One word? When seven would do…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that pretty much concludes our Friday :).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ady was off to Birmingham today to a gardening trade show so he left the house at stupid o’clock. He didn’t get back home again til stupid o’clock either but at least he’s already now worked his hours to have Friday morning off. And he’s taking Davies and Scarlett over to Liza’s for me in the morning too – hurrah :).
Davies spent some time on Fantastic Contraptions this morning. He got past a couple more levels. I’ve not real idea what he’s doing with it and have to confess to not having got anywhere with it the couple of times I’ve looked – my brain just doesn’t seem to work in that way. His does though and whilst I’ve not idea if there is only one right or wrong way to get through each level he was doing things like building rolling platforms to carry the ball across earlier, then managing to explain precisely how he’d experimented and come up with the ideas for them all. Amazing – and slightly shaming 😳 .

Scarlett was playing with a yoyo and messing about with some needles and threads. I so need to get some binka for her to play with so she can actually do some proper sewing.

We had to pop out for bread and petrol and in the car on the way Davies managed to delete all his progress so far on the DS game Ali got him which he’s been playing solidly all weekend – Viva Pinata. He was devastated and it took lots of jollying along from me to get him to be accepting of it and start again. He’s fine now and has already made inroads into catching back up again, poor boy 🙁 .

We’d arranged for a new HEor and her two boys to come round for lunch. She was one of several people who emailed me while we were away camping to say she was thinking of / was about to / had already started HEing a child within a week of it being back to school. She is local (very, just along the road from my parents) and has a 7yo boy who did reception and Y1 and Y2 before finishing and July and not going back and a 1yo boy too. We’d exchanged a few emails and along they came today.

She arrived on the doorstep bearing cake which is always a good start, with her very small 7yo (another very good sign, I can’t be doing with children towering over D ;)) and her dreadlocks and facial piercing all of which had me thinking ‘oh great, she’s normal’ rather than the ‘oh god, she’s a weirdo!’ like it might have done 10 years ago! The children disappeared off together and aside from dashing past between playing inside and out and coming back for sandwiches we didn’t see them for the whole 3 hours they were here. Her and I sat and chatted and had loads in common; she was delighted with the chickens when she saw them through the window and enthused about the idea of an allotment, has very similar ideas on parenting and indeed education to me and we generally had lots of ‘really? me too!’ type conversations.

Of course you never really know what someone else is secretly thinking about you but when I mentioned a meet up at the local soft play later this week for a few HE folk she was quick to agree to come along so I’m very hopeful this could be a regular meet up for us as Davies loved having another similar aged boy to play with. It also firmed up for me that it is perfectly possible to have other children over that they can play so happily with that there is no need at all for adult intervention every five minutes – and how nice that is. 🙂

They left and we had to go to swimming. Scarlett’s lesson is first and when I told Davies that he is officially old enough to go in the pool alone now he stripped straight off and headed for the big pool on his own while Scarlett had her lesson. He spent most of the half an hour jumping in, swimming to the side and climbing out but appeared to be loving it. He did look very small out there all alone but also what a fab feeling that was to let him go off and do it :). Scarlett did well in her lesson; I am hopeful she will get moved up for next term so they are in the same group again.

Davies’ lesson went well too. Scarlett sat and played with my phone while I watched Davies. There is a sliding puzzle game on there she likes and we worked out how to make the puzzle a picture of something from the camera so she was doing sliding puzzles on pictures of herself which kept her nice and quiet 🙂 .

Home for their tea, a bath to get all the chlorine out of their hair and then a load of bedtime stories. Ady collected my new bike from a lovely freecycler on his way home so I’m looking forward to testing that out tomorrow – and also hopeful it will spur both children onto wanting to ride their bikes too. We have got a new one for Davies for Christmas and would get one for Tarly too if we could get her interested in the idea. I’m sure we could pick up a freecycle one for Ady fairly easily and then it would be something we could all do together. There is an excellent cycle path all along the seafont which is of course safe and traffic free so it would be a nice thing to do.

Tomorrow is pay day and also work for me in the morning with a whole list of things to get sorted in the afternoon before Badgers.

I had a quiet day at home planned today as I had various things I needed to get done and I thought we could do some snuggling with books too. I spent some time online applying for passport renewals for us all which led to a long conversation about passports and travelling abroad. I found a container suitable for a kitchen compost material gatherer and set that up, then talked to D&S about compost and showed them where it was and talked about what could go in it. Davies had lots of questions so I got out a book I’d uncovered by happy coincidence yesterday called Create Compost which is a soil association book that we picked up either at the South of England Show or Open Farm Sunday earlier this year. We read bits of that and chatted about various stuff around it. All interesting stuff we’re learning together.

Next we had to go out briefly as I’d arranged to collect a couple of bags of rags from a freecycler for rug making. Unfortunately she’d forgotten to get them ready or tell her poor husband who was most confused to open the door to a strange woman claiming to have been promised rags! 😆 I’m collecting them later in the week now, she assures me she’s got it organised now.

When we got home the children insisted they wanted to go out again this afternoon so I suggested we walk to the allotment to see how far it is on foot and how long it takes. They were both really up for it but I suspected they might change their minds after lunch.

We ate and they got engrossed in playing something with the toy animals but then they started to get restless and wanted to go and gather composting materials from the garden so we decided to go for that walk. I took my old phone which has a pedometer on it so we could measure the distance and decided to dust off my DMs for the occassion. I’ve been in flip flops all summer aside from my week of welly-wearing while camping so my feet protested rather at being all enclosed.

The route on foot should be shorter than that by car I’d have thought, particularly as the way we went isn’t possible by car due to a one way system. But I measured it as 1.8 miles when we drove the other day and it was 2 miles exactly to walk there. I put this down to the footbridge over the main road that we used which has 3 slopes on each side of the road. But we’ve never walked over it before so it was interesting to do. On the way back I used the steps while the kids used the slopes again and I was far quicker than them. It took just over 40 minutes at their pace although I was hurrying them a little as they are prone to meandering. It was nice to glance back over my shoulder every so often to watch them walking, shoulder to shoulder, deep in conversation about all sorts of things though. I sort of envy them their relationship sometimes; it’s very uncomplicated, honest and affectionate :). We spotted conkers on the way and Scarlett found 50pence so plusses on top of the whole exercise and fresh air thing going on there! 🙂

Once there we had nothing specific to do so peeped in to see how many people are around on a weekday afternoon (quite a few actually) and then went back to the park. The allotments are at the top of a very big park, playground and leisure centre. I think they are still a bit too little now but it probably won’t be long before Davies and Scarlett could be in the park while we’re in the allotment. For now there is a big field right next to the fence our plot lies along where they can run around if they have enough of digging and planting which is bordered by woods and footpaths to Lancing Ring.

We had a play in the playground – I went on the giant swing while Davies and Scarlett went on the see saw thing for awhile. There was just a couple of older women and very small children in there. Then the kids had a few gos each on the zipwire before we realised it was getting close to school chucking out time and started to head for home. We stopped at the shops for some sweets and found ourselves on the footbridge facing hundreds of school children coming out of the college. It is a huge school which has a nursery on site, a family centre, the senior school and sixth form college so probably well over 1000 children. When I was a kid it had a very bad reputation although I think it is supposed to be okay now. Scarlett was horrified at how many of the kids came out and lit up cigarettes including the ones in school uniform so we talked about that a bit. Then they overheard some swearing so we talked about that too. It’s no good preaching at Davies and Scarlett about stuff like that – quite apart from the fact I remember doing both of those things at that age I am fairly sure they will reach an age where they want to experiment with various things and I see far more point in talking to them openly about stuff and trying to explain properly why teens want to try stuff like smoking and drinking and swearing than in trying to pretend they are all stupid and that I hope D and S will never do that. Bizarre environment I am pleased to never have to go back to myself though – just in the few minutes we were in the thick of the crowd we witnessed various low level name calling and nastiness, various kids being excluded from the crowd and plenty of generally undesireable behaviour such as graffitti and petty stuff like kicking people’s walls etc.

Back at home I drank lots of tea, made the children their tea and they watched Raven. Ady arrived home and we read 3 longish stories before bed; The Lion & The Unicorn by Shirley Hughes, The Wild Swans (Barefoot books) and Big Blue Whale (another Nicola Davies one) which all led to much additional conversation, especially Lion and Unicorn about an evacuee.

Bedtime for D and S and curry and Jumper for me and Ady which we thought was ‘ok’. I lost interest a bit and got on with some of my ragrugging which has slowed down rather but is over halfway done on the latest blue and green creation which will be a bath mat.

Candle (our cat) appears to have gone blind, all but overnight. She has been a bit odd for a while now I think of it but seems to be struggling with very limited eyesight, particularly at night. She is very old – we have had her for 14 years and the RSPCA said she was 2 when we got her. I suspect she was even older than that. If we had pet insurance or money I guess we could take her to the vets but as we most definitely wouldn’t be able to afford treatment or an operation and she appears to be in no pain and managing just fine,if a little slower than normal I guess we’ll just wait it out and see what happens. Odd to watch a blind cat stumbling around the place again though, 2 years after Malice :(.

I had a lie in this morning and then spent ages and ages sorting out all the washing into piles and putting it away or drafting the children into helping put their stuff away.I supervised (read micro managed) Davies sorting his room out for the second time this week and then spent ages in the playroom sorting that out a bit too. It needs more attention as there is stuff in there which just doesn’t get played with so we need to either decide to get rid of it or get some use out of it. There is also a book mountain that needs dealing with as I think we have bypassed the correct book and bookshelf ratio again so action is needed there.

Ady was cleaning out his car while all this was going on and the children were getting up to various things including playing inside and outside, coming to assist every so often and then doing some drawing.

I then asked Davies if he wanted to come and read to me for a while. He’s at this frustrating point of technically being able to read but not doing it often enough in practise to improve. We have had long discussions about how there is nothing more I can do to assist him other than sit and listen to him reading and carry on reading to him while he tries to follow the words on the page as I read them. It really is a practice makes perfect situation that he is not going to wake up one morning able to do. It is still not coming naturally to him and whilst I would say striving to do something that he finds difficult is a skill that Davies does have for many things clearly reading isn’t pushing enough buttons for him to find it worthwhile doing just now, despite him really wanting the end result. He read a couple of pages but was tired and it just wasn’t happening for him so we had a long cuddle and chat instead.

Ady then asked if he wanted to go on his computer and I showed him the link to Fanastic Contraption which I’d followed from Bob’s blog last night and not done very well on myself. I read the tutorial for him as he clicked through it and then left him to it – for nearly 1.5 hours! He was loving it and doing loads of experimenting, talking aloud, calling Scarlett over to show her and worked his way up a couple of levels. :).

Meanwhile I was reading a book about allotments and doing some mental planning, Ady was cooking late lunch / early dinner and Scarlett was doing a load of puzzles and activities in a pile of comics I’d found in the playroom.

We had lunch / dinner and then Ady and I vegged out for a while and the children set up a toy circus we’ve had for years and they go through phases of playing with lots. They were coming up with every more outlandish ideas for acts in the circus which was amusing us. Then I decided we needed to go out for a walk to work off dinner and get some fresh air so we gathered their scooters and headed down to the beach.

We never actually got as far as the beach but stopped at Brooklands, the big laked park on the other side of the road to the beach and walked round that for an hour or so in the sunshine. It was nice :). Scarlett and I had a fit of the giggles when I called her a pillock for not being sensible about crossing the road. She went all quiet and I’d forgotten it until I went to take her hand and she said to me ‘actually I’m still cross with you for calling me a pillock!’ which made me giggle. She said ‘It’s not funny Mummy!’ and then broke into giggles herself saying ‘well actually maybe it is!’ 😆 I suspect it may become the new family insult. My Dad’s insult of choice was ‘pleb’ when we were children. I’d rather not teach them insults at all but given some of the words I’ve heard from the mouths of children I’m guessing pillock isn’t too dreadful.

We came home and they had a bath followed by Extreme Animals which we have read before but ages ago. Davies suddenly remember it about halfway through though.

Tomorrow is planned to be very low key, what with having virtually no petrol in my car or money to spend. I feel a day reading lots of books out loud coming on :).