One word? When seven would do…

Off to work for me this morning and a very pleasant morning I had too. Wednesdays are always busy; we shut at 1pm, a hangover from the days when every shop had half day closing on Wednesdays which sleepy little town libraries are still clinging onto. Also we always seem to have massive deliveries on Wednesdays which is probably due to more reservations being placed on Saturdays which then get sent to dispatch on Monday then forwarded to us on Tuesday and arrive on Wednesday. So I was on the counter for the first couple of hours which was nice and busy, then an hour on the enquiry desk which was also pretty frantic before finishing up changing my display in the junior library. It was for National Year of Reading in May which the theme was ‘Mind and Body’ for and I’d done head and hands of two children holding books up to read and surrounded by other books, using the senses as my theme. I pulled down the ‘May’ and the ‘Mind and Body’ banners and put up ‘June’ and ‘Escape into Reading’ which is this month’s theme and then changed the books the children were reading to things like Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, Doctor Who and various other sci-fi and fantasy type things instead.

Ady had taken Davies and Scarlett to work with him to a couple of garden centres. He skillfully managed to avoid both the whole Home Ed debate and the being on childcare duty while he was supposed to be working by claiming it was ‘bring your children to work day’ to everyone he met and as such the children were treated like minor celebrities! 😆 They got guided tours round the garden centres, a free go round Paradise Park (usually refered to here as The Dinosaur Place) for which our season tickets ran out in January so they were very pleased to have a free visit to and take Ady round too. 🙂 I got regular text updates including the rather scary ‘just bought a life size Timmy!’ from Ady mid-morning. Davies has been hankering after a Ben 10 sticker book and as he had been getting really crap at going to sleep (regular midnight and still awake episodes despite being in bed by 8pm :rolls:) I’d said if he went to bed and to sleep for 5 nights in a row he could have it. And so he pulled that off, thus proving he can get to sleep and allowing me to yell at him over it in future. So I doled out the £3 to him this morning to take out with him to get the book. Tarly got a pound to spend just because she likes to buy things. She spotted a life sized cuddly dog in the window of a charity shop and begged to go in. It was priced at £3 but she apparently sweet talked the woman in the shop into letting her have it for a quid! Result! Although it wouldn’t have been bought if I’d been there and her room is rapidly resembling one of those tacky fairground stands where you have to get 101 in 3 darts to win a deformed looking Tweety Pie cuddly toy standing 5 foot high.

We all met up back at home for lunch and then Ady headed off to work again and we headed round to Lucy’s. The four children had a great time, ate loads of popcorn, played inside and out in various combinations and generally were lovely. Lucy and I chatted and also ate popcorn. It was lovely :).

We finally left just before 5pm with just enough time to dash home and get changed to go out to Badgers. I’d foolishly got D and S to check their Badger clothes were ok this morning so although they could find them all they’d been put away by them 2 weeks ago and looked just like they been balled up and shoved in cupboards, which is pretty much precisely what had happened! Still they were both rather shamefaced about looking so crumpled and it was a good reminder of why they need to put their clothes away properly :). It was really funny to see them bouncing in full of happiness and with comments from the leader on how they’d caught the sun and were looking all browned and bleached haired, while all the others had suffered a wet half term and were looking depressed after two days back at school (training day for pretty much all schools on Monday I think).

I walked down to the beach while talking to Julie (still pregnant) on the phone and then did some running / walking along the sand which was lovely :). I then had half an hour sitting back in the car while my trousers dried out and I read my book which was equally lovely :).

Home for tea and stories, Ady arrived shortly after us and then Apprentice watching.

Tomorrow is the first day of The South of England show which we’ve been to every year since we moved home. Tomorrow is the only day of the 3 that I’m not working although my Mum (who ususally comes) is working tomorrow so it would just be me and the children. They are keen to go and it is always a really good day out so depending on the weather and how quickly we all get moving in the morning we might go.

Today I spent yet more precious, never going to get them back again, once they’re gone they’re gone, could have been doing constructive or world changing or at the very least meaningful hours of my life on Dolphin feckin’ Island. And I can’t get past day 29 when a virus is unleashed on the water pump and all the sealife needs medicating. And then feeding. And then medicating again. And unlike all the days before it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I go round each enclosure and feed and medicate all the buggers they keep needing yet more feeding and yet more medicating until eventually the marine control board people come along and tell me I’ve failed and need to go back to the beginning again. Eventually (and yes it has taken a full 48 hours) I decided to check on the internet to see if there was a walkthrough or even, so help me, a cheat code to use – oh and get me knowing what cheat codes and walkthroughs are anyway, two children and several years of exposure to gaming didn’t do it, I was able to resist tetris when I had a facebook account, I have merely toyed with Zoo Tycoon when it came already loaded onto my laptop but a week of Dolphin Island in the house and I’m practically a gamehead! And what did I find? Just several forums, blogposts, reviews and pleas for help from various other people scattered around the world also unable to get past day 29. I feel liberated and freed and able to move on with my life again.

I’ve long been of the opinion there is little point to games even when they are something you actually can achieve, when they become quite literally impossible there is clearly no point at all. This doesn’t mean I will be able to leave it alone of course, my fingers are twitching with stylus withdrawal, the electronic music is whirring round my head and tomorrow at work I’ll be ordering in such titles as ‘Orcas and how to look after them’ ‘you and your pet flamingo’ and ‘sharks, a users guide’.

So what else have we been up to aside from DI on the DS and being the neglected children of a DS obsessed mother? Well plenty actually.

Scarlett is being rather tricky at the moment. I could bring out all sorts of reasons and excuses for it but I suspect it is mostly a combination of being 5 and a hefty dose of my genes as she has a beligerance and attitude I recognise all too clearly. I think she’s been getting her own way a lot lately and have plans to realign things a bit as I’ve seen a few glimmers of the steely side of her character lately that I’ve not much liked and suspect she has the ‘baby of the family’ act off to such a fine art she could do with being challenged on it a little. Today she was quite annoying with demands and baby talk and rather too much of the spoilt brat about her, but we’ve had a chat and I will continue to talk to her about it as and when she displays behaviour that she is fully aware isn’t ok.

As is the law of more than one child Davies has been practically perfect in every way in contrast (how do they do that? do they have a rota? draw lots? earn points?) although today was much more the sort of day he enjoys and company he loves, which no doubt helped. 🙂

So, after a fairly lazy morning we filled the car up with petrol and headed over to Ali’s. On the way we changed the lyrics to Razorlight’s America to reflect things that are really in America, we started with ‘Americans’ and ‘dollars’ and then moved onto words they use for things that we don’t so we had ‘sidewalks’ ‘garbage’ ‘freeways’ ‘trunks’ ‘pants’ and so on. Amused us anyway 😆 It was music, literature (lyric writing?) and cultural differences all rolled into one ;).

At Ali’s Davies settled straight into xboxing, mostly alone, sometimes with Freya and plenty of eavesdropping. He is at that dangerous age of knowing how to make himself ‘invisible’ by not interupting or drawing attention to himself but quietly sitting there taking in every word. I remember doing the same myself and overhearing all sorts of interesting things, some of which didn’t make complete sense at the time because I was too young. Scarlett and Freya did some playing together, mostly hatching plans to make mess I think and when she wasn’t being needy and distracting Scarlett played nicely with some of Freya’s very pink toys such as ponies and dolls house furniture.

Ali and I managed plenty of chatting and tea drnking and then we all had a go on the wii fit and the wii sports. I was shite but Davies and Scarlett seemed to fairly quickly get the hang of it and loved playing against each other at the boxing 😆 I can see what an investment buy a wii would be, allowing them to get all their sibling angst out on each other without actual bloodshed 😆

We came home (LSoH music on the way), they got changed into swimming stuff, I had another go at Dolphin Island, plaited Tarly’s hair and then we headed off to swimming. Ady rang as we reached the bottom of the road (Davies takes my calls while I’m driving, hopefully it won’t be long before he can text and twitter for me too :lol:) to say he was a few minutes behind us. I dispatched the children poolside, then Ady arrived and about halfway through the lesson when we were both holding our heads in our hands at Tarly being rubbish at listening and waving madly at us instead we heard a voice behind us say ‘no she’s waving at me!’ and it was my Mum. 🙂

She had popped in on her way home from work to watch so met us upstairs when they were dressed and dry for a quick chat before heading off home. Ady took the children home while I nipped to the chip shop for chips for their tea. Chips, stories then bed for them. Some more DI and finally closure on the whole thing for me followed by Martian Child on dvd which I thought was excellent.

Tomorrow Ady’s taking them to work with him in the morning while I work, then we swap over at lunchtime. I’ve no idea how long we can quite literally juggle work and the children between us but with enough practice we may well reach circus standard, maybe encorporate a little human pyramid type stuff into our act, train the chickens up too and all our financial, work and childcare issues will be taken care of as we take to the road in brightly painted caravans and travel from town to town as Goddards Amazing Circus – all very Famous Five, maybe we could solve mysteries along the way as a sideline!

We had nothing planned today other than going to the bank to pay the mortgage. We did that and not a lot else really. We played on DSs, the children watched Ben 10, I did a bit of baking (chocolate and banana muffins), they played their current fave George and Timmy from Famous Five meets Ben 10 game using geomags and Betty Spagetty, I chucked them outside for half an hour before tea to run off some energy. I read lots of Marian Keyes latest book and pondered on alcoholism.

I have failed to engage with them for lots of today but they are just fine with that every once in a while and it was still interspersed with cuddles, singing, laughing and me looking up every so often from what I was doing to throw a comment into their conversations so I probably engaged plenty overall.

We finished with a couple of chapters of story before bedtime.

Oh and just because it amused me Candle (the cat) fell asleep on a half finished and should have been put away properly bar of chocolate which melted into her tail, side of her face and whiskers and two paws. She reminds me of an ex boyfriend I had who used to regularly fall asleep clutching his kebab and wake with it all smeared into his cheek with pieces of lettuce in his eyebrows. Classy eh?! 😆

Today was Open Farm Sunday and last year we simply went to the nearest farm which was at Lancing College (posh private boarding school up the road from us), this year I arranged for us to go to an organic farm. It was a bit further away but whilst Lancing College farm was great for the Old McDonalds farm experience with all the classic farmyard animals this looked to be far more interesting and educational.

And it was 🙂

The farm is pretty big and has been owned by the family for 9 years during which time they have made it organic and focused on all sorts of interesting farming methods such as crop rotation, creating hedgerows, field margins and beetle banks and building up their flock of sheep. They had created a trail around the fields with information sheets along the way and regardless of Davies and Scarlett I learnt a hell of a lot! Actually Davies was pretty interested in it all too and as he knew very little about farming anyway and organic farming seems so much more logical – based on working with nature rather than blowing it all away with chemicals it was a nice introduction for him. I had decided we wouldn’t need wellies (well actually I don’t have any wellies, something I really must remedy) and actually we didn’t but the last bit of the field was long grass which was irritating both children’s ankles (they both have hayfever and get rashy with prolonged contact to cut or long grass) so I gave Scarlett a piggyback and Ady gave Davies a shoulder carry. I was just thinking it wouldn’t be too long before they were too big / far too averse to the idea for it to happen anymore when cgf twittered something along similar lines.

Back at the ‘welcomming field’ we had the picnic we’d brought along with paying just £1.50 for massive amounts of organic salad, an organic burger and organic tea, coffee and fruit juice (spot the pattern?) from the hueg woodburning in troughs barbecue they had going on. The children went off to play with the lambs.

There was then a sheep shearing demonstration and talk which was interesting too with loads of great questions asked by the various children who were all there and had organised themselves between them into height order so they could all see ok :).

We then left and spotted signs for another open farm just along the road open for another hour or so. We decided we would have a look and chatted about different dairy produce (it was a dairy farm). It was a very different, more ‘commercial’ set up with stalls selling various things from honey produce (got some lovely lip balm for £1) to chicken runs. We got various posters and booklets about farming and then went to try cheeses and buy some icecream. As the woman infront of me at the icecream stall was chatting and I was eavesdropping I realised it was the dairy farm featured in the ice cream challenge show on The Apprentice. And as they were selling the toffee apple flavour as featured I had to choose that one really :).

We came home and the children played in the garden with the chickens, Ady dozed on the sofa and I cooked dinner (retiring the garden with book and glass of wine for times inbetween checking on it). Ady bathed the children and I served up roast beef.

The children went to bed, I watched the season finale of Lost and Ady had a long bath. It’s been a nice weekend :).

We all walked into Lancing together this morning; I went into the library and did more photocopying of songsheets while Ady, Davies and Scarlett had a wander round to look at the rest of the festival stuff happening. They bumped into our next door neighbour who gave them children a pound coin each which is now burning holes in their pockets and then they came back to join me at the library when Rhyme Time had finished.

I had 20 attendees of mostly Dads and their babies with a couple of Grandads and two sets of twins one who came with their Dad and his sister (and it only occured to me afterwards to wonder if they were twins) and another set who had both parents. It was a good sized turnout – not too big to be unmanagable and not too small as to feel like it was just me and two blokes singing to a couple of babies :lol:. The age range was fairly wide with a boy somewhere between 5 and 7 who had very slow speech and I suspect some learning difficulties but was incredibly friendly and chatty and delighted to find someone who was interested in his chatter and knew what he was talking about (Lazytown mostly :lol:). Anyway it went well, we all sang and shook instruments, it sounded very different singing with just a couple of women and a load of men than the usual all female voice sound. Plenty of them hung around to drink coffee and eat cake and whilst I strongly believe it should be utterly normal for fathers to take their small children out to things it is still a rare enough thing to see to enjoy the novelty of it.

We popped to the supermarket for a few bits for a barbecue and then came home via Mick the butchers for some sausages. We had lunch in the garden, the children did loads of chalk drawings (including a big picture by Davies that he and I tried to jump into Mary Poppins style but it just didn’t work!) on the paths and then we walked along to the village green for Sompting festival.

There was an exhibition of photos of old Sompting in the old school which is now a community centre. We didn’t linger long there as the children were restless but we did have a look inside the schools air raid shelter, which was interesting.

The green was slightly disappointing; it’s usually got loads more happening and more stalls than this year which was a big fun fair with very expensive rides and attractions. There were a few stalls; a big church one, some guinea pigs and the biggest draw which was a stand with about 10 owls -all different sorts and different ages from a 9 week old chick to a 12 year old small owl. I got to hold the small owl on a gauntlet so D and S could stroke it and then after they wandered off I stayed a bit longer holding it while other children came over to stroke it and found myself being asked loads of questions about it 😆 Beautiful creatures.

We had ice creams and watched the two local pubs have a tug of war competition and then it clouded over and we decided to come home. Davies and Scarlett carried on playing with chalk and created a ‘Chalk Wonderland Special’ for us to visit complete with spotter sheets for us to look for and tick off, chalk ocean, bridges over it and ending with two camping chairs and lemonade in champagne flutes for us to sit and drink :lol:. More emergent spelling happening and Davies did little bits of reading today of things like the guinea pigs names at the festival (he read Cheerio).

I’ve spent ages playing Scarlett’s new Dolphin Island DS game as all she actually wants to do is play with the sealife without the pressure of ruining the game so I need to complete all the levels so she can do that. I’m doing well with it although the appeal of gaming / DS in general is still rather lost on me. I played some of Davies’ Ben 10 game and just found that annoying and fiddly.

Davies and I watched Doctor Who and Doctor Who Confidential while Ady read Scarlett some stories, then Davies went to bed. They were both (finally) asleep pretty early tonight. Crap weather put paid to our barbecue plans so Ady cooked burgers indoors while I did more Dolphin Island and watched Neil Diamond.

anyone remember those days? Ah those happy days when blogging was more about influencing the google ads and not using paragraphs than anything else! 😆

There is no relevance to this, I just couldn’t think of a title by the way.

A fairly quiet morning as the children were playing with their new DS games – Davies got a Ben 10 one and Tarly got Dolphin Island which she’s been desperate for since playing it with Liza ages ago. I’ve a feeling she’ll need a lot of assistance to complete it but she’s happy :).

I had a couple of parcels that needed to go to the post office and as our little local one did indeed get closed down despite all the protests we decided to walk into Lancing rather than drive and go there. I can’t recall our conversations but I know we chatted all the way. We went to the post office first to get rid of the parcels and then wandered around Woolworths, the charity shops (where Tarly spent her 50pence she’d brought with her on a soft toy huskie, inevitable christened Timmy, as all her toy dogs are currently named – she went up to the counter with her purse and completed the transaction all alone. I got a stained glass flower kit and a sparkly jewel punching machine for putting pretty rivets on material) and the supermarket for various vegetables. We then got cakes from the bakers (plural, we got something in both the bakers in town) and then sat on the bench outside the library to eat them.

We called into the library and they chose 2 books and 2 films each to borrow and then we came home. We were out for a good couple of hours and it was really nice :).

I did some of the stained glass flower kit which Tarly helped with, Davies played more DS. Then Tarly did some craft stuff with lots of glitter and glue.

They had tea and then Ady came home. I’d been starting to stress over the Dad’s Special Rhyme Time which I’m running at the library tomorrow, worrying that some of the Dads simply won’t know the songs so as we don’t have a printer at home I went back to the library to print off some song sheets. It was really quiet and instead of sitting in the office Yvonne and Jan insisted I sit at the desk with them and do it so we had a very fun hour laughing and joking while I typed out the words to all the songs and nursery rhymes I could think of and photocopied them many times over.

Ady and the children were out in the garden when I got in so I brought the children in to get ready for bed and read them the books they’d chosen at the library and a couple of chapters of Famous Five (no let up there – Davies agrees it would be good to be able to read himself so he could take them up to bed and carry on reading after I’ve read my couple of chapters each night but Tarly is still adamant she wants all 21 books read to her. I found this which made me chuckle today as it’s something I’ve been saying about them. We’re planning to do a bit of trail down to Cornwall at the end of June finishing at the Eden Project with a stop near Corfe castle so that should mean something to the children as it was apparently the inspiration for Kirrin Castle another visit to Ginger Pop might be in order too 🙂 ) before they went off to bed. I popped out to see the chickens and Scarlett was already asleep by the time I came back in. Davies was still awake at long gone 11 though.

I’ve collated all my song sheets ready for the morning, enjoyed my far more modest than usual number of alcohol units (cutting down) and am off to bed.

I was woken this morning not by the cockerel but by Tarly and Ady under the bedroom window reorganising the chicken area. Scarlett was wearing her winter boots and a nightie 😆 I went off to work leaving them to it and came back 5 hours later to find them in the same place. All the chicks and hens are now ‘integrated’ although they have gone in for the night to seperate places still, they are fenced in by attractive green mesh which disguises their area a bit and Ady has lined it with potted plants and flowers (which we have in abundance round here). Scarlett has bonded with the non-mothering hen and has spent most of the day tramping round carrying her aswell as loads of time handling the bigger chicks.

I started work slightly earlier than normal today and then finished at 130 instead of working all day as they owed me some prorata hours for the bank holiday. When I pulled into the carpark I realised there were no other staff cars and the grill was still across one of the windows so I had a sneaky feeling I was the first to arrive. Sure enough as I unlocked the door it was all dark inside the library and the alarm started beeping. I panicked only slightly (I was shown how to turn it off but that was way back when I first started 18 months ago), deactivated it and set about turning lights on, unlocking windows, turning all the many pcs and tills on and generally getting the library ready to open. There was a message to ring the boss at Shoreham so I did that and she told me where the safe key had been hidden so I dug that out and got the tills out too. By the time I’d done all that more staff had arrived.

I had been asked to do Storytime today too so I’d ordered in and put aside a few books ready for that aswell as bringing some home to read to Davies and Scarlett for their opinions. There is no set pattern for storytime, just some songs, some books and some colouring depending on how the person running it wants to do it and indeed how the children react as you go along. I like the idea of the colouring tying in with the stories so I drew 3 different characters from the various stories I was reading and photocopied loads of those ready.

It was a fairly rowdy crowd as there were several older siblings on half term joining the little regulars so I had a multi-tiered audience of adoring wide eyed little girls sat touching my knee, babies on parents laps, jaded 8 year olds listening with a weary air and then the parents and grandparents and childminders who bring the children along. We sang lots of songs and I took requests, I read Supersonic Tonicwhich is a nice rhyming action packed story, Giraffes Can’t Dance which is a personal favourite, Kitty Princess which is all good and moral and allows me to do my Miranda Richardson ‘Queenie’ (from Blackadder) voice to full spoilt royal effect 😉 and King Smelly Feet which was my Davies and Scarlett tried and tested one which we’d read at home about 4 times so I was able to put loads into as I knew the story well :). We then did the colouring and as the babies and small toddlers headed off the older children crept forward to chat. There was a group of 5 children; a small girl who always comes and her older brother and his mate and older sister and her mate who the mum was minding all of for the day. I spoke to the two 7 year old boys about dinosaurs and poems and books and killer whales for ages. We also talked about Enchanted, Shrek, DSs and they confessed they’d not joined in with Wheels on the bus go round and round because they were too old for it which made me laugh. I asked them what they would have joined in with but aside from ‘big boys songs’ they couldn’t come up with anything. Which was a shame as I think I could probably have pulled off most 7 year old boys requests for songs 😉 – I’ve promised an older girl coming along to the Dad’s special rhymetime at the weekend that if she comes and sings along with all the nursery rhymes we can do some HSM2 songs at the end 😆 The two older girls came and chatted too and it was actually a really nice hour and very good for the library as we talked loads about books and films (all available to borrow ;)).

I spent the next hour manning the enqiry desk while J (the man at the library) worked on the counter and we chatted. He is Very Serious and somewhere has gathered up the misconception about me that I’m well read so I’ve been bluffing my way through chats about proper literature whenever we work together :oops:.

I got home and Ady dashed off to work, I spent some time chatting to the children in the garden before Lucy and The Rs arrived for the afternoon. It was a really nice visit, the children spent almost the whole time outside and paired off for some of the time with Davies and Rebecca playing together while Tarly and Richard spent ages with the chickens. Lucy and I had loads of chatting time although we still flitted from one conversation to the next without managing to complete any of them :rolls:. They left just before 7pm when I suddenly realised it was really late and dashed about sorting out D and S’s tea, running them a bath and putting all the chickens away for the night.

Ady arrived home, I read a couple of chapters of story and Scarlett was literally asleep in moments. Davies was not :(. Ady told him ages ago he could have a Ben 10 DS game on May payday and wrote it on Davies’ calendar which he has been counting down to ever since. Tomorrow is the day and Ady bought the game yesterday ready to give to him but Davies was aware it was in the house and sent a note downstairs saying ‘Ben 10 DS, mei naoo (me now)’. We’re getting loads of this emergent spelling at the moment, he spent a while on Tuesday IM chatting to Ali with pretty good spelling. He doesn’t do enough reading to be picking up correct spellings really and when you listen to him sounding out words it is easy to see why he comes up with the letters and spellings he does (like naoo – nn aa oooh – now). He is also starting to read little snippets in places (tonight was ‘back up’ and ‘select’ off the tv screen when a reminder for something came up) so reading and writing seem to be happening together suddenly. Anyway, excitement about Ben 10 DS games meant he struggled to fall asleep, again.

We has this plan, Julie and I, for today. It involved her not having given birth yet and the weather being nice. Given her due date is Friday and Goddard babies seem to birth early and we are at the end of May with record lovely weather for the last few weeks I thought the nice day was far more of a given than her not having given birth yet.

But no, this morning saw us, with Julie about as pregnant as a woman can get, marching around in the rain :(. The plan had been some pony riding this morning – Julie is at the stables daily right up to the birth and will be again as soon as she can be to feed and groom Honey the pony anyway, followed by a picnic lunch at the open air swimming pool (lido) which opened today for the (ha!) summer. A quick phone conferance this morning meant plans were rejigged for a pony ride followed by a woodland walk with picnic instead.

Having spoken on the phone we both admitted we were unlikely to arrive on time so the fact we hit heavy traffic on the way and were even later wasn’t too much of an issue. The rain had really set in though by the time we headed off on our walk. Davies went first and as always enjoyed it and showed signs of progress and improvement;

Scarlett was next and her lesson for today was proper rein control so she was holding them tight and learning how to make Honey respond to her tugs, which she did with a look of complete concentration and a small tongue poking out (Scarlett, not Honey) 🙂

Scarlett also enjoyed helping to mix up Honey’s feed, go and fetch in Smokey, another pony who Julie was feeding today and rinse out the food bowls afterwards:

By the end of the ride and the feeding of Honey and Smokey we were all drenched and Davies had really had enough. The lure of dry clothes, picnic and then a walk in woods just didnt’ appeal to him and then Scarlett admitted she’d rather just go home for hot chocolate too which was enough to convince me really. In fairness they had been the first two to ride Honey and had spent the remainder of the walk splashing in puddles so they were both totally soaked and starting to chatter teeth, plus Tarly and I had fallen out over road sense (or lack of!). So we bid Julie, Jack and Maisie goodbye with deferred plans to meet at the Lido on Friday should Julie still be pregnant and the weather be nice… 🙂

Davies and Scarlett ate their picnic in the car and it was just as well we’d packed it as the traffic was dreadful and what is usually a 25 minute journey home took well over an hour. There were roadworks on the coast road which seemed to have created heavier traffic on the top road as everyone tried to avoid it and actually made the coast road slightly quicker. We wrote notes to each other on the misted up windows and talked about whether Tom Jones did the singing in Little Shop of Horrors, why the Sesame Street version of James Blunt’s Beautiful is so much better than the original and just what Mika is singing about in a couple of his songs.

Once home I made the promised hot chocolate which they polished off very quickly and then made a giant traintrack. My input was not required for any of it, which was nice :). Davies remembered his three weather reports today including rainfall recording so his chart is building up nicely.

Ady came home as they were finishing their tea and caught and boxed up the cockerel. We had him in his crate in the lounge for a while and were fully expecting him to be slightly stressed and very meek – not at all, he carried on crowing, continued all the way over to the farm in the car and when we got there and his cage was surrounded by turkeys, other, much bigger cockerels and geese he carried on being mouthy and cocky. Right decision – and I feel good about it :).

Ady and I had a chat with the smallholder couple about various things while Davies and Scarlett played with the turkeys – they do a great ‘whats the time Mr Wolf’ as they sneak up behind you looking all menacing until you turn round and take a step towards them then they run away again 😆 We can visit him whenever we like and we may well get some of the eggs he fertilizes once he’s settled there. We got home with time for a couple of chapters of story while Ady put the remaining birds away. It’ll be nice not to be woken with crowing in the morning :).

More chicken news first – we have a new home for the fiesty cockerel – as an aside, Tarly calls him the ‘feasty’ cockerel as she always forgets the word ‘fiesty’ (ironically!) and if he had a bit more meat on him he would indeed be feasty :lol:. I’ve agonised over the whole thing feeling that I’m being a bit crap being slightly scared of him and not liking the rather disposable nature of it not working so us getting rid of him. However the chickens are not pets, they are more an educational resource and a first foray into the self-sufficient lifestyle we’re hankering after and having done the whole hatching chicks, killing, cooking and eating, celebrating first laid eggs, hatching our own, letting hens hatch for us and so on. Reading chicken forums, smallholders blogs and taking advice from other poultry-keepers it is clear that if a roo is mean he has to go – either in the pot or to somewhere where he will be put back in his place by other, meaner roos or given space to not have to vent his aggression on people. Possibly a bigger flock would have calmed him, but just as possibly not and we don’t really have the space to risk that. Also he was a particularly vocal specimen. I know cockerels are supposed to crow but he really did start at first light and keep it coming til dusk. I’ve no real idea of any negative feelings about this from neighbours – the one’s we’ve talked to about it have either said they like the ‘country feel’ it gives hearing him or that they don’t notice but we had reached the stage of avoiding going round the back of the house as that would set him off and in a garden as small as ours making bits of it out of bounds isn’t feasible. Also it was interfering with my pegging out the laundry :lol:.

So tomorrow night he’s going to live with a smallholder Ady has befriended near where he works. He did say that if we were to sell him at auction in a trio (with 2 hens) we could get over £100 for the3 of them being rare breeds and fine specimens but that would put us with no mother for our wee chicks and no certain hens. Something to think about for the future though… The bloke is also up for bartering and in exchange for our roo and some plants (something Ady has plenty of access to) we can get some meat from him, all organic and locally produced. The plan then is to move the 7 big chicks into the house and run with the remaining hen so a pecking order can be sorted out between them while the broody hen and her 2 babies go into the smaller house and run together before putting them all in together in a few weeks. It’s all a bit ‘Chicken Run’ out there with all the sub-plots and politics, they could do with a scriptwriter really to give them some dialogue!

So aside from all the chicken watching we’ve had a day of acting like proper Home Educators. Currently sitting on my fireplace are two testtubes with white flowers in standing in red and blue food colouring and sucking up the colour into their petals. I’ve had the laminator gathering dust, last used for a Very Hungry Caterpillar life cycle flash card thing Sarah linked to back when she was still Home Educating and I was still pretending to do it properly. I have hama beads that only I have ever beaded with, we have got passed lesson 22 from 100 Easy Lessons with at least one child and I still have posters on the times table up on the wall in my playroom but today I finally joined the ranks of True Home Schooling with the white flower and food colouring ‘science’ ‘experiment’. And it works. And we were impressed. And it made us conclude proper scientific stuff about plants, the genuine safety of food colouring for even us to eat and finally it made us parody TVs Adrian Goddard in a who can do the best impression of Daddy saying ‘plants need water, that’s a FACT!’ competition 😆 😆 :lol:.

This morning we did plenty of not a lot – watched some TV including a Zoo Vet programme about abandoned kittens, a show about a zoo in Auckland where they took young cheetahs out on leads for a walk and had hours old baby giraffes to coo over. The children did some drawing; Davies has taken to labelling his pictures suddenly. Some of the labels he copies from places but has to first work out what they say to ensure he is copying the right thing, others he asks for the right spelling of and sometimes he makes up his own. He sent an elaborate picture downstairs last night, folded up into a paper aeroplane asking for a glass of milk including a picture of a spotted cow, arrows to show her being milked into an urn, then into a carton and finally a glass with the word ‘MIRC’ written at the top. He often substitutes L and R for each other, which sounds odd but when I listen to the way he sounds things out I can see where he gets confused as he seems to make a sound like ‘earl’ for both making them interchangable.

I decided to do some baking and Scarlett came to help – we made flapjack and chocolate brownies. Unfortunately something went arwy with either the oven temperature or the timing (or possibly which shelf I put them on) as both were overdone. The brownie was only good for the bin really but we ate the (rather toothbreakingly crunchy) flapjack with false cheer! 😆

After lunch I went and gathered all the science kits from the playroom – most are those couple of quid from Tesco ones, some of which we’ve done before and are always lacking in rather vital things (one required tincture of iodine which simply isn’t a kitchen larder or bathroom cabinet staple around these parts!) but we did a good chemisty one about seperating things using sand, water, iron filings solution and then filtering through paper to seperate liquid and solids and then using a magnet to pull out iron filings. Aren’t iron filings fun – I’d forgotten the joy of them. I loved those and magnesium tape in Science at school. We then did the flower experiment and as all the other ideas called for things we didn’t have wemoved onto the next kit which was optical illusions. This had different colour plastic paddles to hold infront of playing cards to change the colours in the pictures or hold two or more together to create filters, a mini kaleidoscope, some mirrors to make a periscope (we liked that one lots and spied on the chickens from under the window), spinners to make animated pictures.

Davies then went off to get a weather kit he’d got for Christmas and not opened yet which turned out to be pretty good – a basic weather station with a chart to plot the weather conditions 3 times a day over a week. He put together the wind gauge and then set up that, a rainfall monitor and a thermometer all outside in suitable locations as the booklet advised, filled in the middle of the day readings and remembered later to go and take late afternoon readings and enter them on his chart which we’ve put up to remind us to complete.

We had a very crunchy flapjack break and then came back for a test tube Tesco science kit on electricity about making a battery. This involved cutting out circles of blotting paper and silver foil which as I doubled them over to cut out double thickness to save time got us talking about counting in 2s. I got Davies to do it up to 20 and then carry on to 30 by which time he’d worked each 2 increment and spotted the pattern. Then I asked him if he could count in 5s to 50 which again, having got to 25 he spotted the pattern of and was away. Then we did counting in 10s which he said was really easy because his Simpons DS game awards points in 10s so he is used to watching it go up like that 😆 I asked what 5 x 10 was and without hesitation he said 50 so he’s got the number pattern, the recall of just ‘knowing’ 5 lots of 10 is 50 and it appears a proper base level understanding of what that looks like in his head too. We then talked about sums like 8 x 2 and how you could use your fingers to count up in 2s until you had 8 fingers up and how 8×2 is the same as 2×8. His grasp of numbers is pretty good actually and as and when a new ‘mathematical concept’ is introduced aslong as it has some relevant context for him he seems to get his head round it very quickly.

The experiment was pretty good – we had to strip some plastic coating of the end of two pieces of wire so we talked about that, made a salt and vinegar solution, wired one end of a LED to a piece of silver foil and the other to a coin and then made a battery sandwich of coin, silver, paper soaked in solution 8 times, pushed down on the top one and lit the LED :). That rather delighted them although they are now keen to try it on a larger scale.

Eventually Davies drifted off to play x box and Scarlett brought out her make up and a doll to do a sort of Girls World type makeover on her. It did amuse us to think that while everyone else is on half term we pulled off more in the way of formal education than we usually manage in months :lol:.

The children had tea and our food shop for the month arrived shortly followed by Ady. That was finally put away and I did bedtime story before packing them off to bed so I could watch The Apprentice.

Ady worked this morning while the rest of us had a lie in to recover from the weekend. Scarlett crept into my bed around 7am so my last couple of hours were more dozing interspersed with occasional Scarlett-chatter which tends to be random, fast and always requiring some level of response :roll:.

It was Ben 10 marathon day on whatever channel it is that shows Ben 10 so we dipped in and out of that and Davies and Scarlett did some drawing which moved onto painting later in the day. I was feeling irritated by the state of the house and chicken area but utterly unmotivated to do anything to deal with it. Actually I think it may well have been fabulous house and garden envy sneaking in from the two wonderful specimens we saw over the weekend really.

Ady came home just after lunchtime and spent some time playing Top Trumps with Davies then cooked a roast dinner. The children and I watched some of The Sound of Music and they carried on with their painting. I did sterling work of emptying my email inbox and sending several emails I’d been meaning to do for a while.

We all spent time outside dealing with chicken politics too. The broody bantam led her chicks out of the coop and into the run where she was teaching them how to peck and drink and stuff – a far cry from the mollycoddling they get inside the sterile brooder box in the house with heat lamp etc. on them for days. She sort of gathers them all up in her ‘skirts’ and can even walk along with them tucked up inside her feathers – it’s very impressive. The other hen has started to try and peck at them though and although she is defending them well we will need to monitor that to ensure it doesn’t get out of hand. It is perfectly normal apparently and better if they can learn for themselves to stay out of bigger hens way until they can deal a decent peck back as it means there is no need for reintegration back in at a later stage – plus I’d really rather not have a third seperate chicken area. We are still considering getting rid of the cockerel which would shake up the whole pecking order anyway and probably therefore be the right time to introduce the older chicks into the same space as the two hens and the new chicks. I don’t want to spend time or money creating some sort of super coop if we end up with all 9 chicks being roosters! I think we’ve decided to keep any hens, Spatchcock regardless of gender and one cockerel from the chicks so potentially we will have anything from 2 to 11 hens and a cockerel. Ady thinks he has a home for the mean cockerel – it’s a big shame he is so small otherwise he would be next Sunday’s dinner really.

Some more photos anyway:

Getting them all in tonight was amusing – I assume the new chicks were just too little to find their way back up the step into the coop so they were out chirping very loudly alone while the hens and cockerel had already gone in – they are also small enough to get in places they shouldn’t so we had fun trying to round them up and get them back in the coop and underneath their ‘mother’. The bigger chicks now give the total runaround when you try and put them away too so Ady and I were both out there for ages trying to get everyone to bed 🙄

Davies and Scarlett had an early bath before dinner – Davies had his hair styled just like one of the cool blokes at the Green Fair with red spikes:

It is actually thick enough to tuft up like this even when dry and probably even without hair gel 😆

Not to be outdone Scarlett had her hair blowdried straight and then whizzed around the room getting it to flip around before finally lying down so I could arrange it Medusa-like for her 😆

We had a lovely dinner, Davies and I played Top Trumps and then despite best intentions, early bath and dinner they still managed to be awake long past 9pm. Tomorrow I’ll be on ChickenWatch :).

Ady, who is wonderful – do I ever mention that? – got us all up and provided tea and breakfast etc. this morning stupidly early so we could be out of the house before 9am. I’d checked aaroutefinder and got a journey time of 3 hours, the sat nav said 2.5 and actually we did it in well under that, but it was good to be prompt rather than late :).

We were off to Eve and Rei’s birthday bash held at a gym with free reign on all the fab equipment and then back to their Wednesday friend’s rather wondeful home for further partying. Davies was in tears twice in the car over Very Small And Insignificant Things which had me questionning whether he was up to it or not (very long day yesterday which can often result in him being delicate at best, a bloody pain in the arse at worse) but aside from a small incident with a balloon between him and Scarlett which I carried out my threat to burst in the end to draw a line under it he managed to pull himself together well thankfully.

The gym was fab, all the stuff I remember from school gym lessons; springboards, trampolines, the horse, crash mats, beams and loads of stuff like rings and parallel bars and pits which I’m not even sure I’d seen before in real life :). The children had an absolute ball and Ady and I had a pretty good time too – another ‘should have worn a sports bra’ moment on the trampoline though, and even perhaps should have worn a top that wasn’t so loose it flew up when I jumped 😳 😆 I think only Merry saw!

Always lovely to see Lovely Em of course and great to see Kirsty and James, Michelle and Marcus, Merry and all the various children too :). We barely saw the children as they all scattered into the various corners of the gorgeous house leaving us free to sit on the kitchen floor (as you do) and plan camping trips:). Oh and eat coconut ice 😆

We left around 530pm I guess and although we drove through dreadful weather we made good time getting home. I went to check on all the chicks and bantams and discovered that our lovely broody hen who we stuck 3 of Tom’s eggs underneath has hatched 2 of them and had teeny chicks all nestled underneath her :). We’ll give the third egg another day or so and then remove it if it’s not hatched – I couldn’t tell if it was pipping or not yet. They both seem fine and fit but we’ve not touched them as this is our totally hands off, leave nature to it hatching experience. She appears to be a great mum though and had them all tucked under her wings. The other hen was equally clucky over them and the cockerel seems protective rather than about to eat them too so fingers crossed we can just leave them to it. Made the other chicks, who are now full time outside but in a contained area within the chicken area, look enormous seeing day old chicks again :). So that takes our current poultry count to 12 which will quickly be pushing us to attend to proper integration for all those staying and a bigger house to keep them in at night together too – will consider this further…

Fiesty cockerel:

fatherhood has not mellowed him any!

chicks -I think they are about 5 weeks old now:

this is one of our bantams chicks – as in the chick of our our cock and hens rather than Tom’s

here is Spatchcock the lame chick -he is still much smaller than the others and has more fluff than feathers still but is growing, so he must be eating and drinking and not getting picked on by the others. He wouldn’t have any chances elsewhere so we’ll have to keep him but he’d doing just fine. I’m saying ‘he’ all the while desperately hoping Spatchcock is a hen 🙂 but I learnt my lesson with last years batch to assume they are all roos until proved otherwise by egg production :lol:.

here they are in situ:
Tom’s chicks

And finally the latest additions:

She is looking less than gorgeous as she was the cockerels most favoured hen so lost all her head feathers where he used to hold on. When she went broody he changed his affections to the other hen but her feathers haven’t all grown back yet.

We finished our latest Famous Five and as the children spent most of the car journey listening to yet another one, unabridged, on audiobook in the car I am hopeful I can push Famous Five readalouds to Jan Francis who seems to be ‘the voice’ of all the ones I’ve seen and move onto more interesting things at bedtime now. I didn’t really anticipate just how much they’d fall for them but they have been a big hit here.

Everyone took ages to go to sleep / bed so I expect a lazy morning tomorrow for me and the children. Ady is working, but hoping to finish at not late an hour while I am planning to sit home and curse about bank holidays while maybe doing a spot more ebay listing.

Today has been a day of many provisional plans which including Ady working, us going Suffolk way to camp with The Barts, Ady working again and finally Ady not working but working on Monday therefore it not being worth us going camping for one night and having to pack up early before the party tomorrow and take all our stuff with us even if we could have got into the campsite on a bank holiday weekend at late notice. Our other very provisional arrangements had been two seperate barbecues – both of which we ended up going to today.

The first was a final get together with Chris, Julie, Maisie and Jack, while there is just still the four of them – Julie is just 6 days away from her due date now, which is more pregnant than either she or I have ever been before – Jack and Maisie were born at 37 weeks and both Davies and Scarlett were over a week early too. Some friends were there putting up some amazing flags in their garden like you get at festivals (which is what they do for a living – putting up festival flags) to celebrate the coming of the baby – they made the most amazing flapping sound while looking fantastic and Julie is planning to make them her focus while she’s in labour sitting in her birthing pool in the sunroom looking out over the garden. I’m not remotely envious about her having a baby but I am feeling sad never to be planning another birth of my own again, I have so many cool ideas I’d like to try out – not at all sure that is the right reason to have another baby, and of course it would involve either divorce or infidelity and I wouldn’t actually want the child at the end of it, so I guess I’ll just have to enjoy Julie’s experience in a vicarious fashion 😆

The children had a great time playing in the garden and Ady got an updated picture of the four of them while they are still just four:
Here they are in 2004:

2006:

and today in 2008:

On the way over there Davies had asked me what a hippy was – all of the definitions I could come up with just sounded rather like describing us – I think today at Chris and Julie’s just cemented that :lol:.

We had barbecue food and chatted about all sorts of things – Chris has just done a beekeeping course and bought a hive which he was assembling in preparation for getting bees, Julie and I talked about birth plans, Infinity food orders and generally caught up with each other. It was lovely :). At about 3pmish we left Chris behind and the rest of us went up to the stables to feed and groom Honey:

Then we parted company and we headed off to our second barbecue. This one was for Tom, Ady’s workmate, supplier of logs, pheasants and partridges, incubators and fertilized eggs, our bantams and cheap cricket match tickets that my Dad has enjoyed for several summers running. Tom’s parents are terribly terribly rich and terribly terribly posh but in the thoroughly nice people mould.Tom and his siblings all went off to boarding school aged 8 and came home for the ‘hols’ to sprawling houses with dogs, horses and probably lashings of ginger beer – they really are a cross between the Famous Five / any film with Hugh Grant playing a foppish bumbling Englishman and a Jilly Cooper novel. It is Tom’s birthday and as his parents are away on hols he and his girlfriend are housesitting and decided to have a birthday barbecue. There were a few others from Ady’s work there and a load of Tom’s uni mates all of whom had names like ‘Bunty’ ‘Guv’ and ‘Sissy’. The house is in dire need of attention with all sorts of leaky roof / falling our window type issues but the ground are stunning and are what they have focused time and money on since moving there once all four children had left home. There is a sandschool and stables for the 3 horses, a big electric fenced chicken run where the parents of half our chicks live, various vegetable and herb gardens, a paddock, a meadow, a big patio complete with more tables and chairs than a pub beer garden and two huge patio heaters and finally a woods with a lake (man made) complete with electricity supply, more tables and chair and a rowing boat.

We arrived and were greeted by a pack of 5 dogs in the style of Hairy Mclary all different shapes and sizes, the children were imediately befriended and spirited away by Tom’s sister down to the lake where several people were fishing and Ady and I were sat down and plied with Pimms (proper pimms with 5 types of fruit and cucumber and mint leaves :)). It was great :). The children were in paradise and we barely saw them, they charmed everyone there, made friends with all the dogs and just had the time of their lives :). I sat and drank Pimms and chatted to various people about Home Education, while lapping up all the praise for how lovely the children were and how wonderful HE must be 🙂 🙂 (it was a good day, can you tell?! :lol:). I was so relaxed I even made friends with the dalmation!

One of Ady’s workmates who has just had a baby was very interested in HE and I chatted to her for ages and then discovered that it is her sister who has just been offered the job at the library so I will be working with her soon 🙂 – small world! There was a chicken emergency when we realised Tom’s cockerel was bleeding quite profusely. Ady caught him and I held him while we examined him – he had managed to lose one of his feet feathers, which have very thick and deeply positioned shafts so was bleeding. Ady snipped all the surrounding feathers down short and then we sprayed his foot with some special spray to kill germs and seal it and he seemed much happier. It restored my confidence in handling cockerels as he was more than happy to be caught and held and I felt quite happy doing so. We have 3 of his chicks, actually all of which I think are roos so I’ll be happy to keep one if it has his temprament.

It got to way past 8pm and we decided we really had better make a move so we said our lengthy goodbyes, promised to return so Tom can take the children fishing and shooting (clay pigeon) and out on the rowing boat and then headed for home. One chapter of Famous Five and they were both fast asleep within moments of going to bed (they have not stopped running around all day, they looked really happy, healthy and filthy :lol:) and now as we have to be up really early to get going for Ipswich I really should be off to bed myself.

Work all day for me today. Banking first thing followed by Baby Rhyme Time and then a fairly frantic rest of the morning. It all quietened down in the afternoon and at times positively dragged though.

I was very excited to see British strawberries in the supermarket at lunchtime so bought a couple of punnets and some meringues and cream to celebrate it being payday :).

Ady was home with the children in the morning although officially he was working rather than off and then Dad was here in the afternoon. They’d managed to lock themselves in the garden when I got home although Dad did concede he could have gone round the house to the back door which was unlocked – wondering now if he was scared of going past the mean cockerel? 😆

I made french toast for the childrens’ tea and then as Ady was stuck in traffic and Tarly went into pouty lower lip, tears welling up in eyes mode at the suggestion that Davies and I drop her off at Rainbows Davies took pity on her and said he’d come and sit in too until Ady got back to collect him. She was incredibly grateful :).

Rainbows was decorating biscuits in honour of Rainbows 21st birthday which Scarlett enjoyed lots. Davies and I sat and chatted quietly about how different it was in comparison to Beavers. We decided it was a bit sexist the way the activities were so traditionally boyish at Beavers and girlish at Rainbows but that this Rainbows was much better run that Beavers. We chatted a bit about what he might want to start in September in place of Beavers – we’re looking into Seascouts, Woodcraft Folk, various nature type junior groups or maybe drama – but only after finding one obviously! He is not interested in musical instrument or sports at the moment. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything for the last half term of the academic year but we’ll find something ready to start in September when he’ll be (shush!) 8 and probably more will be available anyway. Ady arrived at about 630pm and took Davies off home.

Scarlett has suddenly really come into her own at Rainbows, everyone knows her name now and whilst she is not the most popular girl there she certainly has her place now. She really enjoys it and gets precisely what she wants from it.

We came home and Davies and Ady were side by side in the neighbour’s garden cutting her hedge with a pair of shears each 😆 Scarlett had a go too and then Maureen came along with her puppy so we chatted to them and puppy-admired for ages. Eventually the children and I came in and they had their strawberries, cream and meringues (which Tarly still insists on calling ‘boo-meringues’ or ‘boomerangs’ 😆 :lol:) while I dashed off to get some ingredients for chicken curry for dinner. When I came home they were in their pjs but claimed to have too much energy to sit still for stories so we put music channels on the TV really loud and all danced for about half an houruntil they were ready to sit down :). I’d brought home a pile of books to get their opinions on which would be good for under 5s storytime which I’m doing next week at work so we read all of those and they gave me their feedback :).

It was consequently a very late night for them and we didn’t eat our dinner until after 11pm. A busy weekend with lots of gallivanting and some working for Ady coming up.

We’d planned to meet Lucy and The Rs at Drusillas today and due to last minute tweakings of plans last night they ended up coming to us so we could travel together. So lunch packed and seating arrangements in the Nicmobile organised we waved goodbye to David (thank you neighbour, all I needed when arse pressed up against the car window while struggling in the very very back of the car with seatbelts :rolls:) and off we went. Our plans to get petrol were twice thwarted when traffic was backed up on every route to Sainsburys and the local pricey garage was out of stock of unleaded. Fortunately we were just low rather than running on fumes so easily made it to the next one along the route.

We got the traditional egg picture from Drusillas,

raced round the first bit with animals and then by democracy decided to go to the paddling pool. We’d met up with C and her two girls M and E and had a very pleasant hour or so lounging around the pool chatting while the children came back for food, to complain about being splashed and have cuddles. We then moved from there to the play area for more of the same really. It was a nice lazy day. D and S were lovely, very low maintenance and I just enjoyed chatting in the sunshine :).

We went off to Lemurland and C, M and E joined us while Lucy and The Rs did the train -have I mentioned how much I hate Thomas? I’m sure I must have done ;). Scarlett asked loads of questions at Lemurland including some sensible ones about physical differences (aside from obvious genital ones) between males and females, their diet, how many babies they have at a time, where all their lemurs came from and how they got their names and a couple of more random Scarlett-y ones too. The woman claimed to remember us from last time and told Scarlett she should think about being a zoo keeper when she grows up. This was a bit of a ‘well – duh!’ moment in much the same way as people remarking on Davies doing someting artistic to us as zookeeping is her number one plan currently but still nice to have affirmed I guess.

We met back up with Lucy and Sam – an ex MM attendee (infact I think she started MMs) briefly – Ali and Allie, she sends her love 🙂 – who Lucy had met up with previously there with her girls K and I so that was brief but lovely. We were slightly hurrying though as were expecting Ady home after 2 nights away and also keen to avoid the traffic and keep having 6 people in car without fully functioning windows for as least time as possible.

As it happened Ady wasn’t home but Lucy and The Rs came and played in the garden for a little while and then we went inside for food and playing and then Ady was home :). I read a couple of chapters each from Indian in the cupboard and Five go off in a caravan then amused myself by taking pictures of the back of our house complete with chicken run, chicks area and cat on a wall:

and the front with it’s plethora of hanging baskets and as seen on tv bedding plants 🙂

Off to work this morning for me. Ady is away which meant it was even earlier to rise to ensure everything was sorted before we were off. Today was Davies and Scarlett’s last day at Archie and Elliots as they have got tenants for their house, bought their camper van and are off WWOOFing for the summer before heading off half way round the world in the autumn on their Great Big Adventure. It has been a brief but meaningful for all of us relationship which I think will continue despite what life chucks at us. When I met Caz and Bid earlier this year I felt a real connection with them and albeit brief Ady’s meeting with them was the same. The children have bonded in a way I’ve never known D and S to do with other children and although life paths are taking our families geographically away from each other I suspect we will come back together sometime…

All of which is lovely and sentimental but doesn’t change the fact that with Julie about to have her baby we are back to zero childcare again. I can’t quite bring myself to worry about it really. I have sufficient reliability and goodwill ‘in the bank’ at work to be honest if we hit a shift when I can’t work, Ady is able to be fairly flexible and my parents are in a helpful phase. ‘Proper’ childcare isn’t really an option -financially and on all sorts of other levels so I guess we continue to muddle through until we reach a point where I am being unreliable at work and need to hand in my notice as a result. Hopefully it won’t come to that but if it does I guess we’ll have done well to have winged it for as long as we have!

So a dash to drop D and S off at Caz & Bid’s with us listening to a cd I borrowed from work with various songs on it including I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair which always, every single time I hear it makes me cry. Hence I have only listened to it about 4 times with Scarlett with me for perhaps one of them – so there she was on her second hearing with her claiming to not recall the first anyway singing along by the end – def. sorting out a choir thing for that girl :).

Work was good – they were interviewing 7 candidates, 4 of whom came in during our morning shift. The first was very elderly looking, the second was very bossy – during the walk round the library with Yvonne she appeared to be showing Yvonne round rather than the other way round. The third looked like Margaret from The Apprentice and when I went to tell Yvonne she had arrived and hissed ‘she looks like Margaret from The Apprentice’ at her it threw her and she put out her hand with ‘Hello Margaret, I’m Yvonne,pleased to meet you’ which she recovered well from but had the rest of us doing the equivalent of Enid Blyton’s stuffing hankies in our mouths during midnight feasts to stop from laughing! The fourth we say was the most promising as she had cool fimo brooches on her jacket but the others agreed that my fimo bracelet is arty and acceptable but one hippy library woman is enough thankyou very much. I do fear for the calibre of the applicants :lol:. I also found myself hankering after the days when I was conducting interviews which was interesting as it’s not often there are elements of previous jobs I miss.

I went to collect the children and found them all semi naked and collecting frog spawn. As usual I had a glowing report of what wonderful children I have from Caz and Bid and indeed they did look great examples of HE and childhood all muddy, wet and at one with nature. Caz told me what an amazing imagination Davies has and what strength of character and ‘go my own way-ness’ Scarlett has, which is possibly what I would consider their greatest qualities too so that was nice :).

We came home and they played in the garden while I did hanging out washing, getting pizza dough on, clearing up a bit and general chicken maintenance. The cockerel’s fate seems rather sealed now with a home found for him. He has elicited his first ‘complaint’ from a neighbour although she was most indignant at Ady’s response that we’d get rid of him and said ‘don’t you DARE!’ but realistically in amoung our chicks there will be at least one cockerel so at some point in the next few months we will have a replacement anyway.

Both children were filthy and as the only real time each week they need to look half decent is Badgers I chucked them in a big bubble bath to clean up a bit. Davies and I watched Mr Magoriums Magic Emporium which I’d been looking forward to and enjoyed while Scarlett had a prolonged bathtime with fizzers and diving tricks and mermaid impressions :).

They had pizza for tea and then it was off to Badgers. I dropped them off and had a lovely 3/4 hour along the beach at low tide with some moments of running which inspired me to dig out my sports bra ready for next week. It was blissful nonetheless. I think having had children who were not happy to go just anywhere and be left for many years has made it all the sweeter to know that they are happy and content somewhere like Badgers finally – it is a mere hour a week but for me the freedom is in knowing they are not just used to being dropped off somewhere they are actively choosing to be there and getting loads outo of it which allows me to enjoy that hour a week all the more. I didn’t take my camera as I sort of feel snaps of my lone shadow and the sun reflected on the sand probably don’t mean a great deal to anyone but me but I have the pictures in my memory anyway :). I had an equally enjoyable half hour back at the car with the latest Marion Keyes book and several blackcurrant and liquorice sweets :).

Home for yet more fun and games with the chickens for me, some watering the garden, hoovering, sorting my own dinner, running a bath and because we couldn’t find out latest Famous Five book starting the first two chapters of Indian in the cupboard. The children fairly instantly engaged with it in the same way I recalled doing as a child so perhaps we’re ready to say goodbye to Julian, George et al. 🙂 They begged for the second chapter which meant a very speedy bath for me in order to be out for the start of The Apprentice.

Davies reappeared downstairs as the firing was done claiming to be too hot – last night he was too cold :rolls: so he phoned Ady to say goodnight, listened in horror to me recounting Beans’ twitters about poor SB and insisted on creating something to send her so made a paint picture and supervised me emailing it across.

I have a siblings post in draft which I am keen to post but need to not be too tired to do properly.

as in staying at home rather than education particularly :).

Both children were quite specific in their requests to not go out and to not see anyone today. So that’s what we did.

We watched some tv, I forget quite what now although I know I got engrossed in some ‘extreme engineering’ show about building a huge hotel in Vegas next to the Venetian. I kept drawing their attention to interesting bits of it and adding my own Vegas trivia too. They had the lego out and Davies built a park complete with snack stand, hedges and roads. Then he built a succession of creatively made vehicles which he brought over and explained the design features to me in great length. We do have a book of lego structures from one or another kit purchased over the years so I suggested following that to make something but he looked at me like I was mental and said the whole point of it is to use your imagination and try and build what you dream up yourself. Funnily enough he’s the same with k’nex, geomags, gears, gears, gears! and any other construction type toy. I sort of see his point given my own philosophy on such things but personally I love following step by step instructions for things like that -I am the flat pack furniture assembly manager in our house – and given Davies’ creative but not entirely orthodox approach perhaps it’ll stay that way unless we want a hostess trolley with integral TV stand and pot plant holder created out of the pieces designed to create a wardrobe :lol:.

Scarlett came and did some stuff on the laptop with me – we looked at my old del.icio.us page from link hoarding days and found a Dr Seuss site with some cool games on it so she did a load of those. Davies came over and joined us for the Horton storymaker and the Green Eggs and Ham memory game and then we all got quite involved in the fox in socks game :lol:.

We had lunch and I finished reading the book for reading group tonight – The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. I read it last year when it came out in paperback and quite enjoyed it then but didn’t remember it sufficiently well to talk about it without re-reading which I’ve been doing on and off since last months meeting, taking it on the train with me this weekend and finally finishing the last 100 or so pages today with lots of cups of tea.

We went out and collected ants for Davies’ Nasa ant farm thingy which he’s had for ages but we’ve only just started seeing ants about after the winter. We caught about six, chatted to various neighbours passing by and then brought them in to put in the ant home. It did say in the instructions to ensure they were all the same type or they would fight – and fight they did. We seperated so many ant brawls (and removed at least one corpse) that in the end we gave up and rereleased any survivors with a plan to be more accurate in capturing ants from the same place in the garden again tomorrow.

Finally I photographed a load of the clothes cleared out from Scarlett’s bedroom last week and started very slowly listing them on ebay – I got about a third listed and will try and do some more tomorrow afternoon. I borrowed Yellow Submarine from the library last week thinking as Davies and Scarlett have liked some of the Beatles music they’ve heard they might like it. It held them in places, or should I say distracted them from the game they were playing in places and I noticed they were already referring to the ‘Evil Glove’ tonight and Scarlett has been singing ‘yellow submarine’ ever since. She really has a knack for picking up songs very quick and can often recall most of the tune and a fair whack of the lyrics of songs after just one or two listenings (no idea where she gets that from 😉 ).Tonight I was talking to her about it and asking if she wanted to think about a musical instrument to learn but she insists she just wants to make songs by singing them. I was in the choir throughout school and got loads out of the act of singing with others (and infact still do) despite no real talent at all. I don’t really know where to look for her on that one but will have a look about and see whether anything suitable exists for her to go and do singing with others.

Then it was off to swimming lessons. They both had a good lesson with Scarlett really getting the idea of moving her arms correctly. We talked about road traffic accidents and why cats have very little road sense, how you should cross the road, stopping distances of cars and how blind people know where crossings are because of the bumpy bits on the pavement. Then we counted how many crossings there were on the strip of coast road between our house and the swimming pool.

Shortly after we got home my parents arrived to sit with the children while I popped off to bookgroup. Ady is away for 2 nights and I didn’t want to miss it at short notice. Reading group was good, a full house turn out with plenty of banter and good conversations. I was back in about 1.5 hours to water the plants and get the children to bed before having a bath and my own dinner. Davies has been up and down stairs though and I suspect he has ended up curled up asleep in my bed as he often does when Ady is away.

all my troubles seemed so far away. Then I went to the dentist!

Excessive weekend all round meant we were happy to have an at home day starting with a lie in. We watched some schools TV and then Davies and Scarlett sort of melted away to play. Toys of choice were Betty Spagetty, geomags and cuddly toys, which they then tidied away and made space for pens and paper instead.

We had lunch and then popped out to the cashpoint. I offered them the choice of staying home whilst I dashed there and back (five minutes at most) or coming with me and they elected to come so we walked leisurely instead quite literally stopping to smell the roses along the way.

My Dad came over to sit with them while I went to the dentist – the waiting room is very small and badly equipt with toys so it wouldn’t have been feasible for them to stay there without me and the dentists rooms are fairly small and littered with things they’d want to touch but shouldn’t so I was happy not to have to take them and allow them to be home educated at the dentist ‘what are you putting that in my mummy’s mouth now for?’ and ‘can I have another sticker?’ all while I had a mouth full of instruments and was lying reclined with a bright light shining in my face wasn’t something I was relishing the idea of :lol:.

I have never previously had a bad dental experience, despite having several extractions including two wisdom teeth, various fillings; some without injections as our previous dentist used to charge for every thing seperately so I had gone without them to save money before when he was happy the risk of hitting a nerve was small. I also had a badly infected wisdom tooth last year but none of that was in the league of yesterday. I had managed to use some temporary filling stuff I got from Boots to plug the hole where the filling fell out and broke in two on Friday night which had done the job just fine so the dentist had to remove that first. She did the injection which really, really hurt and seemed to take effect far quicker than she expected. It numbed me right up to and including my ear on that side, all the way up to my eye on my face and the usual half my mouth, lips and all my tongue. She got the filling out okay but then said she needed to put a band round my tooth and fill that to ensure the filling didn’t go on the teeth next to it. I’d never had anything like that done before – it was like a jubilee clip with tightening bits either side to clamp round my tooth except the contact points on my teeth are very tight – meaning there is no space between each of my teeth. She really struggled to force this band down and I knew it would be sore when the anesthetic wore off :(. Finally she couldn’t get me to bite properly to check it was level and actually started to get slightly impatient with me when I couldn’t do it until I explained that my mouth was so numb I just kept biting my cheek.

I came home, Dad left and Davies and I watched Doctor Who from the weekend that he’d decided to wait and watch with me rather than watch on Saturday while I was away. I thought it was ok, Davies obviously missed the whole murder mytery element to it and was disappointed at the giant wasp as an alien – he’s more into daleks he tells me 😆 I though Felicity Kendall was wearing very well though :).

Whilst watching it I started to feel increasingly queasy to the point of being sure I was going to be sick and also very worried that the numbness was showing no signs of wearing off. It did eventually, after over 3 hours and by then although the nausea had passed it was indeed very sore and hurty :(. I’ve no idea quite what that was all about, some sort of reaction to the injection obviously, possibly not helped by being in recovery from a heavy weekend still and rather more digging about and unpleasantness in the dentists chair than I’d gone in anticipating?

Ady came home and we all headed back out again to my parents to see my brother who’s birthday it was – he was 32 :). We had a nice if slightly surreal couple of hours round there with me and my parents having a frank and honest chat about some stuff they have going on and I’ve previously stayed out of. I love them both dearly seperately but I still think they are two people who not only don’t bring out the best in each other but often make each other incredibly miserable. Frazer was in the garden with Davies and Scarlett who then called us all outside to show us the ‘camps’ they’d discovered under trees. Frazer and I showed Davies and Scarlett where the camps we’d had when we were children were – two of the trees were lost in the 1987 storms and one went when my parents moved their garage and created a second drive and put a fish pond in. I also showed them where I’d fallen off my bike and got a scar I still have on my leg, where Dad and I played catch and where there used to be a lawn that Frazer would kick a football up and down yelling ‘Lin-e-karrrrr!!!!!’ as he went.

We came home, as it was very late we skipped bedtime stories and I cooked dinner while Ady watered all the many, many, many plants we have around the house and garden currently. All of which I’ll have to do for the next 2 nights as he’s away :rolls:. We had a very funny lunatic few moments while I was in the bath and Davies and Scarlett were in their bedrooms all calling out the funniest combinations of things we could think of – such as rainbow elephants, bubble spaghetti, chocolate sewing machines and so on. No idea why now but we were quite hysterical for a while before I remembered I am supposed to be a grown up again and told them to go to sleep!

I’ve just had the most lovely weekend away with friends :).

I worked Saturday morning where I was in a state of complete giddyness and excitement and told everyone I met (including complete strangers who had just come in to borrow books!) that I was off to London, leaving my children overnight for the second time ever.I imagine several of them phoned Social Services when they got home to report me as I’ve a feeling I probably neglected to tell them my husband would be there still looking after the children 😆 Yvonne made me bring all my stuff down and stash it under the desk and then she came back early from her lunch break and hustled me off early to ensure I caught my train with plenty of time :).

The train journey was lovely – I got sit and read my book, eat the sandwiches Ady had packed for me, exchange excited texts with some of the friends I was meeting updating each other on whereabouts and then eavesdrop shamelessly on a conversations between two permatanned footballers wife types bonding and making friends and arranging to meet up sitting a few seats away loudly discussing how they were such ‘good girls’ because they never took ‘class A drugs’ 😯 I think it was the volume of the conversation given it’s content that most surprised me.

Ali met me off the train and we went together to Picadilly Circus. We had several tube journeys over the weekend and all of them made me want to act in a very silly fashion as all my recent tube travelling has been in the company of small children and involved me constantly reminding them not to lick the window / make eye contact with the drunks / point and shriek at their reflection in the window and exclaim ‘look Mummy I have an identical twin outside the train!’ / to use the pole for holding on and helping them balance rather than a poledancing for the under tens prop. I did indulge this slightly by sticking my tongue out at my own reflection, doing a bit of precarious leaning from the bars and when Ali and I were the only two left on the tube after gushing public goodbyes when the others got off a stop earlier I called ‘goodbye’ to the strangers left on the train when we got off. I also enjoyed singing ‘Blue Army’ and yelling ‘Go Pomey!!!!’ at the blue scarf waving giddy with newly won FA cup joy Portsmouth supporters we encountered after the match on Saturday. But I might have done that anyway, I can’t claim to care less personally about football but I was very delighted for Ady :).

Anyway, half our party went to see a play and half of us sat around at Starbucks and waited for them. This was not without adventure mind you, two of us had a very exciting 20 minutes or so wandering round a shopping centre trying initially to find our way downstairs to the loos and then trying to find our way back upstairs to get out again having refused to pay £1 each to use the loos (‘I’m not paying a pound for a piss!’) except the shopping centre was all funny and split level with no stairs just escalators which appeared to move around the place and magically change from being up ones when we needed down ones to down ones when we needed up ones. We eventually escaped and went to Mcdonalds for a free wee (or a McWee) but that involved joining a long queue. I also had a minor coffee latte related drama where I thought I’d been sold the wrong drink, briefly considered drinking it even though I hated it and then Ady rang and told me not to be so bloody silly and to go and buy another one, which I did and then discovered what I had originally bought as well still on the side, which meant I must have swiped someone else’s latte. Oops!

The playgoers rejoined us and we did some wandering around, some of us went for bra fittings while others went off to Ben’s cookies, Lush and B never too busy to be beautiful. And one proper feminist went off to buy equipment to enable standing up urinating 😆 I was restrained but also purchased having been sent off by Ady and told to really properly enjoy myself so I got a gorgeous little box filled with lip paint (which I have had to hide from Tarly as she saw it and has been asking if she can have it ever since. Which I knew she would and was tempted to get her one but she would only empty the contents into a pot, fill it with leaves, sticks, glitter and rose water and create a potion and then probably keep ants in the pretty box – maybe when she’s a bit older :lol:), and a bar of lush shampoo which gave me leverage to get the last bit of ginger stuff in the shop half price from them :). We also went to the Crocs shop, a cheese shop where we tried bits of gorgeous cheese and Jay impressed me by knowing what it all was without looking just like she was on Masterchef :).

We took the tube to Canary Wharf where we were staying, got supplies in from Tesco and finally arrived at the appartment we’d booked. It was not a moment too soon, my feet were aching and it was way past wine o’clock :lol:. There were snacks, curry, copious volumes of alcohol, bra flashing, singing, laughing, proclamations of adoration, phonecalls home to say goodnight to left behind blokes and children and lots of other good for the heart and soul type stuff. :). I’m sure I remember someone saying it was about 4am before the last of us finally went to bed.

We had a nice lazy morning with lots of tea, juice, croissants, bacon (we set the smoke alarms off twice, oh how I pitied anyone in the apartments below or next to ours!), using the washer dryer, chatting and assorted groaning as a result of excesses from the night before. A walk back to the tube and we all got on the same train but got off at various different points so there was loads of kisses and goodbyes along the way until only Ali and I were left. There was a train to Brighton leaving shortly so we caught that together and had a nice journey home chatting with occassional bouts of feeling very queasy indeed. The train seemed to take forever to pull into Brighton doing this very slow swaying motion which I was convinced was going to end with me showing myself up spectacularly on the train infront of a busy carriage – I think we finally got off about a minute before it would have happened – phew!

Ali and I parted, me to go and sit on the train for Lancing that was already waiting at the platform. I sat very still, read my book and concentrated very hard on how close to home I was. Ady and the children collected me at the station, telling me it felt like days and days since they’d seen me the previous morning and updating me in loud and enthusiastic voices about all they’d been up to all at the same time :). Ady was wonderful and sent me to lie down for an hour to ‘recover from my travel sickness’ 😆 😆 – I had several visits each from both children and Ady brought me a cup of tea but it restored me sufficiently to get up and have the bath he’d run for me while he came and heard all about my wonderful weekend. Scarlett got in the bath with me (I think she’d missed me the most) and my parents arrived having been just passing. They stayed about an hour and then left so we could have our roast beef dinner that Ady had cooked.

Storytime then bed for Davies and Scarlett, followed not that much later by me (it was way before 11pm, very early for me :)).

Ady, Davies and Scarlett had a lovely weekend too – the children stayed up on Saturday night really late and went to bed when Ady did about midnight, and they had a sleepover in Davies’ room. There was xboxing, popcorn and pretty much anything else the children asked for I think. Sunday morning they’d been to a carboot sale and come back with various bits including a replacement butter dish for the one I’d smashed accidentally earlier in the week. Ady really enjoyed having some time to focus on the children, he’s been absent a lot this year both physically away lots and mentally bringing lots of work home so he got to switch off and be Daddy which was great for him and the children and the kids thrived on having him here and devoting himself to them so entirely. And as for me the novelty of such freedom hopping on and off trains, going in shops with things I’d have to constantly be nagging a child not to touch, no one making a single demand of me all weekend, spending real life time in the company of people I adore and feeling like I spent the whole weekend being ‘me’ instead of a grown up, nagging, ever alert version of me was just blissful – lovely to know I am still in there after all, I sometimes wonder after a bad day at home with the children, I reckon that’ll keep me going for a long time :).

This morning we did various things including:

Playing some games on the BBC bitesize literacy and numeracy that Michelle linked to yesterday. Davies was okay but not particularly interested in the literacy ones, which I could understand as they were sort of boring and a bit testing for the sake of testing but he loved the numeracy ones. Which actually were equally testing for the sake of being testing but he gets numbers way more than he gets letters. He can do reading but gets no real sense of achievement or enjoyment from it whereas numbers do seem to be something he sees the logic in and mean something to him. Now clearly these tests were aimed at his age group and he certainly did no better than would be ‘expected’ for a child his age but it was really interesting to note that having done no ‘formal’ maths work at all – he doesn’t even know what the word maths means, he was doing the ‘really hard’ levels on some of them with ease. There were some with decimal points to put in order with the numbers 5, 5.5, 6, 7 and 7.5. I explained it very briefly once and off he went, he said ‘oh hundreds!’ when some numbers in the 200s appeared and put them in order too and then did loads of questions with question marks in various parts of the sum with relative ease turning sums round to work out the answers quite happily. Most surprising, although it perhaps shouldn’t have been was how competant he was with currency on a game where you had to work out what coins to give to pay for various things. He was also good with one that had 2d and 3d shapes, again certainly not something we’ve ever talked about as a maths concept but when it talked about cones, cylinders, lines of symmetry and the idea of something being 3/4 shaded those were all terms he was familiar with in other contexts so he got them straight away.

We downloaded the Bamzookis toolkit at D’s request while we were messing about online but got bored of it fairly quickly and stopped playing with that.

I rang the dentist and have an appointment arranged for Monday about my filling. It has since fallen out twice and finally broke in half tonight so I have it packed with a temporary filling from a kit we got from Boots earlier today which seems fine and will hopefully last the weekend okay. Boots was great actually – deals on offer a go go! For under £15 I got my dental emergency kit, mouthwash, three tubes of non-mint flavour toothpaste for the children both of whom gag at the very smell of mint let alone the taste and a packet of disclosing tables on their 3 for 2 dental stuff offer, two packets of hayfever tablets on their buy one get one free and a free sample of Hay Max nasal balm for buying hayfever stuff. Then I got a £5 voucher for spending over a tenner which we went back in and redeemed for a £5 tube of posh handcream :). We did lots of talking about various products for sale in Boots and then went next door to the shoe shop to look for cheap black shoes for Badgers for them both and had a discussion about how flashing light slippers work including me knowing what LED stands for and impressing the bloke stood near us :).

Once home I made some chocolate chip rockcakes as we had nothing remotely nice to eat in the house, we had crumpets for lunch and then Lucy and The Rs arrived.

We’d not seen them for a few weeks due to general busyness all round and quite possibly it was absence makes the heart grow fonder for the children as they all got on really well :). There are times when the dynamic between the four of them is trying but it was a lovely few hours with Lucy and I managing a proper catch up and the kids all getting on well together. Ady came home in the middle of it all and stayed in the garden with them.

Scarlett and I went round to Rainbows where they drew round their feet and did pictures on them of their favourite things. I seem to be a bit of a fixture there now with several of the girls greeting me and coming to play catch with me in the playbreaks, which actually is fine. I think I like children, I just don’t want to be in charge or responsible for them. On the way out Scarlett noticed something slithering along the alleyway and it was a slowworm – quite a big one. This was great as she has recently seen both adders and grasssnakes and has been very keen to see a live slowworm (although we have talked about how they are neither snakes or worms and are infact legless lizards) so she got to see one properly in action tonight which she was thrilled about – I know, odd child :).

Bath time for the children followed by stories while Ady tended to the many (1o!) birds all now outside.

Tomorrow I’m off straight after work to London for an overnight stay meeting up with friends. I am quite giddily excited about this as it is only my second ever night away from the children since having Davies and I will be seeing friends who I adore but don’t get to see much of in real life. It will be less than 24 hours but knowing I’m going away leaving the children with Ady and they are all looking forward to the various treats he has planned for them means I can truly relax and enjoy myself which will be fantastic :).

At home the children were with Ady this morning and my Dad this afternoon. Ady and Scarlett spent some time tidying up the bathroom and then all three of them moved the chicks outside. They have their own self contained residence within the main chicken run and it’s been a bit like a zoo out there with the cockerel and the non-broody hen going and looking at them through the wire all day. Odd to think they are the parents of 4 of them :). The broody one is still doing a grand job of sitting on 3 eggs which I think she is well over halfway through incubating now. We’re likely to be totally overrun with chicks – fingers crossed there will be a couple of hens in there somewhere.

I had a nice day at work. Another colleague is leaving and they have reallocated all the various jobs so I now have a few additional things to do so I spent some time learning about those (nothing thrilling, stuff like how to deal with faulty dvds when they are brought back by borrowers). I also had to phone one of the senior staff for something and she asked me if I’d swap some Saturdays about to help cover the vacancies which suits me as well as it suits them so that was good. She told me I was ‘a model of employeesimship! You’re that good I’ve just made up a whole new word for you!’ which I said I would put on my CV and maybe write on my Library badge too. Infact we decided she should make up new words to reflect everyone’s skills and we could wear them like the stars on McDonalds staff uniform :lol:. If I ruled the world eh?! 😉 :lol:.

I bought home a Shaun the Sheep dvd so the children and I watched that while they had their tea including the little tutorial on making models which was one of the dvd extras. Scarlett is fully recovered from her stair tumble thankfully and is sporting just a small scab rather than any bruising or black eyes. We had a couple of chapters of Famous Five and I also brought home a story cd of one of the stories for them to listen to in the car so they can get their fix and let me off the hook a bit :).

Tonight I watched August Rush which I really enjoyed although Ady proclaimed it slushy (well duh, that’s what I liked about it :)) and went to bed. I also had a filling fall out of one of my teeth which has never happened to me before :shock:. I am hoping to get an appointment tomorrow to have it looked at as although I’ve pushed it back in I can feel it is a bit nervy and I’m going away this weekend and could well do without tooth ache. We were meeting up with EOFF but I am in a slightly antisocial mood for groups of children (lovely as they all are and fully accompanied by parents) and D and S were not fussed about missing it when I talked to them. So I guess the day could well be filled with dental stuff instead.