshire pudding dinner. It was far too hot for such a meal really but the beef had been frozen already so needed using and the kids like their roast dinners. The kids had a bath and hair wash while I cooked and I detangled Tarly’s hair which was in dire need of doing.

We ate dinner while watching Top Gear, all had seconds of the delicious orange meringue pie and then the kids and I watched some Ray Mears before their bedtime (which was then interupted by Nose Bleed Mark 2). Ady and I formulated a crap clearing plan and debated how best to plan our way round the country deciding a big map with stick pins was the answer.

I’ve been looking at the aims and objectives for 2010 just to see where we are with them. What I wrote is in normal type, I’ve bolded my current edits:

First up, regular stuff:

Wildlife Explorers Both Davies and Scarlett want to carry on with this. They get loads out of it and have both settled well into being in seperate groups now. I think Scarlett moves up when she is 8 so this whole year will be in different groups for them. We’ll also do at least the monthly Home Ed meet up at Pulborough Brooks, carry on with the Wildlife Action Awards (silver is complete and just needs printing off and posting, gold is probably already underway if I look at what they’ve already done for it). I’ve been looking at Pulborough Brooks events site and already earmarked several events coming up in the first quarter of the year to book.
Still going strong at WEX, Davies having had a wobble at being in the older group has moved back into the younger one. He is by far the oldest there but is far happier there and the leader, Diane says she’d rather keep him in the little group than lose him altogether.

Swimming Scarlett has specifically mentioned improving her swimming as something she wants to achieve this year. They are both making steady progress and I’d hope they had both reached the big pool by the end of 2010. I have also done well with swimming this year going from a gasping to reach double figures at the beginning to managing my goal of 50 lengths in an hour by the end of the year. My aim is to continue swimming for an hour most weeks and just see how many more lengths are achieveable for me in that time slot.

The kids are still doing well with swimming, both are more that capable of over 50m swimming although this is not particularly reflected in their achievements in lessons where I think they are far from pushy and tend to keep them back rather than pushing them forward. Both of them are happy to stay where they are though. Davies is toying with the idea of a snorkelling course in the summer holidays which I think he’d enjoy.

My own swimming has gone well with me completing the 2.5km swimathon challenge, raising over £300 for charity and having signed up for a channel swim later in the year.

Badgers This will be Davies’ last year in Badgers, infact he could even finish in the Summer and become a cadet in September. He will have done the full five years in Badgers by the time he finishes, been awarded SuperBadger and has already achieved his gold paw and become a Follow Me Badger. He intends attending Badger camp again this summer.

Scarlett has her silver paw and will have achieved her gold by the end of the year. She will still have two full years ahead of her even by the end of this year but will certainly be well on track for completing all the badges and getting her Super Badger status.

I have also joined the ranks of SJA as an Assistant Badger Leader, which I hope the trade off of poking my nose into something that had previously been Davies and Scarlett’s domain and forgoing my hour alone or with Ady each Wednesday evening will pay off with securing the future of the Worthing Badger sett along with giving me something else interesting to add to my CV.

Badgers has finished for Davies although he will be going back next presentation night to be awarded his SuperBadger status. He starts Cadets in September and although I have reservations as to how he’ll get on with it he is up for it at the moment.

Brownies and Sea Scouts which I’ll lump together because they rather conveniently run at almost the same time on a Tuesday evening and mark the fact the children are in the middle set of the guiding and scouting movement now rather than the first one (Brownie and Cub rather than Rainbow and Beaver). Davies has enjoyed his first term at Sea Scouts despite facing some tension over his Home Ed status. I am both proud of him for choosing to stick with it and hopeful it will work out ok for him. This coming term and the Summer term should prove to be the more enjoyable ones with them getting out and about more and doing outdoor activities which I think Davies will love. Brownies for Scarlett will be very experimental and I reserve judgement on how she will find it – and indeed on how they will find her – until after she’s been a couple of times.

As I predicted both of them didn’t last at these. Davies managed a whole term before deciding Sea Scouts was not for him, Scarlett did two sessions of Brownies. I am neither surprised or disappointed.

Young Archaeolgists Club Davies intends signing up for a second year of the local branch so should start attending their monthly meetings again in February when they restart.
Davies is enjoying this and so far sessions have worked out that Ady has attended them all with him which they have both enjoyed.

Reading Groups Along with the Home Ed reading group Davies and Scarlett have started going to monthly I have also volunteered to run a six week long trial of Chatterbooks at the library. They are normally run as a monthly meeting book group but the powers that be have dictated we do it for six consecutive weeks to see how it works out. It’s on the condition that Davies and Scarlett attend as it’s in my own time and has a strict 7-9 year olds age range. I’m still at planning stage with regards to how it will actually work each week but anticipate it including illstrations, storytelling, talking about books and authors and sharing what we enjoy about reading and books.

Home Ed reading group has continued although sessions have been focussed on a display for Bognor library this year rather than book reading. I have run two seperate runs of Chatterbooks which D&S have both attended and helped with.

Having asked everyone what they’d like to do, see, learn about in 2010 I got a fairly reticent response from all three of them but I suspect this was to do with timing (day after a very late night and long car journey) than general apathy about their lives ;).

Ady wants to learn about butchery. He thinks it might be something he’d like to do as a career one day but he’d like to learn more about it recreationally at first at least. We will look out for courses or other opportunities to learn for him. He’d like to visit the Isle of Wight – we’ve not been for years and he has a yen to go over on the hovercraft for the day.
Butchering is now well onto the agenda, IoW will need to be carried across into 2010 part II

Davies wants to learn to ride a bike. I’m hoping he will crack this at Centerparcs actually as we’re intending taking his bike, he’ll have nice flat roads with no cars to practise on and plenty of able friends to cheer him on / show him how it’s done. He wants to continue improving his reading. I think he’s cracked it this year but needs to practise now. He surprises both me and himself with how well he can read when he actually tries but still has a bit of a mental block about trying in the first place as he’s spent so long not being able to read he seems to forget he can. More bushcraft type activities would be good and he’s very keen to try out his own little tent for the first time. He wants to go to Badger camp again and would like to learn some more stuff about animation. He did ask if there was an animation museum and I’ve found various possibilities including The Cartoon Museum, The National Media Museum (which has the annual Bradford Animation Festival each November and we may consider visiting).
Bike riding is still not ticked off, bushcraft is by virtue of a Campcraft Sleepout booked for Davies’ tenth birthday present and animation is by a filmmaking holiday club session booked for October half term. His reading is coming along and is certainly not a concern for me or him.

Scarlett would still quite like to see a dolphin actually! She also wants to see an elephant although she is not being so particular as to demand to see one in the wild. She did say she’d quite like to ‘go to a jungle’ but she knows this might be one of her dreams she needs to make happen one day in the future rather than asking me to facilitate. Visiting either Port ympne or Chester Zoo will tick the elephant box for her at least. I’m hoping a planned visit to Scotland in the summer may prove successful for the dolphins.
She doesn’t want to read or write although does at least concede these days that she may have to learn if she really does want to work with animals. I overheard Davies putting forward a very convincing argument for literacy and numeracy based on her zoo vet DS game the other day :lol:. She wants to improve her swimming and would also quite like to learn to ride a bike now. She’d like to hatch ducklings which we have got planned for the spring as soon as the timing is right for them to be okay outside when they are fully downed.
Yay – dolphins tick, hatching ducklings tick! Portlymphe needs to be bumped up our list for the second half of the year.
Both Davies and Scarlett still want to learn to do backflips. After toying with gymnastics for a term and concluding it wasn’t for them I have put feelers out for circus skills and tumbling / acrobatics coaching instead. They have their names down for Whippersnapper Circus and we’ll keep an eye out for one off courses with them. I also have a fire juggling friend with contacts in the right places seeing what she can find out for me too.
This seems to have slipped off their priority list rather as they have both realised how very tricky it will be and just how much practise is required.

I have had an initial chat with a friend and fellow HomeEdder about art classes for them both as I think they’d benefit from someone giving them advice and training on how to use various materials and some ideas. I’ve also got their names down at a local art gallery for art classes there too if the tentatively planned skills swap (I do something with my friends’ daughters while she gives Davies and Scarlett some art lessons) doesn’t pan out.
Nothing has happened as yet. The skills swapping never quite got off the ground despite plenty of planning chats. We’ve put it on hold until the weather is less lovely!

A woman I met on my WPA course has offered music lessons and has a folk harp, piano and various percussion instruments. We agreed to get Christmas out of the way first and then come back to it but that could become a regular thing if she and they get on and enjoy working together.
Argh, fail 🙁 Really must contact Sheila!

Julie is keen to progress with the pony riding this year too although Honey is getting very old and tired and she doesn’t expect to still have her by the end of the year. Jack and Maisie are not interested but Julie thinks Lorna might be and wants to carry on with Davies and Scarlett who she feels show potential and enjoy it.
another on hold although I do think 2011’s plans might pick this one back up.
I am looking forward to doing some real live shepherding, finishing my WPA training (I have an interview, assignment, H&S training course and CRB checking to undergo still yet along with more training along the way) and actually doing some volunteering. I am reserved about the Badger thing but know I will learn new skills from it and be doing something community spirited. I’m looking forward to the various things I have proposed at work and the further training I have been put forward for too.
Done shepherding, have some WPA stints lined up, done several work related things, have one term of Badgering left committed to.

I want the allotment to be even more successful this year. I want to increase our ‘livestock’ to include ducks and maybe even make some money from breeding chickens.
Grown loads at home, allotment done okay but realised it is hard to balance with work / home stuff, livestock holding increased to currently 14 chickens, 2 ducks and 3 quails!

I want to shop seasonally and locally and try and avoid supermarkets wherever possible. I am planning on batch cooking, using our own produce, PYO and doing lots of freezing, preserving and other such muffiny pursuits.
All going pretty well on that front.
I want to carry on with my swimming weekly, cycling as soon as the evenings are light again (which tidily brings me to 30 minutes three times a week during the summer months) and think about something feasible for the winter months but at least include a couple of daytime walks a week to get the blood pumping. I want to spend more time on the beach.
erm, swimming not bad, cycling not happening, daytime walks currently on hold due to ankle, pretty physical year planned for 2011 though.

I’d like to learn to crochet and try and make one thing every month craft-wise that I am proud of enough to sell / give away as a gift or just keep and hug to myself every time I see it (a bit like my blanket 🙂 ).
Can now crochet, not very keen on it but can do it.
Places to go
Which also includes planned or half planned holidays.

January
Centerparcs

February
There has been a request from the kids to visit Cadburyworld. We have been before but Davies only just remembers it and Scarlett doesn’t at all. As it’s indoors February would seem a sensible time to take a visit there. Having checked prices I don’t think the group discount price is worth the headache of trying to organise a group visit there, but if sufficient people are interested then I might be persuaded to think again…
never got there, no one has mentioned it since so we might quietly forget about it…

March

April
I want to visit the Thames Barrier and as part of the trip would include a riverside walk we stand more chance of decent weather in April than any earlier in the year. Again, would consider organising a group trip if enough people are interested, but equally happy to visit alone. The minimum group size is only ten so possibly worth trying to drum up numbers.
Am also keen to visit Wildwood at some point in the Spring and again would like to try and get enough people in for a group visit so we can take advantage of prices and an educational talk. Another place probably better visited late March / April for hopefully warmer weather.
Groombridge Place opens at the end of March – end of November and is somewhere else I definitely want to visit in 2010.

Need to carry all those forward.

May
We’ll definitely do the Green Fair at Sustainability Centre, although I notice they are doing a Skills Fayre for the whole week with all sorts of interesting looking things happening which I will wait to hear more about and maybe considering doing. I think we’d love it.

Also up for the Victorian Farm camping trip if that happens although it would likely be just me and the kids.

Hoping for a repeat of fabulous time at Jan and Jonathan’s.

If we’re not already booked up there is the Food and Farming Fair at Weald and Downland on 2nd and 3rd May,
done some, others not done due to other stuff.
June
Nothing specific planned yet, but there’ll be heavy horse show at Weald and Downland on 5th and 6th, Open Farm Sunday on June 13th, the South of England Show on 11th June.
had very busy June, quite happy with what we did manage!
July
A camping trip to Scotland is in the planning stages with Marcus, Michelle and Chloe. The quest for spotting dolphins continues…

Dates already released for the Festival of History as 17th and 18th of July so will be doing that again, along with Wicksteed Park for coastertastic fun.
Been fab 🙂
August
Davies tells me he’s going to Badger camp, no idea on dates for that yet.
It’s the Steam Festival at Weald and Downland on 14th and 15th
changed his mind (yipee!) have plenty of other stuff planned!

September
We’ll be doing our traditional camping at Sustainability Centre with day trip to Butser again. I’m hoping to pre-arrange something a bit different at Butser and see if we can get one of their regular workshop tutors to run something for us like flint knapping or Roman or Celtic cooking.
Sus cntr booked, Butser needs attending to.

October
Just noting a few events if we are free at the time: Autumn Fair and Game Show at Ardingly 2nd and 3rd October.
Autumn Countryside show at Weald and Downland on 9th and 10th.
If we’ve not already managed it earlier in the year I want to visit Port Lympne.

November

December
Already planned Christmas camp for Okehampton along with provsionally booking Pennywell for the nativity. Come and join the celebration! 🙂

Not a bad start at all, most of the planned things either in hand or achieved, several decided against in favour of other stuff instead. Have reminded myself of a couple of things I want to do this year and need to factor and plan in so will try and get them sorted.

My Mum had appeared here on Monday evening after work last week, spent some time with the kids (I was cooking a roast dinner, so hobbling round the kitchen when she arrived), been all surprised when asking after our allotment and being told we would obviously be giving it up at the end of the season (they run from October to September so we’ll see out this year, harvest our potatoes, onion, garlic etc and dig up our apple tree once it’s fruited and replant it here in the garden before handing it back to the first person on the very long waiting list) as we’re going away. She said ‘Oh. So you really are going away then? Really?’ as though we regularly come up with harebrained schemes and don’t see them through. It is true we do fairly regularly come up with crazy notions but after getting married in Las Vegas with 3 weeks notice (memorable quote ‘we’re doing this whatever you say. I’d love you to come with us and be part of it but if you can’t then we’ll celebrate with you when we get back’), getting pregnant with Davies (they were in Australia at the time, told them over the phone, Dad asked ‘so what are you going to do then?’ I replied ‘become a parent I guess’), moving to Manchester, having a home birth, Home Educating, not getting a divorce when the full horror of our debts came to light, going camping (but what about the ensuite bathroom?) and so on, I think we have form for seeing them through really.

So I guess the silence is punishment that we are going to do this after all and their faint protests : Dad ‘but you’re really lazy Nicola, you do realise you’ll have to *work* don’t you?’, Mum ‘what will you do if you need medical attention?’ have been ignored. But Davies has been missing my Dad, hell I’ve been missing my Dad and I don’t want the next few months to be akward, I want them to wish us well and be excited on our behalf even if they think we’re bloody mental.

So once I got up – I was doing installment sleeping again – 11pm til about 4am, then about 2.5 hours listening for the cockerels to start crowing, watching Scarlett sleep and feeling sorry for myself that I wasn’t, then sleeping from about 7ish til 10ish when Ady brought me a cup of tea. The others were playing Goddard-opoly (one of those make your own opoly kits from years and years ago), I checked that everyone was in agreement and we rang my parents to see if they were about for us to go over and visit.

They were, we did, I was teased for not helping make lunch despite being nearly in tears from pain – ankle playing up big time today for some reason, Davies was fawned over until I asked Mum to stop (he was looking embarrassed, I was fretting that he’d get Frazer-itis and still be at home when he’s 48) and Ady was being remonstrated with to ‘have a day off’ when he got up to wash up which was clearly just a dig at me as if they’d really cared they would surely have just washed up themselves rather than sitting there? I set my Mum’s laptop up to our flickr account so they could see our holiday photos, the kids sat with them to give a commentary but Mum mostly talked over them and Dad fell asleep.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a crazy idea like a year on the road made easier for you by reminding you that you won’t be leaving behind all that much 🙁

At bedtime last night Davies had complained of a lump in his throat which I’d put down to either tiredness of the onset of a cold. This afternoon he rapidly started to go downhill so it is a cold. He said he wasn’t hungry and as we’d been at my parents longer than I’d anticipated we’d left it rather late for a roast dinner so we’ve defered that til tomorrow and the kids had a quick tea, some story (we read half of ‘not bad for a bad lad’ by Morpurgo) and then bed. Not that they went to sleep mind you, but at least I’d done my best at getting them there.

We seem to have mislaid one of our speckled hens who we are hoping has tucked herself up safely for the night away from foxes as she is not in the hen house with the others. Ady and I both spent some time searching for her to no avail 🙁 Fingers crossed she reappears safe and well in the morning.

We had Stephen Fry echoing round the house as both D & S are listening to different Harry Potter audio books while we watched Stephen Fry in America on TV.