One word? When seven would do…

First updates on serious stuff!

The chick not only survived the night it had sufficiently recovered to be reunited with the other chicks this morning despite our initial plan to keep in inside the house for a day or two. It is eating, drinking, scratching around, not getting picked on and appears to be pretty much okay. It does have a very nasty wound to the side of it’s head and it’s beak doesn’t fully close anymore which suggests some serious damage to it’s jaw but it appears to be functioning okay despite this. It will likely be in the same camp as Spatchcock and have to be a ‘keeper’ here regardless so hopefully it’s a hen and we’re not in the early stages of some disabled cockerels retreat home set up :lol:.

I’ve spoken to Julie tonight and she safely delivered a baby girl around 9pm yesterday. A very impressive 9lb1oz named Lorna Rose Goddard :). Very much looking forward to meeting her sometime this coming week. Julie and Lorna are fine, it was a very, very fast delivery with the midwife just about arriving in time and Jack and Maisie meeting their baby sister when she was just a few hours old. That brought back the wonder of introducing Davies to baby Scarlett when she was just a couple of hours old and he woke at about 4am as he was still in the habit of doing aged 2 only to discover we weren’t in bed where he normally found us but were downstairs with a brand new baby. He gazed in wonder at her for long moments before asking if he was allowed to open door number 6 on his Bob the Builder chocolate advent calendar! 😆

Back to the far more trivial business of blogging our days and we were off to Springwatch today. My Dad called over first thing to ask a favour of me which I did for him possibly against my better judgement but we’ll see whether it has repurcussions or not I guess…

We finally got going and were slightly later leaving than planned but still arrived before 11am and as parking was being charged for this year and all the ‘free’ parking at the university had been blocked off we had to pay a fiver but did benefit from parking very close this year. I did actually ponder getting there by public transport, partially to keep in the spirit of the whole event and partially because if we were paying for parking anyway I’d rather pay for transport and be green about it but I don’t think the four of us could have got there for under about four times what we paid for parking and it would have taken about four times the time too as we can drive there in about 20 minutes.

We learnt from previous years that the free activities get booked up pretty quick so we had a brisk walk round the whole thing and earmarked things to come back to and booked Davies and Scarlett in for a couple of workshops before going round again at a more leisurely pace. We did the usual tree leaf spotting Breathing Places thing where pictures of leaves are stuck around the place and we all got cotton bags. As our main food shop comes home delivery and I send the carriers back with the driver and I am getting better and better at remembering to take cotton bags with me to the shops or carrying things loose if at all possible the cotton bags will come in handy.

Davies and Scarlett took part in an underwater mural painting activity and were among the first to add to it – Scarlett did a couple of rainbow starfish and Davies did a starfish and a shark. When we passed it again later in the day it was looking fabulous with the collaborative works of many children painted brightly all over it – really made you smile to look at it :).

They made seahorse pencil toppers and cuttlefish finger puppets.

We all took part in a taste test of tap water versus bottled water and all four of us could easily tell the difference. Davies was the only one who prefers bottled water although his qualification of his preference was that it was colder rather than it tasting better. We got a teatowel and met Duncan Goodhew who was helping to man the stand with his medal. Ady later got a signed teatowel for Davies from Duncan and took the childrens’ picture with him too. I’ve promised to find them some video footage of just who he is and what he did 🙂

We stopped for our picnic at that point before moving on to the pot making stall. After being given lumps of clay both children confessed to the woman they’d rather make something other than pots which she was very laid back about and showed them some other clay techniques to fit in with what they made instead. Davies made an elephant and Scarlett made a duck, duckling, nest and eggs :). There was a popular sheep shearing demonstration which we have watched there before but having seen a very comprehensive sheep shearing session at Open Farm Sunday last week we skipped that and move to the Sussex Wildlife Trust session they were booked on instead. The meet and greet guide was very friendly and chatty which rather dangerously set the tone for Scarlett who for the rest of the session never quite grasped the put your hand up to speak and only speak about something relevant to what the guide is talking about idea which was of course utterly necessary for managing the group of 10 children but nevertheless something Scarlett would struggle with when completely prepared for it let alone given the idea that the guide wants to chatter about the colour of her dress, what stickers she’s been given and where from and other such trivia :lol:. They were handed spotter sheets and walked a small trail looking for signs of wildlife. It is no criticism of the way it is run but neither is it something I consider a failing or issue for D and S but this deliverance of information is something so alien to them that they never really respond that well to it. Simply having facts shoved at you is something I find hard to process as an adult and that way of talking where you leave gaps in what you’re saying every so often so children can put their hands up to fill in the gaps like a sort of junior Blankety Blank somehow feels really patronising to me, especially when done with a rather blatant disinterest in what the children might have to say. Anyway minirant aside it was good and they saw various skulls of various animals and were told about teeth on skulls giving away information about feeding habits, looked for clues such as droppings, feathers and footprints and finished up with a game where they were blindfolded and had to walk along a string tied round some trees using their other senses to compensate to show them how badgers operate with limited eyesight. They were then given small pieces of card with a sticky strip to attach interesting grasses and flowers to bring home. At the end, despite Scarlett having been a bit of a pain with her yelling out the answers and random anecdotes the leader did come over to chat to us and talk about their family activities and holiday clubs though.

We had time for a brief sit down before heading off again to the other activity Davies and Scarlett were booked in for which was making an underwater sea landscape. This was done in a shoe box with cut out lid and portholes with blue cellophane and was excellent. They used all sorts of materials from clay and chalk and sand to ribbons, raffia and pompoms to make their underwater worlds with loads of information and facts thrown in as they went along. I was asked on several of the activities if the many photos taken of Davies and Scarlett doing things would be ok to be used either by the people running the activities or on one occassion a freelance photographer so will have to watch out in any coverage of the event for their pics :).

Ady popped the shoeboxes back to the car and the children and I had ice lollies then we had a final walk round handing in spotter sheets, collecting clay and lastly watching the tail end of a bird of prey talk. We were home too late for the children to join us for roast dinner (wouldn’t have been cooked in time) and it was too hot for roast dinners anyway so I cooked the gammon in ham as planned and Ady and I had it later with jacket potatoes instead while the children voted for pancakes for their tea. They had a bath and I read a pile of books to them before they went to bed.

Another busy week about to start and then this time next week we’ll hopefully be off on holiday :).

I worked this morning, my Saturdays have been jiggled about for the next few months as we are short staffed due to a couple of vacancies on my Saturday off and it is mainly staffed by relief workers so they wanted a ‘second in command’ type person to be around for the morning and to cover lunches – and asked me! 🙂 Due to being on leave and having a couple of weekend things booked (like Kelmarsh) it wasn’t a straight swap though so I think I am on a sort of two on, two off type arrangement.

It was uneventful anyway, I spent two hours on the enquiry desk where I was shamed by a small girl (couldn’t have been more than 8) who spelt out ‘tutankhamen’ for me when neither I not her parents could spell it 😳 She’d been learning about it at school but I was still very impressed :). I then spent an hour piddling about doing things like clearing out my work in tray and throwing away loads of out of date paperwork from one of the folders I have have taken over dealing with (faulty cds and dvds) as someone has left. Finally I spent my last hour on the counter doing yet more sorting out type stuff. I like the way Yvonne runs the library at Lancing, she works in a similar way to me and we were talking yesterday about how she made lots of changes when she took over as supervisor.

I came home and we had lunch. Ady and the children had been in the garden most of the morning and Ady had made some bread rolls (that I’d meant for Davies and Scarlett to make actually but never mind :rolls:) – it’s the third morning out of four he’s spent with them alone and it’s interesting to observe the change in patience levels when it is the norm rather than a novelty… 😉

We went off to Beach Dreams which is the annual Shoreham (neighbouring town) festival and part of the Adur Festival. It was the tenth one and somehow the first we’ve ever made it along to. There wasn’t much going on to interest us really, it was mostly stalls selling things, beer tent and a very loud drumming session, although I think we’d missed lots of earlier stuff happening. So we walked along the houseboats instead, a couple of which were open displaying artwork. The houseboats at Shoreham have been there for years and always formed part of the landscape from my childhood when I spent time in Shoreham as my Granny lived and had a shop there but I’ve never walked along so close to them let alone been onboard. Do click the link as they are fascinating and a real interesting way of life with some amazing work gone into their construction. Some of them contain things like half a car, a washing machine and so on in their structure and one has a microwave as it’s mailbox. Inside the couple we went on was equally quirky and interesting – both had pianos in them, wooden flooring, bright colours, interesting shaped space and a real cosy feel to them. Shoreham Beach altogether has a real community feel and the boats are an extension of that with most of them having connecting planks between neighbouring boats.

We left there and popped to Tescos to get stuff for dinner and look for shorts for Davies who doesn’t have any and has finally grown out of most of his trousers too. They had nothing so we went over to Asda instead. This was slightly hellish – packed with people and as we were with Ady who’s shopping style never goes much past browsing level we were doing lots of aimless wandering with the children dozily just missing being bashed by people’s trolleys until I took charge and marched round, child on each hand while Ady trailed behind me with the basket.

Home for their tea of lincolnshire sausages as enjoyed at Ardingly and requested each night since. They both went out to play with the chickens until Davies came in for Doctor Who. Scarlett was dragging out coming back inside despite having been asked a couple of times and then I suddenly heard a dreadful shriek and looked out of the window to see her looking horrified. Ady went out and she had run (her default setting) and either trodden on or skimmed over one of the chicks who was badly hurt. Ady dealt with the chick while I dealt with Scarlett who was very shaken, utterly horrified and in a bit of a state. I calmed her down, assured her it was an accident and although it doesn’t make bad things get better or make you feel any better there is no blame to be placed in accidents. Ady thinks the chick will be ok – it’s inside for the night in a crate but does seem perky enough despite a fairly nasty head injury. I guess if it lasts the night the signs are good for it. I have been telling Scarlett not to run near the chicks since we had the first hatchlings last year though so maybe sometimes things need to be that illustrated for her before they finally sink in. Hopefully there will be no lasting consequences and she’ll have finally learnt her lesson.

Davies and I watched Doctor Who and Doctor Who Confidential while Ady read Scarlett some stories in bed. She’s had a bad week really as she’s been playing up and I’ve been coming down hard on her which has resulted in a couple of nights unbroken sleep with nightmares anyway so I anticipate her waking again tonight. When I say I am coming down hard I am just applying zero tolerance to things I might normally let slide but I’m still not using punishments etc. She is just being told very firmly once or twice and then I am either shouting or changing my tone of voice with her. I’m sitting with her and explaining everything afterwards and she is fine but she tends to do quick recovery from upsets in the day and then obviously dwell on them in her sleep – she’s always been the same.

I have RSI on my wrist from holding the DS and I am still not passed Day 29 on Dolphin Island. I have possibly spent more time rearing the sealife this week than my own children but I can’t put it down! 😆

Even though it is actually Saturday and I’ve only just finished Thursday 😳

I worked today; Ady was home with the children in the morning and my Dad was here this afternoon. I think they all spent most of their day outside judging by all the chalk drawings on the paths.

I had a nice day at work – Baby Rhyme time this morning was is growing in size each time, over 20 adults and over 20 babies today so nice loud voices :). We had the two sets of twins who came along to the Dads special one last Saturday both come along with their respective mothers today so that was nice to see them back:). Talking of twins Julie hit 41 weeks today with still no news (she’s not having another set of twins, it is just one baby this time). The afternoon would have dragged as it was very quiet but I found a jo to get stuck into of sorting out all the cds which took a couple of hours and kept me occupied.

When I got home we spent some time out with the chickens, Davies and I read a party invitation that had arrived in the post for them and I made their tea. Due to me chatting to Davies we ended up leaving late for Rainbows and actually missed the first five minutes including the song. This was a bit of a shame as Lucy had brought Rebecca for the first time and I’m sure it would have been better for Rebecca if Scarlett had been there from the start. So Scarlett got stuck straight into the decorating two paper cups taped together with some sort of pulse or seed inside to make a shaker. Now this does not offend me even though I probably now have lentils or split peas in my house because collage or shaker making is the proper use for beans and pulses and seeds, NOT EATING THEM! 😆 They then sat in a circle and sang songs and rattled their shakers and then got to use various other percussion instruments too like tambourines, shakers, triangle etc.

Lucy and I stood at the top of our road chatting awhile and then Scarlett and I had a race home – she won! 😆 Strawberries and cream for both children and then story and bed.

And there, I’ve caught up! 🙂

We did indeed go today 🙂

I do enjoy it there, it’s a really good day out. The first time I went was with the school when I was about 12 and I remember loving it then. This will the fourth year I’ve been with the children I think and both of them recalled it from last year. Definitely our most expensive trip yet as Tarly is now fee paying being over 5 and of course as I went on my own with them I paid for the petrol and the whole entrance fee myself whereas my Mum normally goes halves with me on that. Still well worth the £23 it cost to get in IMO and we barely spent the remaining change out of £30 either, only buying ice creams and a quid each for the children to do a Cats Protection League prize every time thingy where Scarlett won a little black kitten (cos we need more soft toys ;)) and Davies got a little catnip mouse which he has been trying, and failing, to get Candle interested in :lol:.

We had a very straightforward journey, it’s about an hour but the traffic can be hideous on show days but we left home after 10 and were there before 11am so that was good. We talked about driving and how it is more than just the physical act of driving as in operating the car but you need to be alert and aware of other things around you outside the car too.

First port of call (after the loo) was the foxhounds which are just inside the entrance. Scarlett was enchanted and would have happily stayed there all day patting the many dogs wagging their tails at her and giving her doleful looks through the bars of their cages.

We decided to try and stick to a logical route around the stalls although I very much doubt we saw everything and we definitely deviated from our path a few times. We started walking and the first thing that caught our attention were some amazing wooden sculptures. Some were roughly finished and some highly sanded and polished and treated but all had utter charm and beauty. There were various animals – sheep, owls, cat and so on, some still life type stuff like an apple core and flowers and a couple of fantastic lifesize humans including one entitled Motherhood of a pregnant woman with a baby on her back. The grain of the wood went all round her swollen tummy and breasts and almost gave her facial features too, so cleverly had it been worked with. I thought it was beautiful. We chatted to the stallholder for a while and learnt it is a family business and he showed us a video of a couple of the sculptures being done – all with chainsaws! The rougher finished ones are completely chainsawed but some of the more finished ones have sanding done at the end. He was saying what a great spectator activity it is with the noise of the chainsaw, the danger element and all the smells of freshly cut wood and chainsaw oil etc. Sounded excellent :).

We moved from there to the Bee and Honey tent where we tasted various honeys, looked at pollen under microscopes and finally sat down to watch the beekeeping demonstration where they dismantled a hive and talked us through it. It was fascinating and we got to see drones, workers, the queen, larvae, pollen and honey and honeycomb. The children were really rapt and Scarlett particularly asked loads of questions and made good observations. I learnt quite a bit I didn’t know too.

We visited various stalls including Red Cross (I was given a free parents child first aid cd rom), NCDL, Cats Protection League (where they got their toys), NCDL, an independant school stand where the children paused to play giant noughts and crosses while I sniggered and accepted the leaflet when the bloke tried to tell me how bright they were (noughts and crosses?! :shock:) and had I considered their schooling! We stopped at the Peugeot stand where they had a mini driving school set up, similar style to the one at Legoland which was free so they had a nice long go at that which was timely after chatting about driving in the car earlier. They both got their driving licence lanyards to say they’d passed and we moved on.

We stopped for ice cream and sat at the main arena where horsejumping was going on which was exciting to watch and then we debated what else we wanted to see. Whenever we go with my Mum the main attraction for her is the stalls selling things (my Mum loves to shop, *really* loves to shop!) like shoes, handbags, posh jumpers and jewellry so it was nice not to have to bother with any of them. We all wanted to see more animals and I wanted to go to the food fayre and the NFU stand.

We spent quite a while at the local agricultural and farming college stand as they had a variety of animals such as tortoises, ducks and hens and were very keen to chat to the children and bring the animals over to be petted. Scarlett petted the hen she was offered and then asked if the students could catch a duck for her to feel. The ducks were in a smallish created pond and it took 3 of them but they persevered and caught one each for her to stroke :). She learnt that these particular ducks had curly tails if they were male and while the student was struggling to think of the word Scarlett provided it for her ‘breed’ which made all the surrounding students and visitors giggle :lol:. We moved on to the Soil Association stand next where there was an activity to draw a farmyard animal and stick it on their giant farmyard background. It hadn’t been very well patronised (not many children around yesterday really) so they welcomed Davies and Scarlett very warmly and told them to draw as many animals as they could. Scarlett drew a sheepdog which she then decided was a poodle and was training to be a sheepdog and she followed that with a chick

Davies got utterly carried away and urged on by me and the Soil Association woman clearly sharing a love of the surreal and fanciful to rival his own created ‘Sheepy the Supersheep’ who baa’d loudly to create visible soundwaves to distract onlookers while he changed from his mild mannered sheep alter ego into Super Sheep with a cape, eye mask and pants on the outside. He drew an open mouthed cockerel (called ‘Cocky’) to look in wonder at Sheepy flying by, a pointing farmer (who would of course be asking ‘is it a bird? is it a plane?) and a fox to be the baddy stealing chicks who Supersheep would rescue. He then wanted to draw one last animal and chose a pig, which by then as things had gone to ridiculous levels he adored with spectacles (and yes, Davies did call them spectacles too :lol:) and said he was a teacher in school. The SA woman and I liked this idea and could see the merits of highly trained pigs doling out prescribed curriculum in bitesized chunks but we then quickly realised the pigs would revolt and get power crazed and take over. But of course Supersheep would save the day anyway.

As we bade her farewell she had changed her ‘patter’ from ‘come and draw a farmyard animal to stick on our background’ to ‘come and create a superhero farmyard creature!’ so I think we left a lasting impression along with Davies and Scarlett’s artistic masterpieces :lol:.

Food fayre was next and in that weird way that children will try all sorts of things off toothpicks or crackers that they’d never dream of eating at home they tried a wide variety of sausages and cheeses, fudge (gorgeous red hot ginger one), ginger wine, smoothies, honey, lemon curd and more. They each bought a tiny jar of honey for 50pence of their favourite sort.

We moved onto animals next; sheep, cattle, pigs, rabbits, chickens, ducks and geese.

I managed to capture on camera the very moment Scarlett disolved into tears after ‘that one’ sheep rammed her fingers against the bars having taken against being petted 🙁

As usual she quickly recovered though and was petting the next cage down again 🙂

We walked past a fur covered car which rather delighted them both:

I told them about there being a furry mini driving round our town when I was a little girl and also having seen an astroturf covered car before too. They liked that idea 🙂

We walked round the Flower Show and they both loved the idea of bonsai trees and demanded I take this photo of them infront of one of their favourite gardens:

It was getting on for 330pm by then and we were starting to flag slightly plus I wanted to leave before the mass exodus and traffic jams all the way home so we worked our way towards the exit. The NFU stand is right next the exit so we went in there. As we walked in Davies said ‘oh I remember this stand last year, they had this big union jack all made out of vegetable…..ah!’

I chatted to a woman about the Year of Food and Farming and Home Education while the children tried smoothies from the dairy association stand. They’d wanted to grind their own flour like Davies got to do last year but that stand was unmaned so we tried some rapeseed oil and sunflower seed oil instead and talked to the farmer about his business pressing oil. He had a machine there doing it and the seeds are pressed so the oil comes out and is drained, as is, into bottles for sale while all the ‘waste’ is shaped into pellets by the machine which is used for cattle feed. Excellent for the children to see the produce of the amazing golden fields we were admiring a month or so ago.

They then went to the grain stand and got to make hedgehog bread rolls

We were told to come and collect them in half an hour so we wandered off for a final look round the nearby stands where we got free samples of hand cream and a free croc-shine by a leather polish selling stall :). Finally we went back to collect their rolls freshly baked, which they ate on the way home in the car 🙂

(Davies is enjoying the freshbaked bread smell).

They both practically skipped back to the car saying what a fab day they’d had and thanking me so much for taking them. It was great, possibly our best trip there yet :). The traffic was fine and we were home just after 5pm where we spent ages out in the garden with our own chickens and looked through the bagful of goodies and leaflets we’d brought home :).

The children had a bath, Ady arrived home, stories for them and then bed while Ady and I watched I Am Legend which we thought was an ok film made watchable by Will Smith but still had us both jumping in fright fairly regularly :oops:.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it was 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some more photos anyway:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiesty cockerel:

fatherhood has not mellowed him any!

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

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

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

here they are in situ:
Tom’s chicks

And finally the latest additions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

2006:

and today in 2008:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We got the traditional egg picture from Drusillas,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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