One word? When seven would do…

Work for me today and I had a good day. Lots of nice workmate-y banter, after asking a couple of colleagues to swap shifts with me as I’d had holiday refused as someone else was already off on that day for the day before Scarlett’s birthday party (which also happens to be the night I’m going to see Mika with Ros so I could really do with the day off) and not managing to find anyone able to swap with me I cursed at the colleague who was already off only to discover she’d cancelled her leave last week! So hurrah, I now have the time off myself :). That will make for easier party preparation and concert attendance :). It looks like the full timer at work is right on the cusp of leaving, which is a shame as she is very nice and all, but actually I only work with her once a fortnight and she has all the best jobs so I’m kind of hoping I can snaffle some of them (such as creating displays in the library and suggesting some ideas I’ve been sitting on a while for fear of treading on people’s toes. I was told today to stop fearing treading on people’s toes and to offer up any ideas I might have, so I might have a good old think about that ready for after Christmas and see if some of the things I’d like to suggest as possibilities have any mileage in them :)).

Mum was here with Davies and Scarlett all day. As I left they were doing drawings and she was suggesting that she write the words to label things and they copy them. They seemed fairly resistant but when I got home I was presented with no fewer than 20 very detailed, mostly full colour, labelled pictures from Davies. Mum was quick to reassure me that he had not just copied her writing but had helped in spelling them out too and actually I was very impressed by his tidy and totally legible handwriting. A bigger selection is on flickr but here are a couple of my faves:

Love the skeleton in this one particularly:

He was watching Tom and Jerry when he drew this one but it still impresses me that he can draw so well from a memory of characters rather than copying them direct. I can do a pretty good copy of something freehand but do need an original of some sort to aid me, he manages just fine from memory:

and this to me is probably the most impressive, prior to seeing the Simpsons movie I don’t think he even knew all the names of the family, we’ve watched it a few times on TV since but this is without anything to copy from, totally from memory and without much acquainatance with the cartoon really, other than Lisa’s dress which is usually red he’s even got all the outfits spot on:

Scarlett had not been quite so productive with drawing but turned out this shark picture which I think is pretty good and which for some reason as well as writing her name and copying Granny’s ‘shark’ she also write ‘i’ and ‘car’ 😆

Scarlett has not had such a good day, she has a really high temperature and a dreadful cough. I thought she had had the cold before Davies but it appears she is suffering now with it. When I got home she was all hot and floppy on the sofa so I dosed her up with medised, got her in pjs and we cuddled on the sofa. She is currently in bed but very restless and wakeful and coughing with a horrible croup-like cough. Actually scratch that, she has woken and is bundled up next to me in a blanket on the sofa, but I’ve just medised-d her again so hopefully she’ll sleep easier again in a short while. Poor baby 🙁 She is still managing to be very cheery in herself despite so clearly feeling pants.

When I got home, other than tending to the ill I also sat and did some starfall with Tarly, where Davies rather amazed me by watching over our shoulders and reading out things like ‘pick nose colour’ and ‘choose eye shape’ from a gingerbread man game they’d never played before. A lot of it was educated guessing but he was also very clearly doing a fair bit of spelling out too. I can so see how it is all starting to click and wire together for him with reading. He lays in bed for hours sometimes looking at books and says she tries to work out the words from the pictures. Scarlett is doing fast work of picking up all the letters and sounds and seems to be getting there almost completely independantly. I’m thrilled at the prospect of having a reader but equally thrilled that he will have got there in his own time and without the need for reading schemes or dangling carrots – it’s ace :).

I read a selection of stories to them before bedtime which was nice. We always seem to go through phases of lots of reading aloud and then it tapers off and I’m never quite sure why as I love reading aloud and they love being read to. Our current library stock is a few films, a pile of chick lit and feminist literature for me and some WW2 books – a mix of fiction (WW2 set novels and stories) and fact (junior reference books) so we turned to our own bookshelves and dug out a few stories we’ve not read before.

Ady had been off with Tom, his work mate, chopping and collecting logs for us to burn on the fire and also got involved in a shoot. Another of Ady’s past jobs was gamekeeping (an ex gamekeeper, an ex slaughterhouseman and handy with the hoover, you can see the appeal can’t you for a lazy slattern of a carnivore like me :lol:). They were shooting ducks to take home for tea but a combination of not having shot a gun for years and reservations these days about killing meant he didn’t bring home anything to serve with plum sauce tonight. He did however bring home some bargainous storage solutions :). Having spent this week mulling over what to do when we can’t afford trofast he’d been looking online and found some clearance shelving at B&Q online – for just £2 per unit :). A check around stock available traced some to Guildford so he arranged for a delivery driver dropping stock off there from work to collect the shelves for him and bring them back to the office. I’ve erected one and we have 3 more which should pretty much entirely shelve the playroom and take all the boxes and stuff off the floor. So that is the plan for the weekend – Operation Playroom. Pictures to follow :).

Yesterday was all day away training day. It was held in Chichester so Ady dropped me off and picked me up which was handy – even more so as I get to claim train fare expenses without actually having gone on the train – hurrah! 😆

The morning was a training session on Local Studies – which apparently used to be called Local History but has been changed because now they gather recent and current stuff aswell as historical stuff. The man running it is something of a celebrity on the local studies circuit by all accounts, having won awards and lots of lottery and heritage grants to set up initiatives such as this one and this one. He is very knowledgable and passionate, knows his subject inside out and has made it his life’s work and a legacy to pass on. Sadly despite all this and being a Very Nice Man he was also rather on the dull side so his delivery and pace was lacking that certain something necessary to pull off really good training. The course was also over-attended really with 13 of us crammed round an 8 seater table, at least two of whom were either disinterested or openly not wanting to be there.

That said, I found the subject matter really fascinating and once he got to the crux of the session which was an example of how you can dig around the information available within the libraries resources you can uncover a lot of stuff. He does public speaking on the example he gave us which was how he uncovered a whole map of the lives of a family living in the mid 1800s from Worthing starting from one interesting picture of a group of people stood on an unidentified road. I won’t retell it as it would lose all of it’s appeal without the props anyway but as anyone who once loved Moonlighting will know there is something very appealing in the idea of playing detectives and piecing together clues and evidence.

We broke for lunch which I spent walking round Chichester. I went and inhaled deeply in the Lush shop for a while but resisted spending any money. I didn’t do quite so well in a couple of clothes shops but did manage to get a skirt and five tops for £2o in the sale so felt frugal anyway. By now my feet had started to hurt in the high heeled pointy toed boots I was wearing in an effort to pull off Serious Library Worker look instead of sticking the Cleavage and DMS person we all know I am really. I veer between wanting to have A Look and then thinking that actually being comfortable is far more important and the look doesn’t suit me anyway. Time for a wardrobe overhaul I think and putting a few outfits together for such occassions that I know I can wear but still walk in afterwards.

I staggered on to the County Records Office for the second half of the day. This was another case of an interesting subject matter delivered in a boring manner and to be fair by this point all I could really focus on was the agony of my blisters while I moved from one foot to the other. But I did take in some of the amazing 100s of year old maps, documents, family history studies and finally the work of the conservator who does things like restore very damaged documents, maps and so on and also works on preserving things too. All very interesting stuff but sadly not really brought alive as much as it could have been.

We finished there and Ady picked me up and we were home in time to feed Davies and whisk him back out again to Badgers while Ady and Scarlett stayed home. The traffic along the seafront has been awful both nights we’ve driven along it this week and last night was worse than ever so we were running nearly 10 minutes late arriving at Badgers. Davies was still only the 3rd child to arrive though so the leader was thinking about cancelling the session when another 2 turned up, making a total of five and in her opinion worth doing something then. I was sat in the car outside anyway but it sounded like they had a nice time in their little group and were visited by the Badger Leader for the area who wanted to know if any of them wanted to be in the carol concert in December. They all did and Davies is very enthusiastic about it. It’s to be held in the church nearby which is actually where I did carol concerts in my senior school years so will be nice to revisit to see Davies doing his later in the year. They are practising at Badgers over the next month with one additonal Saturday practise nearer the time.

Ady and Scarlett had walked down to Brooklands and were in the park waiting for us by the time we’d parked and arrived there after Badgers. They had various Halloweeny things going on but all at great cost. It was very well patronised though with loads and loads of people there, many in fancy dress. I was up for going round the spooked up train (prices hiked up from the normal £1 per person to a massive £3 per person :shock:) but the children wanted to do the ‘haunted house’ walk through, which was cheaper at £2 per person and had no queue so we went for that instead and got to walk round twice. It was a themed walkthrough with about 5 different scenes (graveyard, dungeon, witches cauldron spell casting room, etc.), very well dressed with props and various dressed up people leaping out at you at various points. The kids loved it and both asked the man if they could come back next year and dress up to be scarers too :lol:. They got to take sweets from a big cauldron on the way out and then we headed back home again.

I think being out Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights for Davies anyway is often a lot but we’ve gone on somewhere else from each one this week (Ikea on Monday, giving blood on Tuesday and Brooklands last night) so it’s all felt like a very long week really.

Today we went over to see Ali and Freya. It didn’t start well with us failing to find a parking space. The road next to Ali’s has recently become one you have to pay to park in which means all the people who used to park there now park in Ali’s road. We drove round for a while, including meeting a dustcart in a narrow bit before ringing Ali to see if the drive is hers or not. She confirmed it was and came out to help me navigate up it but due to the extreme angle of the drive (very, very steep) and it being a narrow space with low walls on each side and cars parked on the road opposite it simply wasn’t possible. The revving and speed required to get my great big car to reverse up in wasn’t possible when you had to go slowly and cautiously so as not to crash into any of the many obstacles. Nightmare :(. Finally Ali had the brainwave of asking her across the road neighbour if I could park in her (still sloping but not so bad) driveway instead and I did that.

The children were not in moods condusive to playing together nicely – or indeed at all, or staying out of trouble so we cut our visit a bit short in the end and came home. Davies and Scarlett played with the bantams for half an hour or so when we got home – so sweet, they are really tame and happy to be picked up and petted, the bantams not the children. And now they are playing with various things including magnetic shapes on a metal tray, the version of Rush hour I got in a charity shop, geomags and Tomb of Doom, oh and a pile of books from the library that I want to take back tomorrow so have promised to read them after tea. I’m about to cook their tea and do some reading aloud before getting them bathed and early to bed to make up for all the chaos this week, then start doing some present making and hopefully have a calm and relaxing evening before another full day at work tomorrow. It’s all go here!

Some very weird monthly hormonal stuff going on with me for the last week, which I’ll refrain from blogging with my usual detail but might explain at least some of my blahness. The rest I’ll put down to not enough time doing fun stuff lately which will be being remedied by this time next week :). I can’t wait :).

As blogged earlier it was a slow start this morning, with a late breakfast. We messed about with some x boxing and some toy playing before finally getting our heads in the game and getting dressed and out. I needed to pop into work so we parked in the library carpark and went in. We were greeted with ‘here comes trouble’ as we walked, which I don’t think I’ve heard greeting my entrance with quite such feeling since I used to get announced walking into my local nightclub by the DJ over the mic (much to my delight, I’ve always been one for the limelight ;)), so that was nice. I do adore getting labelled ‘trouble’ in the library, particularly when I work there :lol:. The children went into the junior section while I nipped in the office and got the paperwork I needed by which time they’d both chosen books. Davies had selected a book on architecture and famous landmarks and buildings from the non-fiction and Scarlett had chosen a couple of story books. I’d not brought their tickets but we took them out anyway (which pushed both their tickets over their 20 allowed items, meaning we now have over 70 library items in the house again as I know mine is well over 30 😳 must do a clear out before I go into work on Friday, no wonder they call me ‘trouble’ :lol:).

We had a quick wander round Lancing as we were there – a circuit of the charity shops and the bookshop. We found a box of Wallace and Gromit Christmas cards for 50 pence which I bought so Davies can send his own cards this year. Davies found a bag of sea creature toy animals for a quid so he bought them and Scarlett found a mummy and baby cuddly jaguar set for 70 pence so she bought that. She has always loved big cats with jaguars being her particular favourite. She pronouces it ‘jag-wire’ though having first learnt the word when she was going through her Dora phase at pre- two. Remember Scarlett and her Dora phase?

I was telling her the other day that if she wanted to she could work with jagwires when she grows up – be a zookeeper or a Siegfried and Roy style jagwire-tamer come magician. She’s going to think about it.

I also picked up a Spy Kit which includes things like fingerprint ink and dusting powder, magnifying glasses and invisible ink so we’ll have a play with that on Thursday (another 79p bargain) and a version of rushhour with seacrafts. Davies and I spent ages playing an online version of rushhour / sliding puzzles a while back so he likes the idea of a real life one and although I’ve not looked at it yet him and Scarlett played with it for a while tonight. Yep, that’s the way to make myself feel better about crap in the house – go and invest in more of it :roll:.

We then headed home via the butchers. We ‘came out’ as Home Educators to him today – which made him say ‘ahhhh’ having made comments about them not being at school before but not actually answering them properly. He made positive noises about it but then he’s often commented on how many questions they ask, how much they remember and how much I talk to them so he’ll hardly be thinking wrong of it really. Slight change in our meat order this month to things like casserole beef and chickens for slow cookering. And as the shooting season started this weekend, we’ll be dining on pheasant tomorrow night courtesy of A’s workmate, Tom :).

We came home and I cooked up a mountain of french toast with cinnamon which cheered us all up and then I enjoyed some idle banter with a friend on facebook which cheered me up further 😉 – maybe I can see the point of it after all ;). Then we looked for inspiration of pumpkin carving online and happened upon this rather impressive specimen which I’m sort of glad I didn’t see on a day I had more time on my hands really, what with the rather finite lifespan of carved masterpieces made from pumpkins. We did one more face, a haunted house style one and have one left which we plan to do something cat-like with. Will take photos tomorrow and can see I might want a better selection of tools next year, it’s quite addictive :). Might try ice sculpting next, wait til you see what Scarlett’s birthday party centrepiece is (joke!).

Ady came home and Davies and I went off to swimming lessons. The traffic was dreadful so we arrived five minutes late but found the classes were running late so that was fine. I avoided maiming myself in a public and spectacular fashion this week and made do with just sitting and watching instead. I did find myself clapping and cheering and wanting to stand up and start a mexican wave when one little girl in Davies’ class swam a width, unaided, for what was clearly the first time for her. She started out with no obvious intention of doing so but suddenly got over halfway and seemed to realise she could do it at the same point as the instructor realised she could do it, so she cheered her on which was enough. It was magical, like watching a baby’s first steps, seeing the dawning on her little focussed face that she was going to do it, and the joy when her fingertips touched the edge and she had done it. 🙂 None of the other mums clapped though so I didn’t follow through with the mexican wave :(.

On the way home Davies and I made up alternative lyrics to ‘one two three four five, once I caught a five alive’ which amused us both greatly. When I was not much older than him my parents took Frazer and I to see the Barron Knights who I always thought were pretty great rewriting humorous lyrics for popular songs. I’d love to do that for a living, maybe Davies and I could set up a band when he grows up and tour with Scarlett and her performing jagwires singing ribtickling parodies of popular tunes of the day. We could bring Ady along to introduce us – TV’s Adrian Goddard introducing….’ It’d be a sell out I reckon 😆 Davies had time to eat some toast and we were off out again.

We’d made appointments after about 3 failed attempts to get to a blood donor session in various places so went along to do that. Scarlett came in with me and was very (morbidly) interested in the whole process, particularly the colour of my blood which we decided coordinated nicely with my nail varnish. My first drop floated rather than sank in the test, my second drop did the same so I was directed to a proper direct from the vein in my arm test. Unfortunately I failed that one too with a poor iron count so didn’t give blood today. The needle was in for ages with her digging around to find a vein which finally popped with a big splash into the testtube, which Scarlett was fascinated by :lol:. I was asking about the rate of people who fail the iron test and discovered that it is higher in coastal towns than inland, particularly in the summer. The nurse said this is something they are looking into possible reasons for but it is a very distinct pattern in seaside places. Interesting.

Ady gave and as with the previous two occassions his blood runs very quickly and he is up and finished in about two thirds the time of everyone else. Last time he bled right through the plaster and his shirt so they were keen for him to wait longer before leaving this time and even called over a couple of others to look at how quickly he was filling his bag with blood. The children and I ate biscuits and drank tea and had many stickers foisted upon us by the volunteers so they came out plastered with ‘My Mummy gave blood today, ‘my Daddy gave blood today’ and ‘I did something amazing today’ all over them :lol:. Davies wanted to know why he couldn’t give blood so we talked a bit about best medical interests, parental consent, understanding of implications and so on. They are both adamant that they will give blood as soon as they are 18 and hopefully growing up seeing it being something we routinely do (when our iron levels allow!) will mean it is the norm for them as adults too.

This time we were in Lancing Parish hall which I don’t think I’ve ever been into before. They have loads of local maps dating right back, aerial photos and blown up picture postcards of local places on the walls so we found our house and looked at the postcards for a while. The training course I am on tomorrow is all about local studies and should be really interesting. Family tree tracing is something that has never really interested me – and with a name like Davies and family from Wales is probably rather tricky anyway and none of my family are from Lancing anyway, but the idea of tracing history generally is pretty interesting and the guy running the course, a librarian from Worthing has won loads of awards for his work in that field and is really passionate about it, which always helps on a training session.

Home for bed for them and a big bath for me. Tomorrow is another long day with badgers at the end and possibly a trip to the local laked park which has a Halloween event going on (Davies said today ‘oh look, they’ve spooked up Brooklands!’) so if the weather is nice Ady and Scarlett might meet us there after Badgers.

Yesterday was Hallowe’en Party day at Magical Mondays. I’d made some biscuits (both children wandered into the kitchen first thing and their first question was ‘why are the pumpkins red?’ :lol:) and we had some Hallowe’en music (which never made it out of my bag) and some pumpkin carving kits to take with us but no actual pumpkins so we left early and stopped first at Sainsburys and then at Asda on the way to get some. Sainsburys didn’t have any, which perpetuated my fear of a National Pumpkin Shortage due to unseasonal rainfall during the summer, or something. But Asda were totally pumpkin’d up with crates of the things in the foyer and a couple of blokes rummaging through them to find the best ones (who we christened Crazy Pumpkin Men, which delighted them) dug out good ones each for Davies and Scarlett too.

Once at MM Davies and Scarlett both wanted to start carving their pumpkins pretty much straight away. I’d started helping with peeling and chopping apples for pumpkin soup so set them up next to me on the breakfast bar area where I could supervise. This proved to be slightly misguided as all the cool kids were carving their pumpkins over at the table where they could at least sit down and engage in pumpkin carving banter as they worked. It then all got a bit manic as the people making soup and soda bread needed to dash off to one of their houses to get a whizzer for the soup and I suddenly found myself minding two additional children who both wanted pumpkin carving assistance, some about to boil soup and three batches of soda bread all due to be ready to take out of the oven at different times! :shock:. It was fine though and all was well.

The children disappeared off to eat iced biscuits off string, bob for apples (Scarlett ate about six apples I think – she was over there for ages and kept bringing me cores, totally ignoring all the cakes and biscuits all the other children were troughing their way through :lol:) and generally rampage. We had soup and soda bread – well I did, D &S refused to try either. Ali and Leo read stories including some from T and L which were fab hyrbids of Night Garden and Empty Child from Doctor Who (L) and one about Slitheen and Spiders (T) all done by spooky candlelit pumpkins. Really enjoyed that, particularly the audience participation and sound effects. 🙂

Back for more feeding before tackling the clearing up. It all feel rather frantic and although I started at least 5 different conversations with people I don’t think I finished any of them. The noise levels were very high and there were stacks of people there including some I’ve either never seen before or not seen for ages – which is great as far as MM as a group is concerned but not something I particularly like personally – I enjoy the smaller group dynamics really and sugar-high children with so much going on isn’t a great place to deal with some of the more challenging behaviour demonstrated by some children :?:. Interestingly everyone else was commenting on how great it was to have so many people there, so clearly it was a personal thing to me rather than anything anyone was doing ‘wrong’. Anyway…

We left there and headed into town where I need to transfer money between banks to pay the mortgage and also wanted to get a birthday present for Claudia for next week and the stuff to make a present for Jasper. We had an hour on our meter and did the whole thing in slightly under so that was good, if rather hurried. Once home I hung out some washing, out away all the stuff from MM we’d brought home and had just made a cup of tea to sit down for 15 minutes for the first time other than in the car all day when there was a knock at the door. It was our lovely neighbour Maureen who had brought over a framed picture she’d taken of the first chickens. She’d adored them having been brought up with chickens and pigs and really loved seeing them in our garden. Apparently when Ady told her we were going to get rid of them she’d begged her husband to let her ask us if she could buy Wobble from us as she’d totally fallen in love with him (he was the black cockerel), bless her. The children were delighted with it and wanted to show her the bantams so we all trooped round the side of the house and she got the guided tour and met all the bantams. Maureen is so nice and genuinely adores Davies and Scarlett and often leaves little presents for them on the doorstep and chatters to them over the wall. She told me what lovely children they are, how lucky they are to be getting the childhood we are giving them and how wonderful what we are doing with HE is. She is so full of praise for the children it is lovely to hear and reassures me that none of our neighbours are likely to go calling social services in horror that they are not in school. :).

By the time we’d said goodbye to her and put the bantams away for the night it was time to cook the children’s tea and wash up – so my tea went cold and I didn’t get my sit down. 🙁 After tea we rushed Davies round to Beavers and I defrosted chicken to get a curry on. Ady came home and did the curry while Scarlett and I did some online pumpkin carving in practise for the design she wants on the massive pumpkins (3) Ady brought home from work today. Off to collect Davies and as promised I spoke to the Beaver leader about the boy (s) that had been upsetting Davies with his behaviour. He is just generally rough, disruptive and well, horrible, really. It was not at all specifically directed at Davies and I don’t think Davies has ever even really been his target, more that he’s watched others getting hurt by him and the prospect of it maybe happening to him was enough to worry him. So I mentioned it, they acknowledged it as an issue and agreed that actually the child is very disruptive and does really spoil it for everyone. He whips up two other slightly challenging boys into a frenzy and the adults find themselves focussing on just keeping them in line rather than actually getting on with any of the things they want to do with the group as a whole. Apparently they suspect all of them of being ADHD but have never been officially informed and suspect this is because then a greater ratio of adults (well actually, quite specifically those children’s parents) should be on hand to assist in managing the special needs within the group. Well that was what they told me anyway. To me a ratio of 3 and often 4 adults to a group of 12 boys seems more than enough really and as my only possible form of action at that point was to volunteer myself anyway I left it at that. Davies was placated that I’d mentioned it as promised and hopefully we’ll be ok from here on in. I’ve pondered on it since and I *think* my feelings are that actually for the sake of an hour a week it doesn’t do Davies any harm to have to compete a bit for attention, witness a spot of undesireable behaviour (particularly if that behaviour offends him and he recognises it as undesireable rather than gets hints and tips from it :lol:) and as he came out proudly clutching a very imaginative picture of what Lancing might look like in the future with lots of gold glitter glue. It had a pier (with the word ‘pier’ on it picked out in stickers) because we have previously talked about how in the (distant) future where we live will be under the sea, so he thought a pier would be another option to an underwater Lancing. There was also a ‘law and order enforcement’ device of a pipe which emitted noises which made ‘baddies’ stop what they were doing wrong, which actually pulled out of the picture and was operational (without the noise of course! :lol:). It’s the sort of thing Davies is often engaged in creating really but it’s nice that he got to spend time doing it with a group, inspired by other adults lead and using materials we don’t necessarily have at home (any glitter glue in this house is Scarlett’s domain!). He says he’s happy to keep going so until he tells me otherwise I guess we consider that episode dealt with for now.

Then we headed up to Ikea. I am having all sorts of odd feelings about life generally, but specifically the house at the moment, which seem to manifest themselves in apathy really. The short story is that actually I don’t want to live here any more. The house feels too small, it it scruffy and crammed and doesn’t fit our needs. I want more living space, a bigger kitchen and a garden that enables us to do the outdoor things we want (such as keep more chickens and maybe other livestock). Lancing depresses me, I feel threatened and intimidated if I go into the town after dark (so that’d be any time from 5pm this time of year) and I seem to see gangs of children, barely older than my own lurking on street corners, looking for trouble everywhere I look. The parks are vandalised, the streets are full of litter, every wall is smeared with grafitti – it has all the shite of a city with none of the ‘charm’. I am very aware that there does not exist a place which doesn’t have elements of the above and whilst I would dearly love to hide my children away until they are well into their 30s and capable of making good decisions about not doing crazy teenage stuff I know that isn’t very feasible and I hope I am giving them grounds for making good choices as and when they need to, but I can’t help feeling Lancing just undermines everything I am trying to do for them.

So there are two choices really – we either sort the house out so it is one we are happier living in for now (although I feel like a bit of a hitting my head against a brick wall with that one to be honest – noone else feels as cramped by the clutter as I do and I struggle to get rid of anything without protests from the others), redecorate, make better use of the space we do have, reorganise etc. Or bite the bullet, decide where we do want to live, work out if Ady needs to get a new job or can stick with this one and set the ball rolling by getting this house on the market and seeing what would be left after settling debts ready to start again.

Anyway, I digress, in an effort to run with at least making the house feel like somewhere I am happy to be for now, we’re trying to sort out the playroom after which we can sort out the kids’ bedrooms, so we’re after storage solutions for the kids toys. I want to make everything more accessible to them, create more space in the playroom, put in a table for the old laptop to go on with printer and laminator and stuff and generally make it a room the kids use rather than an excessively big cupboard. So we went to Ikea. The kids haven’t been there for years so thought it was amazing and wonderful and had a whale of a time there. We debated all sorts of shelving and bookcases (within our very small budget) and eventually having scribbled plans and drawings on paper decided that the best option for now was 3 pine shelving units which we could paint to cheer up. Except they were out of stock :(. So we ended up coming home empty handed. We got back at 1030, Scarlett was already asleep, but roused enough to be pj’d and climb into bed, Davies went straight to bed too and we finally sat down to a curry at about 11pm – other than car journeys the first time I’d really sat down all day.

Consequently today has been a late start. It’s already 1230 and the kids are still in pjs having not long since eaten dinner. We’ve got to pop to the library so I can pick up some details of a course I’m on tomorrow that I left at work and to the butchers for the months’ meat shopping but I’m struggling to galvanise myself to action. I’ve been looking at storage ideas on line as I’ve since decided that 3 shelving units still won’t really solve the playroom – I really don’t want it to look like a stockroom – a classroom would be a more preferable look to be honest, with everything at D&S’s level and easy to get at (and most importantly to keep tidy and put away themselves). I think I’m leaning towards putting everything in stackable storage boxes and keeping it round the edges of the room at the moment, which still isn’t what I want but as this sort of thing definitely isn’t within our budget spending fifty quid on shelving that still isn’t right probably isn’t the best idea either.

Check out the recipe for Wallace biscuits over on this blog – same recipe, saves me copying it out again 🙂

I decided this morning that we really should see my parents. Aside from the odd afternoons childcare over the last few weeks I don’t think we’ve seen them at all for ages so keen not to perpetuate their opinion of me as all take and no give (still can’t quite work that out even if it were true really, I don’t think I’ll ever begrudge Davies and Scarlett ‘taking’ from me) I thought we’d try and spend some time with them with no ‘agenda’. So I rang and invited us over for lunch and offered to bring whatever was required. My Mum is a bit crap at coming out and asking for stuff (I don’t get that really, if you want something, ask for it, don’t beat around the bush) but mumbled about cakes and how she’d like to start making them because shop bought ones are so crap but she didn’t have the time, or the recipe, or the ingredients. This made me laugh most because I don’t recall my Mum making a cake since about 1982 and the family joke is that her idea of cooking is ‘pierce film lid and place on middle shelf of oven’, but also because of it’s very thinly veiled disguise as a request that I bake something to bring over.

We’d planned on starting the Operation Playroom Sort Out Project today but having looked round it without really knowing quite where to start and then going up to B&Q to get some shelving units but drawing a blank as to just what to get and then coming home and deciding we’d go to Ikea tomorrow instead we decided not to do anything to it after all and ended up sitting on the floor in there discussing where we’d like to live instead and whether Ady should start job hunting or not while the children brought us in ‘post’ of pictures of dinosaurs and kept interupting one of the most key and potentially life changing discussions we’ve had in ages 😆 – was all a bit surreal really. We came to no real conclusions and then I went off to make profiteroles.

We headed over to my parents and had a very pleasant few hours with them. Davies talked to my dad a bit about war but I always feel like a very bad matchmaker between two reluctant singles trying to get them to start a conversation really. I remember listening to my Dad talk for hours as a child about all sorts of things and I wish he would open up to Davies like that as I think they’d both get so much out of it. Davies would get a different adult ‘teaching’ him stuff, Dad would get an appreciative audience and to pass on some of his stories and memories on to yet another generation and they would both benefit from building a proper relationship with each other. Dad seems far more comfortably with Scarlett, which I now recall being very obviously the case with me and Frazer when we were little and actually he is probably more at home in the company of women rather than men generally – he seems to project this odd macho expectation onto boys and men which certainly Frazer, Ady and Davies don’t really live up to and then he starts to struggle. Odd creatures, people, aren’t they? 🙂 So I did some stage managing for a while until I got bored of it and stopped bothering and they sort of drifted out of their chat after that :(. My Mum is equally bad actually, she either patronises and babies the children or she places way too high an expectation on them behaviour-wise. This isn’t really a criticism of my parents specifically, more an observation at how bad adults are generally at interacting with children. How they struggle to ‘make’ conversation, know how to pitch their tone without being patronising or standoffish. I too am guilty of this often but am at least conscious of it and manage to overcome it with children I see regularly and know well.

The children went off to play while the adults chatted but they are in that stage of recovering from being ill where they still feel rough enough to be whiny and a bit sensitive but well enough to be boisterous and want to play. So I feel like I’ve done a fair bit of refereeing today. We brought them home around 4pm ish when their pitch started to raise above what we could comfortably talk over :lol:. I’d managed to confuse myself with the hour thing and had thought a 6pm dinner would be fine as it was still feel like 5pm to the children when of course what it would actually feel like is 7pm. They held out well though – thanks to a late lunch. After listening to way too many arguments while they tried to play together with the toy animals I set Tarly up on starfall while Davies played x box and I emptied and dismantled one of the big units in the playroom, desperate in the end to have achieved something in there this weekend. I’d earlier gone through the rail of dressing up clothes with the children and we’d weeded out around half as too small for them so that can all be ebayed now. I was quite gratified to notice how well played with most of the dressing up stuff is actually – it will all have to be very honestly listed on ebay as most of it shows plenty of signs of wear and tear, which tells me it’s paid for itself which is good. :).

I cooked roast beef, which Davies came into the kitchen and helped me serve up with Ady teaching him how to make gravy. He’d love to do tasks like make cups of tea but he is just too short to do it safely still. Scarlett has a (small) burn on her hand from taking something out of the oven earlier this week which my Dad commented unfavourable on (small children shouldn’t be using the oven etc.) I think my take on it is that if they want to do something aslong as it is not seriously neglectful for them to try or guaranteed to end in injury then I would let them, with supervision. Clearly Davies couldn’t take a whole tray of roasted joint of meat, vegetables and boiling fat out of the oven but as someone who was shooed out of the kitchen at that age when I was interested and never really ventured back in again I am really keen that anything they do want to try or show interest in is made as accessible to them as possible.

So we all had dinner together while watching a nature programme which took me right back to watching that sort of show on a Sunday evening while having roast dinner as a child, then the children gradually went off to bed (late by the clock tonight so even later by their body clocks still really), we had baths and then I returned to the kitchen to make some hallowe’en themed biscuits for MM Hallowe’en party tomorrow. This is the first time in several years we’re not doing much for Hallowe’en actually – last year we were at NicCamp and had a party, the year before we had our big party in the hall and the year before that we threw a smaller party at home with about 6 guests. This year we’ve only got MM tomorrow on our agenda. We’re supposed to be taking pumpkins to carve but as Tescos didn’t have any yesterday unless I can get a couple on the way there tomorrow we might have to pass on that. I tried to make some biscuits this morning while making the profiteroles, using a recipe that came with a tub of I can’t believe it’s not butter that also had two free cookie cutters. They came out very wrong – they spread hugely and morphed into a tray of cookie rather than individual shapes and had a cakey texture rather than a biscuitey one. This could be because I used butter instead of I can’t believe it’s not butter as I didn’t want to open the new tub as we still have some supermarket own brand I can’t believe it’s not I can’t believe it’s not butter already open so I didn’t want to open another tub, but I also have no idea whether I used the right flour. I’m very lax about flour, we use value brand and I never bother to check whether the recipe calls for plain or self raising which possibly accounts for my occasssional kitchen baking failures but I doubt I’ll bother anyway. So I had another bash with my own fail-safe cookie recipe and turned out some very respectable looking ghost and pumpkins shapes. I was pretty tired by decorating time though and they are not my finest specimans really – the mixing of red and yellow food colouring in the icing to get orange was a bit hit and miss and they have the look of embarrassed blushing pumpkins or even carved tomatoes as they are rather vibrant 😳 :lol:. Ah well, they’ll all taste fine.

Tomorrow is back to Beavers so I’m planning on a quite chat with the Beaver leader woman if possible – not making too much of it to Davies as I don’t want to build the whole refusing to go a couple of weeks ago thing up into more than it is and hopefully Ady will be home in time for me to leave Scarlett here with him so I can do it properly or even stay there with him tomorrow and monitor what goes on for myself.

so sang Scarlett along with which song today?

Illness continues for Davies, who has coughed himself sick twice today 🙁 but remains on good form otherwise and has eaten loads and gone to bed early so should hopefully be on the road to recovery tomorrow.

I was off to work this morning, loving working Saturday mornings instead of afternoons – it’s far busier in the morning which makes the four hour shift go quicker and I still feel like I totally get to have a weekend once work is finished. 🙂 I’ve been there nearly 11 months now and have yet another training course coming up next week so had the pre-training briefing and a brief chat about how I’m doing generally (well apparently :)). This was good actually as I was a bit downhearted about the whole work thing on Thursday so a good shift today perked me up again :).

I came home and Ady had had a very productive morning clearing space in the garage to put the chiller in, doing bantam run stuff (we’ve decided they are just too small and vulnerable to totally free range in the garden – even Candle would have a go at them let alone other predators, also they would be easily lost, so the run we already have is plenty big enough for normal day to day pecking about with occassional free run when we are in the garden with them) while Scarlett played with the toy animals and Davies had a pj day playing x box.

I worked out the menu for the month and headed off to Tescos and Scarlett elected to come with me. She hadn’t planned to but decided to join me at the last minute and I’m really glad she did. We were out for well over two hours and had a browse round the toys at M&S (birthday present buying for a certain pair of siblings we’ll be seeing next week, one of whom has had his birthday already but we have a very specific gift in mind for and the other we are rather more open to ideas on), the toys at Tesco and a very lengthy look round the clothing. They had rails and rails of sale clothing and Scarlett managed to dig out five dresses for next summer for a quid each. She has wafted around in them all evening and one of them isn’t really very her – an old fashioned pale blue broderie anglaise affair, so she decided that could be a nightie and has worn it to bed. The others are more primary coloured and Scarlett-y. She spent the first half of the time sitting in the trolley before deciding to get out and help. And help she did 🙂 She did loads of counting things in, working out how many more we needed of things if I wanted six and she’d already put four in the trolley, checking for dented tins, looking at the words on things (she learnt to ‘read’ thick and medium on the bread and ‘chilean chardonney’ and ‘australian white wine’ while helping today 😆 obviously she knew the difference by taste already ;)). She was a pleasure and a delight to be with and I really enjoyed the whole trip. She helped me load the trolley onto the conveyor belt and actually finished off loading it while I started packing, then went and sat on a chair at the end of the checkouts. I commented in one of the posts below about how she is suddenly coming into her own and being more of a participant in stuff in her own right rather than a tagging along younger sibling. The next couple of months will see her starting at Badgers and Rainbows too aswell as turning five and whilst she still has way more moments of irrationality, trickiness and just being challenging than Davies has ever managed I am starting to realise that this is more simply a part of who she is (and Davies is not) than anything to do with her age. Clearly they will mellow (or get worse :lol:) as she gets older but it’s been lovely this week spending odd bits of time one to one with her and realising how well she is doing, how she is thriving and how clearly the whole Home Ed decision is working out really well for her as an individual too aswell as something we just do as a family :). Love that girl :).

Once home we had the much loathed task of unloading the car and putting it all away so I did complicated manouveres with the cars in and out of the drive and unloaded it all through the garage into the kitchen before doing the same thing with the cars in reverse. It went away fairly quickly with Ady helping though and I suddenly realised that aside from a tepid cup of tea at 1030 breaktime this morning (I thought the kettle was hot from just boiling, it was actually hot from about 830 with someone else’s first cup of tea of the day) I’d not had anything to eat or drink all day. So with it being nearly 6pm by that point and having worked a full morning, done a months food shop and some Excellent Mothering I felt perfectly justified in delegating cooking the children and later our own tea to Ady while I drank tea and then wine and watched X Factor. :). Ady and Davies had had a grand X box play off while Tarly and I had been out – apparently Davies has the killer tactic of tickling Ady if it looks like he is going to win any of the more competitive games. Ady and Davies don’t often manage to meet in the middle of something they both enjoy – it is usually one of them making an effort to do something the other enjoys so they can spend time together (which they do a lot but it seems a shame that someone is always compromising for the sake of it) so that was nice that they had a couple of hours that they both seemed to like :).

X Factor followed by bath followed by lovely steak, chips, onion rings, peas, pepper sauce and Ady’s special garlic bread with lots of wine more than compensated for lack of food the rest of the day. The children went off to bed clutching their hot water bottles, which certainly seem to have helped Davies to sleep, a wise investment :).

Yesterday on the way home from Fishbourne Davies was asking me questions about the war which I did my best to answer. I’ve got a whole load of books from work today to go through with him tomorrow but as usual what he would really like is some films. Any suggestions for either made for kids, or kid suitable films about the war? We’ve watched Carrie’s War which he liked and I’m even wondering about Goodnight Sweetheart if it’s available on dvd but any recommendations from those of you who have done WW1 and 2 in the past would be gratefully recieved. 🙂

Only taken in July last year but where the hell have all these little children gone then? 😯

First of all, before I forget, two witty things from my offspring today:

As we left the house this morning I said to the children ‘your bedrooms are a tip, we need to get them tidied up this weekend’ to which Davies replied ‘oh ok, but can we not do that thing where you stand in the middle of the room, chuck stuff around and shout about throwing it all in the bin this time please?’ with a smirk on his face. I guess if your child is able to rip the piss out of you about your tantrum moments you can probably ease up on worrying that he is likely to write books, Dave Peltzer style about you being abusive then? 😆

Today I had some evening primrose oil capsules on the side ready to take when I next had a drink (not altogether unrelated to the above paragraph ;)) which Scarlett was most bothered by. She eventually put them on an upturned smarties tube lid and said ‘I don’t you to get germs on them Mummy before you take them’. Davies immediately said in an absent minded way ‘they were not Germans Scarlett, they were Romans. Romans!‘. 😆

Everyone seemed healthyish this morning. A was off on his train to The Smoke long before we’d got up and had a really good day up there apparently in a meeting with QVC folk. D & S were totally up for going to Fishbourne so off we set. We arrived to find that our season ticket (you get a year’s ticket when you go in if you gift aid your entrance, so we have our ticket from July when we met The Beans there) was not valid for today. A bit of cunning on my part though as we got issued a whole new season ticket today which I signed with Ady’s signature which means I now have a one adult, one child ticket and so does he. Scarlett will need a ticket when she turns five so it means when we next go before July all four of us can get in. Not that I’d advocate turning over such charitable organisations obviously but we are on a budget and I had been told by the lady when we came in July that Thursday and Friday of half term would be included.

Ros had already said they’d be delayed so it seemed crazy to wait for them rather than get stuck into the laid on activities so we did. They children had a recruit sheet to take to the ‘recruiting officer’ and apply to become Roman army soldiers. The first step was to write their names in roman / latin using a pen ‘tool’ and ink. They needed very minimal help actually. The recruiting officer asked them if they’d like to do it or for him to do it for them and they both chose to do it themselves using the little card with the alphabet on:

There was a variety of activities, some of which they had to do to get their recruit cards stamped and some which were optional. They chose to do most of them, starting with a puzzle:

Followed by finding out about Roman potions and medicinal things. They were both interested in this one actually and when we went round again later with Ros we got some potion recipe sheets so we’ll be trying these at home ;).

We worked our way outside then and Davies had a go at running at a suspended sack with a sword and shield. Scarlett didn’t want to do it then (she was slightly unnerved by the ‘guides’ in their roman dress actually, well that and being told what to do by someone :lol:) but she did come back and thrash the living daylights out of it later 😆

They did some stone throwing too to get their cards stamped before heading over the The Drill. For this they had to don hats, shields and swords and take their orders, in latin from a roman in full dress. They learnt how to march, turn, raise their shield and sword and to charge. Davies did okay but Scarlett was far more interested in the patterns she could draw in the shingle with her pointy sword 😆 At the end, due to be the smallest she would have been at the front of the line and led the charge but the combination of the big man in funny sandals telling her what to do and the full audience of parents pointing cameras and laughing at her standing there oblivious was too much and she fled. I reassured her that although we might need to cross ‘roman soldier’ off her list of potential career choices now she is still left with a whole host of other options 😆

Then they did some spear throwing. Davies did great at this but Scarlett was again fazed by the woman in Roman dress and wasn’t really up for it. She was eventually perusaded to chuck one spear with me helping her.

We bypassed the archery as although it looked good I didn’t think Tarly would be up for it and Davies was getting cold so we went indoors to do some of the activities in there. We did solider tattoos on their hands:

tried some Roman food, including Spelt bread which they both really liked so we got a recipe leaflet for and they made a clay medal each which we’ve brought home to spray gold when it’s hardened off:

That completed all their obligatory tasks so as we were hungry we headed back to the recruitment officers to get their certificates and wages so we could take them back to the car. The officer frowned over Davies’ name and had Davies spell it out to him way too many times (surely he’s come across it before, even if it was as a last name? :roll:) and then when he got ‘Scarlett’ managed to only use one T. Hilariously Scarlett had followed his writing – the letters are not that dissimilar to the modern alphabet and said to him ‘there should be another T at the end, I have two T’s’ which made me laugh and comment ‘hey you can read latin! :lol:’ to her.

Back to the car for lunch and then Ros and co arrived. We went round with them and did coin rubbing, colouring in, Scarlett got a stone wound scar made up on her hand and spent some time on the wooden horse brandishing a sword

Eventually though Davies’ cough got more and more frequent and he looked fairly pale and peaky so we decided to come home. I’d been crap and not dressed him in enough layers really which with a cold he was really feeling pants. So we said goodbye to Ros and co and headed for home. We stopped at Tescos and Boots on the way to stock up on soup, finally get a winter coat for Davies and some medicine and a hot water bottle each (we’re trying to use the heating as least as possible so lighting fires and wearing jumpers is the order of the day, which means hot water bottles in bed might be wise). Davies already had a Gromit hot water bottle cover (what a surprise eh?! ;)) so just needed a bottle, Tarly didn’t have anything so got a pink covered bottle which they’ve both gone to bed delightedly clutching. I have various scars on my arms and legs from hot water bottle burns (through the fleecy covers, I have *very* senstive and thin skin which burns very easily, plus I often used to go to bed practically unconscious with alcohol and not wake when the bottle burnt me) so they both got Health and Safety talks from me instead of Ady on them.

By happy accident rather than planning other than working in the morning for me we have a free weekend which I think we are all in need of and looking forward to. We have food shopping, bantam sorting (they are already taming up, they let me stroke them quite happily tonight :)) and general house tidying to be getting on with so a nice house based weekend will be perfect.

I can still remember when it was just this morning….

Today has really dragged, work was slow, boring and really rather mindnumbing today. I’d so much rather have stayed with the children – or gone and made fire with Ali and Freya instead.

Just before I headed off to work Ady rang to say he was being sick at work so I spent the whole day worrying about whether the rest of us were about to be struck down with that too – and unable to get hold of Ady who I’d felt quite unsympathetic towards when he said he couldn’t come home as he was going to a meeting this morning. FFS I think vomiting probably excuses you from most things :roll:.

Lucy and The Rs were here first thing followed by my Mum in the afternoon. Mum had cleaned the fish tank and the cat litter tray out while she was here, which is nice but always feels done rather judgementally. Ah well, if it makes her happy… 😆 She also claimed to have discovered one of my favourite glasses was broken although it hadn’t been broken this morning which suggests to me she broke it but didn’t want to confess :roll:. Davies was a bit hot and floppy but she’d got him all cossetted up in a blanket and was asking him ‘are you alright?’ in a baby voice every three minutes (ooh that took me back to childhood and Frazer having a runny nose :lol:) which probably perpetuated it. Again I would have rather more sympathy if he hadn’t still been awake at 11pm last night really.

So I got home, listened to my mum listing all the many things she’d put right in my house, made her and I cups of tea, put the chickens away, got tea for the kids, Ady got home, I sent him and Davies off to bed together to be pathetic in a different room and then got Scarlett off to bed. Ady did come back downstairs and have a bath and eat some soup before disappearing again. So I’m feeling a bit wiped out really, it’s been a long old week and I’m dreading illness spreading through us. Fortunately other than me working on Saturday morning we have nothing planned this weekend so if we are all struck down at least it won’t be ruining any plans.

I have career / lifestyle / future / finance ponderings going on but still too whirly about yet to commit to a blog post.

We lost the sky remote control at some point yesterday afternoon, which wasn’t a problem until the children went to bed as it was stuck on Nick jr anyway and I turned the tv off as soon as they went to bed (dreams of a tv free life – ah what bliss!). But this morning it meant the children had cast around for alternative pursuits and come up with a Halloween songs and sound effects cd. It has the usual ‘classics’ such as Monster Mash and Ghostbusters but then a few rather more tenuous linked titles such as Devil in Disguise by Elvis, so we talked about that for a while.

Scarlett wanted to know why it looked really sunny outside but when she opened the window to talk to the chickens it was really cold so we talked about cloud cover and clear skies. Tarly wanted to play Starfall again but we never quite got there (really must do that Grand Playroom Sort Out I have planned which will enable the permanent set up of a laptop for their use in there) but we did have several communal rounds of Zoo Tycoon.

We did some baking – cheese scones and chocolate chip cookies. The scones were lovely, the cookies got forgotten as Lucy and The Rs arrived and I got carried away talking instead of cookie monitoring and while they were still totally edible I am quite choosy about cookies and only really like chewy ones – these were well onto the side of crispy and crunchy. They’ll get eaten here though – Ady’s home :).

The children seem to have benefitted from reduced contact with each other and all went off to play quite nicely, with various things being played with. It did degenerate into trashing at one point which I called a halt to once something actually got broken, yelled a bit, lectured about ‘how to treat our home’ and they all very efficiently tidied everything up again :). Lucy and I chatted and then they headed off and we returned to Zoo Tycoon.

Ady arrived home bearing gifts of freshly dug out of the ground carrots for Scarlett from a photoshoot he’d been at, Skippy for Davies from a trip to Costco on his way home. And erm, a big tub of washing powder for me 😆 Oh and some cider! He knows how to charm a woman, that Ady ;). The children ate carrots, skippy sandwiches and hoovered up various baking for tea and I read them a HUGE pile of about 12 library books so that I can take them all back tomorrow.

And that’s about it really, a fairly unremarkable day, not terribly unlike yesterday but nice to have every now and again. Tomorrow I’m working all day and on Friday I’m taking them to Fishbourne as they have half term activities going on which we’ll get into free and Ady is at QVC by train so I can use his car to get there too. The activities have been going on all week so hopefully it won’t be too packed with half-termers.

I always plan to do very little and be home-based on a Tuesday. It often doesn’t actually happen that way but today it did. This morning I stayed in bed and finished the book I was reading which meant the children had sorted their own breakfast out by the time I came downstairs. I got various loads of washing done, dried and in again, ‘fed’ the Christmas cake with brandy, let the bantams out (well opened the door so they could come out at least, they chose not to, so I checked on them and they seemed fine, no eggs, but all present, correct and cooing).

We popped out as my wrist has been playing up again the last couple of days – I still can’t decide if it is RSI, arthrytis or what – and I wanted to get a wrist support to strap it up, particularly for work as it’s my right wrist and I am often carrying heavy books in each hand. There was a vast selection in Boots varying from really expensive ones to simple tubular bandages which you cut your own thumb hole in – so I went for that. We had a look at the Christmas present stuff out on display while we were in there – thousands of pounds worth of packaging given by people who don’t have a clue what to actually buy for people, recieved with no real gratitude, half priced on Boxing Day. I shudder to recall how I worked in that environment for so long and how mid October was already high pressure, long hours, well into the 12 week countdown to Christmas with panic about the January sale already queuing up ready to stress me out as soon as I’d finished worrying about that. I also shudder to think just how much I used to buy into that whole consumerism mentality, I really have changed a lot…

We also went to Sainsburys, having had a quick look round the aquarium next door and looked longingly at the tropical fluorescent fish and little turtles. Quickly in and out of there with no feeling of sticking out thanks to half term ;).

Once home we spent some time with the bantams and coaxed them into their run. I got cold outside so went back in to do some baking (very cheesey cheese scones and some lovely banana and chocolate chip cakes – very well received by Scarlett particuarly who proclaimed them the ‘very best baking you’ve ever done Mummy!’). The children, predictably let them out of the run and were very stunned to see just how high they can fly (wings clipped tomorrow I reckon :)). They played outside for a while before coming in for cheese scones for lunch.

On a nostalgia trip I’d borrowed The Box of Delights from work. I don’t actually remember anything about it other than it being one of the first TV shows I actively looked forward to being on each episode. A quick google reveals it was in the run up to Christmas 1984, so I would have been rather older than D&S and possibly more excited about it marking the countdown to Christmas. 15 minutes in it was clear it wasn’t grabbing them so we turned it off.

Davies got the plasticine out and played with that for a while. He’s got some fine wire to make armiture frames for inside his models so he was experimenting with making rabbits with moving ears. Scarlett was a bit bored and roamed about for a while before settling with me to play zoo tycoon. It’s a bit beyond her really so on a bit of a whim because I’ve seen it mentioned on blogs a few times I found Starfall and she played on that. She really enjoyed it and would probably have played on it happily for hours, which sort of surprised me as Davies would never have sat with something like that, he’s always been very suspicious of things dressed up to look ‘fun’ when they are clearly ‘educational’ – although he is quite happy to do educational things when they are being honest about it! 😆 Infact I got bored pretty quickly so we interspersed playing that with some youtube clips. I’d wanted to show them Lee Evans dance to Bohemian Rhapsody but actually upon viewing it wasn’t at all suitable and actually was pretty unfunny, but we did find a James Blunt clip mentioned in Popbitch yesterday which we watched over again and have been singing ever since. :).

When we got bored with that I got the marble run out and we built a very tall collaborative effort which worked well til it fell over. They both played with that a bit more while I wandered off. I like marble runs, the idea of testing, experimenting and working to an end goal really appeals to me. We have two, a bright plastic one (probably ELC) and a nice straight line wooden block one from a car boot sale, neither gets loads of use but they have been played with a fair bit over the years and are one of those things like a jigsaw that any visitor can’t help but have a go with if they are round when they are out.

Scarlett and I put the bantams away for the night, she is just so happy to have birds again and is excellent with them. She’s just so confident, unflappable and able to deal with them, she talks to them really well and just really enjoys looking after them – it’s great to watch :). Can’t wait for eggs.

The kids had tea (Davies said he wanted something made of pig so he had bacon sandwiches, Scarlett had bacon on one plate and a big bowl of pasta too) and I’m about to pack them off for an early night before having an early bath and tea myself as Lucy is coming over to keep me company with Ady being away.

I had a brief phone chat with a friend this morning as he’d emailed to say he’d changed his mobile number so I texted him to test it and he rang to see who I was texting him as he’d lost all his stored numbers. It was brief due to him being on his mobile phone and calling from Ireland so was very much a sort of bullet point catch up, with him asking specifically about Home Ed, finances and my work, which seem to be very much the hot topics for people I don’t see often enough to have general day to day catch up chats with really. Which of course set me thinking about all those things myself during quiet moments for the rest of the day.

Both children have been really tired today – not at all surprising given they had an 11 ish bedtime on Saturday and a not much earlier one last night and are both still fighting off the tail end of colds. So we had great wailing shows of misery from Scarlett on several occassions and more low key tears at small incidences from Davies a couple of times too, which was rather wearing :(.

Off to Magical Mondays, collecting Ali and Freya on the way. Both the children got stuck straight into painting with Davies (who I’d told we’d be doing Halloween decorations) painting a pumpkin and a witch which got at least two compliments from others when was left on the side drying :). He then did some junk modelling and made a fishing boat from a shoebox with some orange net and a cut out fisherman and a loo roll tube for the chimney thing – very good and totally recognisable. I love the way he approaches junk modelling; he looks at the available resources, decides what one single thing reminds him of or inspires him to create and then builds everything else around it. Other children I watch tend to have an idea of what they want to make and then find the right stuff to do so, he approaches it from such a different starting point.

Scarlett combined the two and made a collage and paint picture with her big bit of paper, sticking various bits of material to it and then painted a box and stuck that to the paper making the box ‘a little cottage’ and the paper ‘the garden’. Davies came to show me his boat and asked me to make another fisherman to go in it so I did that and ended up sitting with Tarly making a family to go in her little cottage. We cut out cardboard people and then stuck on fabric and stuff to make a mini Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett complete with mad hair in appropriate colours. Davies had wondered back off by then but I was called upon by another child to reprimand him for calling a couple of the boys ‘poo-heads’, which I did. The same child shortly afterwards came in to complain a different child had called him a ‘fucker’ which made me think that either he was doing something to deserve this litany of abuse or at the very least made Davies’ word sound less harsh :lol:. Interesting child politics at that group sometimes…

I had an interesting chat about the purpose of HE groups, which I’ve been pondering on further but will save blogging for another day, a chat about feminism and motherhood with someone else with was equally interesting and a silly chat about Christmas carols which had us all leaving singing ‘oh come get in the car now, oh come get in the car now, oh come get in the car NO- OW, so we can all go home’ across the carpark to each other. It was all there today really, frustration with my own children, tricky involvement in kids stuff, pondering the meaning of life, the universe and Home Ed groups and a bit of singing too!

Davies, Scarlett and Freya were failing to take my in-car safety chats seriously on the way back to Ali’s so I got a bit ranty (and did an emergency stop to demonstrate seatbelt and car seat usage – Ady would have been proud but I fear I may have scarred Freya’s relationship with cars over busses far more than Ali and J would have managed :lol:). I expanded on it further on the way home from there with D&S until we all got distracted by the very powerful looking sky (black and grey with a strip of yellowy pink over the sea, promising great storms which never happened) and talk over naming of chickens.

Once home we had some playing with toy animals and then some Zoo Tycooning with them both snuggled up with me. We had cinamon french toast (similar to Katy’s but with added sugar and milk in the egg mixture) and then Ady came home with the bantams.

Tomorrow Ady is away overnight and we’re planning a whole day at home to get to know the new additions and I might do some baking (hoping we’ll be getting a backlog of eggs anytime soon :)) and I have a few other bits and pieces to sort out too. Wednesday we are also plan-less but might try and get together with Julie as all out usual haunts are to be avoided for half term. Looking forward to NicCamps now and want to sort a few things out in preparation for that.

They are rare breed buff bearded sablepoot bantams. We *think* one of them laid an egg this morning so are hopeful for one tomorrow (the we think isn’t because we were unable to work out whether it was an egg or not but because in the place they stayed over the weekend there was an egg very near to one of them when they were taken out this morning and it was the most likely layer).

After much discussion I am calling one Omelette, Ady is using the name Feathers again, Scarlett has decided to keep to Punzel too and Davies having gone through a variety of names ended up with Timmy. It was going to be Tammy, short for Bantammy but got changed to Timmy at the last minute. 😆

They’re very cute, way smaller than their predecesors, with cute little feathery feet (a poo-trap :roll) and very Gizmo off the Gremlins style cooing noises instead of the rather loud clucks we were used to (not to mention the crowing ;)). They came in the kitchen and were fed, watered and cuddled (and prodded, poked, cooed over and carted around the room!) before being settled into their new home outside for the night.

First things first, could everyone please wave and say Hello to The Babs! 😆 She will be reading this one post, even if she doesn’t then read my blog again until after NicCamps ;).

Friday was a work-all-day day for me and seems far too long ago now to recall much about tbh. I know I got caught up in conversation with at least two colleagues about whether I’d ever want to do the job full time (I wouldn’t) and how it differs from previous jobs I’ve had over the years. Julie was here in the morning followed by Frazer in the afternoon, so I had a half hour catch up chat with Frazer before he left. They all seemed to have had a nice day but the highlight for me was finding a picture of a cat, beautifully coloured in, with ‘Frazer, 31’ written neatly at the bottom corner :lol:.

Ady arrived home just as I’d served Davies his tea and was quickly washing up some cups and plates while Scarlett buttered some toast and her eggs cooked. I’d plunged a cup which must have had a hairline crack in it into hot water and it had come clean in half and sliced my finger open which was bleeding copiously into the washing up water while Scarlett tried to tear off some kitchen roll for me so I could go to the bathroom and get a plaster without dripping blood all the way there. So he took over the serving of tea, disposed of broken china, double plastered my finger (which turned out to be nothing serious, just very bleedy ) and I made tea and coffee. And then my Mum turned up, unexpectedly. She was on pretty good form and ended up staying for tea and then a glass of wine as time ticked into alcohol territory, which meant we ended up with a very late tea and none of the pre-packing for the weekend I’d planned to get done achieved.

Saturday morning was all rather brisk and efficient and we were off by 9am (should have been 8 but realistically that was never going to happen ;)) and we did rather a lot of this which was a good ten hours out of the weekend:

I’d packed the children a bag each with water, rice cakes, sweets, coloured pencils, a drawing pad and gathered 8 dvds from work in a selection of genres including short episodes of things like Shaun the Sheep and Charlie and ‘Lulah’ (never Lola in our house :)) and some films – Magic Roundabout, The Witches, the Little Bear movie and so on. We also listened to lots of Queen, Mika, Kaiser Chiefs and more.

The journey was fine, just over 4 hours with one stop for weeing in the bushes when it got too close to comfort to continue to the next services. We pulled up at The Babs’ and were met with Babs and a map and sent straight back away again. Only five minutes down the road to a local quarry gardens place where we quickly indentified the row of cars all with EO stickers in the back windscreens but were confused by the two footpaths, one bridal path, entrance to the hall and path to the quarry to choose from. We wandered round the first and most likely looking one to no avail, so I texted Chris and eventually after wandering up another path Ady rang Chris and he got the children to yell so we could track them down :lol:. Davies and Scarlett fell straight into running round and being loud with the other children already on hand (Deep End folk – essential guests for any party ;), Karen and Dom’s 3 oldest, All the Raines, Marcus and Alex and a couple of lucky dip local folk’s offspring too – 15 in all). There was a picnic and a kinder egg dinosaur hunt which they all found and sat on rugs to eat and then adults were required to prise open the plastic eggs and construct the toys (Bob, I youtubed and I do remember it now :lol:). Then Davies needed the loo which required a walk so Ady headed off, ending up with a trail of 3 extra children behind him 😆

We then headed back to Bab’s where everything was very under control and a very pleasant afternoon and evening and early hours of the morning was had in the company of The Babs & Chris, Katy & Bob, Kirsty & James, Karen & Dom and a local couple with the default names of Kate and Chris ;). There was copious amounts of pizza, dalek bread and some very impressive themed baking including dinosaur nests with dinosaur eggs, rock buns and a fab volcano cake. Katy did amazing work as chief children’s entertainer, I got to cuddle Anna and in the evening had a really nice few hours with Katy and Babs (and Kirsty before they left) staggering to bed only when it became apparent that Babs really wasn’t going to take her trousers off after all :lol:.

This morning was a slow start for us four, even Ady and Scarlett, the earliest risers of the four of us didn’t wake until nearly 930am and Davies and I were even slower. We had a fab breakfast of eggy fried leftover sandwiches (Katy just went on and on demonstrating ever more admirable skills :)), lots of tea and finally when everyone else went off to church we headed for home.

It was an uneventful but boring and lengthy (four hours plus on motorways is just not very inspiring really) journey home but we arrived with plenty of time to get a roast dinner on early enough to eat it with Davies and Scarlett and while Davies and I did some Zoo Tycooning, Ady and Scarlett spent a couple of hours out in the garden preparing ready for our newest additions which arrive tomorrow….. yes, thanks to Ady’s workmate Tom, who attended a poultry auction yesterday having been told by Ady that we were after bantams and if he saw any unusual or pretty ones at good prices to get them, we take delivery of four (definitely all girl :)) little brown bantams tomorrow. They are rare breed buff bearded sablepoot bantams. I can’t find them online so will take pictures to post up of our own ones when they arrive but they are little, feathered footed and pretty much excactly the same age as Wobble, Freddie and Punzel so should be already at, or about to reach point of lay. So hurrah for eggs sometime very soon :). As there are four we’ll all name one each. Ady is sticking with ‘Feathers’ on the basis that if youve got a good name you stick with it, Davies is currently insisting on ‘Crazy Frog’ 🙄 :lol:, Scarlett hasn’t decided yet but it will probably be either Barbie related or some form of bantam, hen, or chicken with a Y on the end and I’m toying with the idea of ‘Omelette’ but want to meet her first before I decide.

We have a pretty low key week coming up which I think will be a Good Thing, particularly as its half term anyway so everywhere will be heaving, but are looking forward to MM tomorrow and the prospect of no evening activities for a whole week :).

And I think we’re all cinema’d out for a while ;).

Ady dropped us in Brighton on his way to local stores saving us that £7 parking cost today. We were about half an hour early so took the change to pop into the shops to get a birthday present for Ben which involved two lifts, four escalators and two toy shops.

Back to the cinema where we tagged on the end of a school group going into the cinema although we almost didn’t get the door held open for us as the teacher looked fairly sneeringly at us and told the cinema worker that ‘they’re not with us!’. I won’t rant about school groups again, having done it fairly comprehensively in the past but I just hate the way the adults talk to and treat the children, the way the children react in response and indeed being in the company of a big school group for any great length of time. I was quite surprised that The Simpsons was easily the most well patronised screening we’ve attended, wondering just what was found in it to build a lesson around, particularly as plenty of the gags were well above the heads of a lot of the children and the ones that weren’t were fairly juvenille. Good film though, we enjoyed it. 🙂 Scarlett sat and watched the whole thing, Davies gave a fair few belly laughs and I did a couple of laugh out louds too. It was a screening with subtitles so often I was laughing before the line had been said which actually was quite nice – I like the idea of anticipatory humour.

We scrambled out first before the regimented crocodile formation organisation started clogging up everywhere (just one small rant then, why the hell do school group adults have to be so bloody inconsiderate of others? If we’re out as a group – eg when we’ve been on group trips at camps, I’m always really aware of the inconvenience to others of us being in a gaggle and will shepherd us to one side to allow little groups to go first etc. All of the adults with the school groups today were totally oblivious to just how much impact they and their charges might be having on other people. Really annoys me) and having rung Ady to arrange a meeting place walked along the seafront to the pier – about a ten minute amble. We looked at the two piers – the West pier, now almost totally decimated and fallen into the sea and the Palace pier, all glitzy but with that slightly seedy air that seaside towns have in daylight in winter. I was slightly kicking myself at that point that a) we’d not come on the train after all as I had this sudden fleeting feeling of utter freedom watching the school groups still lining up behind us and being marched back to school while we were able to wander along the beach and on such a beautiful day could have decided to go down to the sea and play in the waves and b) that I’d not brought my camera because the light, the scenery and the wind blowing was all very picturesque. But we met up with Ady and he dropped us home.

Ali wasn’t able to make it over and after a brief text exchange with Lucy I realised I was actually feeling really quite weary, shivering and a bit headachey so my half-plan to get the kids dressed up and head down to the local beach was shelved in favour of sitting in the warm playing on the laptops. I installed Zoo Tycoon on both mine and Ady’s and Davies and Scarlett played on one, while I played on the other. That’s a pretty good way to waste time too :lol:. So good infact that I made them a pretty late tea which they ate watching The Little Vampire and when Ady got home I retired to the bath for about an hour with a book.

I think I have finally succumbed to the cold that’s plagued Davies and Scarlett this week but judging by their speedy recoveries hopefully it was just one day of feeling a bit rough and I’ll be fine by tomorrow. Julie is here in the morning and my brother in the afternoon which delighted Davies ‘I’m just being looked after with people from my family!’ and Scarlett ‘yay, Uncle Frazer! :)’ .

This morning seems a very long time ago….

I went to bed early last night to catch up from the night before but Scarlett was awake with a bad dream so I went and collected her and brought her back up to our bed where her prefered sleeping position is lying curled up on top of me on my back (I sleep on my front), which frankly wasn’t totally comfortable when she was teeny tiny and is even less so now she is nearly 5 and probably as heavy as Davies. 🙄

This morning was work for me, which went quick for the first couple of hours but dragged for the last hour or so with lots of stragglers of people not going until bang on 1pm when we shut and several annoying and lengthy photocopying customers to assist with things like blowing up images in colour which meant I spent a lot of time getting the key to do free copies where my first attempts hadn’t worked 😆 I’m a bit crap with the photocopier :oops:.

Home for a quick handover from Lucy. The children seemed fine – Scarlett and Rebecca had played, Davies had X boxed. I got changed and hung some washing out and then we headed off to Slindon to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie for an Autumn Walk. I have some pics but not downloaded from camera yet. It was nice but Scarlett was a bit clingy and annoying for the first 15 minutes or so. We fed the ducks, Julie and I managed some chatting but it felt like one of the four children was lurking and interupting at any one time which made conversation hard. We ended up in the carpark where they finally all went off to play with sticks to have sword fights and then went off ”scovering new fungi’ for which I supplied my camera to Scarlett to photograph their finds.

We left and came home for Davies and Scarlett’s tea watching Charlie and Lola collected from the libarary today. Then Davies and I went to Badgers while Ady and Scarlett played Charlie and Lola games on the website. No idea what Badgers was about but I sat in the car and ate humbugs and read my books so I was happy.

Davies and I chatted about pronounciation of his name and other words which have two ways of saying them; wind, tear, read with some examples. Which then led to jokes and how so many are plays on words that sound the same or have double meanings.

My leg is incredibly colourful with four seperate bruises on it from my gymnastics at swimming yesterday and is actually quite painful but thankfully didn’t stiffen up overnight as I’d feared it might (probably due to not being allowed to lie still for very long :roll:).

Tomorrow is the final one of our Filmeducation films -The Simpsons movie which Ady is dropping us off at to save parking with hopefully a visit from Ali and Freya in the afternoon.

On QI last night (probably a repeat on a random sky channel rather than one anyone else would have been watching) they mentioned about how people who sleep for between 5 and 7 hours a night will live longer than those who sleep for 8 or more. Clearly these first group need to not all be hard drinking, drug taking, chain smoking overeaters with a basejumping hobby while the second group are clean living zen types for this to hold true but it did give me a proper bona fide reason to stay up til 130am this morning. 😆 Ady did suggest that for the good of my health I spend lots more time with Alison, but he didn’t seem to be altogether sincere in that remark ;).

So I felt rather dragged from slumber instead of tip-top healthy condition when I was woken up before 8am this morning and didn’t even have time to take more than a couple of gulps of my cup of tea. We’d booked to see Happily Never After at Burgess Hill cinema but the manager rang me yesterday to say the film hadn’t arrived and they were going to show Mee-Shee the water giant instead. Ady was headed over that way for the day anyway so he dropped us off in Burgess Hill and picked us up again afterwards. We had a brief wander round the town, getting some popcorn and sweets from Waitrose in advance before heading to the cinema which is a very old fashioned 2 screen cinema. We were greeted at the door and welcomed properly and then listened to a little bit of the manager telling the bigger school group (I say big, there were probably only 20 of them, and then us and another HE mum and her two children) about how the films come in in big reels which last about 20 minutes. They sellotape them together and then run them on big spools – not unlike the two spools on a music cassette tape but on top of each other rather than side by side. He explained that every 20 minutes or so you will notice a black dot in the top right hand corner of the screen. This is followed by a second dot and then the scene will change and that is when the reel has moved onto the next reel – ie where the join is. We kept forgetting to look and didn’t actually see the dots during the film but will try again next time we’re at the cinema (oh, that’ll be Thursday then 😉 :lol:).

We sat right at the front as usual but in this little cinema the front row was almost full reclined with the seats in rows behind gradually getting less reclined. This was nice actually although I was at risk of falling asleep. I decided to track down some tea but when I asked if they were serving it I got made a mug of it infront of me, with milk they’d cast about in the staff fridge to find and my offer of paying was waived away :).

The film was good, very odd school type family film, just like I might have watched as a child – in the style of ET or similar, but nice. It kept Davies totally enthralled with just the odd ‘whoa!’ from him at some of the big scale effects and Scarlett deemed it ‘lovely’ too when it had finished. As we were gathering ourselves together the manager appeared again and rounded us all up for a tour of the projector room. This entailed a trip through screen two, up a spiral staircase and into a tiny room where he showed us the film reels, how they wind onto the next reel and are flashed with light to project onto the cinema screen. He explained about 24 cells per second, how the sound works and showed us the big audio control box, then the system they have of a periscope with mirrors to project onto screen 2 as the cinema was only built with one screen. He showed us a big box of a film ready to go back to the film company and explained (to me, when I asked, cos I was interested) how the films are charged for to them and viewing figures collated. All *really* interesting stuff, even Scarlett was very interested in it all and Davies was obviously totally captivated 🙂 A real Jim’ll Fix It moment for him who has always looked longingly back and up at the shaft of light coming from the projector room when we’re at the cinema. 🙂 After much profuse thanking (and a private pledge to go there for all future film week events 🙂 ) we left there as Ady was waiting outside.

We then toured various garden centres with him in Eastbourne and a couple of supermarkets. We either stayed in the car or wandered round looking at stuff with him. We had budget lunch in Tescos entirely selected from the reduced to clear section so got cheap sub rolls, some sausages off the hot deli, cakes and pancakes for about 2 quid :). We looked in a sports shop for some heelies with no luck and then headed back for home. We got back with about ten minutes to spare before Davies and I needed to head off again to swimming lessons.

At swimming we both managed to demonstrate to an enraptured audience our grace, style and physical ability. I managed to fall down the tiered seating on concrete steps not once, but twice, resulting in very bruised and battered legs, a chorus of ‘ooh are you alright?’ s from the other swimming mums and then an internal struggle not to get helpless giggles at myself once I’d finally sat down. I further drew attention to myself when Davies managed to unthread his goggles so I had to sign to him to chuck them on the side, duck under the barrier to go and grab them, fix them and return them. All the mums were waiting to see if I would provide a hattrick of entertainment by actually falling in the pool fully clothed at that point I think biut I managed to retain just a smidgeon of decorum :). Several of them talked to me as a result though so maybe it’s a breakthrough ;). Davies meanwhile was carrying out a perfectly comically times routine of his own in the pool with two floats, very much in the style of Frank Spencer by losing one so letting go of the other one to rescue it, realising he’d let go of one so letting go of the other to try and resuce it and so on, until the instructor told him to leave it! 😆 The rest of the group got their level one badges tonight – Davies has already passed that last term so when they go back after half term they all start working towards level 2 which is swimming without aids. I think repeating a term has been good for Davies and watching him and the others in his group objectively tonight they are all on a level really so hopefully he’ll come on well with the rest of them now.

We sang Bohemian Rhapsody all the way there and back in the car in a very badly performed duet doing all the instruments too, at the tops of our voices. Very funny 😆

I dropped Davies home and headed off to Book Group at the library. I’d not read the book as it was dry, dusty and boring and I’d struggled through the first third before giving up on the basis that life is too short to read shit books. At least 3 other people had concluded the same and not finished it so that was good. Book group was good, four new faces and five regulars, plenty of teasing and ‘in jokes’ which it’s so lovely to be part of, I’ve really got a lot out of that group. Pat, who is well into her 60s if not 70s caught me at the end and asked if I’d like to go for coffee with her sometime to talk about HE as she’s never met anyone before who actually does it and she’s really interested in it. Rose, the teacher agreed that she’d like to talk more about it too so we’ve semi arranged something for sometime soon which is good. I love the idea of having ‘friends’ generations apart from me – Rose is almost old enough to be my Mum and Pat almost old enough to be my Grandmother. Book group is great for making me feel youthful still ;).

Home for curry and wine provided by Ady while we watched a documentary about the Great Storm of ’87. Can’t quite believe that was 20 years ago tonight – it feels barely yesterday. Work tomorrow followed by one of our now legendary Autumn Walks ;).

Off to the cinema this morning for Spirited Away, another filmeducation showing. Last week’s was at a different Brighton cinema – slightly easier to get to, but more importantly with FREE parking. Oh and a half hour later start time too.

Last year I was very discerning with the filmeducation films I chose, striving for a balance of ones the children would have actively liked to have seen and some I thought would be ‘educational’ or otherwise worthy, with the cinematic experience being enough for D&S to buy into seeing them too. This year there were at least two films I would have really liked to have taken them to but couldn’t as they clashed with my working days this and last week so I was a bit more grabby choosing whatever was showing on the days we were free. Last week’s Earth was always a bit risky being a documentary rather than a story and indeed Scarlett was restless a little over half way in. However it was worth it as we have had endless imaginative play with the toy animals at home recreating some of the scenes, lot of watching of whatever other nature documentaries they have found while channel flicking back at home and various chats about food chains and hunting and migration.

So today was a film I simply chose as it was showing today. I should probably check myself a bit for grabbing something for nothing and paying the price really as parking was £7 😯 so with petrol too I’ve been kicking myself for not checking out train times in advance (would have been way cheaper and we could have spent a couple of hours in Brighton too rather than dashing back to the car park to avoid ticking into the next 15 minute charge – can you believe that’s how parking is charged, in 15 minute blocks!?). Anyway, it was just us and one big school party so we took our usual seats down the very front and settled in. I’d looked at Spirited Away online and noted it was a Japanese film and even said to someone (Julie I think) that I hoped it wouldn’t be a subtitled version. Never a truer word spoken though and sure enough that’s exactly what it was. Which is, you know, tricky with two non-reading children in a cinema really. 😆

Scarlett got fed up fairly quickly so curled up on my lap and chewed by bag strap (that child is so not ready to be parted from her dummy!) which was great because then Davies could snuggle up too and I gave occassional dialogue translations for them. The story was actually fairly complicated but told very well through the pictures without the dialogue (infact it could almost have done without dialogue and still been followed) and very beautifully animated with all of it handpainted apparently. It also had massive amounts of different culture type stuff in it with the movie being Japanese and the subtitles being American so that was interesting when something like ‘you’re a bit fresh’ came up for me to translate further into ‘cheeky’. What with the subtitles, the film being 2 hours (yes that’s two hours people, 120 full minutes of whispering translations with a child on my lap crammed into a cinema chair) and then the 7 quid carpark fare I was all prepared to consider the whole thing an official Fiasco. But both children utterly insisted they’d enjoyed the film and once home spent ages drawing scenes from it and talking about it, followed by Davies wanting to know more about oriental writing and me getting a book about China out and showing him that and then him writing his own version with translations underneath. 😯

They did lots of other drawing too actually. Scarlett drew her cat wand (an accesory from a hallowe’en dressing up outfit) very well and then assembled various things from her bedroom (a jewellry box, a teddy, some ornaments) and drew them. Still life has never been my scene at all and Davies works along similar lines to me, creating his own interpretation of something rather than copying from a picture but that is clearly her thing and she did a fine job of it. She’s also, presumably from watching Davies, got the idea of colouring a whole sheet of paper with backgrounds and horizons too. I guess this could also be from not having seen many other children’s art work, unlike most children her age, so quite literally drawing what she genuinely sees such as sky all the way down to the ground or whatever else is rising up to meet it etc instead of the blue stripe at the top of a page. I’m sure the constant landscape of the beach has probably helped both children with that concept with sea meeting sky being something they see almost daily. Davies made a book which he did the illustrations for and dictated the words to me. It was pretty basic (Davies the dinosaur is a triceratops (pic of one), Mummy dinosaur is a stegasaurus (pic of one), Daddy dinsosaur is a Tyrannasaurus Rex (pic of one), Scarlett dinosaur is a diplodocus (pic of one). One day Harvey the volcano erupted with lava and Mummy dinosaur, Daddy dinosaur, Scarlett dinosaur and Davies dinosaur ran away. Then Harvey stopped and they all lived happily ever after, the end.) story -wise but the illustrations were excellent, totally recognisable as what sort of dinosaur they were and again with full backgrounds. He also did a couple of Doctor Who pictures and then cut out and coloured a pumpkin for Hallowe’en.

I cooked them some tea which they sat and ate while watching The Sarah Jane Adventures then it was time for Davies to go to Beavers. We’d been talking about it all afternoon and he was telling Scarlett how much he thinks she’ll like Rainbows when she goes because he sees some of the crafty stuff they do at Rainbows displayed in the church hall and ‘it’s all the sort of stuff you like Scarlett, like rainbows and unicorns and cutting and sticking’. :). Ady arrived home just in time to walk him round so he headed off only to reappear with him again ten minutes later.

I didn’t totally get to the bottom of what had happened but there had been some debacle with the keys to get in and they had all been waiting outside for ages. Ady had been on his phone rather than talking to Davies and when they finally got in the hall Davies had wanted Ady to stay with him. He’d then decided he didn’t want to go in at all and started to get upset so they came home. I talked to him about it and all I could really get from him is that one of the boys there is horrible to everyone and pushes them about (which he does, I blogged about him before when I went with them to the park) and he’d seen him there and decided he didn’t want to be pushed around by him so would rather not go. He confirmed that he does it to everyone and it’s certainly not specific to Davies but he’d just decided he didn’t want that tonight. I’m a bit torn really – I respect the fact he has decided there is behaviour being demonstrated that he doesn’t enjoy and he knows he doesn’t have to be there so has chosen not to be but I am slightly disappointed that he’d rather walk away than deal with it (not in Davies, just generally that there are so many boys getting pushed around by this one child and none of them have dealt with it – and even more disappointed that the adults are allowing it to carry on really.). We chatted a bit about it and I said I’d ring the leader and speak to her about it tomorrow. It’s tricky really, I know there is an issue with this one child and I am aware they have tried to tackle it but it all seems very ineffectual. I don’t think that particular Beaver group is well run at all and this is merely one in a series of examples of it’s failings but I do think Davies does get a lot out of that hour a week in a totally different environment to any other he’s exposed to, where he does have to be independant and someone not defined by the rest of his family like the rest of his time is. Also I think he gets lots out of it generally and often comes home having learnt something new or made something he’s proud of. We did use the opportunity to talk about telling me if he is unhappy about something, however tricky, and how I promise I will take action on what he tells me and help him sort it out. We agreed together that the best course of action is for me to contact the Beaver leader (impossible to talk to her there) but I’m not quite sure yet precisely how I’m going to tackle that conversation… He’s fine anyway, got changed and watched Doctor Who before having a long bath and heading up to bed quite happily. I do wonder if all other things being equal he wouldn’t have just gone in as normal without a backward glance to be honest, I think maybe sending Ady round with him coupled with all the hanging about was enough to let him fester on some small residue of the little boy who didn’t like being left for so long.

Meanwhile Scarlett and I had planned some pampering! She saw me in the bath with a facepack the other day and then discovered my facial sauna in the bathroom cupboard and has been mithering me for a go with it all ever since. I’d decided that a night when Davies isn’t around was probably best so we’d already got hairbands on and faces being steamed by the time they came back from Beavers. We slathered on hot mud face packs and then got in the bath and had scrubs, rubs, soaks and soaps followed by washing off the facepacks, intensive hair conditioning and a good long relax in the bath. Then out for powdering, moisturising and hair brushing and moussing. 😆 Davies was not remotely interested otherwise he would have been welcome to join in but Scarlett was in her element. She’s such a funny mix of a child who gets mud and grass stains all over the knees of her jeans leaping off high things in the garden but wants mud face packs and flowery scented powders too – definitely in touch with every single one of her sides that girl! 😆 She also enjoyed singing We Will Rock You in the bath (mud on your face, big disgrace :lol:) too.

And I think that is about all I can be bothered to type / remember about today. Constantly surprised as always by my offspring on so many levels really. Looking forward to another day with them and further surprises tomorrow :).

Ady’s been off for four days now and it was very noticeable today that he’s been with Davies and Scarlett for more prolonged time than normal ❓ I wonder if some of why I’m a bit ratty and intolerant by 7pm most evenings has sunk in at all…. 😆

Yesterday morning I worked, which went very quickly. Saturday mornings are probably the single busiest period at the library, direct contrast to Saturday afternoons which have always been pretty dead. It was my first AM shift after my hours have been changed and flew by :), I’m soooo pleased they offered me the chance to change my hours, it feels like I’ve actually had a weekend rather than a rushed Saturday morning and just one real day off.

We have these two old men who come in every single day, Monday to Saturday, to read the papers. They are waiting outside when we open at 930am and take the Times, Telegraph and Guardian to get first read of them, sit chatting over the news stories at one of the tables, photocopy all the crosswords and then head off about 10am every morning. They are a sort of cross between Waldorf and Statler from the Muppet Show and Harry Enfield’s Sad Old Gits. 😆 The Saturday assistant, Tom must have mentioned them to his nan as yesterday morning she must have arrived at the library at about 9am to be sure to be waiting outside the door first and nabbed the Telegraph before they could. There was uproar – raised voices, huffing and puffing and all sorts of elderly men style tantrums! 😆 It was ace. We all congratulated her on it before she headed off puffed with pride with Tom looking on at his Nan with renewed adoration.

I came home for lunch and I’m pretty sure we did something although quite what escapes me and then we headed round to see our friends Matt and Clare. We know Matt from B&Q days and their son A is 6 months younger than Davies so Clare and I have bonded over motherhood although we don’t have a great deal else in common. They had a daughter back in May, followed just a few weeks later by Clare’s mum dying, so they have had a very dramatic year, with Clare right in the middle of her finals to become a chiropractor. So although they only live a couple of miles away we haven’t been to see then since L was born. Clare and I have exchanged texts a few times so have kept in touch but we finally met baby L and had a proper catch up with them yesterday and it was lovely. The children fell straight into playing with each other – Davies and A always get on well whenever we meet up despite not seeing each other for very long intervals and Scarlett joined in their rather riotous game with A’s full arsenal of toy weapons :shock:. Clare and I chatted while Matt and Ady cooed over baby L (Matt’s done a lot of the early fatherhood stuff with Clare away a lot in the week for her exams) and looked at stuff online. I was berated once again for not being on facebook and finally convinced that I should give it a go, if only so Matt can bite me or something?! We had some interesting chats about parenthood and education (A is at a private school, paid for by Matt’s parents, which as Matt and Clare are not in the financial league of most of the other parents there has it’s own set of issues) which was interesting; Clare was pretty convinced by the idea of autonomy, I was less convinced by her talking about homeopathy ;). We left with plans to try and persuade them camping with us sometime next year and promises to not leave it so long next time.

We came home via Sainsburys where we put all the coppers we’d got lying around the house into their coinstar machine and paid for a fivers worth of shopping with them :).

Today has been a lazy morning with a brief burst of activity in sorting out the cupboard under the stairs. I was looking for the clothes airer and a tupperware contained big enough for the Christmas cake. Neither of them were in there but we did clear yet more crap from there which had been stashed, and another pile ready for ebaying. After lunch we headed over to Chris and Julie’s and on the way popped into a discount shop and got a new clothes airer and cake box very cheaply, which of course means both the lost items will turn up somewhere this week!

We had a lovely couple of hours with Chris and Julie. The weather was gorgeous today so the children played in the garden really happily and nicely with each other in various combinations and sometimes as a foursome, while we drank tea and chatted and laughed. They have some exciting and life changing stuff going on which was talked about a lot and we generally just enjoyed a nice easygoing afternoon while the children entertained themselves. I’d put roast lamb in to cook while we were out but had it on too high so the potatoes were cremated, so we fed the children something else for tea and I cooked some more potatoes for us. Ady and the kids watched a Ray Mears programme while I was in the bath, which kept them all captivated learning about eating fungi and cooking wild boar spit roast style.

We’ve another busy week ahead which kicks off with another film in Brighton tomorrow morning meaning we need to leave home at an unheard of hour before 9am so I guess I should get some sleep.