One word? When seven would do…

Ady was home with Davies and Scarlett in the morning. Ady did some gardening, Scarlett played with the chickens and Davies was spirograph-ing apparently. My Mum arrived at lunchtime and when I came home all was peaceful and happy.

My day was rather less smooth 🙁 . I arrived at work to hear the news that one of my colleagues had gone missing from home on Monday. She is the one I have mentioned as new and slightly frustrating to work with due to being slow to grasp stuff. She was last at work on Saturday and had gone missing from home on Monday leaving her phone, keys and various notes behind. Another colleague recalled her spending some time on the internet at work on Saturday so history had been called up from that pc and passed to the police (it turned out to be research on local cliff walks).

At 930am when the library opened her mother rang to say that she had been found dead yesterday, over in Eastbourne, having killed herself.

So a very strange day at work with all the library management for the area spending time at Lancing and an odd feeling between the staff. We have learnt that she suffered from depression and mental health issues, had been very badly bullied in her teens and had enjoyed working with us at the library. Her mother said she had seemed much brighter the last few days before she died, which apparently is fairly characteristic of a planned suicide when relief and perhaps even euphoria kicks in as the nearness of a planned death draws closer. We all, of course, feel bad that we were not as kind, or tolerant, or patient as we might have been if we’d only known that she was depressed, or struggling, or feeling worthless. Those feelings of guilt we who have only been in her life for such a brief period are feeling can’t be anything in comparison to those her family are struggling with right now.

The last time I worked with her was Friday last week. She was wearing a beautiful necklace that I had complimented her on and when Scarlett and Davies came in with Ali to meet me I drew Scarlett’s attention to it too. 24 hours later she was researching her death-plan.

I have no idea whether there was any trigger for her and having only known her for such a brief time I have no idea if we only ever knew her at a low point. I can’t imagine what her poor parents must be going through right now, how tortured and desperate she must have been feeling herself.

I’ve never known anyone who has even attempted suicide before although I have several friends who have been touched by it. I think it’s a human condition to selfishly relate all things back to oneself and whilst I doubt I had any impact at all on such a troubled soul I know she will ever after be someone I remember. I hope she has somehow found peace in death that she so tragically never seemed to find in life.

After a really bad night’s sleep (Scarlett awake, Davies in our bed, Ady deciding he’d just get up and do the washing up at about 4am – noisily!) I spent ages trying to fit into some new boots that had arrived in the post yesterday in the style of one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters and finally gave up :(.

We needed to go to the Ticket Office to collect the tickets I reserved yesterday and I wasn’t entirely sure where it was. I google mapped it and decided it was sort of on the way to Ali’s so rather than my original plan of going to Brighton on the train to collect them on Friday I decided we’d get them today and hope for some parking outside (always highly unlikely in Brighton).

We headed out, with a request to collect cows milk on the way, a need to stop at a cashpoint before arriving at the ticket office for cash with which to pay for the tickets, and our stash of Halloween themed cakes and biscuits and the kids’ DSs with us.

The route was indeed easy and straightforward and singing loudly to Crowded House songs we managed to park in a loading bay just round the corner from the ticket office so I could dash in and collect the tickets, having got cash and milked a cow (well okay, popped into a garage) too. We arrived first at Ali’s NotParty while it was just still Ali, Freya and Ali’s Mum.

The children all disappeared upstairs to DS and I was put to work with a frankly bizarre request to draw a room plan of a 5 roomed house and room cut outs to go with it. With my own humble abode very much in mind I included a parlour, drawing room and library 😆 Ali’s Mum kept confusing me by calling Ali ‘Alison’ and the children interupted their DSing to come and eat copious amounts of sugar.

Lucy and the Rs arrived, shortly followed by Cintha and her girls and another local-to-Ali HEor and his two children. Ali’s Mum left and further sugar eating commenced. Ali did a game with the floor plan stuff which included various tasks and went down really well with the children. Davies and Scarlett deigned to participate in very small ways every so often but really just spent most of the time DSing (Scarlett on Freya’s Viva Pinata and Davies on Ali’s Spore Creatures). They did have some bouncing on the trampoline time and some Wii time too but aside from their early time with Freya before anyone else arrived seemed very unfussed about joining in. In fairness it was a large amount of young girls dressed in pink and wanting to hold hands with each other which is never really their scene and I was very proud of Davies for avoiding a potential situation that could have been a recipe for disaster for him. They had a great time though and clearly got exactly what they’d wanted from the day :).

I seemed to spend a large amount of the time sitting with one or other or both of my children draped across me with Ali and Lucy swapping places at fairly regular intervals to sit next to me, so I had a nice varied chat and drank plenty of tea and ate way too many cakes (those boots would never fit now!). It was really nice, thanks again Ali :).

We came home, the children were very excited to witness the cockerel mating with one of our hens (good, maybe he’ll unplug her a bit for laying again!) and they had tea and both chose to forgoe pudding deciding they’d had more than enough sweet stuff for today ;).

I recently signed up to transfer across to a different plan for our gas and electric and part of the deal was a ‘free’ energy meter so you can see what you’re using and that had arrived today. We set it up and experimented with turning off lights and TV etc. to see how much power everything uses. I am forever going behind everyone turning off lights so hopefully the more visible reminder of cost might aid some of the other occupants of the house’s memory. Davies made me laugh after me telling him that they say it is small changes like turning off lights and not leaving things on standby that make the big difference by wanting to know exactly who ‘they’ are. We decided ‘they’ are ‘experts’ and would maybe quite like to be ‘they’ ourselves about something someday.

Today we had Mel, Liam and Lily coming over to play. We really only see them during half terms and school holidays these days as they have loads of after school stuff going on, as do we and Mel works 2 days a week as do I. Their weekends are even more full than ours due to Mel not being with Russ, Liam and Lily’s Dad any more so the children splitting their time between parents. So we last saw them back in the summer holidays and today when we bade them goodbye it was ‘see you in the Christmas holidays!’ :lol:.

The hour is still playing tricks on me and for the third night running I have slept badly and woken from dreams in fight or flight readiness only to find myself lying in bed and not in any of the situations my dreams are taking me to. Davies and Scarlett had gathered all the pillows (aside from the ones I was sleeping on) and cushions and fleece blankets from around the house and were curled up together playing Viva Pinata. Scarlett has spent most of the morning playing it and is now on level 4 herself, that game has been such a hit here, she really needs her own copy.

I got them some breakfast, went and let the chickens out, brewed a pot of tea and put a second load of washing on but decided not to hang out the one that had been going overnight as it was too cold outside to be standing in the shade getting my hands wet with washing. I feel the cold so much that it would be painful and I often have to come in and warm my hands up when pegging out wet washing if it’s cold outside. So I was sat down, dressed and with tea in hand by 830am and had two hours before Mel and co. were due to arrive.

I had a pile of things I ‘really should do’ so I worked my way through them including paying for the rent on the allotment (did online :)), paying for the renewal of my domain name for the blog (did online :)), doing a food shop for later this week (did online :)). I saw a poster at work the other day advertising Peter and the Wolf and the Carnival of the Animals children’s ballet at Brighton Dome. Both are much loved works for me and the children that we’ve listened to in the car so many times the cds are scratched, none of us have ever been to the ballet but I’ve always quite liked the idea so I’d checked the prices and found a schools matinee with cheap tickets. I’d not been able to book the schools prices online so wanted to ring and organise that too. Also while checking the website I’d seen Bigger Bang advertised too and as that has been much raved about by other local HEors but we’d never managed to get there before I thought I’d book that too. The box office didn’t open until 10am though so I had to put that off.

Instead, after drinking my second cup of tea and supervising the safe return of bedding to various places around the house and encouraging D and S to get dressed, I returned to the washing, got it all pegged out and started working on some baking for tomorrow. Ali and Freya are having a gathering at their house tomorrow with a halloweeny theme and as we’re not planning anything much else for Halloween I thought I’d offer some themed baking as our food contribution. I decided to make some gingerbread biscuits and some cakes. I found a recipe I’d not tried before for gingerbread which claimed to make 20 biscuits so I times’d it by 1.5 thinking 30 biscuits would be good. I don’t know if my cookie cutters are just much smaller than the recipe called for but we have loads of gingerbread biscuits from the recipe! I’ve got quite a cookie cutter collection from various places including one off buys of those hideously overpriced cake or cookie in a box sets which have ready made stuff to add water to, some writing icing or other decorations and the cutters. The ingredients are always horrid and overpriced but they are worth getting for the cutters – we have a dalek one from them and for today I used a ghost and a pumpkin cutter from one from a couple of years ago. I also had a small gingerbread man cutter which I’ve made skeletons with.

Unfortunately I then realised too late I was almost out of butter so had to make do with only 12 cupcakes as that’s all I had ingredients for so we are heavy on the biscuits and light on the cakes!

Mel, Liam and Lily arrived while I was still in the throes of baking so Mel joined me in the kitchen while the children were introduced to the newest chicks and got involved in a rowdy Doctor Who game with Davies. Scarlett carried on sitting on the sofa playing VP :lol:.

We had lunch, played and chatted and then children went outside for a couple of hours to play in the garden. They all left about 330pm as Liam had homework on his school project to do. Davies and Scarlett tidied up the garden and then came back inside to play while I went to ice the cakes and biscuits. I quickly discovered I was lacking decorating stuff too so we had a quick dash to Sainsburys for various bits. While we were there the box office at the Dome returned my call and agreed I could book tickets to the school matinee at the schools discount price as a home educator (I was spoiling for a fight if they hadn’t!) so we got all the tickets booked and I need to get them collected before Saturday.

Home again and reversing my outside stuff by putting chickens to bed and bringing washing in off the line to drap around the radiators to air and take the last bit of damp out of them. I made the childrens’ tea and finished decorating the cakes and biscuits. They had a bath and hairwash, I spent ages brushing all the tangles out of Tarly’s hair and then read them some Olga before bed.

Ady plucked, gutted and otherwise dealt with the 6 pheasants that have been hanging in the garage all weekend. I eat them, am happy with the fact they were killed last week by Tom and could probably even do the preparing them myself with some supervision but they still freaked me out every time I went in the garage, forgot they’d be there and saw them swinging from the ceiling! 😆 We’re having them for dinner tomorrow I think.

Dinner tonight of lasagne and home made garlic bread while watching some more Torchwood – my friend Dayve just brightkite’d to say he is on a night shoot filming for the next series of Torchwood tomorrow. He’s an extra and has been on Doctor Who and Torchwood once before, am quite jealous of him spending time with Captain Jack ;).

The hour thing is messing with my head, as it always does for at least a week every spring and autumn.

This morning was all bright and sunny and lovely so we headed out earlier than planned for a quick charity shop perusal before our meet up at the park. Scarlett’s winter coat is too small from last year and Davies’ appear to have been stashed very effectively over the summer. That is plural as he had the one I hated (grey with luminous stripes on the sleeves) and then a couple donated by Liza. I’m sure they will turn up but as snow is forecast this week and we have a couple of out after dark events lined up in the next week or so they both really needed to have coats that both fitted and were on the coat hooks rather than in some mystery location somewhere in the house!

The charity shops turned up nothing, still rather bizarrely stocking mostly summery clothes – maybe they’ve not yet had donations of outgrown autumn and winter clothing? We’d visited a small parade of shops which seem to all change fairly regularly and had parked opposite a new sweet shop (mentioned in the comments of this article) selling sweets in jars by the 100g (shame about the loss of quarters eh!) such as sherbet pips, toffee crumble, teacakes, fizz bombs, sherbet lemons and loads more. The children both wanted gobstoppers (although Tarly insists they are called ‘gum suckers’) so we all had a bag of something from there.

We then headed to the park, it’s one we used to spend lots of time in a couple of summers ago with Julie and Lucy but haven’t been too much this year. We went there on the Snowy Sunday earlier in the year and again when I did my running up and down while the children played in the park. D and S had insisted they wanted to take their scooters as Toby would be bringing his bike althoug predictably they don’t scoot so well over grass so they didn’t really want them after all.

They all played together in the playpark, then went over to the clearing in some trees where there are mud slopes and dips from back when BMXing was all the thing (I remember that being done, previously it was a mass of trees where we used to make ‘camps’ when my brother and I were kids). Tasha and I followed them from playpark to slopes and then Toby wanted to go back to the playpark while Davies and Scarlett wanted to stay at the slopes, mostly because they’d found a tree that was ideal for climbing. They told me I didn’t need to stay and reminded me they’d been in the tree area on their own way back last summer and the summer before so they’d be fine and I went back to Tasha in the playground. They joined us after about 10 minutes and then everyone decided they were hungry and although it had been warm enough to sit without coats we started to get cooler so headed back to Tasha’s for lunch.

I think she’s hit a bit of a wall and half a term into Home Ed is wondering whether Toby will indeed return to the interested little boy she once sent off to school. He is clearly de-schooling and has times when he really struggles with not having all his time directed and they are both having trouble adjusting to his periods of boredom and aimlessness but with reluctance to do anything. He is very firm about not wanting to ‘learn anything’ and if he does express an interest and she jumps on it too obviously he is turned off it again. It makes me realise how different Davies and Scarlett could have been if we’d gone down the school route. Davies has very occasional times of being like that but they rarely last more than about 10 minutes before he has found something to entertain himself again – I think I might struggle if it was a frequent thing. I’m very cautious of just prescribing what we do as the way to Home Educate and I know how many other families do things so very differently but completely successfully for them. Tasha says she doesn’t want to fill her days up with spending lots of time around other people and doesn’t feel either Toby or her would get much from Home Ed groups but I have said I’ll send her some more links to local groups so she could maybe hook up with more families doing it – and indeed some more online places to hear about how other people Home Educate to see if she can find what is going to work for her and Toby – and in time Vinnie too.

Davies, Scarlett and Toby all got on well again today, taking time out when they needed to and then going back to the game. By about 2pm I thought we were going to need to head off as Toby seemed all Davies&Scarlett-ed out (I’ve heard that can happen ;)) but he got a second wind as they started playing in the front room with Vinnie and some of his toys and Toby came back and joined in again. We finally left around 3pm ish.

The rest of our week is looking pretty busy so we took advantage of the couple of hours before the shops shut and headed off to Portslade which is another parade of shops, this time off in the other direction. This time we had luck and managed to get a coat each, some long sleeved tops for Tarly and some socks for her as she has suddenly taken to wearing them with her boots. She doesn’t put them on until she puts her boots on and then she takes them off again as soon as her boots come off but it does mean the two token pairs of socks she had in her drawer are not sufficient!

We detoured into Southwick to visit a party supplies shop which someone had told me was selling cake decorating stuff and I got some food colouring I wanted and then finally we got home. It was about 20 past 5 and nearly dark so my heart was in my mouth when I walked up to the front door to find it standing wide open. A quick FBI Style scout of the place, poker in hand showed it to be empty and everything was present and correct. I think Tarly was last out of the house and must have just not pulled the front door shut behind her. Phew! I really must check rather than taking it forgranted that the last child to leave will remember to shut the door behind them.

Chickens away, tea sorted for children who are both eating huge amounts of food at the moment (could they really grow? ;)) and then some Olga Da Polga for them before bed. Ady and I are watching series 2 of Torchwood on dvd at the moment so we had an episode of that with our dinner.

I was completely confused with the hour this morning as my clock is radio controlled and had already sorted itself out with going back an hour but I’d not realised so was thinking it said 9am, really 8am but actually it was 9am that would have been 10am or something.

Both children came to snuggle in bed with me for a while and talk about their day yesterday before I actually got up – Davies first, followed by Scarlett.

This morning was very low key – some DSing and computering and lots of waking up slowly. We’d originally been going to Pulborough Brooks for their Family Fun Day but the weather has been dire all day and not stopped raining once. All of us were tired too so it seemed a far more sensible idea to not attempt a day out where we’d end up wet and grumpy really. We did need to get some food shopping so had a trip to Tescos for food for today and the rest of the week.

Back home again Davies played some Fantastic Contraptions while Tarly played some DS viva pinata (Sarah, Davies did tell me where he’s up to but I’ve forgotten, will ask again tomorrow!), Ady cooked dinner and I had a bath. We had a lovely roast beef dinner while watching the repeat of yesterdays X Factor and then early nights all round.

Mum and Dad were here for the day yesterday to look after Davies and Scarlett. They went to Arundel and walked round a lake and fed ducks and moorhens, back to their house for lunch and then went to visit Great Granny before finishing at McDonalds for tea. Scarlett went to bed about 11pm and Davies was still awake at midnight apparently. Unsurprisingly they are both quite tired and pale today but it seemed to go well. I’m sure whole days and evenings with grandparents are commonplace for many children but it just isn’t something that’s really happened before and I know Mum and Dad were nervous, the children were apprehensive and I was bloody terrified! 😆

The reason for the day with grandparents was that Ady and I were off to a wedding. It was one of Ady’s workmates. I’ve met the groom about four times and the bride just once before. It was a church wedding with a huge reception – probably about 200 guests I suppose. The service was very long and the vicar took the chance of a full congregation to spout on at length. I guess it’s wrong to complain about too much mention of the religious side of marriage at a church wedding but there were lots of glazed expressions and the various small children attending were very restless and noisy. The vicar also tried his hand at a bit of lecturn stand-up which was quite ill advised – Jack Dee he wasn’t! 😆

There were a couple of readings and then after the register had been signed a group of about 25 children from the bride’s school (she’s a teacher) came and sang ‘One moment in time’. Not one of my favourite songs but it was just so moving and beautiful. I cried! Even needed a tissue! What was amazing was aside from transfixing all the adults every child in the congregation just fell silent and listened too. It was just perfect, made me want to become a teacher and get married again just so I could have that at my wedding! 😆

Outside then for photos – they were very lucky with the weather and it was mild, sunny and blue skies. We then left for the reception venue. On the way Ady and I had a brief detour into Rustington as my very high shoes were already crippling me just from the small amount of standing up in the church. We failed to find another pair in my tight budget of a tenner but probably looked quite entertaining to the other shoppers wandering about the shop dressed in all our wedding finery trying on shoes :lol:. We arrived at the hotel still before most of the other guests but all the rest of Ady’s workmates were there in the bar so we joined them.

The wedding was meticulously planned and one of those grand production affairs with wedding fairs and consultants and all sorts. It always stuns me how much people pay for weddings and how everyone gets sucked into the jargon surrounding it. At one point the father of the bride came into the bar to tell us there were ‘welcome drinks’ in the hotel reception – not just drinks, welcome drinks 😆 The choice was winter pimms or bellini so naturally I had one of each 😉 .

There was then further photographing including one where everyone was ushered out of the bar and into the small courtyard because ‘the photographer is on the roof and wants an aerial shot’. It turned out he wasn’t on the roof at all but was in an upstairs bedroom leaning out of the window. We finally got to go in and sit down then (there was a sort of MC for the evening of one of the hotel staff who did lots of banging on tables with a spoon to draw attention and announcing things so he told everyone ‘the bride and groom and their families are now ready to recieve you’ which explains why it’s called a wedding reception, never really thought about that before) and the room looked beautiful. There were little pink bags for the women and little white boxes for the men crammed with silver chocolates and lots of glitter and confetti.

The speeches were next and went on for a long time. Other than one small chocolate (I brought the rest home for Davies and Scarlett) I’d not eaten anything all day so the welcome drinks, glass of pink champagne (tasted just like Christmas in a glass :)) and couple of glasses of white wine started to have an effect quite quickly. I wasn’t the only one and the noise levels generally were pretty loud with people taking silly photos with the disposable cameras on the tables and chucking the table confetti at each other 😆 We were on a table with two couples from Ady’s work, the bride’s aunt, uncle, cousin and his (pregnant) partner. We finally had the food, which was lovely (goats cheese tart, roast beef, chocolate brownie) washed down with yet more wine and were then encouraged to go and ‘relax in the bar’ by the MC guy while they prepared the room for the evening bash.

We entertained ourselves by trying on the hats that a couple of our party had worn to the wedding, chatting and drinking even more wine. It’s all rather blurred after that and I didn’t manage to have any more food and missed the cutting of the cake (along with several other people) but Ady went and witnessed all that and sampled the evening food which he tells me was lovely. He stayed in the bar chatting and watching the football while I hung out with Brett, one of the ushers and Stacey, who is on maternity leave and trying to decide whether to return to work, seriously considering Home Ed and is the sister of Sian who I work at the library with. We had a great time, spent ages on the dance floor (I had drunk enough to numb the pain of my shoes, am feeling it today mind you!) and were generally the rowdy, enjoying themselves enough for everyone section of the evening guests!

There was an area of the room set up as a mini studio with camera and printers where you could go and have photos taken and printed off to buy there and then so at one point a load of us went to have that done. We didn’t buy one (£10!!!!) but Stacey kindly bought one for us which has now been installed in the loo at home. We ended up staying until the end at 1am and then dropping a few people home on the way home so didn’t actually get home until nearly 2am.

I was completely finished by then and went straight to bed but Ady sat up with my parents having a coffee or two before they left. Full set of photos on flickr

really today – I think the other 3 Gees had far more interesting days :). Fortunately Ali blogged about the smaller people’s pm.

I was at work all day – this morning that entailed doing the banking – two of us count up all the money, replace the floats (there are 3 tills at work) and then cash up involving various data entry and things like adding up in columns which I’d not done for years before I got this job. One person then bags up all the money and fills in the paying in slip while the other sends all the information to accounts, then goes to the bank to deliver the sealed cash bag. While released into the town you also post any post in the post office post box and go and buy tea, coffee, milk supplies if required for the staff room. It was my turn to go to the bank so I did the post office, the newsagents for milk and then stood outside the bank for about 10 minutes waiting for it to open. I chatted to an old lady who was also waiting about lottery tickets. She was 85 and had walked from the seafront very quickly and was telling me about how her and her husband,when he was alive had played the lottery every week but now she didn’t always bother if she felt her luck wasn’t good. It made me think about phases of our lives chatting to her.

You have your childhood, then your teens and depending on how your life pans out many of us then spend the biggest proportion of our lives in a relationship, often with children. It is easy to assume this is it but having spent more time than ever before in my life these last two years talking to elderly people since working at the library I have come to appreciate that it is not just people who divorce who then have another, sometimes very long phase of their life living differently. This 85 year old was very fit and sprightly. She didnt’ say when her husband had died but I got the impression it was not very recently – maybe 5 years. She could easily have 20 plus years altogether of living alone at the end of her life – well over half my life so far. I hope I live to be very old and cantankerous and it makes me ponder deeply to imagine how many phases of living there are still yet to come for me.

Back to the library where I did some preparation for baby rhyme time for going to tea. I try and vary slightly which songs we sing, more for my own benefit than the little attendees. I was on the enquiry desk when the first mothers and babies started to arrive and they all came over to say hello on their way past. One of the mothers who has twins who turned one last week came over and was enthusing about how much her toddlers loved rhyme time and how much they always engaged with me. Feels very strange to be an adult in the lives of children other than my own really, I’ve never quite got used to that.

During Rhymetime we sing songs and rhymes and bring out a box of instruments about halfway through which then get collected in again and we finish with a few more songs. The collecting in again is often a cue for the babies to get upset and whilst the training for rhyme time stresses how important in babies development that all is I’m more inclined to encourage baby anarchy so today as we had a smallish group (14 babies, 14 adults) I sat in the middle from about 10 minutes before we started, got the instruments out while chatting to the mums and encouraged the babies to come over and have a play with the instruments and then left them out for the whole session.

I did some work in the workroom and then had my lunchbreak. This afternoon I did various bits on the enquiry desk and the counter. It’s been an inset day for local schools so loads of children were around and at least 4 of the Rainbows came into the library today along with various other children. I spent ages chatting to one little boy who had come in at the weekend to borrow loads of books which he’d taken home in his Ben 10 rucksack so we’d talked about that then. Today he was talking to me about Doctor Who – fortunatly Ben 10 and Doctor Who are things I can chat to small boys about ;).

Ady was off this morning and took the children to see Horton Heard a Who at Brighton. They’ve seen it before (we all went to see it earlier this year) but I wanted them to see one with Ady this week so I’d booked it anyway. They had a good time and saw a couple of other HE families there at the end. Ady then dropped them off at Ali’s house and went off to work. They had a great time with Ali and all came to meet me at work at about ten to five. Scarlett was hilarious, digging out every single Rainbow Fairy book off the shelf and presenting them to Freya telling her ‘you can take all these home to borrow!’. She refused to accept that Freya isn’t a member of WS libraries (what with living in East Sussex and all) and I quite like the idea of running libraries according to Scarlett! Sian (another colleague) and I had been discussing what we would do if her and I ran the library earlier but I feel Scarlett would have even more of a flair for chaos ;). Davies and Ali came upstairs with me (or rather they took the lift, I used the stairs) and Davies came into the staff room and claimed some chocolates to take back and share with Freya and Scarlett) and we all left to come home.

I fed the children pizza and pasta (oh, so Italian!) while Ali and I drank wine and chatted in the kitchen, then Tarly and I ran round to Rainbows arriving late. Lucy and Rebecca were also running late so they ran in with us. They made coloured in pumpkins which were laminated and postit note pads added to make a sort of spooky noteholder type creation.

We came home to find Ali and Freya still here so Ady took them off home while I persuaded Davies and Scarlett into pjs and read them a story. It’s been a frantic week and Ady and I are off to a wedding tomorrow so I’m going to bed while tomorrow is still tomorrow and not suddenly today!

Off to Chichester this morning for another filmeducation showing, this time of The Prince of Eygpt which I had no idea was such an old film (made in 1998). I suppose not being a parent back then I wouldn’t have had any radar for Disney or animated films, I wasn’t someone who bothered with them at all before I had children. The cinema is a fairly new one in a complex of ‘entertainment’ with various food places (McDs, KFC etc.) and had free parking which was a bonus. We got there about 945am and there was a big group of schoolchildren with hi-vis vested up adults arranging themselves in queue formations outside. We went straight in and confused the poor cinema guy who couldn’t quite work us out not being part of a school. I explained we were Home Educators and he said ‘oh right, so you were invited too then’. I’ve no idea if the haphazardness of the whole thing is down to filmeducation or the cinema’s various ineptness but we have had such varied experiences over the 3 years worth of filmweeks we’ve been to. The big cinemas in Brighton have always been really well set up for the events and check us off on their printed out list as we arrive, in Burgess Hill we went to a small cinema last year and had our wonderful tour of the projection room, in Horsham there weren’t enough seats, in Reading it seemed to be a free for all and today in Chichester they clearly had no real idea of who might be coming along. From reading Brightkite posts it has been equally varied for others around the country and possibly far more educational value has been gained from the travelling to different cinemas, comparing the attitudes of the staff and other cinema-goers and what sort of experience we’ve had than from actually watching the films! 😆

We had front row seats this time and the rows behind us filled up but we had the front row to ourselves. Both the children said they really enjoyed the film and actually I thought it was pretty good – plenty to chat about afterwards. They both stiffened at the line from the pharoah about people being ‘just slaves’ and were affected by the passover stuff and death of first borns so we talked about that a bit. I was quite surprised how much I’d remembered from GCSE religious studies actually!

We left there and headed to the stables to meet Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna. They were already there but still eating their lunch as purchased from the farmers market in the small village where the stables are so we drove back down to the village hall and got some cakes to eat too. Suitably refreshed we went to the stables and collected Honey. Julie had some general horse-faffing (technical term ;)) to do and fed Lorna too while the children all played and then it was time to take Honey to the field and let them ride. We’ve been talking about doing it for ages but have instead only ever taken the kids out riding on a walk on a lead but this time Julie wanted them to have a go on a lunge lead so they would steer and stop and start Honey and also let them have a bit of a go off lead altogether.

Maisie, to Julie’s disappointment isn’t really that interested and was shouting to get off the ‘stupid pony!’ within a few minutes. Jack refused to ride at all so Davies went next. Davies likes the idea of pony riding and is good at it in a slow and steady sort of fashion. He listens to whatever Julie tells him and does it perfectly but doesn’t seem to have any natural flair for it. He did really well though and had a good go at riding her round the field and controlling where she was going and her stopping and starting. It all sounded and looked a bit like learning to drive with loads of things to be remembering and doing all at once so I was impressed :).

Next it was Scarlett’s go. Scarlett openly admits what she really wants to do is bareback riding circus tricks or gallop across the downs, without a riding hat with her hair streaming behind her and mud splashing up from the horses hooves. She is therefore being very patient with the baby steps it is necessary to do first before reaching that sort of stunt riding 😆

Julie did get her to do an ‘around the world’ saddle trick though which involved sitting normally, then side saddle, then backwards, then side saddle and finally back to front facing again. Scarlett enjoyed that lots :). She then had a go at steering Honey around the field and great excitement came about when she broke into a fast trot towards the gate. Scarlett held on, sat up and far from being fazed was utterly delighted and wanted to do it again! She had some more off-lead time and then did some riding round Julie in a circle on the lunge lead. Both Julie and Scarlett had the biggest smiles for the whole time. Julie was really fired up and said how much she’d loved teaching them and how fab it was to have Scarlett to be so enthusiastic with a flair and passion for it -she clearly shares Scarlett’s riding along the top of the downs vision and aims to be out there doing it with her in a few years. I’ll aim to wave from my allotment as they go past I think 😆

The children headed off into the farm to play again while Julie fed Honey and then her and I filled a sack each with manure to bring home. It was a very comical sight, two women, one with a baby in a sling, precariously balanced on the 10 foot high muck heap in high wind wielding pitchforks and sacks trying to get poo into bags :lol:.

We finished with half an hour at the park which backs onto the stables and we only discovered a few weeks ago despite Julie having had Honey for over a year. We spent ages discussing whether it is possible to swing all the way 360 degrees and go over the bars (youtube proves it is and many other interesting uses for playpark equiptment ;)), breastfeeding and wet nursing, relactating and how home ed is a bit of a lark really that we should keep quieter about incase everyone starts to do it :lol:.

We left as it was starting to get cold and dropped the manure off at the allotment where more shoots are poking through, had a brief stop in Lancing for a couple of things and then came home. The children were famished so had an early tea and watched Waterbabies which I’d picked up from work. Very much of the Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Mary Poppins ilk with chimney sweeps, underwater worlds, animation mixed with real actors and plenty of tunes. Davies was amused to have Bernard Cribbins pointed out to him from 30 years ago as the actor who played Donna’s grandad in Doctor Who. I drank tea.

They are both exhausted and were quickly in pjs and snuggled up with me to read a pile of books before bed. Davies has done more reading of odd words and bits and pieces, today in the cinema he read on the screen ‘cineworld cinemas welcome’ fairly effortlessly. They are both a bit delicate but have both been comforting each other when upset today which is rather lovely to witness :).

And now, as they aren’t the only exhausted ones, I’ll be off to bed myself!

well yesterday technically 😉

Ady was off to London for a QVC meeting today so he offered to run Davies and Scarlett to Liza’s house for me. The plan was for him to take them while I got dressed and then come back to collect me and drop me at work, leave his car at the library and catch the train to London.

However thanks to a mad dash to feed children and find coats for them they were late leaving and hit traffic on the way to Liza’s. I spent ages trying to work out where all the dressing gown cords are in the house. I have 3 dressing gowns – one short fluffy pink one, one long purple fleecy one and one short purple waffle one. I rarely wear them and they hang on the ensuite bathroom door in our bedroom. All three of them are minus the cords as the children have filched them to use as leads when playing ‘puppies’ or tying each other up or something. This means all three are effectively useless as I only ever wear them chucked on with nothing underneath so they definitely need fixing round the waist. Will have to fashion a ragrug belt or something ;).

I got dressed, sorted out the chickens, spoke to Ady and organised that as he wouldn’t be back in time to get me to work I would take my car in to work and then he should drop his car keys in to me at the library so I could have his car for the afternoon and leave mine at the library so he could bring that home when he came back on the train. The library doesn’t open until 930am so he’d need to bang on the door and I’d come and open it to get the keys from him.

I then had about 10 minutes spare so thought I’d quickly check my emails and got caught up in the whole Lion Man thing. And then realised the 9o’clock news was on in the kitchen and I should have been at work!!!!

With many a swear word I gathered up my stuff, dashed out to the car and realised it was all frosted up so de-iced the windscreen with a cd and then drove to work peering through a small patch of defrosted windscreen convinced Ady would already be there knocking on the door to hand over keys to me while everyone at work wondered where the hell I was. I scrambled in at 10 past, made excuses about the children being over in Hove at the traffic being bad (all true, just not the reason I was late!) and then Ady arrived so I spent another five minutes with him. I finally started work at about 20 past nine. Fortunately I have plenty of Good Employee credits saved up 😳 😳 :oops:.

Work was fine, it was busy and the morning went quickly. I then swapped some stuff over from my car to Ady’s (must have looked strange having two cars both open parked next to each other while I moved stuff between the two) and drove over to Liza’s to collect them. Liza greeted me with tea and we had a quick chat before my parking ticket ran out so she got to update me on today’s tales of horror at the hands of Davies and Scarlett 😉 (thanks again Liza x). Then we headed to the park to meet Lucy and The Rs.

We’ve not seen them for quite some while (aside from at Rainbows each week) as there was just too much friction between them all and too much adult intervention required to make it either fun for them or enjoyable for Lucy and I but it worked really well today at the park where they all had the option of playing together or spacing out and ignoring each other. We got there about 230pm and stayed for a full 2 hours. Lucy and I managed the longest chat we’ve had in ages and the kids had a great time :).

We got home and Ady had sorted out leftover stew from yesterday for the childrens’ tea so they had that and then it was off to Badgers. Scarlett has been a bit hesitant about Badgers the last few times although has been fine once she’s there and enjoyed it each time but I have noticed she is slightly clingy at the moment anyway and seems worse on days when I have worked. She insisted she wanted to stay but didn’t want me to leave so I did stay for the first 15 minutes or so and then Julie the leader said ‘right Scarlett Mummy has to go’ and she reluctantly let me. She’s not sleeping well at the moment and veering lots between being incredibly mature and independent and then regressing with loads of baby talk, wanting her dummy outside of bedtime and generally being babyish. I’m inclined to believe there is a reason for it even if Scarlett doesn’t know what it is herself and wonder if we’ve been overdoing it a bit on the ‘you’re nearly a big girl of 6 now’. On the one hand I don’t want to pander to her and allow her to be manipulative and take the piss out of me but on the other hand I do think that even if her motives are questionable if what she needs is more of my time and attention then despite her methods not being great that is what she needs and therefore what I should provide. We’ve talked about it more and she insists she doesnt want to give up Badgers and that nothing else is wrong so maybe the half term break from all the ‘after school’ stuff will be well timed coming next week.

On our various car journeys today we have had all sorts of very interesting and varied conversations. It began with talking about gold, silver and platinum and them asking why they were expensive and what makes something ‘precious’. Scarlett said it was when something is rare and I agreed and said it also had to do with demand. That led on to a discussion about supply and demand and me telling them I had done Economics at A level and talking a tiny bit about it. They wanted to know what else I had done so we talked about Politics which they already know a little about but led onto government and monarchy, our current royal family and lines to the throne and why Henry VIII was the eighth Henry. We then talked about sociology and touched on religion and a very, very long conversation about law & order and crime & punishment including the differences between morally and criminally wrong, how laws are decided, how they are enforced, magistrates and crown courts, solicitors, judges and juries, innocent until proven guilty, defence and prosecution, evidence, motives and loads more. They were enthralled :). Some of the words they already knew they had some great definitions for and as usual the questions they were asking were pertinant, relevant and thought provoking. There was loads there it would be great to come back to, both conversationally and indeed in other ways. I must investigate potential museum type visits for some of it (they want to learn more about precious stones and metals, more about the justice system, more about government and monarchy etc.).

Ady and I had our usual walk, albeit a briefer one than usual and then returned to collect them. Home for a quick perusal of their RSPB magazines which had arrived today and a bit of doing some of the activities in them while I finished the first Olga Da Polga book off. I brought another home today and notice there are at least two more in the series so I’ll get them on order.

We had dinnner and watched episode one of the second series of Torchwood as I’ve also brought home the box set of the entire 2nd series from work to watch again :).

When I got in from reading group Tarly was already asleep. Davies had been in bed but came back downstairs to show me his book. Ady had made him a comb-bound blank paged book of about 15 pages with a Ben 10 picture as the front cover and Davies had made a book of drawings to tell the story inside. The pictures themselves were good but also very impressive was the way he had ‘written’ a couple of complete stories just with illustrations. They were action packed, employed various artistic methods of convey the action and all but animated themselves off the page. After he’d told me he went on to tell Ady and told the story pretty much verbatim from how he’d told me. It’s going to be quite a while before his ability to write things down comes anywhere close to catching up with all the words going on his head and spewing forth from his imagination but if it ever does the results will be well worth reading! 🙂

Davies went off to bed then and then reappeared to check what 12 plus 12 was. Ady verbally told him one way to work it out and then I told him to bring me a pen and paper and I’d show him another. I was in the bath and he brought a tiny pink post-it note and a felt tip but I showed him how to add up two numbers by writing them down and then showed him how to add up three figures in a column too. He got it straight away and when I showed him 24 +24 +24 to ensure he had to carry over a digit he got that too. I didn’t bother talking to him about tens and units as it wouldn’t have had any context for him at this stage but he totally got how to do it and could probably now add up a much longer column of numbers.

Bedtime avoidance is probably one of our most productive times of the day educationally ;).

In the morning when I was doing my baking I did it alone as Scarlett (who is my usual baking companion) was busy playing lego and k’nex with Davies. I popped outside to hang some washing out while the brownies were in the oven and heard the oven door open and then close. Then Scarlett appeared outside:
‘I took your brownies out of the oven because they’re done Mummy’ she said.

She had gone into the kitchen, smelt something cooking, checked the oven and correctly identified them as brownies, stuck a knife in to check if they were done, decided they were supposed to be gooey rather than come out clean like cakes, got the oven gloves and removed them from the oven.

Sometimes that girl just leaves me open mouthed!

We were supposed to be meeting Tasha, Toby and Vinnie at the park today and although it was bright and sunny this morning I wasn’t really in the mood for it so I was quite relieved when I sent her a text to arrange times and she texted back to say could we leave it for today as her partner was off work.

I’d had a bit of a rant at Davies yesterday about not playing with most of the stuff in the playroom which was what had prompted the painting yesterday and this morning he went and got out the k’nex and the two of them played that for ages. They moved onto some collaborative marble run building and then tidied all of that away and got the pens and paper out.

I spent some time in the kitchen – I got a beef and vegetable stew in the slow cooker for dinner – massive success again that was, Davies and Scarlett both had seconds and Ady and I finished it up later with dumplings :). Next month when we plan menus I am aiming for the children to eat more or less the same as us which I’ve been meaning to make happen for ages but not quite pulled off.

I also made some chocolate brownies – one tray with nuts (to me a chocolate brownies isn’t a chocolate brownie without nuts) and one without (to Davies and Scarlett a chocolate brownie isn’t a chocolate brownie if it’s tainted by nuts!) and some cheese scones for lunch. I’ve always been a bit anti electric mixers but my Mum gave us a Kenwood Chef a couple of years ago and it lived in a cupboard but I’ve started to use it and so far have been very impressed with the results :).

I did a couple of loads of washing and enjoyed the housewifely feeling it all brought on – not something I’ll be making a regular thing of by any means but quite pleasant for an hour or so here and there ;).

We had lunch and I intended to read the rest of the reading group book (Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, Liza) but it was failing to grab me and so instead I offered to read some more Olga Da Polga to the children and I read a few chapters of that to them while they did drawing and colouring. Very peaceful :).

The pack came for Scarlett’s Keeper for a day thing so she spent some time looking at that and getting all excited. Her and I also watched Lion Man together (docu-soap thing about a man who works with big cats, think it’s Australian). The sun was still shining so I suggested the children went outside for a while and they ran around out there being rowdy for half an hour or so before coming back in and going to play upstairs. Davies has a sort of science lab set up in his room with all sorts of ‘experiments’ which are mostly nasty things in jars and perfume and make up filched from my bathroom and made into potions.

The phone rang and I had a nice catch up with Karen who I’d not spoken to for ages and ages. Hello Karen if you’ve come back to read sooner than another year :). Then it was time to dash out to swimming.

Last week I realised I am no longer really watching either childs’ lesson properly any more. When Scarlett is in I am keeping half an eye on Davies on his own in the big pool and when Davies is in I am trying to entertain Scarlett. It is always really hot in the spectators area and now they have their lessons so much earlier the pool is fairly empty and always looks really inviting. So I took along my own swimming costume and went in myself today.

Scarlett had her lesson and I paused to watch odd bits from the big pool including seeing her swim a whole width on her back unaided (yay Scarlett 🙂 ) and caught up with the instrutor briefly afterwards. The pools are quiet enough that she is happy to watch the children come over to me and check I have got them rather than me have to get out of the pool so that is good. I did some proper swimming and managed 12 lengths in about 15 minutes. Given I don’t recall the last time I managed more than about 4 I was quite pleased with this. I chatted to Davies inbetween and he raced me a couple of times. The last two lengths he swam with me and I came out of the lanes to swim back with him. He is really confident now and although he has his own unique way of swimming it gets him where he wants to be pretty fast :). He did have a stitch though bless him which probably wasn’t the greatest way to start his lesson.

Scarlett and I practised her jumping in and just messed about, which was almost as energetic for me as the length swimming. She doesn’t want any sort of proper practise or input from me on her lessons and infact I suspect she did so well today because I wasn’t there watching for her to be waving and smiling at. They opened the slides towards the end of our half hour so we had 3 goes on that before Davies came over to join us. He got one go on the slide before they closed it again and then we all got out. They were both really worn out from a full hours swimming each. They had a bath while I got their tea ready and then Ady arrived home.

I had a brief chat with another friend on the phone who has all sorts of crazy life stuff going on at the moment and was all high and giddy with excitement and then headed off to reading group.

It was a fairly small group of two couples, three women, the librarian and me but we chatted for ages about various stuff and it was a good meeting. I dropped one of the women home as she’d bravely walked so she could have a second glass of wine but was wilting rather at the prospect of walking home again :lol:. This month we have 1000 spendid suns to read which I have already started, determined to finish and get ‘out of the way’ in good time.

Home for bath (I hadn’t showered at the pool and stank of swimming pools), stew and Jamie’s Minsitery of Food and now off to bed before it all starts again tomorrow!

I realised late last night that I’d cocked up on when I was expecting a payment to go into our bank account so had a sleepless night worrying about that and managed to be up and ready to go with the children trailing limply behind me at 830am so we could get to Horsham in time to get to the bank before the filmeducation showing we were booked at for 10am. I hadnt banked on Monday morning rush hour traffic though and sat frustratingly still despite using a couple of ratruns from back in the days when I was always out of the house at that time in the morning with somewhere to be.

We got to Horsham, parked and then had a brief wander round trying to find the bank. Horsham is a lovely town, Ady and I used to go there often and I did my Bhs training in the store there so spent a month working in the town and got to know it pretty well. Hadn’t known where the Halifax was before today though! There was no queue so we made our transaction nice and speedily and got directions to the cinema from the cashier. He also asked about the children being with me ‘I assume it’s half term then?’ to which I replied no, we home educate. He was quite interested but asked obtuse questions which I answered but didn’t really give much detail on as I wasn’t really in the mood for discussing how my 5 year old will get GCSEs, given there is about zero chance of them existing anyway in 11 years time!

We had about half an hour before the film was due to start so decided to whizz to Argos and collect a fused socket that Ady had reserved online for our single plug point that we use for both kettle and washing machine – as anyone who knows me well will appreciate having to regularly choose between boiling a kettle for tea or doing the laundry is an ongoing dilemma – this now puts an end to it :). We also got some drinks and popcorn from the pound shop and then headed to the cinema.

We arrived about 10 to 10 which to me is perfect, sitting in the cinema for half an hour before the film starts means Scarlett is already fidgeting and has eaten all her popcorn before the film even starts. The guy on the front desk seemed surprised when I replied ‘just us three’ to his question about how many of us were attending, presumably expecting a coach load to be following me in – just as well they weren’t…. We had a quick use of the loo and headed to the screen only to open the door to a wall of noise, packed full with no seats at all.

As one the whole place turned to gawp at us with the schoolchildren turning in their seats to get a better look and starting at us as though we were about to start acting the film out for them or something. One woman caught my eye and hissed something about ‘no seats’ and a very flustered teenager with a torch said to me ‘uh we’ve not got enough seats’. I said it would be fine, we’d sit on the floor then, to which he looked horrified and ran off muttering about speaking to the manager. There was no bloody way I was driving all the way home again without seeing the film and we’d have been quite happy to sit on the floor.

It turned out there were actually two seats – one right at the very back in the corner and one nearer the front on the end of a row so he returned with a spare chair and plonked it next to the empty chair near the front and tried to tell me one of us would need to go and sit in the corner at the back. Clearly this was not going to happen (send a child? abandon them and go myself? I think not) so I firmly said we would be fine and one of them would sit on my lap and issued him with a ‘you are dismissed’ glare which worked and he scuttled away. Not at all sure what went wrong there then – I understand that Filmeducation pay for the seats and we’d had booking confirmation so either the cinema had hoped some no shows would mean their overbooking would be fine or the school had brought along additional bodies as it appeared to be just one school and one other HEor and us.

As it happened it was fine; Scarlett often sits on my lap at the cinema anyway (she is prone to draping herself upon me) and Davies said his view wasn’t brilliant but was okay. I would imagine from a H&S point of view they were doing all sorts of things wrong but that’s not really my problem.

We really enjoyed the film – I know several people are seeing it later this week so I won’t say too much about it. It wasn’t the best film ever, didn’t have the greatest script and wasn’t very complete in terms of a beginning, middle and end BUT I loved the non-Hollywoodness of it and how real the actress who played Nim was – she reminded me lots of Scarlett with very long, very tangled hair, barefoot all the time and happiest with her animals. Nim is ‘home schooled’ and gives a fab introduction speech which is just so autonomous HE 🙂 I found this review from an ‘unschooler’ which sums it up well :).

I had to explain some of the plot line to Davies when we left although he had surmised most of it accurately and been able to follow the film even though I clarified a few things for him afterwards. I’d say it was the film which has so far captured Scarlett’s attention the best of all the cinema trips we’ve had and we all three said we’d like to see it again. As we left the other Home Educator said hello and we exchanged names – she was another Nic, agreed the film was great and we liked the fact Nim was HE’d and then went our seperate ways.

We came home via Sainsburys for food for dinners for the week and some ingredients for making the Christmas cake. We had another ‘No school today then?’ from the cashier to which I replied ‘no they are Home Educated so no school for them anyday!’. She said ‘ah yes there are lots of people doing that now aren’t there?’ I agreed that yes, numbers were on the increase. She then asked if we liked that then, being home educated, which seemed a rather odd question so we all sort of nodded and said yes, we liked it, thank you. Felt quite odd to have been so visibly doing something different and comment-worthy today as we usually feel fairly invisible.

We had lunch and then I went off and did some baking (banana and chocolate chunk muffins) while the children did some painting. Davies did a fab autumnal tree with a badger and Scarlett did a bug of some sort, must photograph them tomorrow. They came to assist with the Christmas cake stirring and wish making and then went off to play upstairs.

I retired to the lounge with a cup of tea and couple of muffins still warm from the oven while they continued to play. They were missing out on having fresh air and exercise today for certain and were quite rowdy. The game seemed to mostly involve chucking soft toys down the stairs and then awarding points for their ‘flying’ technique but I was feeling tolerant and they weren’t hurting anyone or anything and aside from me their noise wasn’t effecting anyone else so I left them to it.

I was very efficient and rang the membership association secretary for the allotment association and joined that so should get the next newsletter and invite to their AGM / social evening next month. I also left a message on the answerphone of the local Woodcraft Folk group contact and confirmed with Drusillas that Scarlett’s keeper for a day is booked and they got the payment from yesterday.

Inbetween chatting online to Ali, dealing with the chickens and making all my phonecalls I made the childrens’ tea and they settled down to eat and watch Sarah Jane Adventures and Dino-Sapiens. Ady was home very promptly so I did stories (a lovely Shirley Hughes collection and the first couple of chapters of Olga Da Polga) and then Davies and Scarlett went to bed, I got dinner for us in the oven and had a bath while Ady tidied up and lit the fire. I have reading group tomorrow and have been trying to read a Terry Pratchett for it which just doesn’t appeal. I am over halfway but doubt I will get much further as I really don’t care enough about it to invest the couple of hours tomorrow it will take to finish it.

I spent an hour or so tonight sorting out Ady’s-workmate-Tom’s cv for him as he is job hunting. It’s the second time in a week I’ve been doing CV writing / careers stuff and made me remember how much I enjoyed it. I’m wondering about approaching some agencies to see if there is any chance of freelance work like I did a couple of years ago…

Yesterday morning I worked. It was briefly exciting when all the computers crashed for the whole of West Sussex libraries and we had to write everything down. We then went into a ‘fallback’ state where the computers could cope with basic transactions and it all came back on again after about half an hour so we then had to data input everything we’d written down earlier. I quite like a good crisis – one of my happiest B&Q moments was an evening shift one winter when we had a power cut in the whole of Worthing. The store was thrown into darkness except for dim emergency lighting and we brought all the torches and batteries to the front of the store as loads of people were arriving to buy them. We have a fairly new Saturday Assistant, James who is about 16 and very funny so he and I were discussing Air Raid Shelter tactics to see us through the worst and trying to remember the words to ‘white cliffs of dover’ for a singalong if things got really tough. He and I were both a bit disappointed when everything came back online again.

I had a brief meeting with the Childrens’ Librarian for the area as she was the senior in charge for the day. I had pitched a few ideas to her recently for some events and activities which had been really well recieved by my two immediate bosses and her but when she took them further they were not turned down outright but also not taken up with the enthusiasm I’d hoped for. If I’m honest I do feel slightly disillusioned by it, not because one of my ideas has been met with something other than delight but because a few other people I had spoken to had all thought it would be great and I think it would have improved our library’s offering to children in the 5-10 age bracket who are a section I feel are very ill-provided for in the local libraries. I suspect it will be discussed again though and maybe I should try developing my ideas further without the contraints of doing them as a library worker?

Dad arrived at our house shortly after I did so stayed for lunch. In the morning Ady and the children had done some gardening and sorted out the chickens area. They had been in a fenced off section of the garden with two seperate houses (they sleep three in one and three in another of their own free will) and the original ark that Dad and I built last summer. We don’t actually need the ark anymore as they free range all the time so it was just taking up space, so they’d taken that down, moved the houses against the wall and made a huge area of woodchipped ground for them to scratch around in. Very happy bantams :). Whilst inspecting it I caught and held the cockerel for a while. It’s the first time I’ve help him as when he was a chick he was such a wuss and stayed beside his ‘mother’ all the time. He is now a fine looking cockerel with quite a muted crow and a fancy tail so it’s quite a nice contrast to have him nervous of us and able to be handled after Cocky the killer cockerel from before 😆 .

Dad left and we headed up to the allotment where I finished digging over the whole plot, Ady did some planting of stuff and the children spent some time roaming in the field next door before we got all nervous about not being able to see them and made them come back in the allotments with us again. I’ll keep allotment talk specifically over in the correct place though :). We left there about 5pm after a whole 3 hours up there by which point I was incredibly stiff and achey.

Home for a bath for the children followed by a long soak for me while Ady fed them and they all watched You’ve Been Framed together. I then watched X Factor with occasional watching from the children while Ady dashed out to Sainsburys with our remaining few pounds to get Sunday dinner for today. I had lots of wine, spent the whole time watching X Factor exchanging texts with a similarly X Factor-minded mate and was too pissed to care about blogging so went to bed!

Today I slept in very late but had had a bad nights sleep with Candle prowling about on the pillows from about 5am til about 8am when Ady got up. Dad has lent us the money to be paid back in installments for Tarly’s birthday present but refused to put his credit card number on the booking form and gave me cash instead. As I was keen to get the booking form in and get the date booked we took the form and cash over to Drusillas today. On the way back we drove up Bo Peep Lane which is a track road up to the top of the downs where paragliders jump from. The children and I had been up there before on the way back from Drusillas and it is one of my favourite views in Sussex so as it was a gorgeous sunny day we took Ady up to show him too. It is right on the top of the hill and you have panoramic sea views to the south and views of towns, villages and downs to the north – truly gorgeous. It is perpetually windy as a result and as it has that ‘standing on the edge of the world’ feeling about it looking down on everything it is quite thrilling to feel you could be blown over the edge at any minute. When we got back in the car we were all breathless just from standing outside – one of those real ‘makes you feel ALIVE’ experiences.

We came home to collect some food for the children and some water for all of us and to get changed into old jeans and headed back to the allotment. This time Ady did the hard work and dug out the hole for our wildlife pond. I did some digging back over a patch that weeds had started to come back on and managed to harvest another 20 or so potatoes which suggests it really hadn’t been dug over properly. We walked all around the whole of the allotments nicking ideas and chatting about our plans for our plot which means we now have a sketch of what we’re planning and a list of things we need to research the sowing times etc for.

Once home I collapsed infront of my laptop and spent an hour or so entering some competitions which I’ve not done for a while. Ady cleaned out his car and cooked dinner and Davies and Scarlett disappeared off to play in Davies’ bedroom. As an aside Davies’ reading seems to be coming along, he is doing lots of reading on Viva Pinata, read all the text on the front of his early advent calendar the other day (milk chocolate, 25 festive shapes – he then had to ask what festive meant!) and does lots of reading the tv guide on the sky pages. Scarlett does lots of apparently guessing words but is almost always right which makes me wonder if she is not actually guessing at all and can read whole words rather than having done the sounding it out thing. I have no way of knowing without ‘testing’ her and actually it doesn’t remotely matter. They are both really enjoying audio books at the moment and I am trying to get as many of them as possible with accompanying books for them to follow the text with.

We all had dinner and watched Zoo Babies, Pet Rescue and other such animal-y programmes on obscure tv channels while we ate – Scarlett just adores those shows. I then got caught up in another obscure show called ‘Unbreakables‘ while Ady tasked the children with changing the bedding on our bed. They managed it with much hilarity and then got in it together and watched half an hour of Tom and Jerry cartoons on our telly before retiring to their own beds. Scarlett fell asleep about 9pm, Davies has just reappeared downstairs to inform me that he has been wobbling his latest wobbly tooth for ages and it is nearly ready to come out (it is). 😆

said in the chanty style of the Rainbow promise complete with the little jump at the end :).

A lazy start to the morning given Davies and I’s late night. Scarlett came in the bathroom as I was chopping random bits off my hair. I’ve decided to let it grow again – for now, I reserve the right to decide in a weeks time to cut it again – but it’s gotten a bit bushy so some of the thickness needing chopping out even if I’m keeping the length. She is certainly as good at brandishing a pair of scissors in a random chopping manner as I am so I let her take over. My hair is very forgiving due to it’s wavy nature so any errors are fairly disguised, plus let’s face it I’ve never been that into working the fully groomed look where my hair is concerned. So she did some chopping, very proficiently it has to be said and then we ‘released the hair into the wild’ by chucking it out of the upstairs bathroom window. I still recall an hilarious story Victoria Wood told about pubic hair trimming and whether you should throw that out ‘for the birds’ like the hair you pull from your hairbrush whenever I chuck hair trimmings out of the window ‘for the birds’ 😆 .

My Mum rang to say she’d be over around 10ish so we got dressed, breakfasted, chickens fed and made a pot of tea to appear as though we’d been up for ages before she arrived. She is currently looking for work so I’d offered to do her CV for her and she’d got stuck trying to apply for a job online so I said I’d help with that too. We did the online job application which resulted in an interview and I got all the info I need for sorting her CV out which I’ll do over the weekend. She was on quite good form and the children were happily occupied with drawing and Viva Pinata-ing (Sarah, Davies is now on level 7 :lol:).

A friend from work – Frankie – texted to say she would pop round as I’d said we would be home this morning and she was keen to look at my pegloom and ragrugs with a view to getting her own. Unfortunately my peg loom was in a confused state with a tangle of fishing wire so I was frantically trying to attend to that when Ady arrived home on his way past for a sandwich. So he made lunch, Mum insisted on my putting on the ELO cd I’d borrowed from work and the kids were dancing to Mr Blue Sky when Frankie did arrive. I’m fairly sure everyone at work thinks I’m even odder than I really am anyway so the tableau she happened upon when she arrived with me swearing at the pegloom, Mum bopping to Evil Woman and Ady who I always alledge works very hard sometimes on the telly was home in the middle of the day and brewing coffee while Davies frantically DS’d occassionally saying ‘ha! Tell that to Sarah Mummy!’ wouldn’t have necessarily done me much good 😆

Frankie, Ady and Mum all left within a short time of each other which of course allowed Davies, Scarlett and I to get back to our lapbooking, workbooks and GCSE practice papers – sorry tea drinking, laptopping, DSing and colouring and then we went to the allotment for a while.

It was quite busy up there and we chatted to various allotmenteers which was nice. The children played really happily together until an ice cream van could be heard and then they dashed off to the gates looking hopeful. My back was aching after 90 minutes digging so I decided that was my cue to call it a day. On the way out someone overheard me telling them they were not supposed to be running about and said ‘ah, they’re children love, it’s what they’re supposed to do!’ which was nice and makes me feel happier about having them up there as I have heard tell of allotments where children are really frowned at. I got nettle stings on both my arms which are still all numb and tingly 🙁 .

We came home and Davies and Scarlett felt they had not had enough outside time so carried on playing in the garden for another hour or so. I made Tarly’s tea and did some more pegloom untangling then Ady arrived home in time for Tarly and I to go to Rainbows.

They were having a sleepover there tonight and 8 of the 16 Rainbows were there with sleeping bags. Scarlett obviously was not ;). They made sliced bread pizza and played games until 7pm when a couple of the girls were collected. They had been given the option to stay til 8pm even if they were not sleeping there and I’d said to Scarlett we could stay if she wanted to and she had said she would like to stay as long as we could. They turned all the lights off and brought out a ‘campfire’ which was very cool – one of those flickering candle lights with orange plastic surrounded by small logs which they sat round and sang songs. The leader then said she would read a story by which point Scarlett was lying on the floor so I went and joined the circle too so she could snuggle up with me. My favourite other Rainbow – Grace – immediately dashed over to snuggle into my other side and we listened to the story. The sleepover Rainbows then got pj’d up and they all had hot chocolate before it was time for us to leave and them (very optimistically on the behalf of the leaders) to go to bed. I imagine at least half of them are still awake now 😆

I got home and Davies was already in his pjs, Tarly got ready for bed and Ady dashed off to Sainsburys for a couple of ingredients for dinner. I was naked and about to get into the bath when the doorbell rang at about quarter to nine. Scarlett almost got to the door to open it when I yelled ‘NO!!!’ at her expecting trick or treaters. One glance through the door told me it was David and Jeannette / Annette. The children and I hid out of sight but with all the lights on and the telly blaring it was fairly apparent we were in even if they’d not seen our sillouettes at the door and heard me shouting. They put up a good case with 3 doorrings and a rattle of the letterbox and even an ‘Ady are you there?!’ coo-eed through it from David. I was starting to get really quite pissed off and feel rather harrassed by that point but my nudity saved me from reacting. They eventually left and I had my bath and the children went to bed.

I sent Ady over there when he got home as I felt convinced it must have been some sort of emergency to be that persistent at that time of night but it turned out they had got yet more plastic tat for the children. I am torn between feeling charitable and assuming they had seen Tarly and I arriving home half an hour previously so not felt it was too late and actually rather pissed off at both their persistence and intrusion. Not to mention how blatantly NOT THERE Ady’s car would have been when they were on the doorstep and even wondering if they hadn’t actually watched him drive away before coming over…

And now I really should go to bed. I’ve got work in the morning and I expect David and Jeannette will be over for breakfast at 7!

Off to work for me today. An odd mix of staff in the morning including the lovely but incredibly dizzy part time librarian who always forgets obvious things such as the fact we lend out books :rolls:. We also have a new member of staff who I suspect won’t last and is very tiring to be around. She keeps asking how to do things and is very patiently shown but seems to zone out and then asks again a short while later. This morning she started calling me Nicky aswell which is never going to endear her to me :(.

I was asked to do storytime so set about selecting some books and drawing a picture for the children to colour in. I found the star stamp we use to stamp the ‘loyalty’ cards that children bring to storytime each week. When they have 7 stamps they get a certificate and a free dvd loan voucher. Jan and I were quite taken with the star stamp and gave everyone a postit note with an amount of stars on it according to our highly scientific and worthy star giving system. Frankie was stroppy about not having as many stars as me but she later qualified for an additional one for being very patient with New Girl :lol:.

Storytime was okay. I have worked through the fact that actually the maximum amount of stories you can get the young children to sit through is two and what they really want to do is sing songs and do colouring. I chose ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ which is nice and repetitive and interactive – and I can pretty much recite by heart – and one called Baby Bird about a bird taking it’s first flappy flight which had other animals for the children to spot and me to call out ‘what’s that? what noise does it make?’ which always lessens fidgeting. We did lots of singing and it was all very jolly.

The afternoon passed equally quickly and with a few laughs with Sian, another fairly new and very nice member of the team. It was a good working day :).

Meanwhile back at home Ady was here this morning. David had been over with Jeannette / Annette and they had given the children an inflatable ball (Davies), a cuddly snake (Scarlett) and two chocolate advent calendars. Ben 10 for Davies and Disney Princesses for Scarlett.

Advent calendars. On 16th October.

That’s October the sixteenth. Advent calendars. Insert your own proclamations of lunacy in the comment boxes. I fully anticipate whichever incarnation of Jeannette /Annette that wasn’t bringing over her advent calendars for them tomorrrow. And I bloody hope she will be apologising for the tardniess of their arrival when she does…

So they’d played with the inflatable ball for a bit. There was a minor kerfuffle when it was realised Scarlett had taken all the chicks out to play with and not returned them to their brooder so they were running amok in Davies’ bedroom (Chicks on the Loose! An all action film for the whole family :lol:).

In the afternoon my Mum was here and apparently it was better than last week. They went to the park where Scarlett mastered swinging on the swings without being pushed (yay!) and they had a nice long walk. All seemed calm and well when I got home just after 5 ish.

Mum stayed for a cup of tea, the children had their dinner, she left, I dealt with the chickens and some laundry, Ady arrived home and the children fannied about so ended up with no bedtime story from me but took story cds to bed with them instead. Davies reappeared downstairs at 9pm when we were eating dinner and watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s latest so he watched that with us, insisted on staying up to watch Planet Earth even though Ady had gone to bed and then fell asleep on the sofa. I am not relishing carrying him up the stairs to bed in a minute 🙁 .

Tomorrow was supposed to be a local ish home ed meet up but we have no petrol in my car nor money to put petrol in it, when I spoke to Davies and Scarlett neither of them was particularly bothered about going and so we’re staying home instead. We may venture to the allotment if the weather is fine, I have my rug to work on, we have various films to watch and staying home is quite an appealing prospect.

We had a plan to meet Tasha at the park today but we woke to rain and Tasha had already sent me a text to say ‘forget the park, come straight here for lunch at 12ish instead’ which left us the morning free to slob about. In direct contrast to other pretenders to HE the children were still not dressed at 1130am ;).

I drank lots of tea, Scarlett lay around the lounge wrapped in a fleece, singing songs, drawing and colouring while Davies played DS. I unpicked my not-really-turning-out-right ragrug and we all had a retro TV session of watching Tikkabilla. Except Tarly didn’t realise it was retro – I was singing along to the Opposites Song (‘in and out, up and down, standing still or spinning around, the world is full of opposites, all those opposites to be founddddddddd’) and she looked at me in awe and said ‘Mummy, how do you know all the words? Have you heard it before?’ 😆

To the casual observer we were slobbing about but of course the practised eye of a HE spin doctor we were all learning – Scarlett for all her lying on her back in her pjs was answering all the questions on Tikkabilla and guessed correctly which window we were going through. And she did some dot to dots. Davies was reading various small bits of text on his DS instructions ;). I also did some flickr organising which always gives me a glowy feeling, hence the picture below :).

Just as we were rousing ourselves to get dressed, tidy up a bit and head off to Tasha’s the doorbell went and there was my Dad. Busted! The children were really pleased to see him, they’ve misssed him lots as Mum has been doing all his ‘childcare shifts’ lately. He stayed for coffee (and would probably have stayed for lunch too if I’d offered) and the kids did get dressed and we all left together.

We had a nice time at Tasha’s. Davies and Scarlett disappeared off into Toby’s room to play and aside from a brief scuffle between Davies and Scarlett about Ben 10 top trumps the three of them played very happily for about four hours :). Tasha and I chatted but we have fairly quickly exhausted sharing life stories as mine will be largely irrelevant and hers is basically her own childhood and then parenthood as she fell pregnant with Toby when she was only 17. It is odd to meet someone a whole ten years younger than me at the same stage of parenting but with nothing before it. Due to a set of life choices I could very easily have been in Tasha’s position, a single mum at that age and it is slightly disturbing to see how we have reached similar stages in terms of parenting choices and ideals coming from such different starting points. I have huge respect for her in both doing it on her own and in bucking conventionality and striking out for what she naturally believed was best for Toby, despite it being in conflict to how she was raised herself and the advice from others around her. She was talking earlier today about something and I commented on her views being ‘very TCS’ and was surprised to hear she’d never heard of TCS, it’s just what she feels is right for her sons.

Once we have established that we agree about how parents should respond to children and that HE is great we are lacking common ground a bit though. Tasha’s sum total of career was a job in Comet before she fell pregnant, her friends are all just thinking about getting married or having children and she is just half a generation away from me. When I was paying my first mortgage repayment she was starting junior school, my husband is the same age as her Dad, her conversation is littered with references to stuff I know nothing about, her experience of life is very different to mine.

Inspite of all that I like her a lot and think once we get passed the fact we are not going to find common ground chatting about past lives we will find new topics of conversation. She does share a similar sense of humour to me and we both like to make things so that’s a good starting point :lol:.

We came home and Ady had already beaten us here (busted again then, we’d left the house in a hurry and a state) and sorted the childrens’ tea. Then it was off to Badgers. I’m not sure what they did, something to do with bones and skeletons (they are doing Active Badger this term) but they enjoyed it. When we arrived there were were about 10 minutes early and Davies and Scarlett leapt out of the car and ran around on the grass outside for the full 10 minutes. I love the way they just *know* when they’ve not had enough fresh air or exercise and go and get it :).

Ady and I got our own fresh air and exercise by going for a walk for the full 75 minutes. It is less nice now that it gets dark during the 545-700pm time slot but we still enjoy chatting and having some time to ourselves. Home for another pile of books including a second reading of The Cats in Krasinski Square which is a lovely book and includes some historical facts and background at the back which we also read and talked about last time about ghettos in Warsaw. I love the ecclectic historical education they are getting via some of the lovely books we’ve read – I can see the appeal of Sonlight.

And just stumbled across this one and it made me go all gooey 🙂

I continued hating everyone and extended it to the rest of the real world too ;).

I did walk away from the internet this morning though and we were up at the allotment at 10ish. I had some stuff to get in the ground but decided to come over all new age and worry about planting my negative feelings with it so tackled the weeding some more instead. Actually that’s a bit of a cop out, I’m less keen on the planting stuff and far happier killing it instead 😆 . We arrived to discover a wheelbarrow up against our tool boxes. Initially I was all stroppy thinking someone was either dumping stuff on our plot or severely taking the piss with spreading their stuff about but I have to assume it is a kind donation from someone who doesn’t need it themselves any more and noticed our lack of barrow. So, erm, 🙂 I guess.

I did a good attack on the nastiest bit of the plot with thistles, nettles and huge killer dandelions, all of which was very theraputic. The children were perfect angels and played happily for the whole 90 minutes or so we were up there. Even though they are generally pretty outdoorsy kids I am still very happily surprised by how content and self-entertaining they have been during the hours we’ve spent up there. They are quite happy playing in the mud, digging, looking at bugs and chatting to each other :). I listened to them giggling together over something earlier and it was just the loveliest sound :). See, I can’t remain pissed off and negative for very long ;).

We came home for lunch via the Co-Op where I got a load of fruit and veg. Money is very tight again this month and we’re stretching food out from the freezers while trying to stay healthy-ish. Stag party for Ady, London weekend for me and balance for Christmas camp all took a bit of a toll on the budget along with winter shoes for the children but we’re on the last few days before payday now and hopefully November will be an easier month to allow some breathing space before the cash crisis that December always is.

Davies and Scarlett played with the foam blocks after lunch and I threaded up the peg loom for my next rug. I’m planning on making a few as Christmas gifts for various people so have started on my first ambitious one. I liked the shaped pig rug but want to have a go and keeping the rug itself rectangular while having a picture in the middle and am trying a dinosaur one for Jack first. Scarlett helped thread up the loom and I’ve made a good start. It is really hard as you are working upside down and can’t really see whether your pattern is panning out as expected until you have gotten long past the bit you are working on if that makes sense. At least I know from unpicking and rethreading Davies’ rainbow rug that it is easy to start again if needs be.

I lost my rag (ha, see what I did there?!) with Tarly for being troublesome and shouted at her which I will no doubt pay the price for during the night as she almost without exception will have a troubled night if her and I have fallen out and be awake and needing cuddles 🙁 . Davies is so much better at reading my mood and acting accordingly.

Off to swimming lessons where Scarlett had quite a good lesson and Davies enjoyed his half an hour in the big pool before going for his lesson. I’m planning on going in next week as the pool is really empty. Davies could have his half an hour while Tarly is having her lesson and I could do some lane swimming and some stuff with Davies and then Scarlett and I could have half an hour to practise what she’s done in her lesson while Davies has his. Because I am half watching Davies and half watching Scarlett for her lesson and then trying to keep her entertained for his I am not really watching either of them like I used to so I might as well have a bit of a swim myself and some time in the water with them both individually too.

Home for their tea; home made pizza for Davies and pesto pasta for Tarly, their current faves, then they had a bath while I put the chickens to bed, sorted out loads of washing and put loads of clean stuff away and made a start on our dinner (sausages and bacon with root veg all roasted together with garlic, herbs and red wine, lovely :)). I read a pile of books to them at bedtime (The Nightspinners which was a great twist on a fairytale, ending with ‘and she might one day marry the prince, but for now she’s quite happy living on her own :)’, Ain’t nobody a stranger to me which touches on slavery, something we’ve not really talked about much but suspect we might after that, Anna Aphid which was charmingly illustrated and really nice to talk about given our recent reading of George’s secret key to the universe as it puts things rather into perspective and finally Lobsters in Love which was fun and had great illustrations of plasticine figures that Davies particularly liked.). Scarlett took disc 2 of Babe to bed on audiobook that she has been listening to and Davies took a Harry and his bucketful of dinosaurs book and cd that he is following the words in the book to.

We watched Jamie’s Ministry of Food and I did some more ragrugging. I now have a sore throat which could be to do with shouting today or could be the beginnings of a cold which would explain me feeling grumpy and shouting today – which came first? 😆

Need to stay away from the internet today. So far everything I have read everywhere I have been has pissed me off. I want to reach into the screen and grab people by the scruff of their necks and shake them.

In the small rational corner of my brain I am assuming that it must be me rather than the whole of the rest of the world so I think I better retire! 😆