One word? When seven would do…

Yesterday was an early start with us leaving the house just after 8am (and yes, as far as I’m concerned that is early! I’ve done my share of being at work for 7am in years gone by, now I consider being out of bed before 8am to be extreme!). My parents pulled out of their road to follow us as we drove by and we convoyed over to where Ady works. West Sussex Growers Association were having one of their open days with lots of nurseries in the area participating by opening up their sites for the public to walk round and see inside. Ady had agreed to be onsite for the morning at Roundstone as he had done copious amounts of risk assessments prior to the event and wanted to ensure his dictats would be carried out. The nursery was operational, although some machines were not in use due to safety concerns and lots of it had been zoned off with no public access. My parents, who I don’t think have ever really grasped that Ady’s job has moved on from the Garden Centre Manager role he had at B&Q when we were first together, seemed suitably impressed that he is a senior member of management in such a huge operation and is the H&S manager for the site we were at and a further 2, equally enormous sites. I’ve seen it all before but I was still proud :). Ady gave us the whole guided tour and we ducked under fences to see the whole thing which was great for the kids too as they now have a good idea of where the plants Daddy brings home have come from and the sheer magnitude of machinery and production that goes on there. I also enjoyed catching up with one of my favourite of Ady’s colleagues ;).

We left there and my parents treated us to lunch at a pub on the way home. Sadly the lunch was crap. Mine was all but inedible so I sent it back, everyone else ate theirs but it was really poor quality – glad we weren’t paying for it! Two large glasses of wine made me more mellow than usual though and we had roast Rhonda to look forward to in the evening anyway! We came home for coffee and I sat on the floor playing with Davies and geomags and Scarlett and Polly Pockets while Ady stuffed Rhonda. My parents stayed awhile before heading off. Davies and Scarlett had a bath and then we all sat down to dinner and watched Mr Bean’s Holiday, which we thought was pretty good. Rhonda was nice too 😆

Today – I worked from 9-5, a shift I owed a colleague from when she worked my Friday shift when we were at Kessingland (pah! Kessingland!). My Mum, who had got here by the skin of her teeth on Friday morning and blamed traffic rang me at ten to nine to say she was stuck in traffic again. She lives a mile away!!! 🙄 so I had to ring work to say I’d be late too. She was here just after 9 and I was at work by 10 past but I was really pissed off with her over it. Her having the children at all seems to be made into this big production and happens so infrequently that I’d really hoped she could have made more of an effort on one of the rare occasions she does have them. Ah well.

Work was fine, quite busy and it’s so nice to feel I know what I’m doing most of the time. I’ve been in a bit of a daydream today for various reasons (all good :)) so that made it go quicker. Lucy and The Rs came in so I had a bit of a chat to them for a while and generally enjoyed being there although for some reason it felt like a long day away from D&S. I got home just after 5pm, Ady had been home since lunchtime and had fed them tea and got Davies ready for Beavers. Scarlett was in the nightdress she’s been wearing when I left and apparently had refused to get dressed all day insisting she had a cold and couldn’t possibly wear clothes. 😆 Davies’ beavers were meeting at the park today instead of the church hall and had asked for helper parents. Ady had been going to go – we’ve both been CRB checked but he tends to do Beavers as it’s nice for him to spend the time with Davies. But Davies requested I go as he’d had all afternoon with Ady and really missed me.

What a shambles the Beavers is then. The children are with only a couple of exceptions really unpleasant, wild, rude, disrespectful children. They spent the whole hour ignoring what the adults said, phyiscally laying into each other, shouting and just being really vile. As we have probably acknowledged before I don’t really do big groups of children with masses of tolerance but these kids were awful :(. First we played a game where they split into 3 groups of 3 boys and tied their scarf round their eyes as a blindold one boy at a time. The other two in the team led him to one of the many trees in the park and he got to feel it, then was led away and had his blindfold taken off and had to go and work out which tree he’d been feeling. One of the worst behaved boys there, M, was noticing all sorts of things when prompted, such as cobwebs, and numbers of little branches coming off the tree, but then suddenly lost interest and just started yelling and kicking the other boys instead. Then we walked up the hill a bit and were supposed to listen to see what we could hear and identify whether it was man-made, like traffic etc. or nature, like birds calling, wind blowing through leaves etc. You can imagine that we heard very little. Back down the hill again for a few running around games but even those degenerated into the most rowdy boys being yelled at by the Beaver leaders. They tried to play a game of chinese whispers but it was intentionally ruined by the boys deliberately changing the whisper to ‘smelly pants’ or similar each time. Oh it was dreadful! I chatted a bit to Davies and one other little boy who was really interesting and wanted to talk. We looked at the sycamore leaves and talked about why they are like helicopters, why some things like lampposts stay in one place all the time and what might happen if they didn’t.

We finished up on a big pile of woodchip which is presumably either waste from the park about to be collected, or has been delivered ready to be used somewhere in the park. The lads played on it and one of the most unpleasant children threw a load in the face of one of the other boys, causing huge amounts of tears and upset and gagging. Little git. His mum turned up, smoking her roll up, with a younger sibling in tow (no older than 3) who proceeded to join in with the chucking of woodchips while she held court boasting about her child’s bad behaviour in school and how they can’t control him either. Very sad 🙁 I asked Davies if he really enjoys it and gets anything out of it but he insists he does and I don’t think he was particularly protected by my presence but certainly doesn’t seem to get picked on by the rough boys, neither does he seem to participate. Beaver leader is now added to my fantasy list of jobs to wish on people I hate though, a far cry from the organised calm and no shouting environment at Badgers each week.

Davies and I whizzed over to Asda after Beavers for various bits and pieces including an item from this years Tickled Pink range (clothes sold for breast cancer charities, which I always buy something from each year). This year I got a t shirt for Ady and a set of pjs / lounging clothes for me instead of a top as I now have about 5 of them in my wardrobe so thought pjs would get more use for slobbing around the house in. We’ve watched a prettty good film tonight which even Ady stayed up to see and now it really is very late so I’m off to bed.

Today, after the chicken drama detailed in the post below I made cheese scones and the children made birthday cards for Jack and Maisie. Scarlett drew a picture of Spirit the horse for Maisie’s and Davies drew a collection of dinosaurs for Jack’s. Tarly was able to write all the letters in ‘Maisie’ with me just telling her the names of the letters – A, I, S and E are all in her name, she know’s M from Mummy (and McDonalds :oops:) and I from ‘Davies’. Davies can now very rapidly write any letters I call out to him and spelt ‘to’ ‘happy’ and ‘love’ by himself. Once we’d done the ‘To Jack’ and ‘To Maisie’ bits inside they both just wrote ‘happy birthday, love’ and their own name followed by the cards being passed round the rest of us to write our names in. I was really surprised (although I shouldn’t be really, if I didn’t think it would work then I shouldn’t be doing autonomy!) that Scarlett knew most of the letters when I called them out and the ones she didn’t Davies showed her his and she copied those. Her writing is actually very neat, she can do as tidy and small as Davies without much effort. Davies enjoys writing but he likes to copy, it’s rare he will want to go to the effort of working out how to spell something, I guess the day it all clicks and stops being ‘an effort’ will be the day he suddenly starts doing it :).

We all got in the car and headed over to Lewes to collect Ali (with debate on the way about which of her two houses that would be from :)) and then Ady and the children dropped Ali and I (and the cheese scones) off at our Writers Retreat day. It’s the third one I have attended (thank you Ali 🙂 xx) and I can really feel progress being made. I am getting more able to cast off my life and focus on writing, while accepting that huge chunks of whatever I write will be autobiographical and working with that rather than against it. I got some great inspiration for working with that in new ways and the exercises pulled together lots of thinking I’ve been doing anyway. It’s a really supportive, safe environment where I feel able to cast out ideas and get honest, unbiased feedback without people’s personal feelings clouding their responses. There were three people (plus Ali of course) there that had been at previous ones – including the teacher and one new attendee who was a very interesting person too, so lots of chatting was done aswell as writing. I did a piece of writing at the end which I was pleased with and will probably work on some more and got some positive, constructive feedback on that too which was great. 🙂

Ady and the children picked us up, we dropped Ali home (at a different house to the one we’d collected her from :)) and came home via Asda for a few bits for dinner. Some X factor watching, late dinner for the children followed by even later dinner for us.

Ady, Davies and Scarlett had been to Jack and Maisie’s fifth birthday party over at their house today. Ady has pictures but his camera battery is flat so I can’t download them tonight but they had a good time apparently. It feels odd that they all got on with something without me but Ady said all the other party attendees were most envious of me being at a writing day :).

And now, because it’s been a fairly emotionally draining day, even if most of it has been positive, I’m off to bed!

A relaxed start to the day with Davies playing with some blocks while Scarlett put all sorts of clips and bows in my hair and we all watched cbbc together. Then we had a last minute rush to get out of the house on time to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie at the PYO farm. I wrote down a thank you note for Davies to copy while I hung some washing out and Scarlett tidied up. We were late but so were they and we pulled into the carpark right behind them.

The PYO farm we use is a pretty big one, open right through from June to October with a massive variety of fruit and vegetables available through the seasons. The weather has been pretty cold with showers of rain today so we pretty much had the place to ourselves and the tractor ran just for us, which delighted the children 🙂

We picked apples, sweetcorn and Julie got a big bag of butternut squash which the kids helped to pick. We also found a marrow that had already been picked. I was slightly fretful that Davies may decide to get all emotionally attached to one of them but he seemed perfectly capable of seeing them as just vegetables today after last night’s sweet potato debacle, so that was a relief.

Further tractor riding and then we went on to the local gardens which is just down the road and we’ve not been to for ages but is always good for the children to run around and use up some energy. By now the weather was really not very nice, but Highdown is fairly sheltered which made it even more ideal.

There were some children’s trail sheets which presumably was a school summer holidays activity and led you round the gardens spotting letetrs A-J with information about the places the letters were hidden along with little mini-quests too. When we arrived I went off to use the loos there and Davies tutted and said ‘you always need the loo when we come here’, to which I replied ‘yes, I just have this Pavlovian reflex to the place in my bladder!’ which of course then needed full explanation about dogs, saliva, bells and hunger, all infront of a very interested gaggle of elderly people walking up an appetite before having lunch in the tea rooms there – education everywhere! 😆

So we trekked round finding the alphabet clues and spotting things like lily pads, dragonflies, water snails, the tree planted by Queen Mary and bamboo – D and S delighted to both spot the bamboo and tell us all that pandas eat bamboo before we’d even identified it as bamboo eaten by pandas on the sheets :). We ended up in an area with some huge trees that the children can go inside the shade of as a ‘camp’ with conveniently located benches for grown ups so we sat there awhile chatting while the children played and then Scarlett took a tumble and hurt her leg, the rest of us were getting hungry and the rain was setting in so we decided it was home time.

We came home for crumpets for lunch, I drank about four cups of tea and the children played together all afternoon. Scarlett and I made some flapjacks and then they had an early tea of sausage and mash followed by lots of flapjacks :). It all feels very much like the summer was a long time ago here, which I am quite happy about as I love Autumn and being out and about walking today made me look forward to our walks in the woods and wet and windy seaside walks to come. Way back last year I liked the idea of some sort of nature volunteering as a family and I’ve been looking into that again. It seems that it is mostly for secondary school age children upwards that bigger organisations are looking for volunteers but I’m sure we can find somewhere where we can get involved in some sort of outside in nature type stuff.

I’ve got firefox and have been using sage but actually it seems crap lately, struggling with feeds from some blogs and simply not picking up new posts on others. Anyone got any recommendations of anything better? That’s very easy to use 🙂

Had a really good morning at work; it was four of us there, Yvonne (Lancing Library’s boss), Frankie (my favourite workmate), Sarah (the stereotypical library worker) and me. Lots of laughs and lots of catching up as I’ve not seen any of them for a while as they all happened to be on annual leave for the week before I was off last week so plenty to talk about. Frankie – who is the world’s nosiest co-worker – had been checking out the most recent batch of books coming in for me about self-sufficiency, self building and eco houses and so we chatted about that for a while and I showed her the pictures of Simon Dale’s house and explained about having emailed to offer our building help next spring / summer at the latest project. She really surprised me by saying her and her husband are hankering after some lifestyle changes at the moment too and feeling life is too short to work to pay a mortgage and that be your biggest achievement. Her two older children (she has four) are by her first husband though so she needs to stay fairly local but they’ve looked into buying land and self building. She reassured me that I hadn’t got her totally wrong by saying the Simon Dale house looked nice but she thought it might be home to too many spiders though :lol:.

I spent some time on the enquiry desk and joined someone to the library, searched for films made based on Danielle Steel books and dealt with someone who’s new puppy had chewed up a crime novel. I also did an online survey of West Sussex County Council workers about our workplaces and how valued we feel. Ady called in at about 1130am as he’d gone out without a front door key and the morning went really quickly. At 1pm just as we were about to close we had a sudden flurry of people with lengthy reasons for visiting though including a man with twins who both had their legs crossed and desperate looks on their faces asking for the loo, a bloke with pages and pages of photocopying, someone bringing back a book and taking out another three and then the phone rang with someone wanting to renew books that were already 2 weeks overdue with loads of fines and then trying to work out whether it would be cheaper to renew a dvd and pay for another week’s hire charge or just pay the fines for a few more days. And all this happened after we’d closed all but one computer down so we were dealing with it all falling over each other and writing things down on scraps of paper :roll:.

I got home and Ady dashed back out again to do some more stores. I made some lunch for me, which the children pinched most of off me – they were eating weetabix with milk and sugar (sugar!!! I never add sugar to anything except baking, don’t want them to start that idea!) for lunch :roll:. Scarlett has gotten into playing with the pretend food this week so there were various plates of odd combinations of plastic foodstuff on plastic plates scattered round and the teapot filled with water which she was pouring into plastic teacups and bowls. Davies was playing with his Wallace and Gromit playhouses. I asked him if he wanted to paint his dalek shakermaker and he tried to mix up gold according to the key on the box (red and yellow? yep, it merely made orange) but failed so we took it outside and sprayed it with the gold paint I’d used on the papier mache one then he added black detail and scratches to make a damaged Dalek Thay.

I listed a couple more bits on ebay and persuaded the children to stick one of the growing pile of dvds from work on so I can try and take some back. They chose The Lasy Mimzy which seemed a bit slow to start but during the middle captured all of our attention and we ended up all cuddled up together watching it which was nice. They were both quite clingy this afternoon, I don’t think they’d behaved particularly well for Ady this morning as I’m sure their proclamations of how much they’d missed me were spurred on by something, which probably means he’d been cross with them. After late dinners the last two nights and with Badgers an even later finish I fed them an early tea (Tarly had soup, how Autumnal is that? :)) and Ady arrived home in time to stay with Tarly who I believe had a long solitary bath while I took Davies to Badgers.

In the car we had a really interesting conversation about water. Davies wanted to know how water from pipes underground travels up into our taps so we talked about pressure and energy transferance, with him showing a really good understanding of the concept. I explained that a general term for the sort of stuff we were talking about was science and a slightly more specific one was physics although there was more to it than simply energy and movement. Then we talked about inanimate and animate objects, with some examples and how energy can be transfered to inanimate objects from something else to make them move although they can’t move in their own right. Then we got onto tides on the sea, gravity, the moon and all sorts of other stuff – it was a really good conversation with him articulating stuff in a really good way, demonstrating he really understood stuff we’ve talked about before. We were slightly early for Badgers so sat chatting in the car watching one of the helpers in the window talking on her mobile phone. I asked Davies what her name was and he said he didn’t know. The other two are called Julie and Jan so I said she probably was called something beginning with J to keep the pattern and decided Jemima would suit her. Davies thought this was hilarious and dared me to call her Jemima, so when I dropped him off I did indeed call out ‘bye Davies, bye Jemima’ which left him giggling (and her no doubt wondering just what sort of a loon that Davies’ mummy is! :lol:). I sat in the car and read over half of a book on feminism which was interesting, if a bit essay like with lots of referencing other things. I remember my sociology essays being criticised for being too colloquial and not scientific enough so clearly that’s a bias I have towards a certain way and prefer to read as well as write like. I understand why that’s tricky in social sciences though, it’s just clearly not how I process information.

I collected Davies who still seemed in good spirits and we headed to Sainsburys where I needed a couple of things for dinner tonight – potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots and bacon, and some milk and catfood. I had a fiver in my pocket which I could do with keeping as we’re meeting Julie, Jack and Maisie at PYO tomorrow and had checked the bank account to see there was £11 in the account so thought I’d use my debit card to pay. Davies took a fancy to a skinny sweet potato (I’d selected a fat one) and managed to sneak it round to the milk before I realised he still had it, so we walked back round for him to put it back. There followed a comedy sketch with him being sneaky about keeping it and me saying ‘put the sweet potato down, move slowly away from the sweet potato, keep your hands where I can see them’ and him playing along while a couple of people smiled at us. Davies then managed to wedge it under his chin so he could indeed keep his hands up but when I said ‘now seriously, come on, put it down and lets get the rest of our shopping’ he started to cry 😯 real, drippy down his nose tears and great proper sobs. 🙁 No idea at all where that came from but he managed to pull himself together a couple of times and then dissolved again :roll:. I couldn’t quite believe that the child I was having such intelligent conversations with barely an hour beforehand was now crying over what even could correctly identify as an inanimate object but he was inconsolable. I managed to pack with one hand while holding a small child dressed as in his Badger uniform with a very peaked cap that kept poking me in the face while the checkout girl wanted to tell me all about her niece. Whilst in the queue I’d been explaining that I didn’t have money to buy the sweet potato and that crying and making a fuss is never going to work as a way to get things. I explained that I had a list of things I wanted but there was no point in standing in Sainsburys and crying over them as that behaviour wouldn’t get me them. Davies recovered enough to ask for my list and so I said it would start with a bigger house to which he said ‘well they don’t sell them in Sainsburys so there would be no point, not like they sell sweet potatoes (lower lip quiver)’ so I said ‘okay then, I wouldn’t stand in an estate agents where they do sell bigger houses and cry and expect them to say ‘Oh ok, you can have one, just stop crying’. The checkout girl had found this exchange amusing and wanted to share with me the funny things her niece says. And then my card got declined :(. So I left the shopping and said I’d pop to the cash point assuming it was some problem with the card as it’s a new replacement one. And I know I have nearly £11 in there as I checked earlier and the bill is only £7. So I take my still weeping child to the cashpoint and discover that although there is £11 in there £6 of it is an uncleared cheque. Argh.

At that point I decided to take Davies home where he could regale Ady with tales of woe regarding the sweet potato so I dropped him off home and unable to face the embarrasment of returning to Sainsburys (maybe I should have tried the crying thing and seen if they just gave me the shopping actually, she seemed to like the idea) I went to go to one of the two little supermarkets in Lancing. The railway crossing gates were down so I drove to the one this side of the gates, selected my vegetables and realised they had no bacon. So put the veg back and waited for the gates to open before going to the other supermarket, getting all I needed, managing to keep it under the amount of cleared funds in the bank so I could use the card, sat and waited for the gates to open again and finally got home. And you know what? I changed my mind altogether about the sweet potatoes and we didn’t have any, fat or thin.

Ady decided to take both children to work with him this morning to be sure of being back for Badgers later. Ady taking one or both children off was always part of the MasterPlan moving forward. We like the idea that they get a good idea of what our jobs involve (and they both reckon they can already do mine, knowing how to discharge and issue books with the beeping trigger gun although putting books back on shelves seems to be beyond them at home so I’m not sure they’re ready to move up to doing that professionally just yet 😉 ), hopefully see us getting something out of what we both do aside from just payment and of course out there in the Big Wide World there are Educational Opportunities Around Every Corner. Particularly in Ady’s which involves lots of driving, SatNav assistance, geography, different cultures (he drives through London a lot, it’s very different to looking out of car windows in Sussex looking out of them in London). The places Ady drives to and the reasons for driving there are pretty varied too with Health & Safety, QVC Superstardom, Merchandising, Selling and Going Round To Kick Some Retail Ass all up there on his job spec in pretty equal measures.

So they were off, left at 8am, which left me in an empty house with a whole 45 minutes before I need to leave for work. So I’ve come here to blog, to ward off crazy notions of dreadful things that might happen to wipe out my whole family when they are off somewhere without me, I’ve chatted to the chickens a bit, drunk some tea and now I think I’ll head off to work, where I will arrive a good ten minutes earlier than normal – and therefore a good five minutes before I am even supposed to be there (I always scramble in at the last minute, sitting in a staff room before I have to be at work seems mental when I could be home a few minutes longer waving to children out of windows or kissing them goodbye one last time). It seems very odd not to be pulling a clinging child off my leg or answer last minute requests for cereal or be taking a front door key off my keyring to give someone, or, or something so I’m just going to do that here instead if you don’t mind. See you all later, have a good morning, be good, love you, bye!

What a blah day today was 🙁 I got loads done – sorted out piles of washing (everything in the house is clean now, it all just needs putting away) – realised today it was too cold on the concrete patio to be pegging out washing in bare feet – oh the season is achangin’. And I listed 35 items on ebay – piles of outgrown clothes from D&S’s bedrooms. There is more, oh so much more to list but that’s a good start. Am rather pleased with myself for marketing a load of S’s summer dresses as ‘party dresses’ which will hopefully sell for the Christmas season – or maybe people will see through my cunning marketing ploy and not bid for them :lol:. We’d planned to do a car boot sale this month but all our weekends filled up so I’m determined to ebay or freecycle all our junk. Realised that there are plenty of smaller than D&S children coming to NicCamps in November so will take any unsold bits there for first grabs from friends and freecycle anything left after that. We’ve got a pushchair and 2 Britax carseats cluttering up a large area in the back of our Narniaesque wardrobes which I want to get rid of too and several bin bags full of clothes, including lots of coats which should sell well, in the garage.

So I mostly ebayed and did various other bits on line. The whole photo of the plane crash thing has gone quiet now. We are expecting two payments for use of the photos which will go straight to RAFA. The whole episode has just been horrible, from a personal family point of view to the fact someone died in the first place. I think I’ve been in delayed shock from the whole thing today as I’ve been on the verge of tears most of the day and very short and snappy with the children, feeling like I’ve had some sort of personal loss. Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on the whole thing any longer and am very aware that whatever the effects have been on me and mine it is nothing compared to the grief the pilots family will be feeling so I’ll shut up about it now.

Davies and Scarlett mostly occupied themselves. They played with Betty Spaghetty (although amusingly they were making her play out a Doctor Who game :lol:), looked at a couple of educational toys catalogues that arrived in the post this morning, did some drawing, played with foam blocks, danced to Crazy Frog music, sat and politely pretended to be interested when I made them sit through Queen’s Greatest Hits so they could see quite what it is about the Crazy Frog version of ‘We are the champions’ that makes me wince (although I did feel like a real proper grown up moaning about them having ‘ruined a great original’ – I like Queen) and we looked up Freddy Mercury on wikipedia and talked about how old he was when he died, how long ago it was (1991, can you believe that?! :shock:), what illness he had (somehow Aids has come up before with Davies, not sure if it was in relation to Freddy Mercury or someone else famous now but he remembered my previous explanation) and how old he’d have been now. They played Tomb of Doom and I helped Davies made a dalek shaker maker. He has got to take in cardboard boxes to Badgers tomorrow as they are making 3d models of their bedrooms so I told him he needs to make a model dalek just like in his bedroom at home (bet that gets them talking at Badgers, although of course two of them were at the party so have already seen it!) and we decided the Shakermaker one would be ideal. We’ve also been singing this song lots as seen on youtube (it’s just soo catchy!). They played outside for a while too but it was just too cold to stay out for long, which scuppered my plan of a walk really too as it just wasn’t appealing enough to persuade me to wrap up.

Freddie the saved from the jaws of the fox chicken seems ok, a bit subdued and not totally ‘right’ though so I wonder if s/he sustained injuries we can’t see, or whether it’s just in shock. Will see how it fares over the next few days. We’ve shut them away more securely tonight so hopefully if the fox does return it will just keep walking tonight.

I took Davies to his swimming lesson tonight. He tried really hard but is easily the least able in the group I would say, he really concentrates and does what he’s told but his body just doesn’t seem to be designed for swimming! He is utterly confident at being in the water though so at least that is not holding him back. I am sure that more practise would help so it’s something we really must try and build in for him to get but needs to be one to one, so either leaving Scarlett at home with one of us, or bringing her with us and both Ady and I going. Will have to see what we can sort out. I have total sympathy with him though, I remember being told to concentrate on the same ceiling as he is looking at while trying to swim on his back 20 odd years ago and finding it every bit as impossible as he seems to. He looks forward to the lesson each week though and I guess some progress is being made even if it feels very slow. Dinner for the children seems to get later all the time with it being really tough feeding them tea before Beavers, Badgers and Swimming three nights of the week so I can see them edging closer to eating with us and us bringing our dinner times forward. Not sure how that would work out in practise but it’s something to think about in the not too distant future.

Back to work tomorrow which I’m rather looking forward to, I missed being there last week and Ady is home with D&S (I’m only working the morning) and debating whether to take them both off to work with him in the morning so he’s back for Badgers or just take Scarlett in the afternoon and then it doesn’t matter if they’re back for Badgers. It’s all very complicated working round these early evening clubs and stuff.

I emailed David Albert, the author of And The Skylark Sings With Me to let him know how much I’d gotten out of reading his book and to thank him for his inspirational, challenging and thought provoking read. I had an email back from him today to thank me for my message, to let me know that his older daughter is now 19 and about to graduate from university, his younger daughter is 17 and about to head off to uni and he sent me a couple of attachments – one a photo of his younger daughter, aged 16, in Egypt and a piece of writing about where they are now in their life journey.

I won’t recreate it here, but if anyone has read the book or is interested I’ll happily email it to you. What an amazing, inspiring family they are. 🙂

We have this chicken called Freddie, s/he is big and extremely noisy.

Last night at about 1am Ady woke me to tell me there was a fox circling the chicken run – he’d heard a big commotion out there and looked out the window to see it there pacing up and down but couldn’t find anything to put on to go there (‘local man involved in tragedy photo controversy arrested for indecent exposure involving poultry – read all about it!’). By the time he’d dragged a dressing gown on and got outside there had been squawking and thudding and Freddie was lying on it’s back softly clucking round the side while the fox went back for the next one.

Ady and the fox eyed each other up before the fox ran straight into a bit of fence (very dented upon inspection this morning) before managing to scramble up a wall and escape. Ady picked Freddie up, fully expecting him/her to be very mauled and at death’s door and brought it inside. I’d arrived downstairs by this time (although without contact lenses so could only really make out a lump of feathers) but after some stroking and a bit of an inspection up Freddie hopped, clucked a bit, wandered round the lounge looking like it remembered being there but had always pictured it as much larger 😆 before Ady decided it should probably go back out to it’s coop again.

He had a quick look around the garden incase more had been dragged out of the coop already but none were apparent so we went back to bed. This morning they are all present and correct and Freddie seems fine. We’ll do a bit more fox proofing to the run today as I imagine the fox will be back again. It’s all go here.

When I was little my Mum used to buy presents for Frazer and I at Christmas and birthdays and wrap them up and pretend they were from our Grandad – her Dad, Frank. This was because from being an unreliable and rather crap father to her he had continued in a similar vein and was an unreliable and rather crap grandad to us. We weren’t harmed by this – a grandparent is not usually as essential a person to a child as a parent (I say not usually because of course there are plenty of cases where this is not true, but we didn’t feel hard done by as a result of not having him around being a runner for number one grandfather awards) but my Mum struggled with it and tried to compensate for it. He did turn up himself occassionally, always with armfuls of chocolate bars he’d stopped at the nearby sweet shop to buy and as I have later learnt, because he wanted something from my parents but we always called him ‘Frank’ and he was a bit of a curiosity really, and usually welcome because of the chocolate ;).

Anyway, when I was six ‘Frank’ gave me a skipping rope for my birthday. It was green handled and the handles had something in them that made them rattle. It was shiny, unlike any other skipping rope I’d seen any of my friends with and I can picture it to this day. This is back in the day when children were allowed to bring skipping ropes to school, you know for skipping with in the playground. Back before health and safety would forbid it incase of incidents of people getting sued for skipping related accidents, let alone the potential for six year olds to strangle each other or tie up their teacher and go looting the tuck shops in inner city schools! So I took it to school with me. At breaktime I skipped with it – I have a clear mental image of me in my long white socks skipping with my rattly handled skipping rope. I put it in the corridor in my bag on my peg and when I went out at lunchtime it wasn’t there anymore.

I don’t recall all the events after that. Presumably I reported it lost to a teacher or my Mum or someone. What I do very clearly remember is that the next day someone else was playing with a remarkably similar green rattle handled skipping rope in the playground. I’m not sure if I asked them, or my Mum did, or if a teacher did but I recall the child insisting it was theirs. I’m not sure how it got ironed out but I recall the skipping rope was returned to me and the ‘perp’ had to stand up in assembly and apologise. Bizarely I don’t recall the name of the child, or even what they looked like, but I do still remember very vividly that knowledge that someone had something of mine and wasn’t going to give it back easily.

Today at MM we had lots of new faces, possibly too many in some ways as it rather unbalanced the dynamic, although I am enjoying feeling like a real member there, someone who belongs and can have a shared ‘past’ with other members even if it’s just a ‘do you remember back in June when we did X?’. It’s a fairly diverse group of people but in the last week I’ve been struck by how much online debates between members of the egroup have really felt like a community. It’s nice. 🙂 We had a bit of a ‘session’ today where we talked a bit about the group and how it works to the newcommers, answered some questions and chatted about stuff we’d like to do moving forward. I had a couple of chats with 3 of the new ‘mums’ and a couple of chats with other people too which was nice, I like getting to know people below the surface layer and finding out more about who they are as individual people as well as parents who home educated their children – and there are some interesting people at MMs. :).

About halfway through Davies flew into the main room with a barely controlled air of despair about him, which immediately was unleashed as soon as he threw himself on me with heaving sobs. He had lost his sonic screwdriver :(. We went outside and cast about for it with me assuring him it would be there ‘somewhere’ and couldn’t possibly have gone anywhere. He was playing a game where he would throw himself to the ground and then his gaggle of girl mates would try and revive him – he had quite a posse of them bringing him flowers and trying to ‘make him happy’ (ooh er, should probably deal with that – if only for their future expectations of men’s wants :lol:) in the words of one of them. So I assumed it had fallen out of his pocket during one of his dramatic falls to the ground. It was not immediately visible so I enlisted the help of a couple of nearby parents and children and M (another mum) and I chanced upon one of the new lads brandishing a sonic screwdriver. Which he insisted he’d bought from the charity shop next door. 🙁

It was all sorted out, thanks to a very on the ball mother who dealt with the whole issue with tact and understanding for her own son while ensuring Davies and I were both placated (not that it took much, the return of the screwdriver was more than sufficient) and chased it up with me afterwards out of earshot of all the children. I was very admiring of her parenting and general conduct over the whole issue and made sure to tell her so. But for those few moments when it was fairly apparent that the screwdriver he was holding was the one Davies had unwrapped as a birthday gift barely a week before and we were all pretty powerless to do anything about it was a flash back moment for sure to my own seven year old self and that rattly green handled skipping rope. Although I should probably clarify very clearly that it had not been taken from Davies so was not alike in that respect.

We dropped Ali and Freya home and came home to chase chickens round the garden for a while. We’re pretty sure we have a crower in the crowd, which given they all look so bloody alike would mean that they are all potential crowers and not potential layers which is a bit of a bugger. We’ve spoken to the children at length about this prospect and I think we are all agreed that we eat the cockerels. They (and infact I) don’t want to see the process from clucking to cooking but Ady is capable of that side of things if needs be. If we do have a cockerdoodledoo then I think it had very limited mornings of crowing before it says goodbye as I so don’t want to piss our neighbours off with something we’re not keeping anyway. We’ll have to see what developes over the next week or so. Davies is slightly apprehensive about them now, Ady has running daily battles with Rhonda, they all seem scared of me and run whenever I get close unless I’ve got food in which case maximum respect is offered. Scarlett is so the boss of those chickens though – she totally ‘rules the roost’ and is able to pick them up, berate them, chase them all in for the night and everything. She is the chicken whisperer :lol:.

Once home I was able to give full attention to the issue Chris had alerted me to of Ady’s photos splashed all over the internet credited with someone else’s name. Now Ady and I had agonised over the whole sending to the bbc / flickring photos in the first place. Possibly in the cold light of day we might have made different decisions about what we did with photos but taking them in the first place had been at the urging of a police officer, our first port of call was to contact the police to say we had photos (which they have been in touch with us over today to say air investigation units will be touch and could we please keep the photos safe for their inspection) and then we responded to the bbc call for photos before flickring them. The motivation behind flickring was the same as me twittering to say ‘omg a plane has just come down in the field next to us’ – the same reason I blog or talk to people, it’s a natural human reaction to share experiences, to talk about them, to involve others for their reassurance, feedback, comfort, empathy, whatever. I can’t really defend it or justify it but can say hand on heart there was no ulterior motive or cold heartedness going on, just an overwhelming urge to share and talk about what we’d experienced.

So today we learnt that photos had been taken off our flickr stream, almost immediately, and touted round various places by a freelance photographer, as his own work, for money. So far our local paper and Sky news have removed the credit to the imposter and I have emailed a couple of other places. It would appear that the person in question is one of life’s less nice individuals with a bit of a history of not so pleasant doings. This is one of those unhappy situations where there are no winners, it is off the back of a tragic accident where someone died, our own family’s sad experience of being on hand to record it and perhaps foolishly sharing what we’d seen only for someone else to try and profiteer from it. I know I can be naiive about just how sick and horrible people can be but this has really brought home to me the depths some people will stoop to to make money. We’re being sent a fee from the local paper for the photos – which will go straight to the RAFA charity which Shoreham Air show runs in aid of so there is at least some glimmer of a positive act in all this but the whole episode has been turned from a tragic loss of human life to a seedy example of the twisted side of specific human’s lives.

On more cheerier notes – because sometime over the last three days we have managed to laugh and smile, honest, Davies had a great time at Beavers tonight. They made youghurt pot bird seed feeders and bird spotting charts. We hung the bird feeder straight up on the tree in the garden. I think it was the first time I’d been properly personally spoken to by the Beaver leader who made a point of seeking me out to tell me what a great time Davies had had there today. Next week is a meet up at the local park for them which Ady is going to go along and attend at, Davies seems really pleased to be back into his groups routine although he never really says a lot about what goes on he is always hailed by the other lads coming and going and clearly gets something out of it.

Tomorrow is a rare quiet day at home for us, with just swimming lessons in the evening. We still have plenty of birthday gifts to fully explore, I have mountains of laundry and other home-based stuff to be getting on with and if the weather is ok (and maybe even if it isn’t) I think we might head out for a walk somewhere too. Ady had a 15 hour day today visiting Glee leaving before 6am and not getting back til nearly 9pm which he could probably have done without. Hoping for a less eventful rest of the week really.

We popped along to the car boot sale this morning. A got a few bits, some t shirts for Davies, couple of videos and a Wallace and Gromit cd rom with some games on it, but it was a very quiet week there and rain threatened all morning.

Once home I made popcorn and we all had that for lunch before Ady and the children all wandered outside. I had felt like I should do *something* but failed utterly to do anything other than sit infront of the laptop. Davies played his W&G games and then my parents turned up on their way home from a day out for an hour or so.

Davies and Scarlett had a bath with the gellibaff (thanks again for that Helen 😉 – and your ‘dealer’!) – what curious stuff that is, a bit like the crystals you get when a disposable nappy tears open were left around but the kids had a great time with it, although the claims on the box of it dissolving away were a bit ambitious – I had to shower them both down before they got out of the bath as they were still totally gellied up 😆

My parents left, we had roast dinner (Davies is soo adventurous with his eating nowadays, I really must make more of an effort to give him different stuff. Scarlett remains true to form and fills her yorkshire puddings with mashed potato, turns her nose up at carrots that are cooked ‘I only like them RAW’ and nibbled the tiniest bit of lamb before declaring she didn’t like it 🙄 that child is a walking anti-Atkins advert with her carbolicious eating habits), the children went to bed. Tomorrow is Monday again already and back into the rounds of various clubs and commitments – just looked through my diary and I don’t think we have a free weekend now until well into November so I guess we won’t be testing that Outwell out this year after all (unless the seasons really do go crazy) but we’ve been looking at this website this afternoon and I’m going to contact them about the possibility of staying there to help build with children around for next year so plenty of exciting times to look forward to. 🙂

It’s been a funny few weeks. Lots going on with lots of it being the sorts of things which throw me off into periods of introspection, questionning, challenging and reevaluating. I’ve been involved in a long and wearying online debate about whether Home Education is indeed a lifestyle choice or simply an educational alternative; I’ve had a few real life chats with people – a couple of whom are childless and therefore have no corner to defend and both asked intelligent questions and saw many positives without me having to spell them out to them; equally I’ve had a couple of real life conversations with people who either have children at school or are teachers themselves so are coming at the debate from an immediate defensive point of view (as I imagine I was too). I’ve been super-sensitive too to lots of generalisations which have been winding me up – more on that later. We are currently debating and thinking and talking through all sorts of life choices and future plans and I’m suddenly more aware than ever of the ‘forever-ness’ our choices have consequences and effects on not just us, but our children too. They have dreams and ideals and it feels only right to be taking their opinions into consideration at this time when we are likely laying down foundations for our lives, maybe for the rest of our lives. I finished that book I’ve been talking about a lot ‘And The Skylark Sings With Me’ and that has given me acres of thought fodder, plenty of which I’m still ploughing through even though I’ve closed the last page on the book. And finally in a week when one of my children would have been starting school and the other turned seven I suddenly feel like parenting has stepped up a gear; in my own, in theirs and in other people’s eyes.

I’ve often said that I don’t much care what other people think of me. There are very few choices or actions I’ve made in my life that I am not happy enough with to defend and justify and rarely, if ever, do I feel the need to do that anyway. I’ve always been of the opinion that you should accept people for who they are and if being around them has a positive effect on you then you should be around them more and if their company brings out negatives in you then you should avoid them. I expect other people to follow the same discipline with regard to me and that if there are things I do, say, look like, act like or stand for that irritate or annoy them to avoid me and not get irritated or annoyed rather than feel the need to let me know about it. Until it comes to my children that is. Then I become hyper-senstive to everything that is said, thought or implied about them. I want to defend them, protect them and change any bad thoughts people have about them. This is not a reaction to anyone saying anything bad about Davies or Scarlett by the way, simply me doing lots of thinking.

One of my big things about parenthood is that I wanted to celebrate my children as individuals; as the people they are rather than what I, or others, expect them to be. To give them the freedom to grow into their potential, to be happy and fulfilled adults. To get what they want out of live and to spend their time doing things that they love. That is something I have strived for as an adult, and despite some stumbles and occassional wrong turnings along the way, most days I would say I achieve that. I can’t think of anyone I would rather share my life with than the friends and family I currently do. I would not have made any different choices in pretty much any areas and while we are not currently on track for where we’d like to be we are on track for making the next lot of plans to get there. I am proud of being different to ‘most’ people, of treading our own path, of looking at life through different eyes and deciding what is important to us and chasing that dream rather than sticking with one track and following it blindly through life, only to reach the other end and realise that it hadn’t been at all what you wanted after all. I hear too many older people – my own parents included muttering about ‘if I had my time over again…’ and a list of all the things they would and wouldn’t do, they wish they had seen and been and way too many if only’s. I think a lot of that setting us on a certain path takes place in childhood, with the expectations put on us by our parents, our peers, our schooling. I hope to allow Davies and Scarlett the freedom to have never had these shackles in the first place rather than have to break free of them along the way.

The veering away from deciding on their behalf what is important for them is a very big part of why we Home Educate, why we do it in an autonomous manner and why we have not pushed reading, writing, languages, musical instruments and many of the other things which sometimes get asked of me when I describe our educational approach. I have no idea whether this is right or wrong really. Most of the time I believe it to be right. I know that the things they do focus on and have passion for are not necessarily the areas that we have had a bias towards. I knew nothing about dinosaurs, film making or indeed many of the things that my children hold near encyclopedic knowledge on. But I have managed to answer questions, research and facilitate furthering their and my own knowledge, sort out field trips or find others who do know answers for them. There are things which I can see they have taken on as a result of direct exposure to them from me, but there are others which I couldn’t pinpoint their initial spark of interest in. Ironically in following Davies along his path so far I have rediscovered many lost by the wayside passions of my own such as art but I can’t think of anything they have wanted to know more about and I’ve not managed to help them in their quests. I imagine this will become more frequent in years to come and I look forward to the myriad of things they will drag me along with them to experience as we go.

But as a result of holding my lifestyle and choices up for scrutiny rather too many times in the last couple of weeks and not always articulating myself very clearly, or being tired, or defensive, or busy or simply not in the mood I have come away from a few conversations feeling a twinge of uncertainty, a glimmer of worry or simply not quite so brave or convinced or confident as normal of our choices. Ive long been aware that this is a big choice I’m making for Davies and Scarlett – first to Home Educate in the first place – to choose not to use school. This marks them out as different – for life. Likely one of the first pieces of personal information they will give about themselves to new people they meet will be that they were Home Educated and the older they get the more common this will get – already at least once a week or so Davies deals with this question, he is known at Badgers and Beavers as ‘the one who doesn’t go to school’. Will they grow to resent that choice made for them? I know the choice will be theirs to attend school in the future if they decide they want to but watching the children gathered at Davies’ party and later at my house and then comparing them to the children at the party who do go to school, and indeed when I watch the children at Badgers or Beavers or the park I am often struck by some sort of inate difference between Home Ed and schooled kids. This shouldn’t be surprising given how much of an influence I believe school has on a child and of course I perceive this difference to be positive, wonderful, proof of the pudding. But will my children? Will society?

Something that resonated with me very much in the Skylark book was a chapter about ‘typical children’ and how there is no such thing. In just the way there is no typical adult or even human, there is no such creature as the typical child who’s needs can be broadly met with a general provision. I struggle daily with some show of prejudice or stereotypying of people by gender or age – I have a real issue with phrases such as ‘being a boy’ or ‘what boys do’. I only have experience of one son but that is sufficient to tell me that he alone disproves many sweeping statements of what boys are like. I have seen more boisterousness, aggression, desire for rough play and all of the ‘slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails’ type nonsense demonstrated by my own daughter than by my son, let alone the daughters of friends. Similarly while Scarlett may well fit neatly into the pink and sparkly princess mould that she was ‘born to fill’ she also strikes out daily in her own one child feminist crusade blasting myths about what little girls are supposed to do and like and be.

I also get irritated by ‘terrible twos’ and other such age-specific categorisations of behaviour. I was shocked when my second child showed what were deemed to be ‘classic examples of what all two year olds do’ because my first two year old had never done so. He never acted like a 3 year old, 4 year old, 5 year old or 6 year old very often either. He always acted like Davies though. And when Scarlett is being difficult I don’t think for one minute it’s because she’s four, I think it’s because she’s Scarlett and this is her way of acting or reacting to what’s going on around her. I think writing it off as merely down to age or gender is doing that individual a great disservice. It may have a bearing on it, just the same as my hormones may make me react with less patience or indeed rational behaviour towards something the day before my period starts but that doesn’t excuse or explain it 100%. I have always loathed the intimation that I have a temper because of my hair colour; as though it undermines what ever it is that has caused my loss of temper and I try very hard not to do the same dismissing of my children’s emotions or characters by writing them off as merely down to them being a 4 year old girl or a 7 year old boy.

This is a post about not very much really, a collection of thoughts I’ve had swirling around and wanted to commit to a page. It records how I’m feeling just now and I may well come back to it and add more. I feel in something of a state of flux just now, wanting to ensure I am not missing opportunities for the children, while still maintaining that fragile balance of allowing them to find their own way. A bit of quite observation coupled with chatting to some close friends has reminded me of some of the amazing things about Davies and Scarlett which make them uniquely them and I’ve been thinking of ways to help them open out some new opportunities to assist them in learning more about the things that inspire them. So I guess it’s a bit of a watch this space, a lot of getting things down so I can reflect and read back myself next time I have a wobble about what we’re doing and just how crazy we really are and the need to dump some of this out of my head so I can get on with focussing about something else for a while instead. Cos you know, us red headed, female, 30 somethings, we need to be thinking about just the 17 things at any given time. Any more and we might just lose our tempers! 😉

I’m thinking of organising a Spring 2008 NicCamps in Wales. I’d really like to visit the Centre for Alternative Technology and I think as yet Davies and Scarlett are too young to get enough out of a visit to their ecocabins to justify the cost so a NicCamp nearby with a day visit to CAT seems like a good idea.

Borth hostel looks nice enough, well located for other stuff although there are a couple of other hostels near enough to do a day trip from too. I’ve emailed them for price and availability for four night stays throughout March 2008. It is only a 33 bed hostel so numbers would be limited but I’m assuming not so many people will be up for Melrose and NicCamps just a few weeks apart anyway. If I end up oversubscribed I will be setting up a complicated system probably involving bribery, cash gifts, perhaps some sort of drinking game style sports day event and a points system based on how much I like you and your offspring or spouses to decide who gets to come – sort of like Big Brother, but nastier :lol:.

So anyone interested? 😉

We went to watch the Shoreham Airshow today. We’ve watched it for years from various locations. Initially we used to camp out for the day in the layby near the airfield and one year even snuck into the field next door to the runway (you wouldn’t be able to do that now, security gets tighter every year :lol:). Then for several years we had friends who lived in a close the other end of the airport and had amazing views from their garden. The ten or so houses in their road used to take it in turns to host street party barbecues each year and have loads of friends over so we went there for about 3 years running. When we came home from Manchester it had been one of the annual events Ady had most missed about Sussex – he is into WW1 & WW2 stuff and war planes always form a big part of the aerial displays. So in 2004 and 2005 we paid and went into the airport to see the whole thing. I think we only paid about £11 each though (children were still under five then so free) – I notice this year it is £20 for adults and £10 for children making it out of our budget even if we had a bit of cash to splash.

Last year we found a field up on the downs which has an excellent panoramic view of the airport so you get a good view of the action down there, often seeing it from above when the planes and helicopters are doing low displays and lots of the planes turn or do their aerobatics over the fields as it is safer away from the large crowds of thousands at the airport. So today we were totally organised with chairs, picnics, cameras, book for me, radio for Ady, drawing stuff for the children. We parked and trekked over the several fields to get to our prime spot and over the next few hours were joined by probably a couple of hundred people in the field.

The children ran around, did some drawing (Davies did some excellent pictures and I showed him how to do a landscape scenery one with horizons and stuff and we talked about the colour of the sky changing as we looked higher). Ady was in his element taking photos, enthusing over planes and telling the children about the war and the role the airforce played in it. He was actually doing something of a running commentary about the German planes and the British planes, they reenact a dog fight as part of the show and there are fake shots and bombs with black and white smoke and mini explosions over the airfield itself. Scarlett was really into it, booing and hissing when the German planes flew over and cheering and waving for the British ones (although I’d interjected with my bit about noone ‘winning’ a war and we’d talked earlier about why there was a war, what the effect might have been on our family if it had happened in our lifetimes and various other stuff). There were about 8 planes involved in the display, flying right out over the sea and downs when suddenly Ady said ‘a plane’s just crashed. There’s been a crash!’ and started running to the top of the field we were in. As he ran towards it the black mushroom of smoke came up and people with children started to herd them the other way while some people carried on running up towards the hill (there is a valley directly behind the field we were in, which is where the plane crashed – about 200 feet away from us). Ady carried on running and with a couple of other people went as close to the plane as they could get but quickly realised there was no hope of actually helping as it was a total wreckage. One of the other people was an off duty police man and urged Ady to take photos and video with the camera still in his hand.

The emergency services were there within what felt like moments, the onsite fire engine from Shoreham airport and the police helicopter followed by various other vehicles but aside from dousing down the wreckage with water there was little else to be done. The smell of fuel was choking and there was an air of utter despair and disbelief with the almost silent crowd gathered looking down.

The children and I walked slowly up the hill, more to check where Ady was than anything and he rejoined us, crying, having witnessed things he is slowly starting to recount now but will clearly be staying with him for a while. The most poignant part of the whole episode was the planes continuing to circle overhead, totally out of their planned display, trying to check what had happened and then performing a ‘man missing in action’ manouvere overhead. We watched the airport below fall silent as the annoucement was made and then while the airshow continued all who were on the hill watching slowly started to pack up and move away. It’s rather difficult to stay and watch when you’ve witnessed that really.

We got back to the car and I thought how true to type we’d all reacted to the whole situation. Ady had run off, leaving us to offer his help and come back defeated that he’d not been able to do anything (in his eyes). Scarlett had kept up an almost constant stream of chatter about the whole thing, describing how she, and everyone else must be feeling ‘it’s very sad, it’s such a shame, we wish it hadn’t happened, I am very sad, we’ll have to tell everyone we know….’ she continued in a babble, just like previous times when she’s clearly felt emotion but not been able to express it any other way (like Malice dying for example when she felt the need to tell everyone we met for weeks afterwards). Davies got straight in the car, broke out his sketch book and pens and drew pictures of the whole thing. And me? Well I coped really. I dealt with gathering up our stuff, answering the children’s questions, cuddling Ady, making him a coffee, emailing his photos to the BBC and keeping the children away from him while he dealt with it in his own way. He’s spoken to the BBC, Sussex police, met the BBC cameramen to show them the scene when they rang him back 4 times on his mobile cos they couldn’t find it, but declined to be quoted as an eyewitness. His photos are on BBC and Sky news websites and he’s been back up there with flowers to hand to the policemen now manning the site to lay there. He’s agonising over having responded to the BBC’s request for photos as they have obviously sold them on to other sites but given human beings thirst for news I think he can rest assured he certainly didn’t do it for gratuitous reasons or glory.

We came home, Ady went back out again. The children and I have talked about it a bit but we’ll follow our usual pattern of talking about it when they ask rather than bringing it up with them. The children have gone to bed and we’re slowly processing the whole thing. They have not announced the pilot’s name yet and I imagine his family are trying to deal with the events of today in their own way. Ironically I was reading a book today while sitting in the field about following your dreams, not being scared, how a life lived in fear is a life half lived. That pilot today died doing something he loved, something he was passionate about. He was entertaining thousands, paying tribute to lives lost in wars totally hundreds of thousands and presumably with his heart already racing with excitement and passion long before he realised he was in trouble. I’m not for one minute saying it wasn’t a life cut tragically short but when I go, that’s precisely the circumstances I want it to be in – living, living life to the full and doing something I love. I hope he doesn’t rest in peace, but soars, flies and feels his heart race for eternity.

And despite the fact neither of them had gone to sleep any time before 10pm last night it was a morning which started way before 7am this morning.

Davies was crazily excited and by the time I’d hastily scrambled into some clothes and got downstairs he was already on opening his second present. We’d brought over the presents from everyone who came to his party from my parents house last night which made quite a largeish pile with our presents too and he also had the Tardis Playset which he’d asked for with the money he’d been given from friends too. He did incredibly well, getting an excellent mix of Doctor Who stuff, some craft bits, some books, some fun things, some games and plenty of very Davies-y stuff. He was very chuffed and rather than doing thank you letters to everyone he thought a thank you film clip would be more ‘him’ so we filmed that this morning and you can view it below. 🙂 I don’t think he got a single gift that wasn’t totally appropriate for him personally so thank you to everyone, clearly thought was put into all his gifts and it was really appreciated :). He also recorded a video message on my phone to send to Amelia to wish her a Happy Birthday along with him which we sent to Ros :).

Once all his gifts had been opened and unpackaged (wtf is all that packaging about then?) and batteries inserted Davies and Scarlett (who’d been given a Rose model for her little gift on his birthday) set to playing with the Tardis playset and all the new figures while I nipped off to the kitchen and baked three sponge cakes to make a triple layer birthday cake for his third and final cake this year :lol:. I’d talked him down from more ambitious sugarcraft endeavours into a sponge cake with fresh cream and strawberries with the promise that I could still do something ‘special’.

He took a couple of phonecalls from people ringing to wish him Happy Birthday and then my Mum arrived with his cards from my parents and brother and gift from Frazer of a tardis toy which (again once we’d wrestled out of it’s copious volumes of packaging, plastic and tags) was also played with. Our original plan had been to go to Paradise Park for the day to make the most of having Ady and my Mum off work for the day but Davies actually just wanted to stay home and play with his new toys. We settled on a compromise of going out for lunch and to take his single duplicated present (a sonic screwdriver – he’d had an early birthday present of one from Scarlett for his party to complete his outfit but had been given another) to Tescos to swap for something else instead. In the meantime a present was delivered to the doorstep of a Crazy Frog cd for which Davies was very grateful and I will make sure to give something equally ‘special’ to Lucy’s children for their birthday’s in March 😉 😆

I’m not sure if I’ve blogged about Davies and Scarlett’s ‘friends’ at Tesco before? One of the times when Ady was looking after them while I worked they had to take something back to Tescos. It wasn’t long after the chicks had hatched and for some reason they’d got into a conversation with the couple of women on the customer services desk about their chickens, along with various other things. The next time I took them in shopping they’d both dashed over to say hello to their friends and update them on the chickens, and all subsequent visits there have included popping over to customer services to say hello. It’s actually very nice that in such a big and otherwise rather impersonal store Davies and Scarlett have managed to make an impression with women who meet hundreds of people a week. So with the rest of us trailing a few paces behind Davies walked straight up to the desk to chat to them, explaining it ‘was his birthday today (‘oh Happy Birthday Davies, how old are you?’ ‘Seven? Really, you are *so* grown up for seven!’ to colleagues ‘can you believe he’s only seven!?’) and he’d been given a sonic screwdriver at his party but he’d already got one so what he’d really like to do was swap it for something else please’.

Round in the toy aisle there were two Doctor Who figures he didn’t already have and he was struggling to choose between them so my Mum offered to make up the money to swap the screwdriver for both. So back to the customer services we went, where Davies had a further chat with the women there before heading off and promising to ‘come back soon for a chat’. We left them all looking lovingly after him having said to me what a lovely boy he was, and indeed how lovely Scarlett is too 🙂 :). (see how I glow!)

And now here is the bit where we all laugh together. Next door to Tescos in McDonalds and given all the choices as to which venue to go for his birthday lunch guess where Davies chose? 😉 And upon walking in the door who should we see but Lucy, R and R, so of course we went and sat next to them and I was able to get my picture of my son, enjoying his Happy Meal sitting with friends, just as if he’d had a real proper birthday party there and everything 😆 😉

We were headed for home after lunch but as we passed a park where my Mum spent a lot of time as a child and indeed was near where my Granny lived when I was a child too so I recall from childhood we swung into the carpark and went in for a play. Mum and I chatted while Ady played Novelty Daddy and did lots of running round being crazy with the children – all the while pulling lots of The Alison poses to see the planes zooming around overheard practising for this weekends airshow

This was such a cool seesaw roundabout thing that we all had to have a go. Ady and I are about evenly matched for such things:

whereas my Mum was better equal to Davies 😆

We then had a long walk up to the top of the park stopping to try and climb trees, look at conkers or decide what sort of animal lived in the holes in tree trunks. We also had an icecream each. I shared some childhood memories of the park (one where there had been a fairground set up there and I’d gone on a bumper car with my Granny and bumped my nose so badly on the steering wheel my Mum had been convinced it was broken and had been furious with my Granny for not looking after me properly. I guess I was about Davies’ age but I recall it really clearly, which made my mum laugh as so did she but we’d never talked about it since. And another of my Dad bursting my helium balloon by accident on the end of his cigarette. Which was amazing to the children at the very idea that Grandad used to smoke, let alone that Mummy would have once cried over a popped balloon (X Factor maybe, but balloons never!)) and Scarlett got to pet lots of dogs. We popped back into the playground again for a last play on the way back to the carpark.

We called into Truleigh Hill on the way home to see what the view of the airport is like and to work out a good spot for firework night at NicCamps. We ended up parking up and watching some of the planes coming in to land or practise for the airshow and also got chatting to various model airplane enthusiasts with their remote control planes doing aerobatics. Eventually Davies’ patience started to wear thin and all he really wanted to do was go home, particularly as he now had two additional figures to add to his collection so we headed for home. When we pulled up our opposite neighbour (the one who spends all her pension on D&S’s lavendar selling ventures!) was in her garden and called D&S over to say she’s missed them out playing in the garden this afternoon. She’s often said to me how much she enjoys hearing their voices and laughter in the garden when they’re playing out and she said it again, before coming over closer and saying to me ‘they really are lovely children you know, you must be very proud. They are always so happy and friendly and enjoy their life so much’ 🙂 🙂 She works as a lunchtime supervisor in one of the local schools and is forever full of praise about our Home Ed but being around 80 years old is very much of the ‘moaning about the touth of today’ age so it’s lovely to hear such nice things again :).

I whipped cream, chopped strawberries and assembled the cake, which when my Dad and Granny arrived shortly afterwards was bedecked with the rather more traditional cake adornments of seven candles rather than lollipops, sparklers and chocolate buttons to create daleks and tardises and we all sang Happy Birthday while Davies blew them out. It was a tricky cake to cut, being as tall as it was but it was devoured by all 🙂

After cake eating we did some shaker maker making (thanks Ali 🙂 ) and made the Tardis, some Top Trumps – Doctor Who of course (thank you Mel :)) which Davies, and infact me either for that matter, had never played before. He amazingly quickly got the hang of it, reading out the numbers with ease and identifying the various listings for each character (it’s height, intelligence, darkness, monster rating and courage). I can see how such a slightly random gift could well be the key to him deciding to start to read, he’s utterly on the cusp and starting to want to tell me what things say rather than sighing and rolling his eyes if I ask. 🙂 We then had a very riotous game of Tomb of Doom (Em? I think? Thanks, it’s a FAB game!) with it being Davies, Mum and I to start with but Ady and Scarlett joining in too as we were clearly having so much fun. I’m not big on games but this is pretty fast paced, lots of fun, clearly very educational and totally interactive in a way that snakes and ladders, for example, could never be. We had several games of that including our own introduction of silly voices and sound effects for various things – I can see that becomming a real family favourite ;). Oh and I must also mention, although I’m not at all sure she reads such things as blogs any more 😉 the present from The Babs which was a charcoal and pencil set, some oil pastels and a sketch pad. So totally Davies, so completely what he is ready for in terms of moving his art on to the next stage and so nice to have proper, ‘nice’ stuff to use instead of the cheapo felt tips shoved in our craft drawers. We filled the first page with experimental goes at the various pencils and charcoals this morning with me sketching a really quick portrait of Davies to show how lots of lines make a softer, less cartoony effect than bold lines drawn in one go. He really liked the effect ‘it looks *so* real, Mummy!’ and he’s taking the whole lot tomorrow to our planned airshow viewing spot to sketch some planes and other scenery. If he actually does I imagine we’ll see a real leap forward in his output in such things moving onto different media like that. I showed him some watercolour pencils in Tesco and explained how they work and that if he gets into the idea of stuff other than felt tips and wants to start doing things like painting and colour blending then we can invest in some more supplies. Very excited at that actually :).

Everyone gradually drifted of and Scarlett settled in Davies’ room to watch some dvds at bedtime with the idea that she could stay there for a sleepover, but she was back downstairs when she wanted to go to sleep ready to go to her own bed again. Davies had been watching Doctor Who but asked for some Wallace and Gromit to ‘happy me back up again before I go to sleep’ and I eventually turned the dvd player off at 1030pm when he was still awake. 🙄 He didn’t quite see in both sides of his birthday but he was within an hour or so either side, which I thought was pretty good :lol:.

It’s been a nice day. I’ve had two people tell me how fab they think our children are, I’ve had Davies looking like a child on cloud nine for all his presents, cakes, still talking about his party and bubbling over so much about the idea that being seven has so far been a really positive experience 😆 For those of the readers who enjoy slushy sentimentalism feel free to look at my pages listed down the side for the 7th birthday post, for those who don’t please don’t bother, I write them for me and for my children to read themselves in years to come and whilst I am totally unashamed of the hallmark greeting card style they can have they are not really there for critical analysis or eyerolling 😉 :).

A busy day today with me dashing off to my boss’s house for 830am ready to go up to Horsham library for a training session. Ady stayed home a bit later than normal until Lucy and The Rs arrived about 930am so that Lucy’s morning started as a slightly less unsociable time ;).

Wendy (my boss) and I chatted all the way to Horsham about recruitment and selection. Interesting as I worked in both a Recruitment Agency and in writing CVs and of course during the course of my career have done a fair old bit of recruiting as well as been interviewed many, many times during my period of changing job every 18 months or so and still trying to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up so trying out by applying and being interviewed for all sorts of posts to see if that might be my ‘calling’. Wendy can be quite wildly indiscrete, which is something I have encountered in many bosses over the years and never been sure if is something I bring out in them or whether all bosses are infact totally indiscrete :lol:. Anyway it was a good gossipy chat ;).

The training was for Baby Rhyme Time and Storytime. Various libraries across the county do different things but Lancing does weekly Storytime sessions – designed for under 5s, generally we have 2-4 year olds though with the younger end of that most represented as lots of 3 year olds are heading off to nursery now, let alone the 4 year olds. It’s a half hour session with several stories read aloud, some nursery rhyme singing, some colouring or other crafty bit and then off they go. Baby Rhymetime is a monthly session, again lasting about half an hour but for under 2s with lots of very tiny babies attending to have lots of singing and nursery rhymes with some instrument rattling.

Now as it goes reading aloud and actually storytelling generally, even without the ‘prop’ of a book is something I really like doing. But I like doing it with older children and I have no particular yen to be ‘teacher’ up the front with a book. I actually spent a fair bit of time reading books to various children this weekend and loved every minute of it, but it was very much an interactive activity with children I actively like rather than random snot-nosed kids 😆 Also there is a colleague at work who is very much ‘the storytime lady’ by virtue of her adoring children, all children, and thriving on having them clambering all over her while she attempts to read a story to them. Which would so not be my way of doing things :lol:.

Anyway, we arrived and were two of 16 attendees there, armed with a favourite picture book, nursery rhyme and cuddly toy. As previously arranged we’d arrived about 10 minutes after the start time and walked in just as they were working their way round the room introducing themselves. And their cuddly toys 😯 😯 I was staggered at the amount of women who had brought a teddy belonging to them, with a name and a bloody personality and everything (sometimes I can so see why librarians have the reputation they do!) including one who brought the bear she got on her honeymoon 27 years ago. FFS my honeymoon was about a lot of things but the acquisition of cuddly toys was not one of them ;). I’d brought along a long legged tiger which was a birthday present to Scarlett when she was 3 from Layla and is much loved by Tarly but does not have any sort of personality trait or favourite tv show or anything projected onto it even by Tarly.

We split into groups and chatted about why the book we’d brought was a good one. I’d taken We’re Going On A Bear Hunt as I think it is good to read aloud as it has a rhythm, plenty of repetition, loads of scope for making it interactive with joining in, a suspense building ending and nice, non conforming to stereotype illustrations. But some of these women (and they were all women) were giving their pop up book of choice more of a build up than the New Testament. I’d hate to hear them wax lyrical about something like Harry Potter! 🙄

We then had an exercise to do with the 4 categorised ages between 0 and 36 months – split into 0-8 months, 8-18, 18-24 months and 24-36 months. I can’t recall all of the names but there were names for each like ‘movers, shakers and players’ for the 18-24 months group. Then we had various statements like ‘uses their whole body to communicate with the world around them’ and ‘uses increasing communication skills’ or ‘shows curiosity and interest in others’ and we had to put them in the ‘right’ age group. I imediately stropped and pronounced it a trick question as all age groups demonstrated all statements IMO – a newborn baby uses it’s body to communicate it’s needs as indeed does a 3 year old, just in different ways. This of course wasn’t the point of the exercise but I do get pissed off with them whole prescribed ‘your child will be doing this’ type pronouncements.

We did some chatting about the benefits to child, carer and library of storytime and rhymetimes and talked about the schedule for a good storytime. Next we covered rhymetimes including singing lots of nursery rhymes with varying degrees of enthusiasm. I was again stunned at the odd reactions of some of the women to getting up and singing Dingle Dangle Scarecrow – clearly something I could, and indeed have done in my time and would do again, but possibly without the shrieks of ‘yay! my favourite!’ that they were emitting. And such coveting of two finger puppets of birds in order to carry off a truly great performance of ‘two little dicky birds’ you have never previously seen :lol:. I finally lost my patience when shoving Tarly’s tiger back into my rainbow bag to come home and hearing a gasp of horror followed by a ‘you’re huwrting tigerry-wiggery’ from one of them at which point I fixed them with my best steely glare and with the same tone I’d have given Tarly if she’d said such nonsense replied ‘It’s. A. Soft. Toy.’.

It was a good training session, emotionally retarded co-attendees aside and may well lead me to more ambitious work related stuff so I’m glad I attended. On the journey home we laughed at people who have cuddly toys into their 40s and discussed how we have no intention of competing with Karen for the most children on our lap while reading The Gruffalo world record and would bring our own stamps to Storytime rather than emulate what already happens.

Home again and a nice relaxing couple of hours chatting to Lucy while the children managed to continue getting on with whatever they were doing. Davies sat and watched lots of youtube Doctor Who clips, the others mostly played outside.

When Ady got home I dashed off to Tescos for a couple of bits including The Tardis Playset which has been on Davies’ wishlist ever since he got into Dr Who, having seen Tilda’s a couple of years ago long before he had any idea what it was. At £40 I’d said no, but he got birthday money from a couple of party guests so knew he had a certain amount to spend. Yesterday Ady noticed in Tescos that the playset was half price so today I whizzed along there and snapped up the last one. He knows he has it but has not been allowed to open it all up yet so that will be a highlight in the morning.

I got home and washed children’s hairs (I’d cut Davies’ earlier) and then tried to persuade them to bed. I wrapped up Davies’ presents from us (those Doctor Who posters are still coming in handy and have made excellent themed wrapping paper :)) and then packed Ady off to my parents to collect all the birthday party gifts that we’ve made Davies keep back for his actual birthday tomorrow. Davies kept coming downstairs or calling us upstairs for ‘one last cuddle while I’m still six!’ type requests.

And now, while he is still six, because I’ve a feeling seven year olds get up pretty early, I’m off to bed.

I’ve been really frustrated at myself the last week or so for either utterly failing to just say what I knew full well people wanted to hear, or for not managing to articulate what I wanted to say. That, coupled with way too many incidents (many of my own making, clearly some sort of self-destruct hormonal thing been going on with me this week) of holding my lifestyle and beliefs up for others scrutiny and a few real life ‘things’ have had me all over the place today.

Thankfully I have good friends – one spent time with me online, listening and reassuring, and illustrating to me what I already know really. Another listened to my ‘and another thing’ style reporting of that, I sat and watched Supernanny all snuggled up with Davies and Scarlett and we talked about stuff like naughty steps and treatment of people you love and then finally I read yet another chunk (practically at the end, but must confess to having stretched it out by limiting myself to not consuming it whole and savouring it instead!) of Skylark which had just the right paragraph or two to set me back on track again. So all is well again :).

I’m not at all sure I’m ready to blog it all. Some of it I will simply cock up further by trying to write it anyway, some of it is not right for the ‘audience’ of this blog and as a lot of it stemmed from my own crapness in getting my points across I’m probably better having a go at managing that before doing a stream of consciousness type blogpost and muddling it all up again.

Anyway. 🙂

This morning was a fairly lazy one. I had various phonecalls I needed to make which seemed to take forever and require phonecalls back to me again. I offered some reading aloud or film watching but Davies and Scarlett seemed to feel the need to play so play they did. They got out the blocks for a while and then Scarlett brought out various Barbie bits of furniture and clothing and dolls (of which she has quite a collection). This inspired Davies and between them they set up a whole houseful of furniture and had the barbies acting out something or other with songs they made up.

We had lunch and they both decided they did want to go out – I’d offered them the choice of going out and meeting up with Lucy, R &R, going out alone or staying in and they chose meeting with R&R. They tidied up, we loaded Davies’ bike into the car and headed off to the park. Davies is confident enough on his bike but probably nowhere near ready to be without stabilisers. In the same way as I don’t worry about academic stuff I’m starting to be of the opinion that when he is ready to ride a bike he will do it pretty much there and then so I’ve not mentioned this being an issue to him and simply enjoy watching him getting a kick out of the wind in his hair and going as fast as he can.

We met up with Lucy at the (empty) paddling pool and we stationed ourselves on the rocks and let the children play, which quickly turned into a rock clambering exercise until they realised there were ponies nearby at which point it became a pony worshipping exercise :lol:. They gathered around the ponies and the woman running the pony rides and seemed to be engaging in conversation about all sorts with her so Lucy and I did lots of smiling and kept our distance. She seemed quite happy to answer their questions without expecting us to fork out for rides and we did work our way over to say hello and thankyou before following the children back to the rocks again. We worked our way onto the park and finally down to the icecreams where Lucy kindly treated us to ice creams. We ended in the carpark where the children started a game of going to the top of the hill and then following Davies on his bike running back down again. Davies did lots of daredevil style bike stuff actually, bumping down steps, haring down hills and maintaining good control of the bike’s steering and brakes, which is probably way more important to get straight first than the balance on two wheels bit actually.

We came home and had a quick turnaround of Davies getting changed for Badgers, Scarlett packing up some stuff to take to keep her occupied in the car while Davies was at Badgers and me trying to get the dvd recorder to record. Which I couldn’t. And actually, while marriage, mortgage and motherhood have failed to give me the feeling of being old being unable to get the dvdrecorder to work succeeded big time 😳 and the idea that rather than show me how to do it Ady should show Davies and simply let him do it probably cements that really :lol:. Ady was at QVC again today, not presenting yet, his screen test is in a couple of weeks. So far he is sitting in the green room, getting a feel for the behind the scenes stuff, learning the lingo and soaking up those broadcasting vibes. Oh and meeting the celebs of the home shopping channel world – today was Joan Rivers! Apparently after a bit of a chat she told him he should ‘always be yourself. Oh and always wear a blue shirt, blue will make your eyes look gorgeous on screen’. So there you go, sound advice I’m sure 😆

Off to Badgers where the two friends who came to Davies’ party from Badgers were already there playing and came running up to the car with cries of ‘Davies is here! Hello Davies!’ and who’s mum came over to thank me for a wonderful party that they’re still talking about now :). Scarlett and I walked Davies in and Scarlett very actively joined in with all the pre-Badgers dashing about in the hall and looked very at home. I checked to ensure there is no waiting list for when she hits five and she will indeed be there in her black skirt and shoes for the beginning of next term. She can’t wait :). And of course the idea of that whole hours freedom each week to read my book or walk down the beach is rather appealing to me too :).

Scarlett had, predictably without my intervention packed a full carrier bag of soft toys and a couple of My Little Ponies so was not really up for playing with them while I read my book. Instead we named some of the previously anonymous soft toys, had lots of cuddles, chatted about random things, none of which I remember now, made up some songs and ate lots of humbugs. We went back in to collect Davies, had a bit of a chat with the Badger leader who always seems to want to chat but never really has a great deal to say bless her, I’m always waiting for whatever it is she seems to be leading up to saying or asking but never quite seems to get to, but perhaps she really is just friendly. It looks like a good program this ‘term’ anyway, plenty of activities Davies will enjoy and with 4 of the older Badgers leaving at the end of the summer to go to cadets and an influx of newer smaller children coming in suddenly Davies is very much in the middle of the group rather than one of the ‘little ones’, which will of course be further perpetuated when his own little sister joins next term. Another good thing about it :).

We came home, I did some hormonal ranting about Scarlett’s bedroom, we recovered from that and they sat and watched ‘crisis at Jimmy’s Farm’ while I assembled a lasagne, ran a bath and hoovered and then we all watched Supernanny together. That was very interesting with us chatting about Naughty Spots at length. Ady came home in the middle of that, children went to bed, we bathed and ate dinner and now I’m sitting here trying to decide my favourite children’s story and nursery rhyme ready for my Storytime training tomorrow for work and whether asking Scarlett to choose me a soft toy to take along is a recipe for disaster. I’m quite looking forward to this training actually, both out of curiosity at the schooliness of it and simply because I love reading aloud and am quite looking forward to doing it at work although the nursery rhyme element to it is something I am not so thrilled at the prospect of.

Last week Rhonda took a peck at Davies. It was fairly small and we dealt with it straight away by both setting Scarlett on her (she shouts as those chickens in a truly menacing fashion :lol:) and Davies went and picked her up. I’ve read that all the humans and other animals who live with chickens assume a place within their pecking order too and the trick is to ensure that all humans remain above all chickens regardless of the chicken pecking order which is the chief reason we encourage the children to spend so much time with the chickens and let them pick them up and cart them around etc. They are 17 weeks old tomorrow and point of lay is from 18 weeks onwards. But twice over the weekend Rhonda went for Ady, once she caught him really badly down one arm. He’s done all the picking her up, ruffling her feathers etc. but on the basis that we can’t possibly keep animals in our garden which could hurt any of us, specifically our own or other people’s visiting children we’re trying to determine whether we can behaviour manage it out of her, we simply get shot of her or whether the children could cope with the idea of seeing chicken keeping through to the logical (Goddard 😉 ) conclusion. I am definitely over my ‘I couldn’t eat a pet’ phase and reckon I could cope with a bit of roasted Rhonda with cranberry sauce but Davies and Scarlett are a bit less keen.

So I went on my US chicken forum to get some hints and tips for keeping your chickens in line and posted some pictures of them, only to get six replies saying they think they are four roosters :(. We’ve still had no crowing which would seem very unusual and I’m thinking they’d probably be more aggressive if they were four roos and would have more rowing among themselves, although I guess if there are no hens to be fighting over they may be a bit less inclined. I guess we give them another 4 weeks or so and wait for eggs or crowing but the chicken drama continues apace here anyway.

In other non-chicken related news this morning was filled with not very exciting things like doing loads and loads of washing, watching some tv with the children and then sitting and ready a HUGE pile of library books that I wanted to take back. So we had all sorts of stories and reference books including a great one about weather – 100 things you should know about weather which we flicked through and picked out the best bits on but included chatter about seasons, the equator, 24 hours of daylight / darkness in some places, different colours of lightning, tornados and hurricanes, different types of clouds, desiduous and evergreen trees and why leaves turn brown before they die and fall, meteorites and more. We read another one of the wonderful ‘Let’s Talk’ series, this time on girls, boys, babies, bodies, families and friends which they both listened to very closely so I imagine will trigger questions sometime soon. Oh and inbetween all the usual picture story books we also read the book I’d seen Bob recommend somewhere Beginnings and Endings with Lifetimes between, which was lovely. We let reading aloud slip here way too often so it’s been nice to do quite a lot of it the last few days.

We’d planned to see Lucy and The Rs in the afternoon for an hour or so but as I was hanging out the next load of washing before making lunch Lucy rang to say they were home and would we like to go there for lunch so we did that instead. There were various games including drawing and I showed Scarlett how most things can be drawn using basic shapes (square, rectangle, circle, triangle) and then adding in detail by drawing a pig for her using a rectangle and triangle and then filling in lines to add proper shape. She liked that idea so next we drew a robot using squares and then a quick picture of the garden with all sorts of shapes and angles. Davies coloured in a robot I’d drawn and written ‘robot’ above and added ‘Nic & Davies’ to it :). On the way to Lucy’s we’d been listening to Phil Collins very loud as the children love the Cadburys Gorilla advert at the moment so he also drew a gorilla and drum kit too :lol:.

We came home again for an hour’s quiet before swimming and Davies and Scarlett played with their cube worlds for ages. We then had a very tiresome hunt the goggles episode having tracked down the swimming bag and got Davies into his trunks and dressed again over the top. Particularly tiresome as they’d been on the lounge floor just last night and I recall pointing to them and saying ‘they need to be put somewhere safe otherwise we’ll be running round tomorrow searching for them’ 🙄 🙄 🙄 Managed to buy a pair there for four quid which was less than I’d dreaded it might be and as Davies left the pool without his usual red rings round his eyes from his goggles and raved about how much more comfortable they were I suppose was £4 well spent. Bet the others turn up tomorrow though.

Swimming was good. Yet another teacher again but older and better with the children. Encouraging but taking no nonsense and hooked up to a microphone so they could all hear her ok. Davies demonstrated his complete lack of grace, style or technique but also his water confidence and joy at being there which more than compensated. There were several littler children there (they can start at 5) so he didn’t particularly stand out. Did discover we’d actually missed the first week back last week which was very annoying. Beavers started this week so I assumed everything did without properly checking. Whereas Badgers is the other extreme where we were told at the end of summer term we’d get a letter with dates etc and we’ve still not heard anything despite me assuming it restarts tomorrow – will ring tomorrow and check.

Home again to drop Davies off to be fed (Ady and Scarlett had stayed home) and ready for bed and I went back out to the library to an author talk event for reading group. It was Sue Walker, who’s book The Reckoning I’d read (ages ago now actually). While we were all still arriving and gathering I struck up a conversation with Rose, a teacher who comes along and was asking her about SATS, National Curriculum and so on (she teaches Y6 and Y8 this year). Probably inevitably once the direct conversation about school started up she asked where mine went and I answered. By now all the other book group folk, including Sue Walker had assembled and were listening and asking questions. So I am well and truly outed there 😆 We started what looked like it might be an interesting but lengthy conversation which we agreed we’d come back to another time and got on with the author event. It was really good, Sue was an excellent speaker with loads of interesting stuff to talk about and it didn’t finish til long gone 9pm (starting at 7). Really enjoyable and so nice to meet the person responsible for creating something I’d enjoyed reading.

I probably have loads more to say but I’m very tired and have various things to get done tomorrow so I’m off to bed. I know I need to hone myself ready for question time next book group though, it’ll be an interesting one no doubt ;).