One word? When seven would do…

Forest school this morning – today was week 8 of 10, so only two more after this. I wasn’t planning on staying although I didn’t have anything else to do so was intending to just sit in my car in the carpark and read my book. But I got chatting to a couple of the other parents about the review and stuff and felt like being with other Home Educators for a while so walked up the hill and stayed instead.

Actually we didn’t do much chatting, or talking further than that because it was a very hands on session and I ended up helping Scarlett with her activity, which was even nicer so I’m glad I stayed :).

There was a different ranger there today, in place of the older guy with the dog. I have to say not only did I not miss the dog I thought the other ranger was very good. He was very knowledgable about trees, excellent at engaging with the kids and for full comedy value looking like he’d been cloned from the other young ranger 😆

They started with firelighting, as always. All the children are really proficient with the fire steels now and I know I’ve seen at least two different methods of laying a campfire that I will try next time we’re camping. They paused for a snack break but for once seemed to be chatting as a group rather than splintering off, then they brought out the activity of the day which was making a musical instrument from wood. Millie the ranger had a selection including a kazoo and a whistle and Peter the ranger had various sized pieces of wood he laid in a xylophone formation. There were saws, string, palm drills, knives and all the wood you could gather.

Davies decided straight away he wanted to make a whistle, as did several other children despite them being told it was tricky. This was fine but did mean they spent lots of time waiting for the one to one required and also a lot of it they didn’t get to do themselves. But after a false start of it not working the Cloned Ranger (see what I did there?!) stepped up and took them off to look for some hazel and got them working :).

Scarlett looked a bit lost so I suggested to her we make a windchime type instrument like one she loves hanging in the woods at the green burial site over one of the graves there. She liked this idea so went off to gather wood. She came back with a big stick to use as the rod to hang them from, a selection of long and short sticks of different widths and together we drilled holes in all of them and threaded them along the rod through a row of holes we drilled in that. Scarlett did a bit of the drilling and a lot of the threading and all of the deciding what would go where. She couldn’t have done it by herself but it was certainly her creation 🙂 She also found a stick to be the banger/ chimer.

The session went on almost til the end so absorbed were all the children in what they were making. There was just time for hot chocolate and a quick go round the circle for everyone to play their instrument (the other popular choice was a clacker which were also really good).

It was definitely the best session I’ve sat in on and both children actually felt like they’d learnt something and got an experience we wouldn’t have just had walking through the woods on our own.

We left and headed for home for lunch. I discovered a book I’d ordered, Moving a Puddle, and Other Essays had arrived so read some of that. Very timely actually as although I’ve only read the first couple of essays I was sitting there feeling myself relax over someone writing so well and getting what we’re about.

Scarlett curled up next to me and we shared a coconut while Davies, with the aid of a gamefaq walkthrough got through a bit on the xbox he’d been battling with.

Then it was time for swimming. We left early as I needed to call in to the local council waste and recycling office to collect some litterpickers they are lending us for our litter collecting next week but I’d left more time than was needed so we had 15 minutes in the pool together before their lesson. Neither of them are amazing swimmers yet but their confidence is lovely. They both dive under and do somersalts under water and all sorts. I might be able to swim but I still don’t like getting my face wet so it’s lovely to see how much they’ve already eclipsed me :).

They went off to their lesson and I did my lengths.I have been doing breast stroke, front crawl, breast stroke, backstroke repetitons and last week got up to 24 lengths but wanted to make it harder so swapped to breast stroke, backstroke, front crawl, backstroke repetitions as backstroke is my best, the one I can put most efforts into and also my fastest stroke. I managed 24 again which I was really pleased with given how much harder I’d found it with the different strokes. Maybe next week it’ll be 26 🙂

I was all puffed out and wobbly legged when I got out but the kids wanted a go on the slide so I stood watching while they had 3 goes each on the slide, before persuading them out to get showered and dressed. We called into the chip shop for fish and chips for them for tea and headed up to the allotment to meet Ady.

The kids sat on the bench in the sunshine looking out at the seaview and then played on their plots while we did some weeding and some harvesting. I watered and we were there for a good 90 minutes before coming home again. Ady nipped off to get beers while I showered the kids, hung some washing out, brought some washing in and stuck the towels and swimsuits in the wash and dealt with a very stupid broody hen who keeps trying to lay eggs and sit on them in the middle of our logpile.

We finished and whilst we already have the next 2 waiting I think we might move onto something else for a while.I do like them and they are easy and enjoyable enough to read but it doesn’t feel enough like you’re getting stuck into a good story for me. Davies and Scarlett love them and they have inspired all sorts of adventure games so I’m sure we’ll plough through the rest at some point.

Ady cooked a lovely dinner which included eggs from our chickens and potaoes we’d just pulled out of the ground, hence the title. I don’t know, vegetable consumption and a table – what next I hear you cry! 😆

Davies wrote a note to Scarlett’s Duffy cat character which read ‘to Duffy Cat, I fink that the Mr Gum fing is cwl’ which I probably don’t even need to translate, particularly given it looks a bit like texttalk which is surely all our kids will need to know anyway ;).

We watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – well Ady dipped in and out and I got a bit lost in the middle but I thought it was very good. Quite ‘Time Travellers Wife’ in many ways. Not at all sure it needed to be 2.5 hours long though.

Ady was listening to the famous Tom Jones song in the kitchen earlier and as I walked past I said to him ‘so what is new Pussycat?’ and carried on back to the lounge.
Cue Davies a few minutes later delivering a handwritten note:
‘wel mummy the fining wirih is noo piseckat is tat Davies loves u’
which he tells me says:
‘well Mummy the thing which is new pussycat is that Davies loves you’
and you know what? It’s pretty close!

Last weekend when we picked D and S up from Magic Lantern I picked up a leaflet about a puppet show at the theatre as part of the Adur Festival. It’s a two week festival for the very local area we live in and the reason for the various library events I’ve been working at, attending and ranting about over the last couple of weeks. I’d missed this event in the programme but managed to book tickets for Davies, Scarlett and I and we went along to it this morning.

We went to a puppet show as part of the festival a couple of years ago (just dug out the blogpost and smiled at the similarities) but this was way better. There was some faffing around while they kept us in the foyer to get all the schoolchildren settled first which was annoying but worth it as they all had to sit cross legged on the floor while we got to sit behind them on chairs with an excellent view :). We spent the wait looking at some of the artwork and sculptures on display and reading about turtles on the marine display table set up there.

The show was done by Liz Lempen from Lempen Puppet Theatre and was just magical. It was a one woman show and she managed to integrate music, shadows, puppets, storytelling and using her small but very beautiful set and puppets to draw the whole audience in. It was both simple and complex and put me in mind of the childrens’ TV shows I loved as a child like Fingerbobs and the presenters on shows like Playschool who clearly loved children and paused frequently just to smile at the camera. I was entranced, as were Davies and Scarlett.

The show was very educational and I’d happily go and see it again as it weaved a beautiful story. At the end she brought out several puppets to show how they were made and operated and talked a little about the show. We actually went up to her to ask a couple more questions and I would have happily stayed chatting longer but she was preparing for the next show. I have emailed her to say how much we enjoyed the show.

After that we headed to Tesco for a few bits before coming home for lunch. Davies is very keen to finish the end of the xbox game he is playing so he spent some time on that and then we headed up to the allotment. I had planned to take some sausages and marshmallows and make an evening of it, cooking them on the washing machine drum we have up there as our new fire basket but having spoken to Ady on the phone who assured me there was a 100% chance of rain I didn’t bother and we spent 90 minutes up there weeding until I got bored. It’s a bit weedtastic up there actually so we’ve planned (weather permitting) to go up again tomorrow evening and do some more.

Davies spent the time creating an invention to water things based on a seesaw over his mini-pond using the ballcock idea from the rainwater harvesting system we saw at Open Farm Sunday last week. Scarlett helped me pull some more garlic and did some mud sculpting :).

Back home again Scarlett picked me some lavender and I made some more lavendoodles and the kids tea (Davies had salmon and new potatoes, Scarlett had freshly laid eggs and toast and Davies’ unwanted baby sweetcorn!) while they did some more xboxing. I do find baking very theraputic, lots of thinking time, busy hands, clean mess and delicious smells with the added bonus of baked goods at the end of it :).

Ady came home while I was still in the kitchen so we chatted out there while the kids had their tea. There is all sorts of politics happening in the chicken run at the moment so in an effort to sort that out and stop them from eating all the plants on the patio Ady made their roaming area a bit smaller. The kids spent some time out there with them until I called them in for pjs and storytime.

A bit more Charlie Small and a bit of WWLT – both of them were Turtle related thanks to the puppet show – Davies’ was the word chelonian which was in the show and he’d made a point of going and asking her to repeat for him. Scarlett’s was about Lonesome George, also mentioned during the show and we looked up more information about him when we got home. Davies also reminded me about having learnt about grids and OS maps and coordinates yesterday as we were walking towards the geocache and I was explaining about how the GPS worked.

I slept in this morning, which was much needed 🙂 We didn’t have any plans for today so I happily spent the morning on the sofa online uploading photos and reading lots of blogs and forums and email lists about the review and stuff. Davies spent a couple of hours on the xbox and managed to get through 3 levels on a W&G to get him to the last level, which he is now desperate to complete.

Scarlett and Ady cooked the dinner – Scarlett did loads apparently including peeling and chopping and mashing, mixing and so on. She said Ady didn’t let her touch the oven which I normally do but in fairness most of the pans would have been too heavy for her anyway. They produced a delicious roast chicken, with homemade yorkshire puddings and gravy, 3 types of potatoes (roast, boiled and mashed), carrots, peas, suet pudding. It was very nice.

We decided to walk down to Brooklands for an ice cream for puddiing and try the geocache function on Ady’s new phone. We failed to find the first one and as we were all scrambling about in nettles and getting stung were happy to quickly give up but we found the second one 🙂 We filled in the log, decided against swapping anything and ummed and ahhed over the travelbug in there but couldn’t get online to geospeak easily to check what conditions there were attached to it. I still think we need to consider how to do it as the phone function is great and tells you all nearby caches, gives local info and coordinates and then guides you in with a compass feature, how many feet you are away and how many degrees left or right you need to turn but doesn’t give the sort of specific instructions and clues I’ve seen on others’ machines. But hey, we found it 🙂

We had a quick play in the park with Davies showing Ady how he walks over the top of the climbing frame by which time the cafe was closed. I’d been up for wandering over to the beach but we were getting tired so walked back home, calling at a shop on the way for ice creams / ice lollies.

Back at home Ady did some watering in the garden, Davies and Scarlett had a bath and hairwash and I cycled up to the allotment. It rained heavily here last night so I only gave the plot a quick water, picked some sweet peas, pulled some garlic and then realised I had to get it home on the bike so stopped pulling garlic! I managed a rough braid of the 10 or 12 I’d pulled and draped them across the front of the bike to get them home.

I brushed Tarly’s hair and we read some Charlie Small then it was bedtime for them and bathtime for me. I’m really pleased to have had some support over the review from non-HE friends and feel I should do some more research to know how to point them in the right direction to makes their voices heard too. Reading all the press today on it has made me a little more positive

Friday was our annual trip to Ardingly for the South of England Show. Davies, Scarlett and I have been every year for the last 4 or even 5 years and this year Ady took a day’s leave from work to join us which was really nice :).

I’d managed to consume a whole bottle of red wine while getting indignant, despairing and all sorts of other emotions over the Badman review so we were not perhaps up and about as early as Ady would have liked but we were there just after 1030am, parked up and ready to go.

Last year it was just D, S and I and we had a really good day following a bit of a pattern so we started with the hounds again this year. Scarlett just adores them, Davies is slightly more reticent, I feel like Jodie Foster in that scene in Silence of the Lambs where she walks down the corridor lined with prison cells on either side trying not to look left or right and pretending that there is noone locked the other side of the bars! 😆

Davies and Scarlett collected loads of freebies including stickers, badges, fuzzybugs, pens and more. We tried samples of loads of things including soft and alcoholic drinks (cider mmm, toffee vodka mmm, locally produced wine mmm. Oh and freshly pressed lemonade, ginger beer, apple juice…), cheeses, oils, cakes and pastries, breads and strawberries and cream :). The kids sat on police and fire motorbikes,

took part in a magic show,
watched Punch and Judy and a Tufty road safety show,
cycled a bike to pedal power a blender to make their own smoothies,
made masks at the wildlife stall, sat in first and third class carriages of a Victorian train and got to ask questions of the guard including ‘why isn’t there a second class?’.

There were cows, pigs, sheep, llamas, ducks, geese, chickens, birds of prey, bees, ferrets and many more animals to coo over (not forgetting all the dogs Scarlett got to stroke).

Ady and I got to go all misty eyed with nostalgia over a big screen showing old road safety adverts including Tufty, Green Cross Code with the GCC man (who came to our school!) and Kevin Keegan, had a really interesting chat with a woman who operates the mobile speed cameras and the static gatso cameras about the criteria for setting them up, the measures including road layout changes and other traffic calming approaches used alongside cameras, the actual speed at which they take action (10% plus 3 mph) and the other options alongside fines and licence points for what they call a ‘lapse’.

I chatted to the newly appointed Education Officer for a local animal sanctuary about setting up some group visits for HEors and arranged to contact her to talk about the idea further. Nice to network ;).

We watched some of the horse jumping, some of pig judging and by chance were at the front of the fence when they closed off an avenue to let loads and loads of cows and sheep move from the judging area back to their enclosures so we got a really close up view of them all including the enormous prize winning beef cattle.

Ady had the highlight of the day though in the bee tent. We’d sat down with our icecreams to wait for the next hourly bee demonstration and I’d told Ady how last year I’d been offered the chance to volunteer to go in with the bees but had to say no as I was on my own with the kids and they were too small to abandon. I left Ady and the kids sitting down and went to buy some beeswax moisturiser from one of the stands and Ady went past me saying ‘go back to the kids Nic, I’m off to do the bee thing!’ and re-emerged suited up to be part of the next show. Envious is not the word! 😆

We had a lovely picnic lunch, Ady had even packed a mini bottle of sparkling rose wine for me to have, ice creams and more and a really, really fab day out. I love it there :).

We enjoyed looking round the food fairs, craft tents, loved the chicken, duck and turkey tent -did I mention we’re thinking about getting turkey to fatten up for Christmas this year? and the NFU stand is always good with lots for the kids to do. Davies and Scarlett love it all so much Ady and I were saying it’s almost a given one or other of them will do something in farming or agriculture or nature somehow one day, clearly some farming throwback thing from generations past coming out in them! 😆

I really liked the flower tent and this year there were some excellent displays on themes with some really imaginative interpretations of ideas. My favourite were the ones called ‘can you eat it?’



and some fab displays by WI members on the theme ‘Dig for victory – a war time cottage garden’ which we really liked and might have a go at making ourselves 🙂

The only lowlight was probably me nipping off to get a tea and coffee for Ady and I while the others sat down for lunch and coming back to them to discover David and his mother (thank you neighbours) sat talking to Ady, Davies and Scarlett. They probably only lingered for 10 minutes but long enough to have me starting to grit my teeth.

It had been our intention to get back in time for Scarlett to go to Rainbows while we packed the car up ready for our evening adventure but when I looked at my watch expecting it to be about 330 to discover it was actually 530 we realised that wasn’t going to happen! Scarlett was philosophical about it though and shrugged it off okay.

We did get home at about 7pm and managed to pack overnight stuff, grab tent and sleeping mats / bags, put the protesting chickens away (very early for them, 930pm is bedtime at the moment normally) and head back out again to Ros’ to celebrate Ellie’s birthday.

We arrived stupidly late, but for once were staying the night so it didn’t matter :). We were utterly delighted to see Layla, Si, Claudie, Jasper and of course Nell there too so that was an added bonus 🙂 :). I got to have a lovely long cuddle with Nell who is perfect and beautiful and so tiny and delicate – at 3 weeks old she is only the size of my two at birth – Davies might not be doing much in the way of growing now but my babies have both been full size versions at birth! 😆 And most charmingly and endrearingly of all Nell appears to be showing signs of being a redhead – yay! 🙂

We all four had a truly lovely evening – Davies and Scarlett played with Claudie and made friends with another boy there we’d not met before, I got to chat to Ros and Layla, Ady got to have a beer for once as he’s usually driving home :).

Ady and Scarlett went to bed around midnight, I sat at the campfire with Ros a bit longer but mindful of needing to be at work this morning I went to bed just after 1am, collecting Davies from the TV on my way 😆 So happy with our little weekender tent again. It goes up really quickly and easily, is the perfect size for the four of us and goes down again just as efficiently :).

Saturday I woke at 530am and tried to work out why, registering it was noisy. It was a mixture of birdsong and preteens who I suspect hadn’t actually slept at all. I had a quick shower to wash the eau de campfire from my hair, the kids went straight from sleep to trampoline in under 2 nminutes, Ady and I took the tent down and Ros kindly supplied us with hot drinks. We were away at 8am and I was at work, bug eyed and a bit fuzzy well before 9am.

Thanks to Ros and Tony as always for a fantastic evening and fab hospitality 🙂 xxx

Work was a bit of a daze really. I spent the first hour in the workroom on ‘light duties’ thanks to my delicate state and my indulgent and amused colleagues 😆 I spent it looking through A Victorian County History, a reference book which one of my tasks for the coming year is to find out 3 facts I didn’t know before from along with Whittakers Almanac and The National Directory of Associations. I did Whittakers last week so today I was reading all about Sompting from 1066 onwards. Very interesting stuff.

I spent the next hour on the enquiry desk but the only enquiry I fielded was about a local lord from the 1800s and some of his antics. It’s been a local history-tastic morning :).

In the final hour I was on the counter and my colleague J and I were looking at an OED online quiz for library users which had us learning which fruits have been known as ‘bumblekites’ in the past among other things. That was my WWLT fact.

Meanwhile at home Ady and the kids did some gardening and then came to collect me from work at 1pm. Then it was over to Chris and Julie’s for a belated postponed birthday barbecue for Lorna who was 1 last Sunday. On the way over Ady learnt that telescope is also a word refering to the action of something telescopic aswell as the thing you look at the sky through.

We had a lovely afternoon with Chris and Julie. The four older children ran around the garden playing together while Lorna sat in the middle of the lawn just watching it all go on around her 🙂

I helped Julie change the settings on her laptop to keep up with having changed her ISP and struggling to send and recieve emails and then we came home. D and S had some toast and a few pages of Charlie Small before bed. Scarlett fell asleep on my lap almost as soon as she climbed up for a cuddle but Davies took longer as he was busy creating a time machine out of cardboard. I’ve no idea where his stamina levels come from :).

We’ve had pizza for dinner and now as I am falling asleep over my keyboard I need to go and make up some of my sleep deficit!

I worked all day today. I had a fairly frustrating day as I spent much of it chasing around trying to mop up after a very poorly executed attempt to run the Adur festival events had gone tits up and from the opposite extreme of events with barely anyone turning up we had an event for tonight scheduled that we’d managed to sell more tickets than actually existed for.

Another of those times I wish for a cloning machine, as trumpet in a case with my name on it in hand, I know I could turn around the marketing and event management for the local group of libraries so easily and would love to do it, but I’m simply not in a position to pitch myself forward for the job at the moment…. unless of course those LA bods who are going to be talking to Davies and Scarlett without me being around are prepared to formalise the arrangement and have them every other Wednesday morning so I can skip off to work?…. 😉

I also spent some time planning the display for this years Summer Reading Game which seems to have meant I’ll be making a papier mache dragon…not at all sure how I managed ended up volunteering for that.

Ady was home in the morning and my Mum was here in the afternoon but as far as I can tell that was largely irrelevant as Davies and Scarlett spent the entire day in the garden. They harvested some potatoes (which they had for dinner with salmon), discovered yet another place hens have been laying eggs which means we have an egg glut and played Indiana Jones.

I got in and made their tea and then we watched Bedtime Stories which I’d brought home from work. By the end of that Ady was home so we had a group chat about the Badman review with me doing lots of ranting, Ady doing lots of anecdotes about social workers from his youth and the children swinging between indignant and outraged and rather nervous. My opinion is that it is about as bad as we fretted it might possibly be, I hope it’s one of those extreme ‘we’ll ask for everything to change and bargain down from there’ type things and that we’re ready to fight to the end and emigrate if all else fails really.

We watched Springwatch where we all got ‘what we learnt today’ (or hereafter called WWLT for brevity) facts about fledglings and leatherback turtles- although my WWLT was a new word – lenticular – which I learnt at work. I’ve somehow managed to drink a whole bottle of red wine while cooking and eating dinner but have bypassed drunk and gone straight to tired so I’m off to bed as we’ve, as usual, got a mad few days coming up.

We’d arranged to go to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum today with my Mum. We’ve been meaning to go for ages and had decided a while ago to get a ‘friends’ ticket which gives free entry for the year for the price of just two visits.

The weather was looking a bit on the dodgey side but we went for it anyway and actually although it was overcast most of the day it didn’t actually start to rain until we were driving home.

The museum itself is very good – a selection of historic buildings taken down from their original location and rebuilt within a big slice of Sussex countryside along with authentic interiors, gardens and in many cases volunteers in traditional dress talking about the relevant historic periods. There is a lake and millpond with water mill, various animals and lots of activities to do. Our main reason for joining though was the various events that run through the year at weekends and school holidays.

Davies and Scarlett have both been there a couple of times but not for a few years and I thought it would be a good place to have access to for a year and get familiar with. For that reason I was quite happy to have a wander round today and not be desperate to do the whole thing and milk every last educational drop out of the day. I think we did go in all of the buildings actually but we didn’t worry about reading all the posters or taking note of everything we saw, just found out more about the things that took our interest.

We liked the maypole and I’d love to see it in proper use with dancers. We had a bit of a go and were joined by another little girl and her mummy and granny in having a bit of dance round it which was fun. I remember having a maypole set up in infant school and being part of the team who danced round it to make patterns with the ribbon :).

We looked at a display about woodworm and woodbeetles and wood wasps and the damage they can do and learnt aboout heartwood and sapwood layers in tree trunks. Then we went into the building with activites and spent ages building a timber house frame with struts, braces and pegs.( As usual flickr is playing up so I’ll drop pictures in here when they are finally uploaded)

Davies and Mum did some experiementing with weights and measures while Scarlett and I looked at seperating grades of stones, gravel and sand and built some walls using miniature bricks in different bricklaying styles. Davies and I looked at using braces to tie building walls together and he showed me the arched bridge he and Mum had built.

The volunteer running that area told us the water mill was about to close for lunch so we headed over there to look at that. Davies remembered loads from our windmill visit but hadn’t realised what was powering the mill so went back outside to check for sails and realised it was a watermill :). They bought some duck food in there along with a cookie each made with flour from the mill.

We were then assaulted by the ducks 😆 loads of ducklings at various developmental stages from small and cute and fluffy to fully feathered but small and noisy. The children really enjoyed feeding them 🙂

We had a quick look at an area about plumbing and masonry but we were all getting hungry so retired to the cafe for lunch. We bought sandwiches and went back to the pond to sit and eat at a picnic bench. We spent the whole times with ducks under our table begging food, much to the kids’ delight and then both of them managed to catch and hold a duck 🙂

After lunch we went to walk round some of the buildings. Unfortunately we got tangled up in various school groups despite my best efforts to avoid them. I hate the way the teachers talk to the children and the way the kids don’t actually seem to get much out of these visits and are so bloody rude and oblivious to other people around. Way too much pushing, shoving and no respect for others 🙁

We managed to get away from the group and spent some time looking round the buildings. We all decided we really liked the simple lifestyles they suggested, particularly the gardens all planted up with fruit and vegetables. I was so impressed that Davies and Scarlett were able to name so many of the plants even the roots or those not yet showing fruits including onions, leek, carrot, potatoes, broad beans, peas. Actually, sod the kids I was impressed that I could identify them actually because I couldn’t have done six months ago! 😆

We had a good wander round before returning to the pond again where Mum and I sat on a bench while Davies and Scarlett went off to watch the ducks again. When we walked over to tell them it was time to go they were most perturbed about a small duckling that had jumped into the pond (I think they had chased it, non maliciously but were feeling bad) and then the mother duck had jumped in too followed by the other two ducklings and now none of the 3 ducklings could get out again. The volunteers were alerted and we watched their efforts to rescue them for a while (it was all very Springwatch) but had to get going and were assured they’d get them out even if they had to wade in to rescue them (it was fairly shallow knee height water).

As we started to drive home it began to rain so we’d definitely had the best of the day. We played the Yes and No game (where you mustn’t say yes or no) in the car on the way home. We dropped Mum home and just had time for Davies and Scarlett to have a quick tea and get changed before heading back out to Badgers again.

Ady pulled up behind us in the carpark so we both took them in and then we went off to Waitrose to get some milk and sat chatting in the car for a while before I headed off to Shoreham library for an author event with Andrew Crofts . I’d not been sure whether or not to go and had only told Ady about it on Monday and mentioned if he got home in time to collect the kids from Badgers I might quite like to go. He’s a ghost writer for celebrities, business men and lost of those white cover books about childhood abuse. I got in for free as my money was waved away by my boss who was on the door and it was a very enjoyable 90 minutes. He was an excellent speaker, very entertaining and amusing and I really enjoyed it.What a cool job he has! He gets to ask every single nosey question, write a book and get paid for it! I was by far the youngest person there, I imagine everyone else was of pensionable age but I’m really glad I went :).

There were more drinks, some of his books for sale that he would sign and quite possibly further questions and chat with him but I left then in an effort to get home to say goodnight to the kids and have dinner at a sensible hour.

I helped Davies plait and tie up some strips of leather he and Ady had cut to make an Indiana Jones whip and then D and S went to bed, I had a bath and Ady cooked a lovely steak dinner complete with our own potatoes :).

Off to Forest School this morning. I had thought I’d stay if one or both children asked me to but when we pulled up at the carpark they both leapt out and headed off to see the rangers, the dog and the other children. I stayed in the background tidying up the inside of my car which was a right state with jute bags, waterproofs, fleeces and spare clothes strewn all over the back seat, the very back seats and the passenger seat footwell. It’s all nicely organised now :). They waved me off happily when it was time for them to walk up the hill so I drove to Asda and had a happy hour wandering about in there getting a few bits for dinner, a new swimsuit for Tarly (age 7-8 gulp!) and generally enjoying being unencumbered :).

I got back to the park and sat in the car and read my book for nearly an hour before heading up the killer hill to where they all were.

This week they’d played a few games and the main activity had been using pre-sawn discs of wood to make things. They had made glue on the fire and used the mini handdrills to make holes and added bits they had gathered from the woods to create creatures and figures from the wood.

Scarlett had made a flower and a couple of slugs. Davies had made a snail and a couple of other things. I have to confess I am not overly impressed with Forest School really. There is way too much hanging about doing very little, way too much time to just play about in the woods, many of the activities are not relevant to being in the forest and I don’t feel there is enough of the sort of learning I was expecting there to be about wildlife, trees and flowers and well, you know, foresty stuff I guess. If it was a pay as you go, £15 a week thing we’d definitely have stopped going by about week 2. That said Davies and Scarlett really enjoy it and every so often something will come up that they learnt at Forest School so whilst we won’t be repeating it in a hurry and I’d possibly research something like this a bit more in future before committing to so much money if I were to ask them they’d say it has been worth it.

We walked back down the hill and came home. A parcel had arrived from Kirsty (thanks Kirsty, I love it. Can’t actually find my teapot at the moment to take a photo but it definitely looks like it will fit. As an aside, where the hell can my teapot have gone anyway?!) which contained a picture for Davies from Marcus and a bracelet for Scarlett from Alex so they set to making stuff and doing drawings to send off in return. I was checking my emails and eating a coconut direct from the shell using a knife to break bits out and the table was strewn with 6 cereal packets as Ady had got them all out, hotel breakfast stylee for the kids to choose and while they’d taken their dirty bowls out I’d not yet taken all the boxes back to the kitchen. So that was the perfect time for my Mum to ring on the doorbell!

I quickly cleared up and she spent some time chatting to Davies in the playroom while Scarlett insisted she couldn’t write anything in the lounge and I finished eating my coconut.

My Mum’s car was being MOTd so she’d walked to us and was feeling blue that it had failed and is going to be expensive. They’ve definitely spent more on their car in the last 12 months than it would be worth. We were heading back out again to swimming lessons so dropped her home on the way.

Davies and Scarlett tell me they had a good lesson but I was busy with my lengths and managed to up them to 24 today :). I ran out of time rather than energy too which is a good thing. I’ve no idea whether I’ll be able to much improve on that as I suspect I am now swimming about as fast as I’ll get, it’s just that I could swim for longer, which is time I don’t have. We got dressed and dried and nipped to the chip shop for fish and chips for the kids tea.

As we drove past our next door neighbour’s house Scarlett looked at the house and noticed our elderly neighbour was sitting on the floor holding her head with her wheelie bin knocked over on the floor next to her. She told me and I left the children in the car in the drive while I ran round to see what had happened. Sure enough she was sitting in her drive, looking very shaken having fallen over while trying to do something with the bins. She had a massive lump on her head and a clearly broken wrist :(. An across the road from her neighbour had just pulled into his drive and asked if we needed help and sent over his neighbours who are her friends. The woman called an ambulance while I sat on the ground with her rubbing her back and chatting to her. She was very shaken and started to mumble and shiver so I asked the neighbour to get her a coat or a blanket. She seemed really flustered but with no sense of urgency so I was getting a bit frustrated with her. Meanwhile Davies and Scarlett appeared over the hedge with the car keys having scrambled over from the back seats (can’t open back doors thanks to childlocks which I really must take off). They came round and then I told them to go on in the house and have their tea. They were so good and just went off to do that.

I managed to galvanise the neighbour into getting a blanket and a coat for Peggy although she (the neighbour) seemed far more concerned with where Peggy’s purse was. Maybe that’s just an old person’s first concern but it seemed rather non-urgent in the scheme of things. The ambulance finally arrived and I helped them get Peggy on board before checking the neighbours were okay to lock up Peggy’s house etc and then came home.

Davies and Scarlett had been absolute stars, locking my car, working out which was the front door key and getting in the house. Climbing up to the cupboards to get salt, vinegar, ketchup and glasses for drinks and splitting the large piece of fish between them. I was so very proud of them for being calm, unflappable and allowing me to help Peggy when she needed it. A bit of a test for them and they really rose to the challenge 🙂 :).

Ady came home and while I read some Charlie Small he turned out the first of the potatoes in sacks from the patio. A really good haul of potatoes from all three so that was very good news :). The chickens were also thrilled to be getting all the green of the plants to peck away at. 🙂

I nipped up the allotment (I drove, swimming is enough exercise for one day at the moment and I’m conscious of my knees not being up to too much at once. This is one of those horrid catch 22 situations that they are weak because of the extra strain on them by my being overweight but in doing exercise to lose some of that weight I could do permanent damage and prevent myself from being able to exercise!) to gather a a few more broad beans, some sweet peas and check on everything as I’ve not been up there since Friday and although it’s not needed watering thanks to lots of rain I just wanted to check everything was in order.

I got home and the children were supposed to be in bed but as usual they were both in and out of their bedrooms while I was in the bath until they started watching Springwatch which kept them glued to the TV until it finished, begging to be allowed to watch it again tomorrow :).I think we could manage that :).

I cooked dinner and we watched Come Dine with Me, which we always enjoy.

We didn’t manage what we learnt today amidst all the other excitement so we’ll try and catch up tomorrow.

I’d booked us into a filmeducation showing today clashing with the monthly Pulborough Brooks meet up. I knew Davies and Scarlett would probably choose PB over the cinema particularly if there were likely to be friends or cousins there but I thought if the weather was bad then we’d get more out of the cinema.

I’d checked the weather forecast last night and pretty much decided we’d do PB so when we were up this morning and I checked with them and they both went for Pulborough Brooks I wasn’t surprised. We gathered up some food to take and headed off.

When we arrived there were only 3 families there – the husband and 2 older children of Katy who usually organises it (Katy and new baby were home resting after overdoing it a bit last week), another Katy and her 3 children who I have been unsuccessfully attempting to coordinate diaries with to get together so that was nice. We admitted we’re both a bit hard to pin down before August so it was good to catch up today 😆 and K and his 2 children who it was nice to see there again. Another couple arrived with a toddler, having found the group on facebook but not having made it along to anything before so we chatted to them for a bit and then all set off.

K (the man K, not the K who runs it and wasn’t there or the K who does’t run it but was there even though she’s very busy) watched Davies and Scarlett for a while before commenting to me on how close they seem and how self-contained they are and happy to be in each others company. He said he’s noticed it about them before and it was really nice to hear. It is true and something I consider to be one of the biggest plusses to HE for us but still nice to have mentioned :).

Initially we were near the front of the group but we kept stopping to look at things and mark stuff on D and S’s spotter sheets so we ended up right at the back. When we stopped to look for newts in the pond and then had a nightingale singing merrily away pointed out to us we lost the rest of the group completely.

This was fine and the three of us had a really nice walk round together chatting and spotting things. Davies learnt his thing of the day about dragonflies and we saw a nightingale again a bit later on aswell as loads of butterflies and rabbits and a heron which flew really low above our heads. They are such amazing birds herons, totally pre-historic looking in flight I think.

We didn’t manage to spot any adders and the water level in all the lakes and ponds was really low so there was a real lack of waterbirds too including ducks and lapwings which are normally in abundance. Lots of young deer to look at though and it was nice to be out and about and chatting.

We passed the rest of the group who had all stopped at a midway point so finished the walk first and had decided to head off home rather than wait for them all to come to the playground but as we went to the carpark so we saw Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna arriving, 2 and a half hours late along with Katy and co who hadn’t done the walk but had found Julie in the carpark just as they were leaving. So we went back in again too and ended up staying for another 90 minutes as everyone else trickled back to the park again.

It was really nice, I got to lay in the sunshine chatting to Julie, Katy and K while the kids all played in a big group together :).

We all started to drift off around 2pm although it took about half an hour to actually pack up picnics and get to the carpark. I suggested moving on to PYO but Julie was doing her weekly food shop and keen to go and get it done. Davies didn;t want to go without friends so we came home. We came via Sainsburys as we had no fruit or veg in the house so Scarlett and I went in while Davies waited in the car and we got loads of fruit reduced to clear.

Back home Davies and Scarlett spent a couple of hours connected on Lego Indiana Jones DS while I read my book and ate a load of pineapple, mango and coconut, faffed around with laundry and put some eggs in the incubator. We got 6 eggs from our bantams today which is pretty good (we’ve 7 hens but you only expect them to lay about 3 eggs a week according to books).

Ady arrived home just as I served up the kids’ tea. I read some Charlie Small and we did some googling and youtubing to answer one of Tarly’s questions before bed. Davies lost his 7th tooth and wrote an excellent note for the ‘toof fery’
‘TO TOOF FERY, IV LOST MY TOOF AND I NID A PAND PLES’ 😆

Davies and Scarlett really did the What I Learnt Today properly today with it being stuff that has genuinely crept up during the course of a normal day rather than a deliberate factoid as we’ve done some days. Davies learnt that dragonfly larvae are called nymphs. He also learnt (as did I) that the larval stage can be up to 5 years but as dragonflies they live around a month.

Scarlett learnt (from her Karen Carpenter curriculum ;)) that a bayou is a pond, lake or slow running stream.

I learnt that although tinned food has been around for nearly 200 years (first tinned food in 1810, common by 1846) tin openers have been around for a lot less time, with the design we use today not invented til 1925. I guess necessity really is the mother of invention 🙂

Ady learnt about Hitler’s alleged visit to Liverpool but after a bit of research I’ll be telling him in the morning that his fact source is dodgy again. He did learn about potato diseases though as the leaves on two of his plants are looking very sad so he was doing some reading on the net and in our veg books about that.

was today so I booked us into the two farms we visited last year again as we’d enjoyed them both. First was Brickpitts Organic farm which is an organic sheep farm with some arable organic farming too. It was nice to see how well they’re doing and that since last year they’ve bought another 25 acres of fields from a retiring neighbour and are adding to their business. I really like their ethics and ideas and it’s so nice to see someone succeeding given the gloom and doom about small businesses and what to many would be considered a luxury product.

They were more organised this year and we managed to have a chat with both husband and wife which was nice. We arrived and were greeted by the wife and spent some time stroking some orphaned lambs before having a chat with a woman from a woodland charity who recommended the field study council for more information – dropping link here to follow up for myself. Then we took the farm trail round some of their land that they’d marked out with regular signs giving information about what you could see.

We all learnt lots about hedges, crop rotation, organic farming and admired their new rainwater harvesting system. Scarlett found a pheasants egg which I correctly identified (Ady is loving his internet phone for checking to see if I’m right about things on the go ;)) and an ear tag from one of the sheep next to a fence. Davies had the best spot though of a baby deer, really tiny and still wobbly of leg lying in the long grass while all the crowds wandered past. The husband (farmer husband, not the deer husband) came along and we chatted to him for a bit about badger holes and mentioned the deer and he said it happens often when the doe gives birth in a field with gates and hedges and the baby can’t get out until it’s big enough to jump over the hedge so it stays in the field, hidden in the grass while it’s mother goes off for food each day and then returns to it again later until it is big enough to leap over the hedge.

We finished the trail and had another look at the orphaned lambs as they were letting the children go into their pen to cuddle them.

Scarlett took the ear tag and the egg to show the wife who was really good at chatting to her for ages about both and took the tag so she’d know which sheep needed a replacement and explained the code on one side was the farms’ number and the code on the other side was the indivdual sheep’s number and she even knew that one by name. When I got an email back to confirm we were going to that farm today she had remembered either my name or email address from last year and knew we were HEors and said they do educational visits etc if I wanted to arrange one. I will email her to thank her for today and see what sort of thing they offer and put it out to see who is interested in visiting. Having seen her in action today I think it could be really good :).

We then did some felting bracelets using merino wool and wet felting in soapy water. I got a bit roped in as the woman running it heard me comparing it to needle felting with Davies and Scarlett and talking about the different ways of felting and how they get the same results so I ended up with a small crowd too :). We’re all now sporting felted bracelets and I might have another go at them with some of my wool.

Finally we watched some sheep shearing before moving onto the next farm which was literally round the corner.

This one, The Old Dairy is much more commercial and ‘Day Trip to the Farm’y, which is still very good but not quite so charming somehow as meeting the real farmers who seriously farm and just open their doors once a year. There was a farm trail round their sheep, pigs, goats, ducks and chickens which we more or less followed. We admired their very pretty bantams and then got something to eat as we were all hungry. Davies and I went for a hog roast in a roll which was actually a bit disappointing as it was very fatty and bitty although it was after 2pm so coming to the end of lunchtime I guess. We ate that watching a woman with a spinning wheel and then Davies and Scarlett made paper sheep on a stall for a local agricultural college while Ady and I tried some cheeses and Ady (who is lovely :)) bought me a halfpint of local cider which was very welcome :). The ice cream seller had run out of icecreams so we went into the tiny farm shop there in search of some and found not only icecreams but also some fertilised bantams eggs for sale of the ones we’d been admiring. At £3 for 6 eggs we thought it was worth a go and have bought some home to put into the incubator tomorrow along with a few of our own eggs too :).

We came home and Ady got dinner on and the children had a very annoying half an hour of being needy when I just wanted to sit down and relax. Eventually they went off to have a bath so I got some peace 🙂 Dinner was lovely and I then read a bit more of the latest Charlie Small book before packing them off to bed so I could have a speedy bath before The Apprentice. It didn’t work and they were both still bobbing about til much later but the intention was there.

Today Davies learnt about silage (what it’s made from, what it’s used for) and that you shouldn’t release balloons off as they can be harmful to wildlife. He also liked one of the facts from the farm that there can be up to 10 million bacteria in one gram of soil.

Scarlett learnt how to identify a pheasant egg and about chimpanzee’s tea parties (after I ranted her over table manners :lol:).

Ady learnt a load of stuff about foxgloves including that they are poisonous to most wildlife, can be used to treat heart problems (I already knew that from Clan of the Cave Bear :lol:) but not why they are called foxgloves.

I learnt quite a bit about hedges and what papyrus is (Oh how I’ll miss Margaret!).

I struggled to get out of bed this morning to go to work, particularly when Scarlett put her arms round my neck and hung off me saying ‘don’t go to work Mummy, I haven’t had enough time with you this week…’ 🙁 Getting up and heading off to work within half an hour for 3 mornings out of the last 4 is just too many for her.

Work was frustrating. I was working extra to run a storytime special as part of the Adur festival and it was planned to be a session for 45 minutes including stories and craft activities for 4-8year olds based on a theme of mixed up fairy stories. Unfortunately all the marketing for it has been crap – there is a real lack of Adur festival brochures, the posters and flyers came through really late and whilst beautiful with their pencil drawing of a fairy in some woodland hardly appeal to children, none of the other staff have been briefed to ‘sell’ the event to people coming into the library over the last couple of weeks and we’ve done nothing about putting it on the council website on the library pages or anything like that. I find this really annoying as I only get about half an hour a week in work time to look at anything like that but I am really aware of the obvious benefits of marketing such events and what a productive use of time it would be to get the word out there about the things like that the library service offer.

Consequently at 10am we had one little girl who comes to storytime every week and her baby brother :(. I’d done a bit of preparation work but intended to wing it a bit but was being assisted by the Children’s Librarian so was having to pretend I was super organised and as enthusiastic about the whole thing as she was. We did manage to rope in 4 more children over the course of the hour as they came into the library and were pressganged into joining in.

We started off with a sack filled with items for the children to guess the fairy story. C, the children’s librarian had brought in a bowl and spoon (porridge, Golidlocks), a mirror (Snow White) and I’d brought in a brick, some straw and some sticks (3 little pigs), a silver slipper which used to be Scarlett’s and prior to that used to be Lulah’s (Cinderella) and some runner beans from my granny (Jack and the beanstalk). That went down well with lots of kids tv presenter style overacting from C and I.

Next I read a story which is a parody of one of the most parodied fairystories ever but went down well with lots of joining in of huffing and puffing (sounded like asthmatics anonymous in the junior library!). Then I left C to read a lift the flap story about fairystory houses while I gathered the first of my activities which was folding a sheet of paper into three and drawing a head, passing it on, drawing a body, passing it on and then drawing feet. We had some good mixed up characters from that and then C read from and I led an activity of a storyboard of mixed up people and places. It would have better suited some older children really but I’d done lots of drawings of things to give inspiration so with lots of encouragement we got some ideas down.

We finished about 11 and I went for a restorative cup of tea. Whilst I’d been peering outside the library hoping to see lots of children heading towards us for storytime our regular drunk was on the bench outside the library with his flask of alchohol. He said something conversational to me and I replied and then he said ‘don’t worry, this isn’t whisky in here, I’ve just filled it up with beer!’ to which I laughed and said that at before 10am it probably wasn’t much better really! 😆

Part of my objectives for the coming year, along with everyone else is to visit various named reference books and learn something from them, very similar to what we’re doing at home at the moment, so I got the first book; and had a good peruse of that which gave me my thing I learnt today :).

I was on the counter for the last hour and it really dragged as it was so quiet.

Back home I caught up with Ady, Davies and Scarlett’s morning which had been spent at Pulborough Brooks for Wildlife Explorers. They’d looked at some live moths caught in a moth trap last night and learnt about moths and butterflies. Davies got the leader to write down a word for him that he was bringing to the What I Learnt Today table which apparently impressed her no end when he explained what we did and why he’d like it written down :). Ady enjoyed a nice walk round in the sunshine.

I had time for a quick lunch and then we were off again to Magic Lantern. It was the last one of the season and they watched The Prince’s Quest we watched at home not that long ago. We were slightly late due to dreadful festival traffic so I ran in with the kids who were led off happily. It’s been great for them, they’ve loved the films and the chatting about it bit too and Ady and I have really enjoyed the couple of hours we get to potter around the shops or the town on our own too :). We’ll definitely be signing them up again in September :).

Ady and I had a wander round the charity shops and he got a pair of shoes, a video and found two identical china mugs with Viva Pinata characters on them which we got for the kids. I found a book I’d been looking for in the local bookshop in the branch there and we had a quick look round the Oceans Day marquee that was up for the festival. There were various live sealife things such as crabs, a display about litter in the sea and on beaches and loads of photos of seals and dolphins seen off local beaches (rare but not unheard of). We still had 45 minutes to go so went into a cafe and had a coffee and an iced chai tea, both of which were lovely and under a fiver so we considered an excellent treat :).

We collected Davies and Scarlett and as there was a stall in the arts centre for the Environment Agency who were giving away jute bags for signing a pledge to not use plastic carrier bags we both signed up and got free bags – mine is excellent, it has a picture of a water butt and says ‘I love my big butt! Save water’ 😆

We left there and drove past home to the village green to catch the last hour of the Sompting festival which basically entailed the children going on a crazy house ride – like Danny and Sandy are in in Grease for You’re the one that I want. They totally got their £1.50 each out of it by working out how to stay on and and go round again and again. They were both really dizzy when they came off after about 20 minutes 😆 We were heading off again when I decided to give into their pleas for another ride and took them on the waltzer style ride which we all enjoyed (Ady stood and watched, very much not his sort of thing :)).

Back home we watched Madagascar 2 on dvd and then it was bed for Davies and Scarlett. An as usual late dinner for us of curry and a second night of rather too much wine – those boxed are lethal!

Oh and, things we learnt today:
Davies – the group name for butterflies and moths is lepidoptera,
Scarlett – to kill a zombie you need to chop it’s head off 😆
Ady – RV stands for Recreational vehicle – I knew that already but the kids had asked him this morning so he’d googled it.
Nic – in the year 2007-2008 nearly 1.8 million driving tests (car) were taken in the UK – the passrate was 44%.

Work all day for me today and it was one of those days that dragged and seemed very s l o w indeed. I did Baby Rhyme time in the morning which is suffering from having altogether too many toddlers and pre-schoolers and not nearly enough, ie none, babies. It’s supposed to be for under 2s but I reckon all of the attendees today were over 2.

At one point we had two of them making a break for it with the maracas, one beating the crap out of the upturned instrument box with a drum stick, dangerously close to the head of another one, one trying to get under the table to get to the turned off kiddie computer, two of the mums having a bit of a chat while me and one of the toddler bravely carried on with Wind The Bobbin Up. I did an awful lot of ‘go and sit on Mummy’s lap then’ songs – Humpty Dumpty, Row, row, row your boat, Grand old Duke of York, Round and round the garden… I was even contriving new actions to go with songs that don’t normally have them to get kids on their bums and Mums to shut up. I could so never be a teacher! 😆

In other news I chatted at length with the keen and enthusiastic young librarian about what I might want to be when I grow up and she was encouraging me to think about being a librarian (for which I’d need a proper qualification so is a real, proper job). I do consider it from time to time but have never got as far as looking into whether I could go straight to a masters degree without access level qualifications and what sort of cost implication there would be. Maybe I should look into it more. I did ask her if she got a teasmade if she recruited me but she denied any ulterior motive 😆

In the afternoon I spent some time drawing pictures of characters and props from fairy stories for tomorrows festival storytime special. Nice work if you can get it ;).

Ady and I arrived home at the exact same time which led Scarlett to ponder on how we’d managed it. I joked that we don’t really go to work, we con my Mum into babysitting and go swanning off together for the day and have lunch in expensive cafes. I’m not sure my Mum didn’t half suspect I was telling the truth! 😆

Everything seemed to have gone smoothly here today and I think the children spent most of the day in the garden playing Indiana Jones. My Mum had ‘thoughtfully’ gone through the strawberries we’d picked yesterday, washed them all and thrown some yucky ones in the bin. I did point out that composting them, feeding them to the chickens, or leaving them for me to make jam with would have all been better options. Sometimes she is ‘helpful’ in the most peculiar fashion…

Scarlett had a speedy meal of eggs on toast which Ady and I made jointly while also making tea and coffee for me, Ady and Mum, weighing out and mixing pizza dough and chatting to my Mum who stood in our tiny kitchen watching us in amazement. We’re such a team! :).

Mum and I walked Scarlett round to Rainbows where she had a wobble about being left – half term last week, bit of a bad time with Rebecca at the park this week and not having seen me all day was enough to have her not sure about being left there. She did get over it though and was fine in the end. Mum came up to the allotment with me to do the watering and have a good look, as she’s not been up there since last year when it had just been dug over and was all empty. I was quite proud of seeing all our hard work through someone else’s eyes.

Back to collect Tarly and Davies came with us as he was in the garden when we dropped the car home. Davies had his dinner and while Ady and Mum chatted I read a couple of books to the children including: which I’d got along with a couple more dealing with your temper type books aswell as and then we read which is good but we’ve read so many similar books that it had a lot to live up to – my favourite of those type remains .

I wanted to read and they wanted the next Charlie Small both of which we have waiting but instead we got sidetracked into talking about What we Learnt Today instead.

Ady learnt that all polar bears are left handed, which I’d heared before. Davies learnt about Painted Lady butterflies which are the most common in the world courtesy of Ady telling us he’d heard about a mass migration of them locally and finding some information and images on the net about them for Davies. Scarlett learnt that there have been times when fish and frogs rained from the sky and how that came to happen. I learnt the alleged origin of the term ‘Tommys’ regarding English soldiers and then we all learnt various factoids from which we happened to have sitting on our bookshelf.

I had a good haul in a charity shop at lunchtime including a top and cardigan for me, a proper decent winter coat for me, a W&G t shirt for Ady, two tshirts for Tarly and an engraving machine all for £20. So we had a go with the engraving machine. It’s a toy one for kids but works well at engraving onto some dog tags and keyrings that came with it. Really impressed with it for £1.50 although I’ve not yet had a play on it myself to see how creative you can be with it.

Scarlett struggled to get to sleep and was pretty clingy to me – I’ve a feeling she won’t take tomorrow with me working in the morning and her at Magic Lantern in her stride.. ah well. She has a really nasty bruise on her side and both knees are bruised and scrapped from Wednesday at the park so she really did hurt herself. I suspect it was rather more of an accident than she let on at the time as she’s already told me Davies got to her first and was stroking her and cuddling her. I’ve expected her to be in plaster since she starting walking so I’m surprised she’s got to 6 without more than 3 stitches in her chin. I had a friend when I was younger who broke both arms, legs, wrists and more all in seperate accidents on rollerskates or other such crazy stunts and I always expected that of Scarlett really.

Another late dinner and I really should go to bed.

I slept in this morning which I felt way better for having done and when I did get up I was ready to face the day properly :).

I let the chickens out, did the kids a second breakfast (they’d been scoffing various things already), tidied the kitchen up, sorted some laundry and then sat down with a cup of tea to discuss ideas of what to do with the day.

Ady has a geocache thingy on his phone which has GPS and can tell you the nearest caches to where you are and direct you to them. It had said there was one at Brooklands and Ady had offered to leave his phone here. So I suggested geocaching, some time at the allotment, PYO which opened last week, some baking, staying home, seeing if I could arrange to see friends, going to town to get Tarly a new rucksack. Davies wanted geocache and Scarlett wanted PYO so we planned to do the geocache first, come home for lunch and then go to PYO in the afternoon.

Except Ady had forgotten to leave his phone here and taken it to work 🙁

So instead the kids had some time out in the garden with the chickens including building a fake chicken out of sticks and feathers, while I processed some laundry. We were so close to midday by then that they had some food for lunch and then we headed off to PYO.

It’s still really early in the season so there wasn’t much to pick yet but all we really wanted was strawberries anyway so we had a happy hour sitting in the field picking (and eating!) those and got a huge punnet full. We walked round and looked for peas but only picked a handful, there were broad beans ready but we have those growing and ready at the allotment and didn’t want spinach or cabbage or rhubarb.

We drove into Worthing town and parked up for an hour and looked for a rucksack for Scarlett. I picked up a couple of tshirts for me in a cheap shop as I seem to be lacking cool, comfy tshirts to wear with jeans and the kids found some rip off lightsabres each for £2 so I got them one of those each which they were delighted with. We found a rucksack in the cheapo sports shop which claimed to have 70% off. It’s a pink Puma one so Scarlett likes the puma on the front :). It does look more likely to stand up to actually being used than her previous one though :).

Back home I did my baking – I noticed the lavender was in flower so I made some lavender shortbread and at Scarlett’s request some snickerdoodles with lavender in which we re-named lavendoodles and are very nice indeed :). I also made pastry for quiche for dinner which has cleared some of the 25 eggs we’ve collected over the last few days now all the hens are laying again :).

Davies and Scarlett played in the garden for nearly 3 hours, really nicely, together. I peeked at them every so often and it was just really nice to see them so happy together :). Ady came home and I left him to bath and feed Davies and Scarlett while I cycled up to the allotment to water it. I got a kick out of ruthlessly chopping down the spinach which I’d never wanted to plant in the first place and was blocking the sunshine from my precious sweetcorn. Really enjoyed that :).

Back home I read the last four chapters of George. Not sure what we’ve got lined up next. I finshed putting the quiches together and cooked dinner. Ady went and voted first and then I went when he got back as the kids were already in their pjs when we remembered. I chatted to the neighbours on the way and was most amused by the choice of 15 candidates for the european elections :).

Today Ady learnt about the speed of raindrops falling, Scarlett learnt about carbohydrates as a result of a conversation with me at PYO about wheat and what we use it for. This was well timed after me spending time on my healthy eating course yesterday so she now knows about us getting energy from carbs and how they should form a big chunk of our diet, Davies learnt about water on Mars from George and asking me about it afterwards and I learnt about the Goldilocks Zone, also from George. I also learnt that all 3 of us can now tell a few root vegetables by their leaves after we all correctly identified onions and carrots and beetroot which I don’t think any of us could do this time last year :).

I’ve been battling, and losing, with flickr so I’m going to give up and go to bed. Some of us have got work in the morning ;). It’s been a nice day, reminds us of just why we do this :).

I was at Worthing library this morning for a training session on the new computer systems that are being installed in the libraries over the next few months. Ady was home with Davies and Scarlett so rather than drive and pay for parking he ran me in. We also picked up S, my colleague who was coming too. She thoroughly enjoyed Davies’ observations of some boats out at sea which he decided where on fire and described as ‘boiling black with red hot embers’ 😆

The training was pretty good although S and I were getting our heads round the system rather quicker than the other 3 attendees. Fortunately it was two trainers to five trainees so Wendy, our direct senior was able to concentrate on S and I and keep us learning. We had to join new borrowers and make up name, address and occupation for then so S and I enjoyed setting up accounts for each other including Mc prefixing our surnames as per a day at work a few weeks ago when we all added a Mc to our names for the day and I was a sailor while she was a shepherd 😆 Later we had to add another family members so I had a twin who was afro-carribean while I was of course scottish and she had a five year old son who was a professor called Dave 😆 Little things…

The training finished just after midday so we dropped S home and then Ady went off to work, Davies, Scarlett and I went to Brooklands to meet up with Lucy and Co and a couple of other local home ed families. Davies and Scarlett were hoping to see Toby there but Tasha and I hadn’t managed to coordinate days properly (ie I emailed her late last night and she read it and thought it meant tomorrow) so they didn’t make it. Unfortunately the dynamic didn’t pan out at all well with the couple of children who were already there and Davies was instantly made to feel unwelcome 🙁 Scarlett managed to fall over and graze both knees and an ankle within five minutes of arriving and then managed to fall off the swing and bump her head so I had tears from her twice within 10 minutes too, which is ususual 🙁 Davies wanted to leave pretty much the whole time although he did go off a couple of times to try and play and both children managed to overhear a rather nasty conversation between the other children which upset Davies although Scarlett shrugged it off.

Davies quite daringly climbed over the top of the monkey bars which I looked round to see just as he was finishing and was a bit of a heart in mouth moment. Scarlett did it and managed it with me underneath but she was really scared as heights is one of the few things that she can be cautious about.

We left as it clearly wasn’t going to improve and both children were keen to go so we got an ice cream each and headed for home. On the way home we had a chat about it all and ironed out what was and wasn’t important and my expectation of them to either make the effort to get on with others or ignore them and play together and enjoy themselves regardless of anyone else. It had been enough to put me in a bad mood though so I wasn’t receptive to their efforts to have my attention and eventually they connected on their DSs and enjoyed playing together while I worked through the second assessment of my Healthy Eating online course. I’ll wait for feedback on that and then I just have the third section to work through to complete it although I anticipate a bit more work on the one I submitted today.

Davies and Scarlett had tea and then we headed off to Badgers. On the way we listened to The Carpenters and Scarlett asked me to skip past Rainy Days and Mondays as it made her feel sad and teary. She is often moved by music like that and we talked about how amazing it is that a piece of music can have such a profound effect on your mood. We also talked about Karen Carpenter as they wanted to know if she’d ever recorded anything happy. On the way home we listened to Top of the World to show she had!

I walked down to the beach for half an hour and chatted to my mum on the phone as I need her to look after D and S all day on Friday so Ady can work all day as he was off this morning. That was hard work and I had to grovel for it which makes me feel crappy. I’ve felt really pissed off the last couple of days by the ability of other people to effect my mood as it is not something I normally suffer from and it’s particularly hard when related to other people impacting on Davies and Scarlett’s happiness 🙁 I remember saying to someone when I was pregnant with Davies that the sorts of things I fretted about with regard to parenthood were how to mend broken hearts and fix things a kiss wouldn’t make better. I struggle with my own recollections of being the child people didn’t want to play with, knowing that now I couldn’t care less what other people think of me and I’d consider it their loss to not want to be in my company and knowing that neither of those are particularly helpful to my children in the here and now of their lives. Davies takes things to heart while Scarlett tends not to care so I see me in both of them at different times and I suspect neither is correct. Scarlett will need people and Davies will need to toughen up. It’s even harder when I see them so popular and happy in other company.

Badgers was good, they had a visit from some Community Support Officers who arrived in a CCTV Police van which they all got to go and sit in and explore. I think they mostly covered things like road safety and the role of the police in keeping us safe but they all seemed to enjoy it and came out with various goodies including colouring in sheets, pencils, stickers and a sheet of their own fingerprints.

Home for a very comprehensive ‘what did we learn today’ which included looking up the meanings of the words poignant and melancholy, a brief biography of Karen Carpenter including images and a quick talk about anorexia.

Davies learnt about fingerprints being different on every single person and different on each finger (he knew about everyone having their own unique prints but thought they were the same on each finger) and the six different types of crossings. Scarlett learnt that some police vans have cameras in them and about anorexia, Ady’s learnt that his new phone does all sorts of twiddly things including geocaching (although I think it’s Davies who is most excited about that!) and I have learnt about the nutritional value of coconuts and pineapples as part of my assessment was a food diary from yesterday. I was also unsure as to whether coconut was a nut or a fruit and now I know it is a fruit :).

We had a chapter of George and then it was time for bed for the children as I wanted to watch The Apprentice final five show and The Apprentice. We managed our earliest dinner of the week shortly before 10pm.

Up and out first thing to Forest School. We were cutting it fine this morning but fortunately everyone else seemed to be too (or maybe it’s now running on Home Ed time? 🙂 ) Davies and Scarlett quickly found their mates and barely needed to say goodbye before they headed off up the hill.

I drove round a bit of Lewes I don’t know trying to locate the scrapstore. Eventually I found it, had a quick look round, resisted the urge to gather armfuls of ‘just in case’ stuff but did fill a bag with hair bobbles and bands which will come in very useful as Scarlett and I can never find any.

I then parked up in Lewes high street for an hour (*really* expensive parking) and had a quick wander round the charity shops. I got two tops and a pair of trousers for Tarly, all of which she loves but are too big just yet, and that was it. I drove back and walked up the Hill of Testing to find the Forest Schoolers just as they were sitting down to some elderflower drink so I got a cup too which was nice and refreshing :).

I sat and chatted to Liza while they finished up and then went back down the Hill of Testing again. I was not very impressed this week that Davies had managed to sustain two injuries, including a lump and blood drawn on his head from being poked with a stick. There is a child there who is very unpleasant and violent and I will be happy to ensure we don’t cross paths with again, which is a shame as I like his mother but genuinely fear for the safety of my children around him. I don’t think the rangers are hands on enough with some of the stuff that happens around him and today was obviously another example of that. On the way home Davies, Scarlett and I talked tactics about dealing with him for the remaining four sessions.

We stopped to try and get Tarly a new rucksack – predictably choosing the novelty pink rucksack rather than a proper one meant the quality was low and the zipper is broken beyond repair. We didn;t find one but both children fell in love with straw hats in Matalan. Davies wanted an Indiana Jones style one and found one in the menswear department. Scarlett found a similar one in the ladieswear adorned with shells which is very pretty and as I suspect she won’t wear it much I will be happy to wear instead. I’ve had £10 worth of shopping vouchers in my purse for ages from some survey so happily redeemed them for the hats which was good.

Back home for lunch and egg collecting for me – all the hens are back to laying and we got 5 eggs today 🙂 – and the children did some connecting on their DSs. I also did some phonecalls and efficient stuff and got Wickstead camping booked, Truleigh Hill hostel booked and took a phonecall from English Heritage about my mix up with the Tesco vouchers and got that sorted out too :).

Then it was time for swimming. The kids had a good lesson, both coming along really well :). I managed 22 lengths and will strive for 24 next week as it seemed easier than last time. We walked to the chip shop for the kids tea but it was closed so we went to another one on the way home instead which turned out to be much cheaper and the kids said much nicer so will go there in future. I know it’s deep fried but they are both now eating and loving fish which is great. It’s a very slow and steady thing but we are definitely improving all of our diets gradually.

Ady came home and we all went up to the allotment for various pulling and planting tasks – I’ve finally caught up over on the self-suffish blog as far as the allotment is concerned although I have more photos that need putting up and various chicken-y updates too.

We took some lettuces over to my parents and called in at Sainsburys for a couple of things where we bumped into one of the Badger leaders (perfect! all smudged with dirt and in old clothes!).

I read a chapter of George and we talked about what we’d learnt today:
Nic – onions shouldn’t flower! if they do it means they have bolted and will be smaller, lighter and have a green shoot through the middle where the flower stalk has grown.
Ady – told us about the penguins on satellite story
Davies – learnt about elderflowers at FS – he said he’d previous thought they were large, poisonous flowers but now he can tell me the recipe for making the drink and wants to try doing his own now he can identify them. He also asked a question about the National Lottery stand so I explained the lottery to both the children and we had a brief chat about gambling which I’m sure we’ll come back to.
Scarlett – learnt about elderflowers and lotteries aswell but also says she spent some time talking to one of the rangers about how they carve wooden spoons.

Another really late dinner thanks to a minor drama when Scarlett asked where Candle was and I realised I’d not seen her since about 530pm when I was hanging some washing out. Both kids were in bed but very upset so I went out to look for her in the growing dark. I saw 2 foxes hanging about and was starting to give up hope and plan to resume looking in the morning as even her eyes don’t reflect anymore since she’s blind so searching in the dark for a blind black cat is unlikely to be easy. I had one last walk down a road down from ours and found her sitting in someone’s drive. She didn’t seem too stressed but I’m guessing during those 4 hours she’d probably been quite confused.

Really glad to have found her safe and unharmed and we’ve decided she can no longer go out without one of us as aside from the cost of vets bills and how devastated Scarlett would be we’d quite like her to go quietly here at home rather than in some dramatic car accident like all 3 previous cats :(.

And now, to bed.

Off to The Smoke today for the LSO concert at The Barbican. We always toy with walking to the station when we go to London, it’s only about a 15 minute walk but the prospect of the walk at the end of a long day and long train journey is always unappealing so we drove to the library and parked there.

We usually get the train to Victoria and tube in from there to wherever in London we’re going but having checked traintimes online last night the recommended route was changing at East Croydon, then onto Farringdon from where it is just one tube stop. This all went incredibly smoothly with trains pulling onto the platform ready for us both times.

We found seats and were chatting generally when we had an unscheduled stop at Preston Park station in Brighton. The children thought they knew the word and we remembered there is a dog in A Close Shave called Preston. Davies couldn’t imagine him so I got my diary out and drew a quick (bad) picture of him to remind him. Davies then drew a few pictures and then Scarlett did. She drew a tapdancing cat with fat legs which she christened ‘Duffy Cat’. This refers back to my Granny seeing Duffy on Top of the Pops at Christmas and commenting on her fat legs which has become a family joke. Scarlett told a story with her pictures about how Duffy Cat did loads of tapdancing, got really fit and lost all the weight. Davies and I added bits in and Scarlett had Duffy Cat selling her books and exercise dvd like all shrinking celebrities. This kept us entertained for ages 😆

Davies played his DS while Scarlett and I played the ‘on Monday I went to the shops and bought…’ game which is standard train journey entertainment for us. We walked from the tube to the actual Barbican which was slightly longer than I was expecting somehow, went to the toilet, faffed for ages trying to find Door 8 where we meeting Michelle and then got a cup of tea / bottle of coke and sat down with that to wait.

LovelyEm and co were next to arrive, followed by more Home Educators including lots we didn’t know, and indeed didn’t actually know Michelle either. One family were lovely and had a 6yo Scarlett and a 8yo boy too so I chatted to the mum for a while and the kids ran about together. Eventually we went in – it was well over an hour that we’d sat there though and so I thought the kids did well really. Scarlett asked to ‘sit with my friends’ so she went off ahead although we ended up directly behind her anyway as she sat with Chloe. I sat with Davies and I was quite nice to just have one child to whisper stuff to. We all really enjoyed it although felt slightly silly during the Bamboozled bit. I was torn between wishing we’d managed to learn it and inwardly sniggering at the school party behind us who were so proud of not only knowing it all but having put together their own actions too. At the end they stayed behind to do it again in their seats which is probably very commendable and great but is one of the small things about school that I used to cringe at even when I was at one, maybe I’m just not very good at belonging!

I think we were all itching to get out by the end so after treking to the bowels of the Barbican in search of toilets we sat at one of the fountains to eat. Scarlett joined The Beans in paddling round the fountain – she soon dried off in the sunshine. Davies wanted to but didn’t want to take shoes and socks off and roll up his trousers and as that was the only circumstances he was going in under he chose not to. I realised they’d slipped away and then realised there was a whole row of fountains when I’d been relieved they had moved away from the one we were sitting at 😆 Fortunately they were busy running around with the others rather than getting waist deep wet without me realising 😆

We walked to the Museum of London, which we’d visited before. Davies, Scarlett and I slipped off and looked at the London before London bit of archaeological finds and replicas. The guy who runs Davies’ YAC works there and his picture was on the wall and I suspect he’s referenced some of the exhibits in YAC sessions so that was cool for Davies and actually Scarlett was quite interested too.

We’d picked up the London’s Burning activity sheets so caught up with the others and did some of that including watching the film. People had started to drift off by then and whilst if someone else had been up for going on elsewhere or even a more enthusiastic explore of the museum I suspect we would have been too but I was happy enough to sit and chat to Michelle and Merry while the kids did some drawings.

At the exit D and S handed their sheets in although the woman on the desk was very firm about them being properly finished so only stamped Davies’ sheet. We walked back to the tube where I lost my rag with both my children nice and loudly and publically which is always good for making you feel like a great parent.

Order and good humour was swiftly restored and we walked straight onto a train for Brighton at Farringdon and settled down happily with seats. Davies said he’d been thinking about games to play and explained one using alliteration. He didn’t know it was alliteration but now he does :). We played that for a while and then I read my book while they DS’d and Scarlett eventually did some more drawings of the Amazing Adventures of Duffy Cat.

At Brighton we had yet another train waiting at the platform for us to walk on to – it really was an amazing day for public transport with no delays and excellent connections. Again we got seats and we were back in Lancing just after 5pm. Davies and Scarlett begged to go into the library as we went past so we nipped in and I had a quick chat with a couple of colleagues while Tarly cleared the shelves of Magic Kitten books which she reckons Ady will read to her 😆

We came home for their tea and had a plan to all go to the allotment but they were clearly both flagging so I cycled up there to water while Ady supervised a bath to wash London off them. I need to be cycling more regularly to make a dent in how bloody hard it is to do that 4 miles, much of which is uphill, but I did it :).

Back home we had a chapter of George and talked about what we’d learnt today. Davies learnt about alliteration, Scarlett learnt about Samuel Pepys (which she remembered as my parents cat was called Peeps and we read a book about a cat in the Great Fire which refererenced Pepys a while ago), Ady learnt that there is a type of bee extinct in the UK which is being reintroduced from New Zealand and I have been learning about why people wear neck ties which I got curious about while finding out why birds don’t get electrocuted on wires in one of those bizarre one link takes you to another tangents that fact finding can often send you on.

We had a very late, but very lovely dinner of curry just after 11pm and knowing the kids have to be at Forest School in 8hours I really should go to bed and rest my weary cycled and London addled body!

We had a plan this morning to be up earlyish and get to the allotment before it got too hot up there. Ady woke me with a cup of tea at about 930am so that blew that idea, until I got downstairs all ready to go in my old jeans and he told me he’d already been 🙂 He’d woken early so gone up there before anyone was up and done it all :). Have I mentioned he is lovely? 🙂

So that put us at a bit of a loose end and after discussions we decided to drive up to Truleigh Hill – much talked about this week in respect of Christmas Camp – and go for a walk around that area. I guess we got there about 1130am and despite plans for a short walk we didn’t get back to the car til after 2pm.

We paused at a bench to admire the view and have some food and drink and Davies and I spotted a fox shoot across the path infront of two horses which looked so odd during broad daylight. We saw loads of buzzards, a lapwing and a cuckoo too.

We then walked downhill for a while, knowing we would therefore have to walk uphill again. We were going through a field with access rights but didn’t want to take the logical footpath so carried on up what looked to be a well trodden path which took us past a really cool tree that was almost entirely hollow for most of the trunk.


The path sort of ran out but we were already far enough into the field to decide to carry on. We knew there were cows thanks to all the cow pats but no sign of them. We found the bottom of the field with no gate and realised we’d need to either retrace our steps or walk along the other fence to see if there was a gate so decided to carry on parallel with the open of crossing the field again later. In the end we nipped over the fence in a dip which made it easy to cross and took us onto a path. It didn’t seem to be a proper footpath though and took us through the middle of a huge herd of cows on both side of the fence (the field we were in and the one next to it). Aside from a couple of frisky calves they were utterly unconcerned with us but did make us think this wouldn’t be the right field to take Marcus, Michelle and Chloe on a nice countryside walk through 😉 😆

The heat and all the up and down-hilling of it had us all flagging rather by the end and grateful to get back to the shady car. We stopped at Shoreham on the way home for me to get a couple of bits for dinner today and a picnic tomorrow and then came home.

I made ham in coke along with various vegetables including our own broad beans from the allotment, which I didn’t eat myself and the kids were less keen on cooked (they like to eat them raw from the pod) but Ady told me were lovely. While it was cooking Davies DS’d (Ady got him Night at the Museum 2 and he was enjoying exploring that), Ady and Scarlett did various outsidey things including playing with the chickens and planting some stuff.

We had dinner and talked about various things including What We’ve Learnt Today (we forgot yesterday) – Scarlett had learnt it was the 150th anniversary of Big Ben starting to keep time, Ady learnt that the world record for the most tomatoes off one plant in a season was 10,000 fruits, Davies learnt the word and purpose of stillages and I’ve learnt a bit about the theory of cellular memory in organ donation cases. My learning led to all sorts of discussion including the term ‘anecotal’, the types of evidence you could cite in things, organ donation generally and how we all felt about it.

I was intending to cycle to the allotment to do the watering but everyone wanted to come and it was such a nice evening I decided the midday trek would be sufficient exercise for it not to matter if I didn’t bike and so we drove up and watered.

Back home the kids had showers and then a chapter of George before bed and I’m about to check train times for the morning and head for bed myself.

I worked this morning. I was fairly quiet and low key.There’s been a job swap of all the little tasks we take responsibility for so I get to learn a few new things over the next few weeks which is always nice. I had a bit of training today on the overdue procedures and I’m at a training session on Wednesday instead of at work to learn about the new system that’s being put in over the next few months too.

I got home at lunchtime to find the others in the garden. They had had a productive morning taking the drum out of our old washing machine. We’re going to take it to the allotment to burn rubbish and it will also be a firebasket for camping too. Apparently it was quite a task and took longer than Ady had expected.

They’d also done some drawing in the garden using the easel, Scarlett had built a hive for solitary bees, Davies had built a ‘spaceship’ and they’d been soaking a sponge bit in sugar water to set up a butterfly house Ady brought home. His work is selling various (very expensive) wildlife homes so he brought home one of each to set up here at home to test and take some photos and give feedback on.

We took the washing machine to the tip – it’d had 10 years service, moved to Manchester and back, washed all the baby clothes and finally sat in the garage for a good six months. I like the idea it will live on in our campfires :).

Ady had spotted a tent and camping show set up at a farm place a few miles away during the week and we are on the look out for a porch / canopy so thought we’d got and have a look at that as a lot of the tents there are Outwells. We didn’t get a porch but we did get a couple of other bargains. First of all a windbreak – this one but in blue I think for half price at £20. We’ve been wanting a decent one and this looks really good. My other want for camping this year was a decent set of pans. We’ve previously ‘invested’ in a cheap set of supermarket saucepans each year and just chucked them away at the end of the season but they are not practical when we’re trying to fit lots of things in and it’s a false economy really. I really liked a Coleman set http://www.amazon.co.uk/Coleman-Family-Cook-Set/dp/B000MRBMAI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=sports&qid=1243725259&sr=8-1 although they were selling them for £25 and we were debating them and then realised they had a special offer of buy a stove and get the pan set free. We do have a perfectly good stove that Chris (Ady’s brother) long term lent us but it is quite heavy and big so we decided to go for the deal and got the stove and pans for £40. So still no canopy but we’re pleased with those additions to our camping stuff. 🙂

We had a quick look round the farm shop (you pay to go in to the animals bit and we refuse to do that) including chatting with the bloke in the chicken feed shop who was really chatty until we said it was bantams we had rather than chickens at which point he got all snooty and said ‘oh bantams are just toys, just playing with chicken-keeping!’ 😆 so that told us then ;). The kids are interested in the idea of resucing some ex-battery hens so we might think about that although I’m a bit reluctant to run the risk of introducing disease to our gaggle.

We left there and went to the allotment via Tescos for a length of hose and McDonalds for some tea for the kids. Ady tried on some shoes in Tesco which had me crying with laughter (loudly and hysterically enough for people to avoid the aisle we were in) as they were just so funny. Made of this really thin brown material that was like paper or cardboard and took on every contour of his feet. They had sort of pointy toes and looked so funny on him it tickled me for ages. 😆

At the allotment we just did a really good watering job and are planning to return there tomorrow for a bit more tidying up.

We peaked early with our what we’d learnt today so consequently I’ve forgotten everyones and will have to add it to tomorrows :). We had one chapter of George and the children were really late to bed. All that galllivanting and unaccustomed to (these days) spending money has quite worn me out!

I woke up just after 8am this morning and considered and intended getting up but must have fallen asleep again as next thing I knew it was 830am and the doorbell was ringing. I ran downstairs, pulling on a dressing gown which I must have removed at the same time as a nightie last time I wore it as a nightie was trailing out of one sleeve, half blind without contact lenses and Davies was peering at the front door hissing ‘I think it’s Grandad!’ so he let him in and I went back upstairs to get dressed. 😆

We had a nice hour or so with Dad while the kids ate their breakfast and then he headed off one way and we headed off the other to visit Ali and Freya – and J too as it turned out :).

We’ve not seen them for quite a while so it was really nice :). Freya ran out to meet us and the kids went off straight away to Freya’s room. Scarlett reappeared but was in the main happy enough to play with the kittens and leave Davies and Freya to it (they were playing a W&G computer game on Freya’s laptop). Considering we were there for over 5 hours and she spent well over half of that entertaining herself I thought she did well really.

Didn’t excuse her carpet art but we’ll leave that as it’s been dealt with now ;).

Ali and I enjoyed some nice chatting including working our way through a list of Things We Should Remember To Talk About that I’d mentally compiled and Ali added to. Very theraputic :). J came home for lunch so he was about for a while. We all moved outside towards the end and the children all played together, something to do with George’s Secret Key. I did some knitting which was nice, I like knitting in the sunshine chatting to friends :).

We had a super quick drive home – half term does seem to mean less rush hour traffic, which was good as we’d been rubbish at leaving promptly so I was expecting to hit all the traffic. Ady was already home and the kids did something in the garden with him while I got their tea sorted. Our food shopping arrived so we were all taken up with putting that away and then it was storytime.

Ady had printed off the LSO booklet so I read some of that to Davies and Scarlett and we practised body percussion (clapping, finger clicking, thigh slapping and stamping) which was fun but we drew a bit of a blank at learning the song as I can’t read the tune to teach it to them. We got the toy keyboard out but it has 3 octaves all of which are squeaky and I just can’t remember enough about reading music to play it at the right speed which I found very frustrating. I can’t particularly say I regret not learning to play an instrument as a child and indeed I did learn recorder and piano for a few years but I do wish I could play now, especially this weekend at J&Js and again tonight when it would have been good to be able to sing the song or pick it out on a piano to teach the kids. I did find a ‘learn to play the keyboard’ book in our book stash but I think that’s a bit ambitious in a weekend 😆 I did impress the kids by being able to pick out a Katy Perry tune or two for them though so I’m not totally musically untalented 😆 😆

We had a couple of chapters of George and then what we’ve learnt today:
Ady learnt that it was the 65th D day anniversary which he sort of knew but surprised him.
I learnt the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows (but further investigation suggests that she probably did to start with and along with her eyelashes they were lost either in da Vinci’s own titivating with the work or some over zealous cleaning over the years).
Davies learnt how to google 🙂 I’ve never really shown him but watching Freya he picked up enough to come home and show me including using the drop down suggestion-y bit. I’ve said he can use the old laptop and I’ll set him up with an email address so I must sort that out over the weekend.
Scarlett learnt about how earthquakes and volcanoes happen as she was reading one of those little Usborne Science books at bedtime and brought it to me to ask a few questions about the pictures. I notice she is beginning to recognise sounds of letters at the start of words to try and decode them too and with minimal help she worked out the word ‘diamond’ by telling me the sounds for each letter.

I worked this morning. It was really busy as being closed for Monday seems to make everything back up and remain chaotic through the week. I guess in terms of deliveries and reservations and things there probably is 6 days work to get through in 5 on a bank holiday week there. It was my all day to work day but thanks to getting pro rata bank holiday time off I only had to work til 130pm rather than 5pm.

Mum was here looking after Davies and Scarlett and I’d already said we’d do something with her in the afternoon so I suggested we go and visit my Granny (Mum’s mum) who we’re long overdue seeing and we went round there for a couple of hours.

She was really pleased to see us and we had the added bonus of my Uncle Tony being there too. Granny’s bungalow is built in what used to be grounds of Tony’s house although it’s all been changed on land registry etc and they have their own seperate gardens now. He lives for 6 months of the year in Thailand where he has a home and girlfriend but no visa for permanent residency and then back here for the other 6 months before going back to Thailand again. He’s been doing it for years having had a really shitty few years when my Aunt Elaine who he’d been with for years and years since they were teens died aged 40 of breast cancer. My cousin Dan, who is a year younger than me was only about 14 and Tony married again really quickly to a woman and they had a son, Jack. The marriage didn’t last and she now lives in Australia with a new husband (and Jack) while Dan lives in Tony’s house here and Tony comes back to when he is in the UK.

Tony and Elaine were real hippies and spent lots of time travelling. I used to really envy Dan his upbringing when we were kids and he was allowed to call his parents by their first names rather than Mum and Dad, get away with all sorts of high jinks and just have a much more relaxed upbringing. Elaine was lovely and always used to buy me the *best* presents for Christmas and birthday, which would usually be messy or inappropriate (eg plaster of paris model kits or make up) and end up being confiscated by my Mum fairly quickly 😆 I wish I’d known Elaine better really and often think we’d have quite a bit in common now and she would definitely have fully approved of Home Ed.

I think Tony has only seen Davies once when we was just about crawling and never met Scarlett so it must have been odd to be presented with two full size proper children for him :). He is a lot like Frazer (which given Frazer is a lot like Mum I suppose is no surprise) and Davies and Scarlett were instantly comfortable with him, asked to see his house and garden and got taken off next door for a look round. They stayed with him for ages helping him with some gardening he was doing and only came back to ask if they could go to the tip with him, a request I had to refuse for car seat reasons.

Granny presented the kids with their easter eggs (we’d not seen her over Easter due to us all being so ill) and there was a packet of mini eggs in there that she foolishly suggested she would have hidden round the garden if she’d known we were coming so they hid their eyes and told her to do it then! 😆 She did and they enjoyed finding them.

It was time to leave and we have very little food as the main shop is coming tomorrow and it was getting late so I stopped at the chip shop for the kids to get fish and chips for tea. I sent them in with the money but they came back five minutes later to say they were being ignored in the queue which was a shame 🙁 I suspect they probably didn’t stand very still in the queue and weren’t very assertive when it came to giving their order. So I went in with them and got it.

When we got home Ady was already here, Mum (who had left her car here) said goodbye and left and the kids cleaned up the whole load of fish and chips :).

Davies tells me he learnt some football tricks from Tony today, Scarlett learnt she has a Great Uncle Tony and he is cool, Ady learnt that 8 fruit trees make an orchard, I learnt from looking at some photos of myself that I need to get some better fitting bras and that you should soak runner beans before you plant them.

Scarlett went to bed rather than listen to stories (I refused to let her carry on playing with toys sitting on the floor while I read) although she stayed quiet enough in her room to hear it anyway.

We have my old laptop out at the moment as we’re using it to download music from a site Ady got a free subscription to with his new phone and it has a big memory but the screensaver is set to randomly pick photos so it’s like a digital photoframe and I’ve spent the last couple of nights getting really distracted by all these old pictures from my 30th birthday onwards. Loads of Manchester, various camps including the 2 Melroses we went to, the first 2 Kessinglands and the Hesfes we atteneded, Hunstanton and the Halloween Helmsley, our Halloween party, trips to Ireland, Centerparcs and other weekends away aswell as just loads of pictures of Davies and Scarlett looking so small and cute :).