One word? When seven would do…

Today was the monthly Pulborough Brooks Home Ed meet up. We missed last month’s as it was while we were camping so it was good to go along today. Tasha had mentioned that they go to Pulborough Brooks quite often so I’d told her about the monthly meet and offered to give them a lift (she doesnt drive) and she took us up on it. There are many times when I fret about both the size of my car (we bought the Sharan when we were in Manchester and ‘needed’ a second car. We already had a Peugeot 405 and worked seperate hours. Although public transport was great in Manchester it would have been very hassley with childcare aswell and we’d been running two cars for a few years. We’d usually had one decent car and one old banger though, this was the first time we had two decent cars. We decided to go for a people carrier as although we only had Davies we were planning another baby, did the trip back down to Sussex again fairly regularly and wanted something that would enable us to take my parents out with us when they came to visit us too.) and how much I use it. Possibly if we had more money we would have swapped the Sharan in for something newer by now and given Ady also has a people carrier as his company car we’d have gone for something much smaller as our private car but we can’t afford to replace it, we do try to walk if we can although public transport for us already paying to run a car is certainly not a cheaper option and whenever possible I offer lifts to people so my car is full up as much as it can be.

So a picnic of sorts packed up we dashed to their house to collect them and headed over to Pulborough Brooks. The children were pleased to see each other although there seems to be a bit of tension about whether Toby is a friend for them both or just for Davies. Davies and Scarlett both assume, as they do with most children they meet, that he ‘belongs’ to them both and indeed the times we’ve seen them before Scarlett has been more than an equal party to all the playing and hanging out. I suspect Toby is considering Davies more his mate and Tarly his mate’s little sister though. This is quite possibly a ‘school’ thing – I’m guessing playing with girls two years younger than you didn’t happen much in the playground, and may also be a result of the huge age gap between Toby and his baby brother Vinnie whereby he views younger siblings as not hugely playmate-worthy.

To Scarlett’s credit she managed the whole thing well, stepped away when she was getting upset, came and spoke to me, very articulately about what was ‘hurting my feelings’, listened to my explanations and suggestions and then threw herself back into playing again after some time walking along with me. I suspect it may be a recurring problem and know my best course of action will be leaving them to sort it out themselves unless intervention is required due to high levels of upset or nastiness.

Also attending were Katie – who organises the meet up and her 2 children, Katy, Julie’s friend with her 3 children, Elaine, Julie’s friend with her 2 children and Julie, Chris, Maisie, Jack and Lorna. I spent some time walking round with Tasha, some with Chris and Julie, some with Julie and Tasha and some with just Scarlett and I. I liked the way both the children and the adults seemed to keep forming and reforming in groups to chatter as we walked round. It threatened rain a couple of times but never came to anything. We didn’t do a great deal of nature spotting really but it was nice to be outside anyway.

We then sat and had lunch in the playpark, arriving just as a school group was leaving to carry on with their educational pond dipping session. Our group of children nervously circled the school children, who were in turn all looking at them with great curiosity 😆 The children carried on playing, we carried on chatting and eventually left just after 230pm.

We dropped Tasha, Toby and Vinnie home and despite requests from all three children for us to go to their flat for a play (Tasha said it was too messy) or them to come back to our house (I had also left the house rather rapidly and was actually looking forward to sitting down, drinking tea and catching up online from the weekend) we came home. We had some squashy bananas that I made into some banana and chocolate chip cakes and then I did indeed sit down, drink plenty of tea and spend some time online. Davies watched Polar Express (he’s having an early Christmas filmfest at the moment, I think he was watching other Christmas films on the in-car dvd player at the weekend) and Tarly played with her barbies and made potions.

We drew all the names out of a hat (well actually a Barbie bathtub) for NicCamps Secret Santa, I did some washing, cooked a couple of quiches (one for dinner, one for the freezer) and then Ady arrived home.

There was then one of those timewarps where two hours seems to vanish and finally after a couple of bedtime stories the children went to bed. Tomorrow is swimming and weather permitting maybe some time up at the allotment.

I had a lovely weekend with some online friends from Feminist Parents. It was our second such weekend, not as many of us made it as on the first occasion and indeed that first one had been so perfect it had a lot to live up to really.
There was something of a comedy of errors with regard to the appartment we’d booked. Initially we’d been staying in two, four bed appartments but the company had phoned C, who had made the booking as her plane was on the runway (she came over from Ireland) to say they had been double booked and they’d move us to other appartments in London. That plan was then rearranged again and we ended up in four two bed appartments near St Pauls. As several people had dropped out (some very last minute, some a while ago but too late to cancel) we managed to just take three of the two bed appartments in the end as one of the seven attendees was just a day tripper.
I’ve no idea what the other two sets of appartments (our original booking or the second replacement) would have been like but I was quite unimpressed with where we ended up.They were nice enough inside and well-equipped but had NO view at all, no balcony and were crazily hot and airless despite it being October and windows being open so I’ve no idea what they’ll be like in summer. I suspect we were very spoilt with our fab appartment in Canary Wharf with balcony and lovely views last time but if I’m paying to stay in London I’d quite like to see more than the odd pigeon and another block of appartments out of my window!

Ady had had the crazy idea of driving me to save money. And I’d been even crazier by agreeing. It did save about £30 on train and tube fares but it also meant he and the children spent about 4 hours in the car on Saturday and the same again on Sunday when they came to collect me. It is just over 50 miles to London and the satnav said it should take an hour but it was closer to 2.5 as Brixton and Croydon were nose to tail traffic and the satnav isn’t intelligent enough to know about road closures and diversions. I was therefore slightly stressy when I finally exited the car and had already decided to just get out and walk around and find Borough Market where I’d arranged to meet my friends. As it happened it was literally across the road so I was soon being hugged and kissed and soon forgot my woes :).

I met two friends who had already met and we were soon joined by a fourth. We went to a posh coffee shop place that literally only sold coffee. No tea, no hot chocolate, nothing. Just coffee. I don’t drink coffee – it’s for grown ups 😉 but we managed to get them to give us a cup of hot water and I put one of my own teabags in it that I had in my bag anyway. I took great pleasure in drinking my illegal tea and took every opportunity to say the word ‘TEA’ and watch the coffee people recoil in horror 😆 We had a good old catch up, in particular with one friend who has all sorts of life changing stuff going on at the moment.

We were then joined, in roughly ten minute intervals by the other three of our friends including Ali. When there were five of us we popped into a nearby shop and bought a couple of bottles of chilled fizzy wine as we had originally done an internet alcohol and snack shop to be delivered to our appartment. This was being taxied over to us but given our two hour delivery slot time and how long it might take to arrive we were worried about being without wine after dark 😆 . We also all had a can of pimms which we drank on the steps of Southwark cathedral and felt suitably downmarket and upmarket all at the same time about. At least two of the party claimed never to have ‘drunk out on the street’ before 😆 .

Another friend arrived bearing chocolate for all and finally when we were all there we walked across London Bridge (which was not falling down but we sang about it anyway) and to our appartment near St Pauls.

We then proceeded to do what seven women, with alcohol, in a hotel room, without partners or children for the evening are bound to do and talked, drank, ate, laughed, gossiped, sang and generally had a good time :). Very good for the soul, spending time with friends :).

Sunday morning (and there was the briefest of interludes between Saturday night ending and Sunday morning starting believe me) we did tea and toast in the appartments and then some of us went for coffee, some went off to do shopping and some left for home. Ali and I stayed together until she headed for the station and I found somewhere to perch and wait for Ady to collect me.

I’d been very sensible with my drinking levels and interspersed my wine with plenty of water so despite being very tired I didn’t have a hangover and was able to cook roast dinner and spent lots of time snuggled up with the children in the afternoon. Last time I’d felt really ill and had to take to my bed when I came home :lol:. We watched Shrek 3, they both got in my bath with me and Ady and I had a lovely roast pork dinner. I didn’t manage to stay up so late a second night though and was in bed by about 10pm catching up and enjoying being in a bed with bedclothes next to Ady rather than someone else ;).

The big news of the weekend back at home was that 4 of the eggs that our broody hen has been sitting on hatched. She has another 3 still under her although the chances of them hatching decrease hugely every day. They are eggs from Tom’s hens so will be speckled bantams. Given the poor success rate of leaving them outside (only one chick made it to adulthood, our current cockerel, out of the four chicks that have hatched under hens), the turn in the weather and the politics of the coop generally we’ve brought them inside under a brooder lamp. That does sound a little cruel, letting the hen hatch them and then taking them away but actually chickens are not that reliant on their mother once they’ve hatched and feed themselves from day one; they only really use her for warmth.

So we have four chicks currently installed in Davies’ room (warmest room and least at risk of being bumped into by hoover or blind cat or children playing) that we will decide the fate of once their gender becomes apparent – I’m getting rather good at that now and reckon I should be able to tell by about five weeks old. Tom would like one hen and we will keep any others, cockerels will have to go but Ady has a home for them should the need arise.

It’s Friday! 🙂 A whole day later than it should have been due to having been all Friday-ish with Ali yesterday but Friday nonetheless.

I was off being Nicola from 9-5. It’s slightly fraught at work at the moment for my direct boss, Yvonne. She is managing on herself and 3 established staff (of which I am one), two new staff, one of whom is clearly not going to work out and is therefore very hard work to be around, a full time vacancy which is being covered by a succession of relief staff all of whom come with their own training needs, a swap with a member of staff from another branch who is heavily pregnant and for H&S reasons is being shipped to our branch as her own has a spiral staircase which is hard for her to navigate and a member of staff who is fully trained but very moany and just hard work generally 🙁 . I do feel very sorry for her and am trying to be as supportive as I can be in the hours I am there, which I suspect makes it almost worse as she said to me today ‘if only you were here more…’ which possibly means I am just throwing the rest of the week into ever sharper relief for her :(. On the plus side it’s nice to feel valued ;).

I did the banking this morning which requires going to actually pay the cash in when the bank opens at 930am. I think I have said before how much I enjoy being in a town centre (albeit a small one) just as it starts to wake up and shops open. My Mum owned cafe / restuarants from when I was 7 to long after I left home and I worked in high street retail for several years myself so there is clearly something of the shopkeeper in me somewhere and I like that opening the doors ready for business, putting your wares out onto the street feeling, nodding to other shopkeepers doing the same as you go.

I did Baby Rhyme Time today too which went well. It is National Bookstart Day today and the theme this year is Pirates and we had a batch of song sheets, stickers, bookmarks and small books to give out so we did that and included a couple of the songs into rhyme time too. There are two sets of twins who come to rhymetime one of who are a year old next week. We also had another birthday for next week and a little girl who is one tomorrow so we sang Happy Birthday to all of them. The little girl turning one tomorrow was there with her Daddy who is on paternity leave, her Mummy and her one week old baby brother – now that’s getting all the childbirthing over in rapid succession!!! The Dad looked incredibly proud of his little family and was introducing everyone to his new son while the Mum looked amazingly well for someone who’d had a C-section a week ago and was a mother of two within a year.

I had a note in my tray asking if I would ring someone who had come into the library having just taken her four children out of school to HE them and seemed in need of some support, but she preempted that by coming in to see if I was working so I got called back from my lunchbreak to come and chat to her. I’ve promised to send her an email with some information (she’d never even heard of EO) and said I’d be happy to meet up too to chat. She seemed positively overwhelmed by the magnitude of what she’d done but quite nice so hopefully I can offer some support to her away from my library capacity.

Meanwhile back at home Ady was off this morning and my Mum was here this afternoon. Both the children have been a little ‘odd’ and Scarlett was very fragile on Wednesday after Mum had been here in the morning. After an 11pm chat with Davies I’ve got to the bottom of them not really being happy with being left with her twice this week. It would seem once a week is more of less tolerable but not ideal and twice a week is simply too much. She is in a fairly down frame of mind right now and is utterly incapable of pulling herself together infront of them so is just very depressed and negative to be around. Having spent my whole childhood trying to deal with that it is not something I am prepared to put Davies and Scarlett through. She’s pulled all sorts of tricks out of the bag with them from what I can gather including emotional blackmail, threatening stupid things, withdrawing affection and generally not acting like a responsible adult that they can feel safe in the care of. I am slightly over-dramatising in that to the casual observer perhaps none of this would have been apparent but I know from the reactions of my children and my own experience as her daughter she is not a suitable person to be in sole charge of them this frequently 🙁 . I am always very upfront and honest about how I am feeling around Davies and Scarlett but they get to see the whole picture and if I am being ranty or generally difficult to be around they are aware of why and see the conclusion and me moving onto being okay again. With my Mum they simply have not spend enough time in her company to be comfortable with her ‘down’ times. This is going to be a thorny one to navigate but I’ve promised Davies I’ll find a way to ensure she is not the one looking after them so often, certainly not twice a week.

So after work was rather characterised by clinginess from Davies and Scarlett for me. Ady didn’t quite get home in time for Rainbows so we took Davies along with us for the first 15 minutes or so until Ady collected him. They talked about emergencies and showed the Rainbows how to put someone in the recovery position and what to do in the situation of an adult being unconscious (phoning for an ambulance etc.) then they played games :). Scarlett – and Rebecca – were delightfully unbothered by the competitive element to the games and simply enjoyed them as fun :).

For show and tell Scarlett had taken an egg shell as our hen who was sitting on eggs hatched one out today. So she showed it round to everyone and told them we had another new chick at our house. There is a sleepover at the hall next week which Scarlett doesn’t want to stay at but will go along for the first hour of.

Home for stories and bed which was very prolonged indeed due to said clingyness. I am going away tomorrow overnight, up to London to meet friends which I am very much looking forward to but isn’t the greatest timing unfortunately :(. Still, I will aim to have fun, drink lots of wine and enjoy being with great friends anyway ;).

As I’m tired and I’m working tomorrow and somehow it’s already tomorrow!

This morning I made a few phonecalls and various other adminny tasks and then packed up some food and water and we headed up to the allotment. We got there just after 11am and it was by far the busiest I’ve seen it yet. We met our end-to-end neighbours who seemed very nice. The sun was shining, birds were singing, everyone was in a smiley ‘good morning! 🙂 ‘ type mood and it was all very blissful :).

The children both did some mud sculpting – Davies made a chickens head and Scarlett made a penguin; both were excellent and have been left up there to dry out in the sun – hope it doesn’t rain and wash them all away! They then found a huge hairy caterpillar so played with that for a while. They both wandered over to ‘help’ me for a while but quickly realised it was actually quite hard work so wandered back off again fairly sharpish 😆 . I had a very successful couple of hours (not sure where the time went actually, it didn’t feel that long at the time but my back tells me it clearly was) and finished digging and weeding all the way to the end of the half I’ve been working on. That means in my 6 sessions up there I have dug half of the entire allotment. I am very proud and pleased about this and rang Ady specifically to boast about how great I am when I’d finished :).

We paused on the bench to eat some fruit and drink some water and enjoy the sunshine before heading for home in time for Ali and Freya to arrive.

A very nice visit was had with the children all playing DS, sometimes together, sometimes with chatting and sometimes just side by side but all very peacefully :). Davies showed Ali his War Museum and I sent them all outside for ‘ten minutes’ to run off some of the sugar they’d consumed with a bowl of sweets. They appeared to have a timer out there though as they were gone for almost ten minutes to the second before reappearing and reconnecting to their DSs. 😆

I did some ragrugging, threading up the loom with string and then unpicking and re-doing Davies’s rainbow rug that had come undone as the yarn had snapped. I redid it longer and thinner which actually I’m more pleased with anyway :).

I ran Ali and Freya home when Ady got in from work and then arrived home to read a couple of bedtime stories. It was very nice, outdoorsy, interesting chats, nice company, creative and active yet relaxing day all in one :).

Work for me this morning and today I was at Shoreham library which is the next town along. As part of my development review my boss asked if I’d like to go and do the odd shift at other libraries and this was one of those shifts. It was fine; I prefer Lancing and Wednesdays are a fairly frantic day as the library closes at 1pm so there is always a bit of a rush to get everything done. I felt like a bit of a spare part and had to ask loads of ‘how do you do this?’ type questions but I did get to peruse their junior section and came home with a big pile of books to read to the children so that was a bonus :).

Mum was here with the children this morning. She is struggling with not working and in a bit of a sorry for herself state of mind which is understandable I guess but she has always been prone to wallowing rather even when there is nothing actually wrong, whereas I am of a rather more positive mindset and struggle to remain sympathetic for very long. Harsh, I know. We had a brief chat and then she headed off when I got home just after 1pm.

We finally managed to get out of the house, dealing with a Scarlett and the Fleece of Doom fleece in the process. It was so named during our last camping trip when it was the focus on one of her and I’s fallings out and even she refers to it as The Fleece of Doom in the middle of stropping about it which is rather comical. She did wear it in the end. She’s been a bit fragile today, apparently she caught her fingers in something while Mum was here which had her in tears, then she cried about a wasp getting squashed in her car door (it didn’t) and then when I put some petrol in my car I got back in to find her in tears again because she had put her muddy boot on the car seat and got mud on it and thought I’d shout at her. I didn’t.

We got to the stables and met up with Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna. The kids had a run around while Julie saddled up Honey the pony and we headed off for a walk. Davies had first ride, then Maisie and then Tarly; Jack declined. Both my two enjoyed it lots and are ready for the next challenge on the pony really. We’ve planned a visit in 2 weeks when they should get a chance to ride in the field on a lunge lead. And I shall take some bags up with us to gather some manure for the allotment too.

I spent half the walk carrying Lorna who was being all stroppy about being in her sling and the other half leading Honey while Julie carried Lorna. Aside from my own children I’ve never really had huge amounts of contact with other little people and although I still maintain babies are boring I am enjoying limited cuddletime with Lorna :). Less sure about Honey! 😆

It was a gorgeous afternoon, the sun was shining, the children were all really happy to be together and out in the fresh air, the trees were turning all fabulous autumn shades and we were on the top of the downs looking out over the sea and landscape below and it was just beautiful :).

We left and got caught in traffic which meant our journey home was nearly an hour. Ady had just beaten us home so he warmed up some stew for the children while I dashed about getting their clothes for Badgers ready. They had a visit tonight from Bee Fit a local fitness place so needed to wear trainers and loose trousers. I found Davies’ old Beaver bottoms for him and a pair of outgrown Beaver bottoms for Tarly and they looked all PE-ish and sporty :). They both groaned and moaned about the stew and both LOVED it! Davies didn’t like the carrots but LOVED the parsnip, sweet potato and swede; Tarly liked all of it. So that was a bit of a result :).

We dropped them off at Badgers and Ady and I headed straight off for a walk. It’s become something we try and do every week if Ady can get there in time and its so nice to walk along just the two of us chatting and remembering that we are a couple as well as the parents of the same children. When we got back to collect them we discovered that Tarly had cut her knee open when doing aeroplane slides across the floor. I assume from a nail or something in the floorboards as it has ripped quite a cut in her knee 🙁 . Apparently she cried lots and wanted me 🙁 but everyone rallied round her – Davies said the whole group was trying to cheer her up and offering to get tissues to wipe it. It bled lots although it had stopped by the time we got there. I feel crap that I wasn’t there although I know that’s not feasible for every little bump and scrape 🙁 . Davies cleaned it up for her properly when we got home with his first aid kit using an alcoholic wipe and plaster.

I read various stories and then they went to bed – but not to sleep. Davies’ current fascination is with war stuff (spurred on from festival of history in the summer) and he’d been asking for a set of those cheap plastic toy soldiers in all different poses like Andy has on Toy Story. Ady got some today from a pound shop so the children split them between themselves and Davies set about making a’war museum’ in his bedroom. He labelled the door, made a ‘No PUBLIC’ sign for the roped off area and set up a whole battle reenactment scene complete with props from his room, an art section of pictures he’s drawn of tanks, planes, what soliders uniform and armour looked like, an interactive bit with a voice changer set to a mode that sounds like machine gun fire and loads more. He adores things like that – his bedroom is currently ‘dressed’ for Halloween with cobwebs and spiders draped over everything including door handle, dalek, bookcase etc.

Lovely stir fry cooked by me for dinner and now I am ready for bed. It seems a long time ago since this morning!

I overslept this morning having turned over and gone back to sleep at about 7am when I heard Ady and Scarlett being all cheerful in the morning with a disgusted tsk. They are the resident larks, Davies and I are the owls. So I was somewhat wrongfooted when the phone rang just after 9am and it was Julie being all cheery and efficient and brisk. I daren’t confess I was still tangled up in the bedclothes in a darkened room as a) she has a newish baby so sleep isn’t really a topic we touch on much b) she is in bed by 9pm every night anyway which leads me to conclude she may be a bit lark-y herself and c) I was far too busy concentrating on speaking instead of murmph-ing to her to construct sentences. Finalised arrangements to see her tomorrow, listened to her chatter away for a while and then got up.

I did the herculean task of tidying up the kitchen after I’d cooked dinner in it last night – I’m a bit of a messy cook and it’s normally Ady who clears up after me, got the children’s breakfast, let out, fed and did some inspecting of the chickens. One of the hens is sitting on 7 eggs which must be due to hatch pretty soon. I’ve not yet decided what we’ll do if they do hatch; whether to leave them all to it, seperate her and the chicks, or just bring the chicks inside and put them under a brooder lamp. The weather is pretty nasty and I suspect letting the other chickens have free rein to terrorise them may be a bit foolish. We’re not planning on keeping any so it’s not as though they will need to integrate with them anyway.

I then peeled and chopped loads of vegetables and got the slow cooker going for beef stew. Well I thought I did anyway…. it turned out I had plugged it in and turned it on but not switched the plug socket to on, so when we came home at 2pm ish expecting to be greeted with gorgeous stew smells we were greeted with nothing other than a still stone cold and uncooked slow cooker full of stew in a virgin state. This was fine for Ady and I who don’t eat until 9ish anyway as 7 hours is ample cooking, less fine for Davies and Scarlett who I had persuaded would try a bit of it as it was never going to be ready at 5pm. Ah well.

We wrapped up a parcel, gathered together library books we could return, collected all the various bits to take up the allotment including our now full kitchen waste bucket for the compost heap and headed out.

First stop was the post office to send our parcel and use the photo booth, but when I asked for change the woman leant conspiratorially over the counter and told me to go to the photographer across the road instead as he was the same price and would be certain to take passport-acceptable shots. So we went there where we were ushered into a white box of a back room and had photos taken of each of us not smiling, not showing teeth, showing ears and looking straight ahead. Davies and I were fine with this, Scarlett, mistress of the ever ready photo smile struggled 😆

We popped to the nearby hardware store for some string for my peg loom, to the library to return a pile of books and collect another pile and then back to the photographer to collect our photos. A quick detour to the bakers for lunch and the fishing shop for some fishing line, also for the peg loom and we were off to the allotment. It has rained pretty much solidly all day here today but we were lucky enough to have possibly the only dry hour of the day up there.

The children dug, rescued drowing beetles from their ponds and enjoyed getting muddy. I planted in some bulbs and cursed my choice of tops. I had worn old jeans, dms and an old fleece but not banked on getting hot with the exercise so taken my fleece off to reveal my shirt – a white, cheeseclothy material which gaped at the front when I bent down to put bulbs in and blew up at the back as the wind caught it, more or less rendering my topless (but still with bra obviously). The couple of dog walkers and the bloke cutting down the field next door with the tractor and attachment got to bear witness to my inappropriate allotment-wear anyway 😆 .

Home to turn on the slow cooker, drink tea (me) and play with the geomags (them) at which point Tarly started to wind me up by refusing to go and get her swimsuit and towel for swimming from the playroom (room next door to the lounge) because she was scared. I tried various good and bad parenting methods of dealing with this and rapidly lost patience with her. Eventually she did get them and we discussed whether the things she claimed to be scared of were likely to pose a real threat or not – ghosts; no such thing, monsters; far too scared of me to come and live at our house, aliens; unlikely to visit us when the rest of the world is available given their amazing alien technology 😆 .

We finally headed off to swimming but the damage to my temper was already done. Davies went in the big pool and did some great jumping in and swimming but also did a fair amount of looking like some sort of unaccompanied lunatic by just hanging out in the pool and splashing as hard as he could. Scarlett did some great swimming – she is really coming along and has natural grace and strength. When she really gets how to swim I suspect she will be brilliant. Unlikely to happen of course when she is too busy splashing with her float and picking her nose to listen to what the instructor wants her to do though. Grrr.

Davies then failed to respond to my increasingly frantic beckonings to get out of the BLOODY pool and come over to have his swimming cap put on because the rest of his class was already in the pool having their lesson and just waved cheerily back at me instead. The other swimming mums were pissing themselves laughing at me. He finally realised what I meant and meandered on over and then failed to hold his cap on properly at the front so I could pull it on properly at the back. And then got in late to his lesson. Grrr again.

The pool and then the changing room was packed with foreign students. Worthing has a massive influx of students every summer / autumn who I am sure are individually very bright and sensible people but tend to gather in huge, oblivious groups with big rucksacks getting in the way as they stand, gormlessly in the most inconvenient and chaos causing places possible. They were doing that in the changing rooms and infront of the lockers, just completely blocking the way and mooning about. Grr again. We got out and it was raining again and as I went to open the car door Scarlett did this pushing infront of me by weaving her way around me thing and ended up getting knocked to the ground by me. I was so cross with her I just yelled ‘Oh for crying out loud, get in the car!!!!’ and slammed all the car doors much to the bemusement of various people standing nearby. Having checked she wasn’t hurt I then ranted at the children for five solid minutes before driving home in silence.

Once home I put their tea on and ran them a bath. I told them to go and get in it and they said it was too cold. I told them to pull the plug out and let some water drain away with the hot tap running, possibly in not the kindest and most nurturing tone of voice which resulted in Davies sitting, sobbing, in the bath because it was cold. This I could understand if he was a small baby who I had forcibly plonked in the bath rather than an eight year old who climbed in himself. I showered them both, washed their hair and they ended up staying in a while longer but continued to be rowdy and annoying and subsequently got ranted at more. Fools!

They had dinner, I calmed down and we read the last couple of chapters of George’s Marvellous Key to the Universe. I 100% recommend it for anyone who hasn’t read it. We loved it and me and the children all learnt loads from it. They both went to bed with story cds, we finally had our stew, I drank a glass of wine, watched Jamie Oliver and made a doormat for the backdoor with cut up supermarket plastic carrier bags. Am not feeling altogether more chilled out. 😉

Aside from going out of the back door to feed the chickens and out of the front door to collect the kerbside recycling blue boxes in from the pavement I’ve not left the house again today 🙁 .

I pottered about this morning, drinking tea, sorting washing and occassionally coming to comment on the post below 😉 . Davies and Scarlett played with the lego and the Doctor Who toys. Tasha (new friend) texted me to ask whether we were up to the beach and as it looked grey and horrid outside I told them to come over here instead. We do love the beach loads but I knew it would be mere minutes before one or both of the children were in the sea so it seemed more sensible to have a longer time with friends and entertain them here instead.

The balance was due to be paid for NicCamps Helmsley today, which turned into something of an epic involving 3 text messages, 2 phonecalls with Em, 3 phonecalls with YHA and nearly an hour to sort out :rolls:. Ah well it’s done now, as Em said this morning, always nice to have the next holiday lined up to think about. On which note I’m thinking about a spring hostel break – possibly late March / early April – possibly Hunstanton or Manorbier or even Truleigh Hill again – anyone provisionally interested?

I then busied myself with gathering all the various bags of rags I’ve been collecting into one place and starting to cut them all into strips. This is easily the most tedious bit of ragrugging and the one I made yesterday was more fun as a result of having all the rags already in strips. I also realised the most material can be ripped rather than cut which was something of a revolution 🙂 . I still have callouses on my finger and thumb from the scissors today though. I did it for about 5 hours. I think everyone will be getting ragrugs from me for Christmas 😆 .

Tasha, Toby and Vinnie arrived around midday and Toby disappeared straight away with Davies and Scarlett – the slight friction from last time at the soft play centre had completely disappeared and the three of them got on fantastically and cleared up after themselves too :). Vinnie is one and just starting to walk – I’d forgotten what it’s like to have that age children in the house. Tasha and I chatted and I tore rags and it was all very nice. We found plenty to talk about and the children get on really well and it makes me feel good to be meeting Davies’ needs for same age mates rather than the junior posse he sometimes has to mix with. We’re taking them to the RSPB home ed meet next week and while I’m wary of overkill with new friends I think it could well work out for us to see them weekly or at least fortnightly. Toby fits really well into Davies and Scarlett’s little twosome, joining in with whatever games they are already playing and seeming to enjoy Tarly’s company as much as Davies’ which is great. He is into similar things and seems to play very much at their highly imaginative level with dressing up, props and many sound effects.

They left just after 4pm and I had intended to get up the allotment for an hour but it was raining and grey so I revised that plan and gave the children their tea instead. They started watching the Sarah Jane Adventures but Tarly deemed it ‘too scary’ so they turned that off. Ady arrived home, general catching up with each other took place and then I read them a couple of chapters of George before they both retired to bed with story cds which are the new black round here at the moment. I think some sort of music / audio players may well be Christmas gifts around here this year.

Tomorrow we will definitely go out if only to swimming but I also need to get passport photos, post a parcel and if the weather is remotely on my side plant my onions and garlic.

Today, on a Sunday, in the rain, we went to garden centres. This is so something I never thought I’d be doing 😆 . In fairness what we weren’t doing was the mindless, purposeless wandering round because our lives are empty of meaning and we think looking at scented candles, overpriced vases, allegedly ‘home made’ flapjacks and potted herbs will enhance them. We were specifically looking for garlic bulbs, compost accelorator and apple trees.

It’s been wet,wild and windy all day here today without less than five minutes between rainfalls. This prevented allotment visiting so we did some allotment shopping instead. First thing though we watched some of the Great North Run on tv. A friend of mine was running in it so I was hopeful of seeing a glimpse of her (I didn’t) and I quite like watching sporting events like that on tv. We cheered on Jo Pavey who we thought was going to take first place but came in third and then headed off out. My friend did amazingly well and came in at a great time. Even more amazingly she only started running this year and in January was interval walking between lampposts speeding up at every other one – 10 months later she is running a half marathon with a fantastic time. I’m very proud of her 🙂 .

The garden centres were, predictably packed so we checked what we were looking for and did quick in and out manouveres in all of them. We came home, Ady cooked a lovely roast beef dinner, I cut up loads of rags into strips for a special shaped rag rug I’ve made for a gift (my first ambitious project yet – I have a plan for another already :)) and watched ‘It’s not easy being Green’ which I love. I spent some time hanging out on their forum earlier this year chatting about smallholdings and chickens and I’ve read the book that goes with the series but not seen every episode. It was being shown back to back on one of the tv channels today so that was good.

We had dinner watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, I made raspberries, meringue and cream for pudding (well more constructed than made I suppose) and then I watched X Factor, the children played in the playroom (what a novel idea!) and Ady had a bath. We then swapped around, Scarlett went to bed to listen to endless audio books some with the book to ‘read’ along with, I had a bath and Ady and Davies watched Harry Potter. I then deigned to be in the same room as it but paid no attention to it as I made my rug.

I feel a bit housebound today despite having been out briefly so I’m hoping for some better weather tomorrow as we have a tentative arrangement to meet friends at the beach.

Ady has been to a stag-day today. Gone are the days of a bit of a knees up the night before you get married apparently – these days it’s all about weekends in Dublin, scubadiving or other ways of spending a couple of hundred quid before you even start buying wedding presents or hiring suits. We didn’t do stag / hen night stuff – Ady went to the local pub where he spent the entire night ducking the drinks people had bought (and spiked) for him and returned sober and relieved that noone had booked him a stripper :lol:. I had two friends over, both of whom were single and much younger than me and cross examined me about how I knew he was ‘the one’ – as we were sitting in our house we’d bought 6 years ago together at the time it all felt a bit academic really and no sort of hastily made decision 😆

Anyway, Ady was off bright and early this morning out for breakfast before heading to an indoor gokarting place in Southampton for a couple of hours karting followed by a long lunch – very long, he got home around 7pm :). He said he enjoyed it but was wiped out and has gone up to bed early.

Davies and Scarlett went to the Wildlife Explorers session at Pulborough Brooks where they made bird food in yoghurt pots, went outside to look for seeds for birds to eat and apparently leart ‘loads’. They were both very full of it and Davies said he made friends with another boy there. 🙂 My parents took them and they all came to meet me from work at 1pm.This was quite a big deal for everyone I think although it really shouldn’t be. The children both confessed quietly later that they’d not liked Grandad’s driving and their requests for food had been ignored, there was general hullaballoo about using my car to take them there and where it was and how it would all work and I spent the morning at work not at all happy about the whole thing really. Anyway…

I worked this morning, it was busy, when I wasn’t worrying about the children it was quite a laugh; my Saturday is quite nice with me, two older colleagues and the two Saturday assistants who are both about 16 and nice kids.

Davies and Scarlett breezed in at about five to one with my parents trailing behind, chose a pile of books and a dvd and generally swanned round like they own the library :).

We came home and Davies and I made bread rolls from the dough I’d put in the breadmaker before I went to work and Mum and I had the chicken soup, Dad and Scarlett had tomato soup and Davies had rolls and no soup for lunch. The children got a bit giddy and energy filled and my mum, in a rather horrified tone asked what on earth I did with them when they got ‘like this’. I replied if I was home alone with them I’d possibly waterproof them and take them to the beach, otherwise snuggle down and read to them to which Davies produced a book about writing stories for children and so I started to read it to them. My parents took that as their cue to leave so we finished reading the book and then decided to sort out the paper and pens drawers as they were rather muddled and we couldn’t find any plain paper for drawing on even though we knew we had some. We got the 3 drawers in the lounge and did a keep, unused or recycle trawl through all the papers with a large pile going straight into the recycling box. We then went through all the pens and crayons and chucked out all the ones that don’t work – the result of which is we know we need new felt tips :lol:. So we now have a tidy drawer of paper to use, one of artwork they want to keep and one of pens that work :). They did some drawing and then wandered off to play again.

I spent the afternoon looking out of the window at the wind and rain and feeling all coldy and miserable. We had been invited to Chloe’s birthday and to Messy Day today and had to turn both down due to me working and Ady stag-daying so it felt a bit crap to be sitting around indoors when we could have been with friends instead but it just hadn’t been feasible to manage :(.

When Ady finally got home I went to Sainsburys for some bits for dinner and then slumped in a bath when I got home. Scarlett came and joined me in it for a while and then wandered in and out of the room while I watched X Factor. I cooked dinner and now feel utterly bed-ready.

The date for the Sustainability Centre Green Fair for 2009 has just been put up on their website for Sunday May 10th.
We’re going to book camping from Friday 8th to Monday 11th – anyone want to join us?

I went to bed really early last night (it was before 11pm) and a decent night’s sleep had me feeling much better this morning. Ady OTOH did the reverse and while he is normally the one in bed before 11pm he stayed up to watch Pompey playing football and finally came to bed around 1am. Less than sensible considering he was running a friend to the airport this morning before work and had to be up again about 430am 😆 .

I’d got a bee in my bonnet (don’t you love that phrase? I think it may well be why I love ‘Birdhouse in your soul’ so much 🙂 about getting some shoes to wear with a dress to a wedding Ady and I are going to in a couple of weeks so we decided to do that first thing. We were in town and parked before 10am, found shoes in the first shop we looked in, found some hairslides to go with the outfit in the second shop and were back home again by 1130am – result :). I think we made a slightly odd spectacle in New Look as I tried on shoes and my junior Trinny and Susanah gave me advice like ‘can you walk in them?’ and ‘ah yes but can you dance?’ ‘will you wear them again and if so where to?’ 😆

Before we’d gone out I’d added some water, carrot and onion to the remains of yesterdays slow cooker chicken and turned the slow cooker back on to make soup and the breadmaker on to make dough. Davies went to play his DS for a while (he’s still loving Viva Pinata 🙂 ) while Tarly and I made some rolls and strained the soup, transfered it to a saucepan and added some cornflour. Scarlett and I had both for our lunch, Davies passed on the soup but had rolls and came back for seconds. They both ate the remainder of the rolls over the course of the afternoon :).

They disappeared upstairs to play – Scarlett is enjoying watching Davies play this DS game and Davies is enjoying having an audience, I kept feeling all glowy seeing their two messy blonde heads bent together over a DS chatting together about whirlms and sparrowmints and having no idea what they are talking about but enjoying watching two people I gave birth to being so close and having such a seperate relationship than the one(s) they have with me :). I bimbled about online for a while and then decided the weather was so lovely and I would feel so good about doing it that we’d head up to the allotment for an hour.

Davies and Scarlett needed little persuading – I am sure the novelty will wear off but they have great pride in their own little patches, love the chance to wander off to get water and chat to other allotmenteers and are generally very outdoorsy children anyway. They love digging and making a mess without anyone worrying about it, Davies is loving creating his own empire and landscape and Scarlett is very happy gathering wildlife :). I did a full hour of digging and was very pleased with my progress. It cleared my blocked nose too :).

We came home and they continued playing outside in the garden until Ady got home. I did some ragrugging and tonight have finished effort number 3 – a rainbow ragrug which Davies appeared downstairs at 11pm, declared he ‘loved’ and took back away with him upstairs so I suspect has found it’s home in his bedroom :).

Scarlett had Rainbows – she chose to take a small green caterpillar she found yesterday and has created a little enclosure for from a tupperware box. It has air holes in the lid, she has drawn a (very good) caterpillar on the top and aswell as more leaves for it to eat she has added a couple of ornaments too :). She is mastering the art of hulahooping currently, having recently learnt (of a fashion) to skip with a rope. Today’s activity was making a windmill so they did that and then Scarlett led a game of sliding across the hall on her knees which had most of the Rainbows following. She was then involved in a game of ‘it’ which predictably noone caught her for so she remained not it for the whole game. She ran around at her usual superspeedy pace but was one of the only children not red faced and puffing and panting. I can’t preach as I am clearly very unfit myself but I do look at the other Rainbows and Badgers and indeed the other children at their swimming lessons each week and think that sadly Davies and Scarlett are in a minority at being obviously active children every day 🙁 .

She did well at Show and Tell talking about her caterpillar. Lucy (who stays with Rebecca) and I were trying very hard not to giggle when one of the girls showed her new cardigan, brandishing the label and saying ‘it’s from NEXT!’. How can 6 year olds give a stuff about things like that FFS?!

The other big news for Scarlett,which she shared with the Rainbows is that her and I spent some time online today looking at the websites for Marwell Zoo and Drusillas as I had said to her that I was thinking about a keeper for day type present for her birthday this year. We compared Marwell’s offering – £100 for half an hour, has to be accompanied by an adult who has to pay to get into Marwell, you won’t be allowed to touch the animals – with Drusillas £120 for the whole day 10am-4pm, go behind the scenes with a keeper for the whole day, prepare feeds, handle animals, participate in the proper feed and keeper talks for the lemurs and the penguins, have to be supervised by an adult who gets in free and up to four other people can come along at reduced entrance rates. No real contest there then! Ady’s printed off the forms and I’ll ring them next week to see when I can get it booked for, it would be great to have it on her actual birthday :). It’s still 2 whole months away but she is already crazily excited :).

And that pretty much concludes our Friday :).

Today was a work day for me. I had felt crap last night, had a bad nights sleep and was up early this morning as my nose was too blocked to lie in bed any longer and Ady suggested I ring in sick. This had not even occurred to me as an option tbh and I didn’t even when he suggested it. As a child being off school sick was rarely something that happened in our house as with two working parents both with their own businesses it would have thrown the house into chaos. Plus Frazer and I were fairly healthy children anyway. My working life was always in jobs where being off sick was very frowned upon and it’s a mentality which has just stayed with me. I don’t think wallowing at home under a duvet makes you feel anything other than worse really anyway for something like a cold and I’m fortunate to not have ever suffered from ailments such as migranes or other debilitating things which simply render you physically incapable of getting up and going to work. Quite aside from that if I had stayed home Ady would have gone to work instead of being here for the morning and I’d have had to phone my mum to tell her not to come in the afternoon. I would have been grumpy and impatient with the kids and not up for doing anything with them so it would have been a recipe for disaster really.

As it was I went off to work and aside from feeling a little vacant I was better for being occupied. It was quite busy and the day went passed pretty quickly. I spent 3 hours on the enquiry desk and did a whole load of envelope stuffing for a job I’ve been given to oversee. I did a display and made a phonecall to a local reading group coordinator to sort out his account and arrange for someone to attend their next reading group meeting. I spent some time chatting to the Homework Club Coordinator about childrens’ services within the library and generally had a nice, busy day :).

At home Davies was all curled up with my Mum showing her his DS game and I think Tarly was feeling a bit neglected (understandably, D often says my Mum is very impatient and intolerant of S and he feels bad about it 🙁 )so her and I curled up together instead. She wanted to make a book so we folded up some paper and I helped her write ‘Scarlett and Candle walk to Brooklands’ (the park Mum and they had walked to this afternoon) and she then drew a picture of her and Candle walking. Amazingly she knows all the letters now and their sounds so is very close to being able to start writing herself. I know I mention this lots but it is just such a stark contrast to how Davies got there I am constantly feeling it is worthy of comment.

I cooked their tea and Mum and I chatted a bit before she left. Ady arrived home and I read a couple of chapters of George before the children headed up to bed. Dinner was a joint effort with Ady putting a chicken in the slow cooker (not one of ours!) this morning and me making potato gratin and cooking some baby sweetcorn and asparagus to go with it. At 930pm both children were still awake – Scarlett listening to a Magic Kitten story cd in bed and Davies still up in his bedroom creating some sort of Halloween wonderland complete with cobwebs, sound effects, signs and drawings and mysterious other stuff. I love how he immerses himself in things and gets so much pleasure out of them :).

Tomorrow’s plan is all a bit weather dependant. Ady and I are going to a wedding in a couple of weeks and I need some shoes so I could try and find them, if it’s dry we could do with another allotment visit for more digging and watering and depending on how I am feeling it is very tempting to stay home and use the chicken bones and stock from tonight’s dinner to make soup to eat with home made bread rolls. Or maybe a combination of all three…

This morning we were super efficient. We had to catch the 839am train from Lancing to Victoria so were all up at 730am, kids were breakfasted and dressed and had their Badger uniforms packed in a bag, I was dressed, tea’d and had a picnic for all packed and we were out of the door at 810am. We parked at the library and had 20 minutes to get some money out and buy our tickets (one side of the station) before getting onto the platform for our train (other side of the station). Except all of the cashpoints wouldn’t give me any money (this service is temporarily unavailable). We were running out of time and I only had £10 in my pocket and the station ticket office doesn’t take visa electron. So on a brainwave we dashed into CoOp with moments to spare, grabbed some tissues (we are all snotty today with a cold) and got cashback. I knew there was money in the account so no idea what the unavailable nonsense was.

Into the ticket office which thankfully, and unusually had no queue,tickets purchased (£17.70 for one day travelcards for the 3 of us, bargain!), back across the train tracks and onto the correct platform with about 5 minutes to spare. Precision timing, loads of luck and something we could never in a million years pull off more than once in a blue moon let alone every single morning! 😆

The train was direct to Victoria which is 1 hour 20 minutes and we found seats easily and sat and chatted. We had a very surreal conversation about a black fox that Scarlett said she’d heard on tv had been spotted in a graveyard. We were coming up with as many reasons as we could why a fox would be black instead of red. I think my favourites were that it was figure conscious and had heard black was slimming and that he was feeling his age so had resorted to Just for Men to touch up his roots. 😆

We then stopped at Hassocks for a scheduled stop for 5 minutes so discussed why Hassocks was a holding bay and whether we’d meet certain (crazily made up on the spot) criteria for being allowed out of Hassocks to continue our journey. The children and I were in fits of laughter but I do sometimes worry about whether people are observing us and wondering quite why they are not in school and whether I really should be in charge of them on my own! 😆

We played a game which Davies called ‘handy’ where you have to use your hands to represent things (animals, buildings etc.) and the others have to guess what it is. We also played ‘on Monday I went to the supermarket and I bought one x…’ but themed it first to halloween and then to Christmas. Cue further hilarity. You really do get some odd people on public transport 😉

At Victoria we headed for the underground via a quick peep in the Lush shop, I promised the children we’d call back in if we got back to Victoria in time. The tube was super speedy – just one stop, infact we spent longer on the very steep escalators than we did on the actual train. I’d rather stupidly assumed the RI would be signposted from the tube as so many attractions seem to be in London. It wasn’t.

We stopped in a shop doorway to regroup and make a plan when a woman and boy accosted us and asked if we were Home Educators looking for the RI?! She introduced herself as Sue and her son as Travis (although I heard Tardis instead and think that is a far more suitable HE name) so we sort of walked along with them a bit. I’m assuming it was just our lost air, our proximity to an event that HEors were invited to and the fact the children looked of school age rather than because we have reached that level of screaming our HE status just by looking at us…

We were warmly welcomed in and told they were about to open the theatre so we went straight up. I peeked in the door and asked the man inside if we were supposed to come in yet and he said he didn’t know but we probably should come in anyway. He turned out to be the man running the show and did a couple of optical illusion tricks with D and S while the rest of the hall filled up. There were a fair few HE folk, probably about a third and the rest school trips. We had sat at the front and it was during that last 10 minutes before the show started we realised we were in the morning session and Em, Katy and Chris & Helen were all booked in the afternoon. I don’t know why it hadn’t occured to me to check. I’d booked our session ages ago before it had been mentioned as a possible group thing and at the time booked to ensure we’d get back for Badgers. D’oh!

As it went it was fine. Davies really enjoyed it, got loads out of it, learnt loads and is very keen to go to more of the events. Scarlett did well considering she’d been sat on a train for 1.5 hours, sat still for a whole half hour before the event started and then sat through another hour of the talk. She was a bit droopy on me every now and again but still picked up quite a few nuggets of information from it.

We left there and headed to Green Park to meet up with the others. I’d totally failed to notice the park itself (although we had come out on the other side of the main road from the tube station and had been looking for RI rather than parks) but quickly found them all and enjoyed an all too brief, but lovely nonetheless chat and play including a communal huddle under the trees when a sudden downpour of rain appeared.

We’d planned to go and visit the Museum of Mankind which presumably given there were signpost signs for it was pretty local but the sudden rain and the knowledge that we would only have a couple of hours before needing to dash about on packed trains meant Davies and Scarlett chose to head for home instead. It did feel odd having only been there for 2 hours but was far nicer than the potentially chaotic and stressy journey home at 5ish.

We got back to Victoria and as promised we had a quick look in the Lush shop and I bought them one thing each – they chose a bath bomb each. I abstained :). There was a train already at the platform which went past Lancing without stopping but we decided to get on it and go as close as possible to home (just one station away) and then get another train from there rather than wait at Victoria for a direct one.

The journey home was as uneventful really, we had a 9 minute wait at Shoreham for a train to get to Lancing and then walked back to the car. The water bottle in my bag had leaked which meant the whole of the back of my jeans was soaked where it had been resting and the bath bombs had both started to fizz in my bag! 😆

We got home and Davies and I watched Waterhorse while Tarly went off and played DS. I rethreaded my peg loom and made a good start on my latest rug. They had dinner and we went to Badgers. I read in the car for a while and then Ady arrived and we went off for a walk together as usual on a Wednesday. We talked through a flippant remark that my Dad had made about me yesterday and had been playing on my mind since and I felt better about that for talking to Ady about it. I adore my parents but they are never without agenda and it’s so amazing to have in Ady someone who is always on my side, always sees the good in me and wants the best for me and to make me happy rather than someone who is after scoring points or making themselves feel better by putting me down. We are very, very lucky. 🙂

Home for a couple of chapters of George before bed for the children. We had baths, Ady cooked dinner, I ragrugged and sneezed. Tomorrow I’m working all day and I aim to spend Friday at home, probaby hugging a mug of soup if I continue feeling like this.

First thing Davies and Scarlett did some brio-ing. They don’t actually play with the track once it’s set up much but they do spend ages building elaborate and complicated tracks. It’s interesting to watch. I leafed through some allotment books and offered to read them a story but they declined.

My food shop arrived about 1030am so I was busy with that for over an hour. It was cheerfully delivered by a ‘cheeky young man’ who made me feel ancient and housewifely merely by making me think of him as both ‘cheeky’ and ‘young’ but a marked difference from the grumpy Sainsburys driver. It was all delivered fine with nice long BBE dates and the couple of substitutions they’d made were all supplied with the next brand up at the price of what I’d ordered so that was a result – they say on their website that they are proud to be the only supermarket who do that. Sainsburys have pissed me off more than once by substituting wine on half price offers with wine at the same full price and then taking a week to re-credit me when I have sent them back.

A month’s worth of food shopping takes a lot of putting away though so continued exercise this week of the bending, stretching and lifting variety. I was inspired by the arrival of some oats to make some flapjacks and had just got them ready to go in the oven when my Mum arrived. We had a cup of tea and then Scarlett came and begged to do some baking too so my Mum took Davies off with her for half an hour to do a few things while Tarly and I made some snickerdoodles, then they came back and we all had lunch.

Mum did leave her job in the end and is currently job hunting and has an interview tomorrow for which she needed photocopies of her passport and nat ins card so we popped to the library to do that on the way to swimming lessons.

Davies went in the big pool alone while Tarly had her lesson and practised his jumping in. His instructor noticed him and went over to talk to him. She caught up with me later and said ‘well he’s not eight is he?’ to which I replied ‘yes he is. Only just and he is small but he is eight!’. I think she felt quite embarrassed but she’d only been saying to him to be sensible about not going out of his depth, which I have no issues with. Although technically I could I wouldn’t dream of dropping him off to swim without me spectating and I still go with him to the changing rooms etc.

Tarly had a good lesson, she is almost at swimming point now. I would say it is more her inability to listen to what she is supposed to be doing and then do it that is holding her back more than technical ability :rolls:.

Dad joined us for Davies’ lesson which went well too. Dad is terrified of the water and can’t swim at all and he pays for their lessons. I like him to come along and watch at least once a term and see Davies practising leaping in for fun and Tarly cheerfully sticking her face in the water so he can see he’s getting his moneys worth!

We then followed Dad back to my parents house to drop off his van and he got in my car to come up to the allotment with us. I had some bits to drop off there anyway and we wanted to show them it. they were both really impressed and we walked round the whole allotments for a while oohing and ahhing at some of the very established and well tended plots. My Mum is always very enthusiastic about ventures like that but claims to have always wanted to do similar whatever it is (she apparently always wanted to keep chickens / work at the library / stay at home with her children etc.) even though most of it would have been within her reach anyway. Dad is generally more disparaging and rubbishes most of my ideas but they were both nicely positive about it 🙂 .

We came home again and the kids had bath and tea then Ady arrived home. I got Mum and Dad helping to make our tea. I read a couple of chapters of George to the children then they went to bed. We had dinner, Mum helped me string the peg loom ready for my next ragrug and after a pleasant evening of chatter they left.

We had a fairly laid back morning here. The plan was to do the food shopping for the month today and get on with the laundry backlog. In practise neither the children or I felt remotely like walking round the supermarket for hours so I spent a couple of hours battling against the asda online food shopping website instead. I see all the benefits of online grocery shopping but there are downsides too and the length of time it takes to do the first shop on them is definitely one of them. On the upside I got a delivery slot for tomorrow though which compares very favourably to Sainsburys which is normally well into the following week when you go to book one. It did mean I didn’t get any laundry done though as we have no washing powder until it arrives with tomorrow’s delivery.

While I did that Scarlett played for a while with some fuzzy felt, then joined Davies in playing with the lego. They built spaceships and supercars before tidying all that away again. Davies then did some DSing (Drawn to life) and Scarlett spent some time with a maze book (it was all about Darwin but I think that bit went over her head as she just did the mazes).

The sun was shining and we had the tools and hose to take up to the allotment and I also wanted to water the leeks and onions we’d planted on Saturday. So we made a picnic and took it with us to sit and eat up there. Davies did some work on the rest of his plot, Scarlett started digging a pond in her patch and I did another 2 hours of digging and weed clearing. I wore gloves this time which really helped (both with not getting nettle stings and with not getting dirty hands). I’d taken plenty of water with me and stopped for a couple of gazing out over the view breaks. We were there for nearly 3 hours and the kids were really good again. I even caught the sun on my arms and cleavage which is amazing given it’s practically October :).

We came home around 3pm when I’d had enough digging and I sat and drank tea while they carried on playing some game which involved being noisy. They had tea and they watched some programme which I’d never seen before but seemed to be a lot like Dora with plenty of interactive stuff all to do with letters. They were both shouting the right answers out at the TV though. They are both into writing notes a lot at the moment and consequently Davies is getting good at spelling while Scarlett is learning how to write lots of words in their entirety.

I forgot to mention yesterday in the car how they were using some of Ady’s business cards to write and draw on the back of. First of all they both did some flashcards to go with the chorus of American Pie (hands waving bye bye, American flag, pie, Chevy, good old boys, whiskey and rye, singing, die) which had me in fits of laughter. I told them about that Bob Dylan video where he does similar with words on cards and found it for them on youtube this morning. On the way home Scarlett was drawing on the backs of the cards and writing ‘to mummy love scarlett’. She did a seagull with a huge head and little body and when I commented on it being out of proportion she said ‘No Mummy, that’s perspective. It’s head is really close to the camera and it’s body is really far away!’ 😆 😆

I read some Georges Secret Key to the Universe to them and then they allegedly went to bed. I say allegedly as Scarlett reappeared and sat watching QI and picking bits of my dinner off my plate before finally properly going to bed.

I’m aching again and feeling very worn out but in a good productive sort of way.

Continuing the self-sufficient-ish theme of the weekend we went up to Tom’s for a day of fishing and shooting. The original plan had been to get there early enough to join them for some actual shooting but we had to go and collect a washing machine in the morning instead. My Dad has inherited a house which he is renting out to a tenant in 2 weeks time so is frantically trying to get ready. A new kitchen and bathroom have already been fitted complete with appliances and he is now decorating the whole house. There was a washing machine there that had only been a few months old but the new tenant has their own washing machine so Dad had offered it to us as our’s (which was a wedding present from my parents 9 years ago, has moved to Manchester and back and been very, very well used averaging a load a day for most of those 9 years) is on it’s way out.

While we were there having a look round the house we also got some tools from the shed (a second fork, rake and rotovator) and a hose (not quite long enough to reach from our allotment to the water tap but at least we’ll only need a length of hose rather than all the attachments). Felt a bit odd picking over a dead person’s things although Mum and Dad have cleared the rest of the house very speedily and don’t seem to feel nearly so strange about it. Infact the whole thing is really quite mysterious to me but that’s their concern rather than any of my business… We arranged to see them on Tuesday (Mum for the day, Dad to join us to go and watch the kids’ swimming lessons and then both of them for dinner) and headed home to swap over cars and go to Tom’s.

It’s actually Tom’s parentss’ house but Tom and Ingrid are housesitting while his parents are on holiday. It is a big, rambling house with even bigger, even more rambling garden – several acres with 3 paddocks, a sandschool and stables, huge vegetable garden and greenhouses, loads of outbuildings and a stream and two huge lakes in some woodland at the very bottom. Gorgeous :). They are very old money ‘posh’ and it all feels very much like stepping into a Jilly Cooper novel (without all the sex ;)) spending time there. There are dogs, horses, chickens and although Tom and Ingrid and all their friends are childless (so far) they all adore kids and Davies and Scarlett are in their element up there.

The children disappeared with the dogs as soon as we arrived while Ady and I helped with preparing lunch – home made burgers (two varieties), marinaded chicken and lamb all cooked on the barbecue. We finished with pancakes served with ice cream, honey from Tom’s Mum’s bees (the most delicious honey I’ve had in years, tasted just like honey I used to have as a child, so much flavour), some homemade strawberry and chili jam I’d taken with us, raspberries from the garden and nasturtians for fun. All washed down with far too much chilled wine to be drunk at lunchtime without feeling a bit wobbly for the rest of the afternoon 😳 .

We gathered up fishing rods and reels and headed down to the lake. Via the chickens and the two 4-week old chicks under a brooder. With just a quick glance I identified them as one hen and one roo – we’ll see if I’m right but I’m very confident I am. Amazing how I knew zero about chickens a year ago and now am able to talk quite confidently about them. Someone asked me something the other day about chickens and I knew the answer :).

The lakes are man-made and two seperate areas. One is deeper than the other and both have islands in the middle although only one island is accessible by a bridge. There are rowing boats for going out on them and a stream flows through the bottom of the land. The whole area is surrounded by really old established trees of all sorts. It’s beautiful 🙂

I’d never done any fishing before and neither had the children so Ady and Tom showed us how to use the rods, bait them up and cast them. Another of their workmate’s had arrived by then and he is a fairly serious fisher so he set himself up on the other side of the lake to do some proper fishing. Ady did a lot of nightfishing in his youth and often talks fondly of it and wants to take Davies at some point. I’m not at all sure Davies is quiet or patient enough yet and equally not sure that Ady is good enough at letting Davies find out errors for himself rather than taking over – yesterday demonstrated that a little but interestingly without me saying a word Ady had concluded for himself that he’d been too hands-on with Davies and caused him to lose interest. It’s a lesson it’s taken me a long time to learn but he really is best given some basic instruction and left to find his own way with most things. He’d never be ready to learn a musical instrument for example as he’d need way too much instruction which he is very resistant to.

I quite enjoyed it although I’m not big on sitting around doing very little which is what fishing seems to be largely about – I’m more about instant gratification ;). Davies spent some time collecting conkers with Ingrid , Scarlett did lots of dashing about between people fishing to check their progress and I did lots of taking photos of beautiful reflections 🙂

Sam (the other workmate) caught a tiddler so the children had a close look at that before it was thrown back in

Then Tom brought out his gun for the children to have a go with. I hate toy guns but I had had a go at shooting a real gun by the time I was Davies’ age as my Dad has always had guns around from his childhood (very securely locked away from us kids of course) and showed Frazer and I how to use and respect them. Ady worked in gamekeeping for a while when he was younger so knows plenty about guns and shooting. This was a little 410 shotgun but still had an almighty kickback to it. Tom showed the children all the various component parts, explained what was in the cartridges (we bought one home to cut open and show the kids later) and explained how it all worked, then showed them how to shoot with it. They both had a couple of goes – Davies took the kickback for his second go just to see how very powerful it can be. I had a go and Ady had a couple of goes; all just shooting at the top of a tree. Next time we’re going to try some clay pigeon shooting with them.

We were all called back to the lake then as Sam had finally caught a decent sized fish, a mirror carp. It was too heavy for the kids to hold but they had a really good close look


then it was released into the other lake as they are trying to populate that one with fish too

That re-inspired the rest of us to try some more fishing and this time Sam gave some weights so we could try lower in the water and some decent bait (we’d been using bread that was falling apart and off the hook in the water). Scarlett had a go at some fly fishing with Tom too

but nothing more was caught and we started to get feasted on by the midges so returned to the house for a cup of tea before heading for home.

We got home around 730pm so the kids had a bath and tea before heading to bed, very tired, around 9pm. I had a bath and the feeling of not being ‘quite right’ that had started to come over me on the way home got worse and I couldn’t face dinner so went off to bed myself before 10pm. I slept through and woke feeling fine this morning so obviously I was just worn out from such an outdoorsy, action packed weekend. Very nice though 🙂

I drank rather too much wine last night and then around 530am Candle tried to jump up onto the bed, missed and scratched my arm as she scrabbled about. I woke with a raging thirst so got up to get a drink and then couldn’t get back to sleep so when Tarly woke just after 6am I went down to her and tried to persuade her to come and sleep in our bed for a bit longer. I almost managed it but her and Ady got up about 645am when I finally did fall asleep again. Consequently we didn’t get out of the house as early as we’d planned but were still at the car boot sale before 10am with a picnic packed in the car.

We were looking for gardening tools – we already have a selection of small forks, trowels etc. and one shovel but need a couple of forks (or at least one), a rake, a couple of watering cans, maybe a wheelbarrow and various trug-like things. Not all right now but as you can often pick things like that up for a quid at a carboot sale it was worth looking before heading to B&Q for new ones. We had no luck and the only thing we bought was a bag of apples and a cob of sweetcorn for Davies who walked round eating it raw, while Scarlett and I munched our way through the apples.

We then had a frustrating trip to Tesco for petrol, a few things for dinner, Homebase for forks and finally B&Q for a fork all of which seemed to take forever. But we did arrive at the alllotment and sat down at the picnic table and bench at the edge of our plot to have our lunch, enjoy the sunshine and look out over Lancing and the sea 🙂

Then we got to work. Davies spent ages digging over his patch, methodically removing all the weeds and taking them down to the compost bin. He then planted up a few things, came up with various inventions and decorations for ‘Davies’ Magic Garden’ and was just utterly in his element. Thinking about it more an allotment is just soooo Davies; digging in the mud for treasure, filling your plot with random bits of junk cobbled together to make useful things, sitting and contemplating your ‘kingdom’ and visualising an end product that might be a long and distant dream. He was practically dragged away when the rest of us were ready for home and is already desperate to go back :).

Scarlett did well considering and probably stuck it out far happier than many 5 year olds would have done. She was concerned about germs for a while and not keen on getting her hands dirty but she coped well with it and really enjoyed gathering up the masses of potatoes we dug out of the ground

I think she will enjoy it even more when we have the pond dug in as she loves bug detecting and I have a few ideas to make the hands being dirty thing less of an issue for her (and indeed for me). She was less up for putting in the effort of clearing weeds etc. but she is more of an instant gratification type of girl :).

Ady and I did really well and cleared over half of the plot – I won’t repeat what I’ve already blogged over on self-suffish again but it was way more enjoyable than I’d anticipated and a very rewarding couple of hours work 🙂

It’s very sociable up there -not only did we chat to another allotment holder (the children more than Ady and I actually as they met up with him at the tap and chatted for ages) but we also exchanged ‘good afternoon’s with all the people walking past the other side of the fence walking their dogs up the downs.

We came home and dossed about for a while before the kids had a bath, dinner and bed (both asleep really quickly tonight), I cut up loads of clothes into rag strips in preparation for my next rug and Ady did some wombling about in the garage and mowed the lawn.

We used the onions we’d dug up in tonights dinner of chilli and we’re going to use the potatoes for tomorrow’s roast. I know they aren’t the fruits of our labours in planting them, but they were a nice reward for all that digging today :).

Which I only got my head round at about 4pm when I suddenly remembered it was Rainbows tonight when someone was being all Friday-ish at work.

At home Ady was here until 1030am, then Mum came over for an hour or so and played drafts with Davies and got the children all whipped up about going to France. My parents have come into (a lot of) money recently and are splashing it about a bit and want to take us to France / Belgium for a couple of days before Christmas hence the passports things so Mum was talking to the children about that. Dad took over at lunchtime and Davies apparently beat Dad at drafts. This is a Big Deal, I don’t think I’ve ever beaten my Dad at drafts. Davies also told me today that unless Freya has got further in her Viva Pinata DS game he has now overtaken her. This is with only having the game for a week and having deleted the whole thing on Monday and having started again since then. Somewhere I’m still hung up on ‘conventional’ achievements when daily my children are making big old giant leaps in the things that matter to them! 😳

Davies had also spent some time setting up a ‘science lab’ in his bedroom with various test tubes, coloured liquids and his bubble lamp. He’s drawn diagrams in a notepad of what his experiments are supposed to show. I need to talk through with him the point of experiments but he certainly has the mad professor thing licked!

I had a good day at work. I overslept and woke up at 829am. I have to be at work at 9am so when I was starting the banking and was slightly woolly I felt quite justifiably so having only been up for half an hour and not having had a cup of tea yet. I did manage to pitch, quite convincingly, my idea for an Over 5s Story Session to the childrens’ librarian who had come in to see me though and I think we may have had a result with moving forwards on that. :)I did have a cup of tea before Baby Rhymetime though which was just as well as although the first session back after the summer break was 2 weeks ago when I was in a field with cows geocaching this was my first session back and the babies were pleased to see me. They have all grown loads over the summer and were all crawling. I had a semi circle of little people sat around me, clambering and trying to get into the instrument box and a veritable fight broke out about who was going to hold my hands for Row, Row, Row your boat! 😆

Lunchtime was interesting as I got chatting about children’s literacy to the new girl and had a bit of a rant about how schools are failing our children before confessing that I Home Educate. She listened to me go on about NC, how school is homogenising children, how one size doesn’t fit all and how I can’t change schools but I can change my own children’s experience of learning before asking ‘so wouldn;t you have been interested in a TA position instead then?’. If Scarlett had been there she’d have called her a pillock! 😆

The afternoon flew by, Sian – a relatively new member of staff who by utter coincidence has a sister who Ady works with so already knew of me, has a 2yo daughter with cerebral palsy who she is considering HE for. I have arranged to meet up with her outside of work, with our children to chat about it properly. Her sister has only met D and S once and they were at their most delightful so she has only good feedback so far ;).

I came home and brought various books with me which Davies fell upon, particularly 10 experiments your teacher never told you about which had some great stuff about mass, gravity, force, wind resistance etc.

Scarlett and I headed off to Rainbows; she brought her camera and got me to take a picture of her and all the Rainbows and for once talked properly about what she’d brought. I was slightly surrounded by Rainbows at the beginning all showing me their teeth gaps and wobbly teeth and talking to me about various things (including chickens). They did hama beading today which felt slightly odd. Scarlett seemed to enjoy it so I did remind her we have loads of hama beads at home she could do again if she wanted. Might have to bring them out and see if she is interested.

I dropped S home and whizzed up to Sainsburys for dinner supplies. Ady and Davies had been xboxing so Scarlett joined in with that. They played their DSs in bed for a while hence Davies and his progress on Viva Pinata. Scarlett came out to say she’d finally named another Nintendog Ruby and with fairly minimal help worked out how to spell it :). Im fairly sure I had more to say but it’s dissolved in a diluted haze of wine so it’ll have to wait for a more lucid posting.

Up and about early today so we decided to go and continue the Boot Quest before soft play. The place we used to go to in Worthing was called ‘Fun Junction’ but it is now called PLAY which is an acronym for Play, Leisure, Agility, Youth. I’m guessing they came up with the PLAY bit before the words that it stands for 😆 As an aside I do like the names of soft play places. Locally we had Fun Junction (a meeting place for fun?), Monkee Biznez (I may have slightly changed the spelling of one of those words but they started it!), Funplex (plex of fun, many a chat we’ve had about the meanings of the word ‘plex’) and ‘Flying Fortress’ which is the most sensibly named as it is in an airport hangar and is the shape of a big plane.

It was Lucy’s idea to meet there but she is offline currently so I’d posted it to the local HE list and invited a few other people (SIL Julie, Tasha our new friend) along too but didn’t really know who might actually turn up.

So we were out and away nice and early and parked in town and walked in to continue boot-shopping. We got trainers for a fiver from shoezone for both children – they wanted the same ones but still had no luck on the boot front. We did go and ogle the kids DMs in the posh shoe shop in town where Tarly fell in love with both the shiny hot pink DMs and the snowflake and penguin print ones. They are so cool :).

We headed off to soft play then and Lucy and Sam were already there. I’m sure I’ve mentioned Sam before, she is very sweet but irritates me. Today she compounded that by calling me Nicky twice and wanting to talk all about nursery (well it’s not nursery actually, it’s playschool :rolls:). Cintha and Tasha also arrived and Julie came along later too so we had a good little gathering of folks, well worth setting it up as a regular monthly get together.

Davies and Scarlett played almost entirely with Toby, their new friend from Tuesday and all was going swimmingly. We ate lunch with them and then Davies started to play the victim. He does this every so often (Julie was most entertained as Chris is still like it at 40 and Jack does it too so she reckons it’s a Goddard male gene fault :lol:). I did have to wade in when a small boy who was being very unparented and causing hassle for Davies, Scarlett and Toby came over with his mother who was trying to tell me they were being horrid to him as I’d sat and watched the whole thing play out over about an hour and he was simply being a violent little git who they had been incredibly tolerant of but had finally had enough of and were trying, unsuccessfully to let him know they really didn’t want to play with him. She actually left soon afterwards which I felt a bit bad about but everyone else assured me I hadn’t been rude or horrible to her, just justifably short. Cintha did say I’d been scary too but that’s more a default thing than something I brought out specially ;).

Anyway, Davies and Toby struggled for a while when Jack and Maisie arrived and the dynamic alterered. Scarlett was doing a bit of stirring too I think and Davies got upset and unable to deal with things rather than put them behind him and move on. I did wonder if some pheromone was being piped in actually as suddenly all the children started falling out with each other and we had a long line of them all queuing up to have cuddles. I did the ultimate in faux pas by saying ‘Oh I much prefer boys!’ just as Scarlett approached me but she questioned me on it and seemed happy with my answer (we did joke that the mood Davies was in if he’d heard similar about me prefering girls he may well have been off to perform self mutilation in response :lol:). But all ended well with us arranging to get together with Tasha again hopefully next week and the kids all said goodbye to each other.

I decided I really did want to get the whole boot thing sorted so we drove over to Littlehampton where good old Peacocks came to the rescue as always and Scarlett found a very similar to the OshKosh pair she liked brown cowboy style boots for £12. Result :). Davies found a really nice jean jacket with sewn in hoodie fleece which was half price too and is now the proud owner of his first item of age 8-9 clothing :).

We came home and they had tea, Davies and I fell out and he had some stern words from me which have hopefully gone in. I’ve really felt like I’ve tried hard to meet his needs this week and focussed on him a bit with setting up social opportunities for him with same age boys and spending money on things like soft play admission so I do expect him to put a bit more effort in to making these things work for him when the chance is there. I always feel like Davies does take on board chats like that though and tries hard to make a change. Of course that Mummy-pleaser thing tends to override most things for him.

Ady rang to say he was coming home in a works van as he had a pallet box for a compost bin so could we meet him at the allotment so we grabbed the kids trowel and fork and headed up there in the late sunshine. We chatted briefly to two fellow allotmenteers and the kids claimed the area they want as their patch. I had planned for them to have a patch each to avoid arguments but they were insistent that they want to work together and share a patch so they earmarked that and started digging. Ady arrived and we manhandled the compost bin over and looked at the sea view before wandering round planning what we want and where it might go.

As we left we introduced ourselves and chatted to a few plots down neighbour – David. He’s at the end of his second year there and has a very tidy and productive plot. He told us our plot belonged to a man who died earlier this year but had previously worked on it very hard and grown lots. He told us about the allotment association which is worth joining and gave us a whole load of his excess leeks that are ready for planting out now and said we could also plant onions and garlic now. This is great as we are keen to plant something now rather than wait for the spring.

We had a walk round the adjoining plots and chatted to another family up visiting their plot, got some ideas of what we’d like to do and then headed for home. I read some more of George’s Secret Key to the Universe. Davies got one of those magic writing slate things where you can erase what you’ve written by lifting the top sheets so he and I were writing each other messages – all of which he could read and write no problem. He chucked it down the stairs to Ady and I who were in the bathroom chatting (him in the bath, me sitting on the floor) with ‘I LOVE MY MUMMY AND MY DADDY’ on it later which was lovely :).

Tomorrow’s a working all day kind of day so I’m off to bed.

This morning was most odd. Ady woke me to help get Davies and Scarlett ready to go and I waved them off (after frantic checking of old emails and texting Liza to remember her address as now I actually know where it is to get to I have freed up the bit of my brain that contained details like the flat number etc.)and then had a full half an hour all alone in the house before I had to go to work. Very strange feeling.

Work was bedlam. Wednesday mornings are always chaos anyway but we were shortstaffed with me, Yvonne the boss, moany Sarah and a relief member of staff. We had a HUGE delivery of reservations and returns and it was busy too. So that was a blur of a four hours. I did have a lovely email from Brenda the big boss though and a Barefoot book from Cara the children’s librarian who had been chatting to Davies about them last time he saw her and had been clearing out her sons’ bookcase (she has two boys slightly older than D and S) and had a lovely Leonardo Da Vinci Barefoot book they didn’t want anymore so had left it in my tray to ask if I’d like it :).

I left there and headed to Liza’s to pick Davies and Scarlett up. They had covered Liza’s front room in pictures, accidentally drawn on the sofa and floor,got covered in mud at the park, refused all her kind offers of food and been generally noisy and Davies-and-Scarlett-y. Thank again Liza, it is so very, very much appreciated 🙂 x. Davies got a fab birthday present of pencils and art pad along with a cool homemade Ben 10 card and a chocolate Ben 10 lolly. Scarlett went all wobbly bottom-lipped as I’d promised her last week that Davies’ birthday was well and truly over so Liza very kindly produced a lolly for her too which cheered her up.

We left there on a Scarlett shoe shopping mission. She has wellies and crocs and black Badger shoes only so needed a pair of proper winter shoes now the weather is turning. She’s had boots for the last 3 winters as that solves the not wearing socks or tights issue whether she is wearing trousers or long skirts (she doesn’t really wear short skirts anyway) so we were looking for any colour but black boots. We tried Asda, Matalan, Brantano, Sainsburys but had no joy anywhere. The closest we came to something suitable was a lovely pair of Osh Kosh boots which were £32 – considerably more than I’d intended paying. The quest continues…

They did get a small gift each – Davies got another Ben 10 figure and Scarlett got a cat in a basket toy and I got 2 Tickled Pink t shirts from Asda in honour of payday today.

We also collected the bag of rags from a freecycler that we’d missed earlier in the week, dropped off the allotment paperwork and collected the key so we can now access the allotment and plan to start digging this weekend :).

We had just got in at 4pm laden down with bags, I’d served the kids a speedily prepared tea (Davies, pizza from yesterday, Scarlett eggs and toast) and was bolting down some marmite on toast and a cup of tea myself while trying to sew on the 7 badges I’d left to the last minute to put on Davies’ badger jumper when my parents turned up. They stayed for an hour, distracting the kids from eating and me from sewing and then we all left together.

The kids had a great time at Badgers. I read in the car for a while and then Ady arrived and we went for a long walk and chat including a supermarket visit to get dinner for tonight and some chocolate liqueurs for me :). Back at Badgers we were told that they have a local kids fitness person coming in two weeks to do a session with all of them for which they need to wear trainers. Arse! So not only do I have to spend money on black shoes for them to wear once a week and black trousers for them to wear once a week I now need to get them a pair of trainers each for them to possibly only ever wear once. Of course everyone else already has black shoes and trousers and trainers for school – wonder if I could get away with a pair each of those black elasticated plimsolls?

Home for bedtime stories – one of the tales from the Barefoot book of Monsters and the first two chapters of George’s Secret Key to the Universe which came highly recommended as ‘perfect for Davies and Scarlett’ from a friend and sure enough had them instantly captivated.

And I think that’s about it – this morning feels a very long time ago!