One word? When seven would do…

Blimey, that was a long day!

I did indeed tidy, hoover, clear out my car and get changed before heading off to work. It was an event to mark the winner of the Orange prize for fiction announced tonight at Shoreham library and was staffed by me and three senior library staff. We had 32 attendees so the library was pretty full which meant we messed around setting up chairs and tables for ages, sorting out refreshments and then last minute photocopying ballot forms and cutting them out while people queued outside the doors from 20 past 7 onwards (the event started at 8pm). We did meeting and greeting and pouring out drinks and offering nibbles before all sitting down and someone read a synopsis of the six shortlisted books then people read excerpts of them all. Brenda (second most senior person) read two and she said to me afterwards she’d almost passed me one to read which actually I would have done quite happily. Then everyone voted for their favourite and had more wine while we counted up the votes and announced our winner followed by the actual Orange winner. The same book won, which was one I’d got about halfway through and given up with but actually having listened to a passage read outloud will possible go and try and read again giving it the chance to drag me in a bit more as I’d tried to read it in small sections with Ady or the children around and listening to it read aloud I realised it deserves more than that and needs the chance to pull you into it’s pages and make you feel like you are really there with the characters.

The attendees (very s l o w l y) left, we cleared up and I left just after 10pm getting home within about 10 minutes to a dinner in the oven (Ady had long since finished his) and the taped Apprentice which I’d avoided all text messages incase I got the result before I’d watched it. And now, I’m off for a bath before staggering to bed and doing it all again tomorrow – reminds me of retail at Christmas time and as next week is even busier than this week I really will be ready for a holiday come Kessingland!

The weather changed from threatening rain and being all cold and gloomy all morning and the sun broke through just as we arrived at the PYO farm. Another HE friend met us there so there were 9 of us altogether. We picked strawberries, peas, broad beans and onions. At one point Scarlett stayed with the strawberry pickers and Davies went off with Julie to pick sugarsnap peas which I don’t like (taste like runner beans to me!) while I picked normal peas so I was without children – felt very odd seeing them both in the distance on either side.

And now I’m home alone! Ady’s taken Davies to Badgers and he and Scarlett are waiting outside in the car – Scarlett’s watching Peter Pan on the in car dvd player and Ady is revising. I’m off to work in about an hour. This is the longest I will have been home on my own since I had children – noone has ever taken them out while I’ve stayed at home before – it feels very strange and really rather lovely. The quiet is amazing :). I do of course have a job list to keep me going during this hour, including washing strawberry juice off my hands and getting changed ready for work, clearing out my car so Ady can have it on Friday and I can have his and running the hoover round, so the feeling of utter freedom is slightly hampered and about to go away again 🙂

starting with Carnival Child this morning. I can’t find a link to the company who present it although I can find evidence of it travelling all round the country. It was held at the local secondary school so for the second time in four days Davies, Scarlett and I found ourselves walking into a school reception and inhaling that unique ‘school’ smell. I’d not told them until we got there what the surprise was and had half wondered if they’d fear I was at least carrying out my continual threat to pack them off to school, but they were just interested in the various posters etc. so they clearly never believe that threat ;). I had to sign in as a visitor and then someone came to collect us. I had thought that more tickets would have been bought by ‘normal’ people as it was billed in the festival brochure as suitable for 3-11 year olds so I expected to see a smattering of preschoolers at least, but it was us, an entire primary school (aged 4-9 or so I guess) of about 300 pupils and some special needs adults. The hall was set up with chairs along the back and a row along each side with the schoolchildren to sit on the floor. We were first to arrive (by about 15 minutes) and told to sit wherever we wanted so we sat on the row of chairs along the back and busied ourselves looking around the school hall spotting no smoking signs (both children horrified by this ‘but children don’t smoke!’), spotlights, a covered piano and a stage. I explained about school assemblies, we talked about what things the stage might be used for and then the school children arrived and were directed into classes to sit on the floor. They arrived in the classic crocodile formation, in pairs with adults at the back and front. A ‘luvvy’ type who knew the company putting on the show had come and sat next to us and was very amused by Davies, Scarlett and I talking about the schoolchildren. They had most curious methods of crowd control including getting one child to stand at the front and carry out a bizare series of touching his head, shoulders, nose, clapping, sticking his tongue out etc. while all the children on the floor had to copy him and all the adults (teachers and helping parents I assume) joined in too. Davies sat there looking very horrified and faintly embarrassed for them all whispering (but they look silly!) while Scarlett and I played paper, scissors, stone and refused to be quiet when all the schoolchildren were being hushed (why? the play hadn’t started, people always talk at the theatre before the lights go down). Two of the children were from Beavers and looked delighted to see Davies, waving and hissing ‘Hey, Davies! Hello!’ at him before sitting on the floor while we sat on our chairs. The person at the front started doing a clapping hand raising thing similar to the we will rock you crowd move at a Queen concert to which I started to explain to Davies about crowd control and also about how there was only one adult to every 15 or so children and actually they could get together and revolt if they thought about it. I don’t think I could ever send the kids to school really, having given them so many encouragements to defy pointless authority! 😉 Then again they might rebel against me and be the most conforming adults ever 😆

The show was pretty good – a full hour long so Tarly was slightly restless in places but Davies sat transfixed with just the odd whispered question. There was an odd moment when some of the children seemed to think they were at a panto and started interacting with loads of ‘oh no it’s not!’ when the first puppet was explaining the plot line (to do with carnival magic saving the rainforest with the use of dancing, music and a magic mirror – slightly tricky to follow anyway so not helped by the wave of ‘it’s behind you!’ that followed once one or two children had started) and the adults all looked panicked while trying to shush them 😆 We left the instant it was over as there was a load of ‘now sit with your hands in your laps while we all line up in order’ from a woman who I assume was the headteacher but having been there really early I wish we’d gone over to the stage and tried to talk to the people putting on the show beforehand to learn a bit of the behind the scenes stuff. I explained to Davies how the puppets worked (they were on sticks – we saw the occasssional flash of hand from beneath) so I think we might have a go at that next time we’re home for the day. Also there was a bit about snake charming which I tried to explain to D&S in whispers but need to find a proper clip of real life to show them. Will search youtube later.

Home for lunch and in about half an hour we’re off fruit picking.

Today was our only free day this week – we had MM and Beavers yesterday, tomorrow we’re seeing a play in the morning, fruit picking in the afternoon followed by Badgers and I’m working in the evening, Thursday I am working all day and evening and Friday we’re off to the South of England Show. At the weekend I’ll be working on Saturday and we’ve swimming lessons followed by an Open Farm Sunday event on Sunday. Hehe, look at that linkerama!

So we had a nice lazy start to the day with Scarlett coming and getting back into bed with me and snuggling up to fall asleep again. Davies answered the door to the postman who’d brought an ebay parcel of Betty Spaghetty stuff so they played with that on my bed while I got dressed and talked on the phone to a local EO woman who was ringing me for a catch up chat. We all came downstairs, the kids had breakfast and got dressed while I tidied the kitchen and generally pottered about deciding what to do with the day, drinking tea and doing a few online bits while the children watched Class TV and Watch.

The chicks currently reside in a big plastic tub which used to house our dressing up outfits before we got all above ourselves and put up a clothes rail in the playroom for them and put all the clothes on hangers! Over the top to prevent the chicks from getting out (and Candle from getting in) and to rest the brooder lamp on we’ve been using two of the shelves from our camp kitchen. Clearly this means we either can’t go camping, we have to leave the chicks without a lid while we go camping or we made an alternative lid. I decided to make my mission making an alternative lid today. My Dad had offered us a roll of chicken wire he’s had in his garage for ages, so my biggest requirement was the timber. I explained the challenge to the kids and off we set.

Firstly we drove to the now shut down Wizard store on the local industrial estate as I know they had a whole pile of pallets in their yard which I thought might still be there abandoned. Indeed they were, but the unit was all chained up. We drove around the estate a bit but all the likely looking pieces of wood obviously belonged to people. Next we drove to the nearby local tip which closed a while back and I thought may have piles of fly tipped wood just waiting to be used by someone else. Nothing. On the way we drove past loads of skips which we’d talked about as possible sources of ‘treasures’ aslong as we could find someone to ask permission to rummage in but they all had garden waste, hard core or things like tiles in them. We drove to B&Q to price out timber and realised it would be about £30 to buy it new so that was not an option but we did have a very lengthy ‘lesson’ in there about hardwood, softwood, sawn wood, barcodes, measurements, pricing, internal and external doors, architrave, tongue and groove cladding and flooring, chipboard, plywood, MDF and treated and untreated woods. I surprised myself with how much I knew about wood quite frankly but I guess a builder for a father, 6 years working in B&Q – 2 of them in kitchens and living in two houses having loft conversions gives you a bit of a working knowledge of such things :). And now D&S have one too – and it was clearly interesting for the couple of builders watching and listening to me explaining about how chipboard and MDF is made too ;).

We left B&Q and went to Wickes to price their timber up and as we could detour onto another industrial estate I did so. This time I found a little area with several empty units with skips outside with pallets in and just one shutter door up. I went inside and found someone to ask if they were really rubbish and he told me to help myself. 🙂 Result! I could only fit two in my car whole (hadn’t thought to bring tools with me to try and dismantle them, just as well as it happens, I could still be there now!) so we loaded up with those and then called in to my Dad’s to collect the chicken wire and scout about his garage for tools. I couldn’t find any (he keeps them all in his van, so if he had one of those stickers saying ‘no tools are kept in this vehicle overnight’ and thieves believed it then it really would work :lol:). We came home and after much swearing, telephone consultation with Ady about tool location and rummaging through the garage and the cupboard under the sink I turned up a staplegun with no staples, a rusty saw which must be older than me and I think was already in the garage when we bought the house and lengthy searching in the garden turned up the hammer too. I managed to use the hammer and saw to good effect and made a new lid for the chicks brooder 🙂

except I ran out of staples halfway through fixing the wire on so we went back to B&Q to get staples and some nails because I now had a design for a run for them in mind and wanted to do that too.

We came back for late lunch, I left a message on Dad’s answerphone to ring me, partially to let him know I’d collected the chicken wire and partially because I had a sneaking suspsicion I’d need more tools that I had. Sure enough although my design idea was sound my hammer wasn’t up to dismantling the pallets and my nails would not penetrate one thickness of wood let alone two to be fixed together. So it was very fortunate that Dad rang back and agreed to come over and give me a hand. The children were very free range during the afternoon, playing mostly outside, coming over to find out more about what we were doing and learn about the tools. While we were waiting for Dad I let the chicks have a roam about outside under D&S’s watchful eyes while I cleaned their brooder out and then we popped them back in outside on the lawn for a couple of hours to enjoy the sunshine.

Dad was great, he did the drilling and screwing while I did the dismantling and directing and stapling. My right hand and arm is now absolute agony from stapling and hammering and sawing so hopefully it will be better tomorrow. We built two identical panels which we then joined together at the top and put struts across the base of to form a triangular pen – about 8 foot by 4 foot, pretty portable and very well received by the chickens 🙂

Ady came home and we sent him straight back out again to buy beers which we sat and drank watching the chicks loving the freedom of space and being outside with safety from a very curious Candle. They can have a few hours in their each day in the nice weather ready for outside eventually. We rang Mum and asked her if she wanted to come over too for fish and chips, I got her to bath the children (filthy dirty children!), Ady tidied up inside and Dad and I went off to get fish and chips for everyone to have with more beers to congratulate outselves on a job well done. The children went to bed (very late again!), Mum and Dad left and I’m off for a quick soak in the bath before heading off to bed myself – another busy day again tomorrow!

Magical Mondays today, we picked Ali and Freya up and arrived super efficiently on time. Ali did a drama session today which Scarlett joined in fairly well with before getting fed up and wandering away from and Davies and I stuck with to the end, with Davies really enjoying it. I’m sure it helped that it was Ali running it (he loves Ali 🙂 ) but it is his sort of thing anyway. I always get faintly exasperated with the few who try to spoil it for the rest at these sorts of activities – and indeed the parents who abandon their children to it, particularly when it is their children being disruptive and struggle to understand why the school / work mentality of being *forced* to participate and therefore protesting by being rude or acting silly still surfaces in an entirely voluntary activity like that. 🙄

In the car once everyone had calmed down from asking me questions all at the same time (I say everyone, I mean Davies and Scarlett :lol:) and my phone had stopped telling me I had a text message about 20 times in very quick succession ( 😉 you know who you are!) Davies asked if I thought Mika was doing his own backing singing by him being recorded singing one thing and then it being played back while he sung the other bit. I agreed that could be the case and told him about watching someone on TOTP accompany themselves on the piano and violin on a split screen video which was cutting technology in it’s day. I then mentioned the duet Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole had done after Nat’s death which led to surreal discussion about whether Nat had been a ghost or a skeleton. Davies went straight into MM and drew a skeleton complete with detachable head that it could juggle with, which I entertained myself by singing ‘When I fall in Love’ with for a while when no one was looking 😆 he then drew lots of Doctor Who things and Scarlett did some drawing too before we went through for Ali’s drama. They both returned to the drawing again afterwards and then Davies went off to play Doctor Who with some of the other lads while Scarlett appeared at a loose end for a little while – her two usual playmates – Lulah and Freya had teamed up with each other and were outside – before settling down to play with some ponies quite happily. The Doctor Who game ended and I read Davies a bit out of someone’s Doctor Who book for a while before helping to tidy up and coming home. There is one particular child at MM who I really struggle to see in a positive light and they were particularly irritating to me today which has led to some low level pondering on my part this afternoon. It’s not a cheap activity for us with entrance fee and petrol and although there are some really nice people there I am trying to be objective about what we do and where we spend our money, which friendships could be maintained without the need to attend a specific group on a specific day and precisely what all of us get out of it.

We dropped Ali and Freya home and came home via two supermarkets and a clothing store on the quest for a sun suit for Davies, which we finally got in Sainsburys (thanks for the tip Ros 🙂 ) so that’s that ticked off our list :). Ady picked up some more toy animals at a car boot sale yesterday so they were being played with this afternoon while Doctor Who and the Cybermen was being played on dvd and Davies did an invite for his birthday party. I had a phonecall from the Beaver leader to say they weren’t wearing uniforms tonight and to come in old clothes as they were doing painting, so I gave the children their tea and then we walked round to take Davies to Beavers and give back forms for him to be part of the team for the It’s A Knockout tournament this Saturday (which I’ll miss because I’ll be at work 🙁 ) and to pay for a trip to the local airport next week – Ady’s going along to that one too, I think he is probably more excited at the prospect than Davies is :lol:.

Scarlett and I came home and I painted some henna pictures on her at her request, we danced a bit, looked at some song lyrics online and then she danced some more. 🙂 Ady came home and we all walked round to collect Davies from Beavers.

I’ve just posted pictures of the chicks on a US chicken forum and had my suspicions that Freddie and Rhonda are hens and Punzel is a cockerel seconded (nothing conclusive but I didn’t admit that was what I thought and someone came out with them themselves), noone seems to know about the black ones but I’m almost 100% that Wobble is a cockerel with no real idea about Feathers. Hopefully that gives us our two hens we wanted and maybe 3 cockerels to choose between with Feathers being a definite to keep having come this far so that maybe being the decider on the cockerels with Punzel being the second choice to keep (although if that looks like being the case moving forward I may very well swap Punzel and Rhonda’s bands over given we did that purely on which one came out of the box first when we had the bands ready to go on 😆 The plus of only 2 hens is that if we did then keep a cockerel we could maybe keep one or two of a second batch of chicks we let them hatch themselves, it’d be nice to watch it happen naturally having done it the ‘lab’ way first. 🙂

Davies has learnt to wink. With both eyes. I can only wink with with my right eye closed 😉

Yesterday Davies emptied a wallet and piled all the money up in denominations, counted each lot and then asked how to work out how much he had altogether. Some of the piles he could add up himself (including counting up to 16 in 2s which I was very impressed about having never done that with him at all). I showed him how to use X on a calculator and he added up each little pile either with the calculator or by himself and wrote down all the totals, then used the calculator to add it all up. Then we came up with a list of all the things he could buy for £2.69. He’s cemented this by watching Class TV megamaths this morning on division calling out loads of the answers to things I had no idea he knew 🙂

Scarlett woke in the night yelling and ended up in bed with me while Ady went and slept in her bed. I woke up this morning to find her stroking my wrist where I’ve had a practise go at the henna painting (where I can hide it under my watch for work 🙂 ). She was looking at it in wonderment saying ‘that’s beautiful Mummy, how did you do it? Can you do me?’ and then went off to my bathroom to practise on herself with my eyeliner creating designed on both her hands she wants me to do with henna later 🙂

Scarlett is currently more covered in cuts and brusies than usual having had a run in with a razor shell in the bath which resulted in a cut on her knee which keeps reopening and now has a long chicken scratch above it where leg leg was in the way when one of the chicks took off for one of their funny little flappy flies in the garden. She’s also got a huge bruise on her hip from a collision with the door last week and last night when washing her hair I found an unexplained cut on her head too.

They both really enjoyed having Claudia here, Davies especially. It was really good to see them running round playing with someone older than their usual playmates who really added something to their game. Yesterday morning while I was still pretending to be asleep under my duvet on the sofa I listened to Davies and Claudia’s conversation for a while which covered topics as diverse as Mika, earthquakes (including an excellent description of how they happen from C with D adding in bits here and there), X box games and that cute thing children do where they recount a story to someone who was there at the time including retelling them what they’d done ‘and then you said this and then I did that’ type stuff.

I’ve booked the party venue hall for both of their birthday parties this morning in a show of utter organisation. I won’t be doing anything about Tarly’s other than that yet but at least I know I don’t need to organise my own work around it, but Davies will be designing invitations later today so watch your inboxes 🙂

catching up 🙂

Friday I worked, it was a pretty good day, made even nicer by Ady coming to meet me for lunch after his exam. He thinks he did ok – he has the second and third exams this coming Friday and then we just wait until mid August to get his results.

Julie had been here in the morning with Jack and Maisie looking after Davies and Scarlett and they’d had a nice morning, followed by Dad here in the afternoon. Ady came home to find Dad sitting on the garden bench while the children had branched out from their lavendar selling with marketing and advertising ventures. They’d put a sign reading BUS STOP on a stick out on the grass verge infront of their ‘shop front’ (garden wall) to encourage people to stop and linger there waiting for a bus and a sign asking ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DOG?’ with a picture of a very mangy looking dog, also designed to make potential customers slow down so they could engage them in conversation. They’d made £1.40 from lavendar sprigs sales :lol:. At this rate we’ll be selling space for concession stands in the garden – Merry, if you want an outreach BM stall you better book your space early 😆 and Joyce, I reckon there’s a market here for your business too if we pitch it right. We won’t have any problems selling excess eggs if we have any hens our of our five chicks at least.

Saturday A beautiful morning here so having established an ETA from Si & Layla we got the garden guest-ready and then wandered down to the village green where it was the first day of the local village festival. Adur Festival is for the whole first two weeks in June which covers Lancing and Shoreham but Sompting (our village) has a mini festival for the first weekend. We had a good look round, tasted some extremely hot chilli sauces (kids adored chilli chocolate), talked at great length to the representative from the local beekeeping association about how easy it is to keep a hive of bees – very tempting but our garden simply isn’t big enough to give a hive space away from the children – maybe when they’re older or if we ever move though – I’m really getting into this smallholding idea 😉 and Ady’s always fancied the River Cottage lifestyle. If we could just combine it with a Health and Safety consultancy business and set the whole thing up for £100K and no credit required…

We came home with balloons from the local church, two free energy saving lightbulbs for having pledged to save 20% of our energy and a load of leaflets on beekeeping. We’d not long been home with Layla, Si, Claudia and Jasper arrived. Much wine, beer, fruit punch, food and ice pops were consumed, we stayed in the garden until about 8.30pm and gave the chicks their first taste of outdoors with a half an hour run around in the garden followed by their cage placed in a sunny spot for the rest of the afternoon. A lovely evening followed a lovely afternoon with plenty of silliness before I was the last person to bed around 3am.

As Ady and I were sleeping in the lounge we didn’t get much of a lie in as Davies and Claudia were up pretty early despite a midnight bedtime. Ady disappeared for an hour or so having woken really early and gone off to the car boot sale, I had a long bath and we were all eating croissants by about 930am. A lazy morning and then we headed back to the green for the second day of the festival. We arrived before it really seemed to have gotten going so when I overheard someone say the school next to the green was open we decided to go in there for a look around. It is the infant and middle school that Davies would already be at and Scarlett would be starting in September but I’ve never stepped foot in the place before so I was actually quite curious to see inside. None of us had stepped foot in a school since we were pupils and were knocked back by the smell of school that hit us as we walked towards the doors. Inside there was a clay activity to make a clowns face which Davies, Claudia and Scarlett all had a go at and then a circus skills activity going on in the school hall which they all had a bash at too. Pics on flickr.

We went back to the green and they all had a go on some of the rides – Claudia did the inflatable slide while Davies and Scarlett went for the inflatable space rocket thing, then the bigger two went on the Very High Indeed slide and then I went on the fast spinny ride twice – once with Tarly and once with Claudia and Davies. I love the fair 🙂 We had a quick look at the Animal Encounters stall where they had giant millipede, African Land Snails and Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches aswell as a tigers claw and a lions tooth and an emy’s egg to look at and a variety of snakes skins and deers antlers. Then we came home for more garden play, chick worship, food and drink before waving our guests off mid afternoon. A low key couple of hours with the kids in the garden followed by a much needed bath and very early nights, Ady is cooking a lovely smelling roast dinner and I’m about to pour my second glass of wine while sitting with all the windows open and the sun still shining while I can hear the sounds of the fair dismantling in the distance. A lovely weekend. 🙂

Just typed a long blog post (really! 😉 ) and then in a (slightly drunken) finger wobble closed the tab. Can’t be bothered to retype it all but I had a good day at work, Ady thinks the exam went ‘ok’ – he has parts 2 and 3 next Friday and then that’s it until he gets his results mid August.

Not intending to be around much at the weekend – back next week 🙂

Obviously your prime concern will be what the weather was like here today. Well it was sunny, pretty much all day and (drumroll please!) I got ALL my washing done and dried. Woo and also hoo!

I had a plan to get the house all surface tidy this morning but spent an hour on the phone to Julie instead so had to do a quick sprinkle round every room with some mandarin essential oil to give the house a citrus fresh scent and do the breakfast washing up before giving D & S strict instructions about playing nice.

Lucy and The Rs arrived very shortly followed by a new HE contact Lucy had tracked down and made contact with. She only lives about a mile away from me and has a four year old son, Nat (who Davies and Scarlett very amusingly kept using different vowel sounds for in the middle, he was called Nit, Nut and Net at various points today by them :lol:), she has always been intending to HE, Nat has never been to school but rather astonishingly has never had contact with other Home Educators. She was very nice, if something of an enigma to me for her lack of network either online or in real life and her lack of worry about it either – I think most of us are very aware of the socialisation challenge we are thrown almost constantly so have a very ready line of defence against it. She didn’t, neither did she seem at all apologetic or concerned about it. More power to her really I guess, but it was the first time I’d been the first other HEor someone had met and not faced a barrage of questions, concerns, worries and need to seek assurance and information from them. Nat seemed a perfectly nice little lad who got swallowed up into the house by the other children almost immediately and proved quite a hit with them all I think. Davies struggled a bit, he spends a lot of time being a Big Brother and it always seems a shame for him to have to do it ‘professionally’ when we have friends over as well but he managed well, organising a film showing in his bedroom. Ady asked him this afternoon what he thought of Nat and his answer was ‘yeah, he was ok. He liked Shrek 2’ which seems to be enough of an indicator of whether he is acceptable or not 😆 I was rather in policewoman mode on the beat round the bedrooms and playroom in a bid to keep disturbance to a minimum with a zero tolerance policy on crisp eating in bedrooms, bouncing on beds or wilful trashing of my house. Scarlett and Rebecca – who seem to have formed some sort of dreadful alliance and will probably be making Lucy and I curse ever having introduced them to each other at such a young age when they hit their teens and being awful – both recieved cautions for crimes including climbing up Scarlett’s bedroom window, jumping on her bed and being a bit handy with their slapping of boys 🙄

Ady rang just after lunch to say he was passing the house on his way to Tunbridge and did I want him to pop in and collect a child for the afternoon so I nominated Davies, giving him a bit of Daddy-time and Scarlett the chance to play with Rebecca in a girlie fashion for the rest of the afternoon. Ady came home, whisked Davies away, K and Nat left and once Scarlett had recovered from not being the chosen one to accompany Ady she and Rebecca had a whale of a time playing together really nicely. I made quiches for our dinner and with some leftover pastry made some jam tarts which we sampled before taking Lucy and The Rs home. Ady fed Davies ‘on the road’, Scarlett had a bowl of pasta and then Ady and Davies arrived home. Bedtime was rather protracted but they finally got there and as I’m working all day tomorrow I really should go off to bed myself. Ady has his first NEBOSH exam tomorrow – the second one is next Friday and then that’s it – no more studying, college or revision for him which will be a big pressure off him and a relief to us all. I’m really proud of him for sticking with this, it’s been tough for him and not something he has enjoyed at all, which given it was voluntary makes it all the more commendable that he’s seen it through. So I imagine many a beverage will be drunken tomorrow in celebration of being halfway through the exams by the end of the day.

stick with the stuff you know…

Work this morning. Just for a change it rained.

Very subdued workteam today comprising me, my least favourite work colleague who I would best describe as ‘mardy’, the childrens’ librarian who is precisely what you would imagine when you hear the profession ‘children’s librarian’ – very sweet, nice, teacher-ish and speaks the whole time as though she is addressing children and reading them a story, and one of the Saturday assistants who is a very nice lad but only 10 years older than my son, putting him closer in age to my offspring than me and thus someone I am likely to embarrass both myself and him by attempting to find any common ground. In his eyes I am quite clearly ‘a grown up’ and as I always struggle to act like one it seems best to be silent rather than cock it up by coming over as a bad parody of a grown up (the best I can manage) or trying to by ‘down with the kids’ and say things like ‘well bad’ or ‘minging’ which are probably way adrift of what all the cool kids say nowadays anyway. 😆 The rain brought the borrowers in in droves though where they all sat about on computers or browsing the shelves with slight steam rising off their damp clothes. I was on the counter most of the morning where I said a rotation of about 3 different things for most of the four hours;
‘well it is a morning at least’ in repsonse to ‘well it’s hardly good’ when I said ‘good morning’ to people as they walked in.
‘no, it’s not lovely it is?’ in repsonse to ‘it’s horrible out there’ as people came in shaking their brollies.
‘I know, we were on the beach most days in April’ to ‘what’s happened to the seasons, it’s June in a couple of days?’
All of which I must have said about 57 times each 😆 I did come home with a big pile of dvds that had come in for me though including HSM (again) that Davies has been after watching again and they put on (twice) this afternoon singing along to, so I have all the songs buzzing round my head yet again 🙄 We were indeed soaring and flying all afternoon long :lol:.

Everyone seemed to have had a nice morning here with Davies putting on a magic show for us when I got home ably assisted by junior audience members. He is toying with the idea of being the compere for Cabaret Night at Kessingland, which I think he’d be great at, but then he’s also toying with a magic act, some singing and dancing along to Mika and a stand up comedy session, so we might have to wait and see what he delights us with on the day.

Once we’d had our fill of HSM I started telling Davies about the animation on Ivor the Engine from the show we’d watched the other night and we got the pens and paper out to make some of our own. Then having demonstrated the idea we put an Ivor the Engine video on so he could see it all in action. He really liked that idea (it’s very basic animation with a static background and lots of pieces of drawn things which simply move across the background. Characters are created with various heads, limbs etc and then the bits are swapped over on the background accordingly – no need to do things like animate mouths or faces, just swap for a different head) and we talked about some ideas for making an animation like that. All the digital cameras in the house take pictures that make the stills too long and I can’t work out how to shorten them sufficiently to properly animate, so after looking at them in shops and online for ages I bought a webcam off ebay which should be here by the weekend so we can have a go with that – a friend made an excellent lego animation film with her son using a webcam recently so I know it can be done better than with digital camera.

Davies has been going to sleep later and later this last few weeks, often not going to sleep before 10pm, which would be fine if he slept in the following morning, but he doesn’t so he is getting lots of tics and twitches as he does when he is tired and his eyes are all sore and slitted, so I sent them both to bed at 630pm tonight. I read Scarlett a pile of books including an excellent story called Beware of girls which is a good twist on the big bad wolf stories, then a collection of Wicked Wolves Tales to complete a load of wolfy type stuff and a couple more about witches and little girls. Ady read to Davies – they have been looking at a comic style Wallace and Gromit storybook for ages which I refuse to read – comics are all but impossible to read out loud with all the non verbal sound effects, speech bubbles and words along the bottom, particularly as they have tried to spell all of Wallace’s Yorkshire-isms phonetically which makes it really hard to read. But Davies was still playing with toys while I cooked dinner and appeared just before someone was fired in The Apprentice, so it was 10pm again tonight despite him having been in bed for more than 3 hours 🙄

In animals in the Goddards household news Candle is fine, I am clearly forgiven and she has not done any dreadful acts since, the chicks have been cleaned out (again – man, can those creatures poo!) and Freddie – the oldest, two weeks old tonight, can now fly/jump/hop out of the box if the lid isn’t on 😯 and is looking ever more feathered with every passing hour. They are incredibly tame and will happily hop onto your hand or arm and when their box gets hoovered round at least once a day will come nosily over to see what’s going on rather than hiding at the back of the box behind each other like you’d expect (it’s what I feel like doing when I see a hoover 😉 ).

I’ve missed my vocation in life you know. I wasn’t meant to work at the library or any of my previous occupations. I was not supposed to be at home Educating my children. Oh no. My calling in life was clearly to stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Wincey Willis and John Kettley and bring you regular weather updates from Sussex. I was supposed to be a meteorologist!

So today, just for a change it has not done this
it has done this instead which was nice.

After a phonecall from Ali to say they wouldn’t be coming over today after all 🙁 I decided the weather was just too nice to stay in all day so after shoving more washing on we headed into town to move money about in bank accounts, which needed doing one day this week anyway, so saves a rush job later in the week. We had an hour and a half on our parking meter which should have been loads, and having exchanged texts with Lucy to call round and visit them on the way home I thought my time keeping was going to be pretty good for once, but somehow time vanished! We only got two people commenting with ‘I bet you hate half term’ to me when the children were, well, being children really. To which I was able to grimace and say with total honesty, ‘yep, I hate school holidays’ which of course I do, but not because of my children ;). We picked up various bits and pieces, things like fleeces half price and super snuggly pjs for Davies ready for camping, oh and pac-a-mac style waterproof coats for them both. I recently realised that both the children’s pjs are halfway up their legs and Scarlett is wearing 2-3 years and Davies is wearing 4-5 years so I got Tarly a couple of pairs of shortie pjs in age 5-6 on the basis she can wear those for a couple of years and I’ll get some more for Davies when I next see some cheapy ones. We continued our search for a sunsuit for D and waterproof trousers for them both but to no avail. And then I realised while we were queuing in a shop to pay that our parking ticket had run out five minutes previously so we dashed back to the car.

A quick stop at the supermarket to get some lunch on the run and then round to Lucy’s house via my house to peg out washing on the line. We had a lovely couple of hours round at Lucy’s with Rebecca, Davies and Scarlett playing mostly outside without any real adult intervention required and Richard joining them as and when. Richard is really into Toy Story atm which is quite charming for me as it was the film which Davies was obsessed with when he was two and kickstarted his love of all things animated, particularly Pixar – including taking him to see Disney on Ice where he shook Buzz and Woody’s hand when he was 3 and the Pixar exhibition at the Science Museum last year. He used to sit and watch that film back to back four or five times a day and it was real interactive viewing too with him laughing and gasping at the action, chattering away to anyone else in the room about what was happening and reciting some of the lines along with the characters. He hasn’t watched the film for well over a year if not longer and in the style of the film his Buzz and Woody toys lay under the bed discarded (altogether now, ‘when somebody loves you, everything is beautiful…’) but watching Richard all captivated by it today took me right back. 🙂 Yep, I’ll even get sentimental about other people’s children’s obsessions! 😆 Lucy and I managed a fair bit of chatting which was nice, we spend a lot of time together but rarely manage to actually finish a sentence without interuption let alone a whole conversation!

We came home and I had a falling out with Candle, the cat. She really hates the chicks being here and as ever her method of protest about something – us going away for more than one night, lots of people in the house, new babies (when we had them!) is to go and poo somewhere, preferably on the clothes of the person she is pissed of with, or even better on their bed if she can get in the bedrooms. Hence we keep the bedrooms shut at all times nowadays. Anyway she’s been pooing in various places over the last 10 days since the chicks were born and I got home to find the house stinking as it was warm and all the windows were shut. I grabbed her, took her to the poo and then flung her out of the front door. Which is pretty much what I always do when she does something wrong – take her to it, shout at her and then put her outside (to think about what she’s done 😉 ). I was really pissed off and chucked her slightly harder than usual and she disproved the cats always landing on their feet law :shock:. She looked at me with utter confusion and I slammed the door and watched her shadow slink away feeling sick that I might have really hurt her. I didn’t want to go straight after her as I was fairly sure she was ok, just shaken and I was still really cross, so I went and cleared up the mess and got the kids’ tea on before going outside to find her. She was hiding under the garden bench looking very sorry for herself so I called her and she came and followed me back in the house, jumping straight onto my lap and has been very affectionate all evening, whereas normally when she’s done something wrong she will avoid us for a few hours. Anyway no harm done but it was a horrible feeling thinking I’d hurt her through anger having lost my temper.

I’ve been doing lots of hanging out on chicken forums, mostly US ones and am slightly dismayed that I appear to be turning into a classic US Homeschool Mom – one of the forums which I found purely by googling about chickens, chicks and eggs (and believe me you need to be selective when you are googling the word ‘chick’ :roll:) has a huge great thread about homeschooling and how it seems to go hand in hand with chicken ownership. I’ll be swapping recipes for cookies and making corndolls and pinnys next! And there was me thinking I was alternative – I’m just a cliche after all! 😆

Here’s Rhonda 🙂

she’s doing fine, as are they all. No idea whether they are hens or cockerels yet. They’re growing at an amazing rate, flapping their wings and actually getting off the ground very slightly.

And she’ll get to meet her very soon 🙂

I slept in this morning, I was having a lovely dream although I can’t quite remember what about now, although it was interupted regularly from about 730am by one or other child coming to report various things to me. It has rained all day long here and we didn’t have plans until 1pm so while the children played and watched films I did a bit of baking. I made some choux pastry, melted some chocolate and started to whip up some cream with icing sugar for filling to make profiteroles and then while I turned to do something in the sink the top heavy bowl with the whisk in it fell over and cream went all down the gap inbetween the cupboards and the fridge. I managed to construct a special cleaning implement with tea towels wedged on the end of the dismantled broom handle and hopefully got it all mopped up – I’ll soon know if it starts to stink of gone off cream in the kitchen in a day or two. I then realised that actually it was single cream which the motor of the whisk would burn out before it whipped so the children and I ran round the local shop dodging raindrops and puddles to get some double cream instead so I could finish them. I also made some chocolate chip rock cakes and had grand plans for flapjacks and some cheese and pesto scones but ran out of time so might do those tomorrow instead. I like the idea of some home baked sweet and savoury things to have for lunches instead of white bread and value jaffa cakes this week. 😉

Ady had hoped to be home before 1pm but various emergencies at work meant he didn’t leave until nearly 3pm so the children and I headed over to my parents at 1pm. Having had quite a ranty morning I was determined to remain calm and serene and be nice to everyone, which I managed to pull off well so we had a nice lunch, Ady arrived, I graciously accepted compliments on my choux pastry, sat quietly cuddled up to Ady while he and Dad watched the football and Mum played with D&S and a rather impressive collection of Betty Spaghetty dolls that she has amassed over there. It was quite nice to sit there and daydream for about half an hour with noone actually wanting anything from me until Davies brought over all the dolls to show me them.

We left there fairly early as I wanted the children to try and get an early night after several late ones over the weekend (it didn’t happen, but my intentions were good!) and came home. I cleaned the chicks out as they were stinky and we took some proper pictures of them each now we know which one is which. I cooked a very lovely, if I do say so myself, spaghetti bolognaise and home made garlic bread – really impressed with the meat from the butcher so far, lovely lamb yesterday and excellent mince today, we’ll be boycotting supermarkets before you know it ;). Ady and I watched the BBC four show about children’s TV in the ’60s and the film afterwards about Smallfilms and making of Ivor the Engine and Bagpuss which I’m kicking myself for not videoing, Davies would have loved it and I can’t find it listed anywhere as repeated :(. But it’s given me some ideas for animation with drawings which I might share with Davies tomorrow along with some more baking before a visit from Ali and Freya in the afternoon. Oh, and probably some more rain.

If there were three things my mother would shake her head sadly over and tell complete strangers she is disappointed about in me they are as follows:
1. My weight
2. My laziness around the home – despite it not actually being true my parents still have me painted as a 15 year old teenager who slobs around the house all day. Quite how they think our house isn’t knee deep in crap with starving children and general day to day running of a home ground to a halt when they both consider ‘Nicola does NOTHING’ is beyond me (well actually it isn’t, they think Ady does it all!) but I do have to concede that my house does fall fair short of their standards of a place for everything and everything in it’s place showhome standards. Truth be told I would rather sit on my (fat) arse and read books all day while eating bon-bons and ordering internet shopping but actually I seem to be pretty worn out by the end of every day which suggests to me that I am not being nearly as lazy as I would like to be.
3. My crapness with money. Well I guess even I can’t deny or defend that one, but having lived very successfully within a very limited budget for 18 months now maybe we could let that one slide?

So if ever there wasn’t a good day to arrive (late!) to Davies’ swimming lessons, rushing him to the poolside to watch his lesson before stripping off into a frankly ancient and unflattering (we got up very late this morning and it was the first one to hand, really it was lucky I remembered to bring towels and children and a swimsuit!) swimsuit, stretched elastic in all the stress points of my most overweightiness (I’m pretty sure I wore it whilst pregnant too so it’s really quite misshapen) having left the kitchen strewn with all of last nights curry remains, it was today. I looked up from taking Davies to the pool to see my Mum, sitting immaculately turned out in her Casual Sunday wear (honestly, the woman is like bloody Barbie with entire outfits on coathangers in her wardrobe with matching shoes, handbags and jewelry for every occasion, she’d have plucked out ‘Sunday morning watching grandson’s swimming lessons’ this morning with jeans, T shirt, matching cardigan and pink trainers and a cute little rucksack style bag) in the spectator area. She did manage to refrain from waving and calling to Davies and distracting him from his lesson, which as there was only him and the triplets there today was quite a good one for him.

Ady and Scarlett got straight into the water and were having a great time bobbing and splashing about while Mum and I watched the lesson. Then I went and got changed and we all had a swim. We were probably in there about an hour, Ady and Davies went down the big slide a couple of times, I remembered why I’d stopped wearing the old swimsuit and bought a newer one last year – the top completely flops down when I try and do anything remotely active in it – great for easy access breastfeeding, crap for swimming in a public pool and totally unsuitable for going down a slide with a child on my lap with an audience at the bottom! 😆 I did four lengths of the pool – which is lame I know but wore me out! I did some swimming about with Scarlett on my back, plenty of stuff with Davies trying to reinforce what he’s been learning and then the lesson after Davies’ ended so the little pool was opened and we spent ages in there playing with floats and the mini slide which Scarlett particularly adored. And all the while with my Mum watching wearing her special ‘blimey she’s five times the size of me’ look :roll:.

We finally came out when we all looked like prunes – the others had all been in for half an hour longer than me and met Mum upstairs at the entrance. She bought the kids sweets each from the vending machines and then they begged her to come back to our house to see the chicks, which she did, raising a slighy eyebrow at the washing up strewn kitchen before we tidied it up. Ah well, it was very nice of her to come and watch Davies and nice to see her generally, even if it did give her fodder for that sad head shaking for weeks to come. 😆

Ady got a roast dinner on and we braved the continuous rain (it’s not stopped all day) to go out to a local animal food and supplies centre to get some stuff for the chicks. They were about to run out of food and I’d read in several places that you should start introducing a bit of grit to their chick crumb diet and we needed a proper feeder and waterer as none of our home made efforts have worked, neither had the canary waterer I’d got from the pet shop yesterday. We also got some coloured bands for their legs so we can finally know which chick is which. No idea which of the yellow ones was which initially although one is about a day ahead of the others in feather growth so we’ve kept that one as Freddie which was the first to be born, clearly the black two didn’t need them but we thought they’d feel left out if they weren’t colour coded ;). There was a tent show on the green over the weekend which was looking very damp and quiet but we stopped and had a quick look round there. Being in a tent while slightly cold and wet with the wind flapping and the rain pouring took me right back to Newgale and The Great Flood but still hasn’t ruined my anticipation of camping this summer :).

Home for a lovely roast dinner, some hama beading which the kids asked to do but got bored and wandered off leaving me to finish – I made an elephant for Davies to look like Elmer and Scarlett’s name – both of which were ironed and stuck to their doors while they had a bath. They have a collection of shells from the beach in the bathroom which often get put into the bath when they play various games and a razor shell had broken and cut Scarlett’s knee quite nasily, which brought about an abrupt end to the bath while she was given first aid. She was very blase about it though, claiming it was nothing compared to the time she had stitches 😆 Clearly she was right to be calm about it as ten minutes later she was dancing round the room to Mika with Davies trying to make up a dance routine for Kessingland cabaret. Very much in the style of that dance to Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn that’s done the rounds on youtube with very literal moves for every line, but very cute to watch. I’d have videoed it but they were still naked from the bath so it wouldn’t have been something I’d have put out for public viewing anyway 😆

I’m watching Lost and struggling with the rollercoaster of ‘they’re dead! They’re not dead! Someone else is dead! No they’re still alive too! This time they really are dead! Or are they?’ type stuff that’s going on with it. Oh and googling for waterproofs for D&S having realised how crappy it is to have wet clothes whilst camping :).

I worked at Shoreham library this morning, which for those of you not familiar with local Sussex geography is the next town along from us. I was asked a couple of weeks ago if I’d swap my afternoon shift today for a morning shift there and I readily agreed, not least because really don’t like working Saturday afternoons, it just means the whole day is a write off as there is not time to do anything really in the morning and by the time I’ve finished work the day is gone. So I got to go and have a poke round a different layout, slightly different money taking system (they have an old fashioned, Open All hours style till which I’ve not used since Clinton Cards days) and meet some new workmates. We were overseen by the Childrens’ Services Librarian who is lovely but Very Sensible Indeed. She has two boys, about the same age as D & S and took the chance to have her teabreak with me and ask me about HE which she has clearly been itching to do since I started working for the library. The library service is really quite close partners with the schools system, particularly on local levels so I imagine the very concept is shocking to her but she hid it all well and I did a sort of low level compromise on answering her questions about whether I set aside ‘school time’ each day and how I can teach them things when it might not be my area of expertise with stock answers rather than my own more passionate replies. Some people are just not worth spending time convincing because you know in advance you will not change their basic beliefs or ideas and actually have no real desire to do so. Her children are clearly happy in school, she is clearly happy with them in school, we only had a 15 minute tea break and the first five minutes were taken up discussing the weather, it really would be a waste of my time and energy to start trying to give her my hard sell chat about autonomy and free range education!

I quite surprised myself with how quickly I picked up the lay out of the library – the numbers for all the books have clearly stuck themselves into my brain way quicker than I’d realised and I appear to be more confident with things like ordering books in for people than I’d realised when I found myself doing so and holding a mini training session for one of the Saturday girls who’s been there for two years. I’ve really been accepted into ‘the fold’ at work during the last few weeks, with them clearly deeming me ‘alright’ and sharing some of the in jokes and modifying what they say infront of me a little less, which is good – it will be six months I’ve been there next week, which if I was full time would have been an age in any other job I’ve had and childcare wobbles and occasional dragging workdays aside I am really enjoying it.

So anyway, I worked this morning, was allowed 15 minutes travelling time so arrived late and finished early getting home before my shift would have even started if I’d worked as normal at Lancing this afternoon. Ady and the children had been busy doing stuff in the garden, refloored the chicks brooder with peat as the sawdust was smelling and gotten involved in a game of Harry Potter using the geomags. I think they’d watched HP4 too, so they are now up to date with the films 🙂 Hurrah for the library!

Ady had promised to help Dad cut his hedge so we went over there and they did hedge cutting while I took the children over the road to the pet shop and bought a water feeder for the chicks. We came back and the children played in Dad’s garden while Ady and I chatted to Dad.

This month we are concentrating on local sourcing of products for our monthly food shopping so we’ve done all our meat purchasing at the local butcher and will get all our fruit and veg from the greengrocer, so we only used the supermarket for alcohol, tinned and dry goods. It may not actually save us any money but it certainly won’t cost any more and we’ll be all pleased with ourselves for our responsible purchasing :lol:. So we went to the local butcher and the onto Tesco for our bread, milk, tins and dry stuff, then Ady took the kid to McDs while I went to M&S (all on the same complex) to get a couple of bras so I don’t wear my frothy lacey affairs every day. There was a mother and daughter in the fitting room getting the daughter measured for her first bra which is something I don’t recall doing and of course won’t be doing with S for quite some few years yet but I could sense the excitement of the young girl getting her first bra which is one of those landmark moments of puberty I recall longing for and being thrilled about for ages afterwards knowing I was wearing a bra! Now it’s just a bugger to know that I have to spend £20 on something which a cheap version simply will not do of, but despite my cleavage flashing most people will not see!

We got home in time for Doctor Who and then packed the children off to bed while we put all the shopping away (worst part 🙁 ) and then I cooked a lovely curry.

Tomorrow is swimming lessons for Davies and we’re all going to go swimming afterwards as the weather is too iffy for car booting and I really want to get some reinforcement of Davies’ lessons now he’s starting to make progress.

And there you go, not quite bullet points, but probably still brief by my usual standards!

Just deleted another comment from table bint over on M&T. This time picking me up on a couple of spelling mistakes. I’m pretty sure I know who she is, another Home Educator on the blogring that isn’t Early Years and the Far Out Crowd one too – and having learnt recently just what they all think they are far out of I am pretty much filled with simple irritation at the lot of ’em anyway.

I really loathe the fact that the biggest challenge to Home Educators actually isn’t the government, it isn’t other people who have their children in school, it isn’t that nosey checkout operator who asks ‘no school today?’ every time you go to the supermarket and it isn’t misleading articles in the TES. It’s other bloody home educators!

I’m not saying I don’t judge other people, I do it all the time, and within my own little circle I could even be described as scathing (yes, really 😉 ) but I can only assume that people’s need to go and make little snidey comments on the blogs of total strangers is to feed their own insecurity at their parenting, educational provision or lifestyle. I’m not going to respond, the table rant was on a bad day when I didn’t follow my own usual advice to ignore people not worth responding to, but the blog is now moderated for anyone I haven’t approved a comment from before and hopefully in the style of most of life’s minor irritations if I don’t pay any attention to her she’ll give up, go away and focus her attention on something a little more worthy, like her own life.

I had a smidgen of a lie in today although with both children in the bed with me after Ady left around 6am it wasn’t the luxurious and indulgent experience it could have been. Actually shortly after 830am I gave up because Davies couldn’t get HP2 to work – he couldn’t see the word ‘play’ on the screen. The reason for this became apparent when I did come downstairs – they’d put the bonus disc which just had ‘play bonus stuff now!’ or something similar as the only available option rather than the film disc.

Once I was up I busied myself with all sorts of thing to do, plenty of them online, while Davies watched HP2 and Scarlett brushed my hair, in a very comprehensive manner and with much detangling spray. I packaged up all my ebay sales from earlier in the week and then we went off to Lucy’s via the post office so I could get them on their way. We had lunch and then headed over to the beach for an hour or so which was very nice although having worn jeans I couldn’t really go in the water before heading back to Lucy’s for baths for some of the children before coming home. The children put on HP3 to watch while I did various online things and made a few phonecalls.

Feeling very off blogging for various reasons and only really doing it so I have my own record to look back on, infact I’m really generally anti-people at the moment, particularly online ones (because of course online people are a whole different species to real life ones :lol:)…

My day was pretty mundane really, I walked into work, had a fairly run off the mill sort of day with a variety of library tasks including putting books on shelves, taking books off shelves, issuing books to borrowers, discharging books when borrowers brought them back, putting new dust jacket covers on tatty books and withdrawing a huge pile of books off the system, ripping out the first page and pricing them up for sale. But I did get paid today so I celebrated that with a brie and pesto pastry for lunch :).

Back at home the children watched Harry Potter and Davies dressed up as Harry in his glasses and a cloak while Tarly was Hermione. I had a massive pile of books on chickens waiting for me at work, which as I was walking home again I quite ruthlessly picked through only bringing the pick of them home and picked up HP 2, 3 and 4 on dvd for them to watch over the next couple of days. I’m still flatly refusing NOT to watch them on some sort of hangover principle about all the hype of the books and the films – well that and the whole mystical magical world sort of thing not being something I’m remotely interested in. I was far more of a Malory Towers and Famous Five kinda girl than a Lord of the Rings as a child – I’d rather read about / watch real people doing real stuff than fantasy or sci-fi type stuff. They left our house and went to play at Lucy’s for a while (this is all hearsay btw, from what D&S told me :)) before coming back here again after lunch to meet Dad.

Dad walked them to Brooklands and bought them ice creams and when I got home Scarlett was cuddling a chick and chatting away to my Dad, while Davies was sitting near the garden wall with a little sign written by Dad advertising lavender sprigs for sale for 10 pence each – and he’d sold one! 😆 Dad left and Scarlett went out to man the lavender stand with Davies while I cooked their tea.

I then got everyone to dig out all the library books from their bedrooms and various other places and piled them all up in the hall to tick them off the lists I’d brought home of all the items out on our tickets – nearly 70 in all :shock:, we made a biggish pile of things to take back and the rest all disappeared back into bedrooms again, but at least everything is accounted for!

Chicks continue to grow apace – they are a week old today, all have proper wing feathers and the start of tail feathers showing today. Feathers (one wing) continues to do ok but is markedly smaller than the others – I’m pretty sure it’s grown, just not as fast, and it has wing feathers and is flapping it ok. The yellow ones are still interechangeable although there does seem to be one very vocal one. We put a stick in their brooder tonight to give them something to start perching on which they are loving. The yellow ones particularly are very friendly, despite the pecking and will happily hop onto your hand if you put it in and sit for quite some while being stroked quite contentedly. Hopefully there are a couple of hens in there at least who will make nice tame pets having been reared and handled so much by Davies and Scarlett.

There’s a 8% Chance That You Need Therapy

You almost certainly don’t need therapy. You have your life under control – and things are going pretty well. If anything, you would make a great therapist. You have a natural understanding of human psychology.

Said Scarlett about Eve and Rei this morning while we were making their birthday cards and wrapping up their presents! Ady’s heard a similar quote about The Proclaimers (obviously brothers rather than sisters) but it really made me laugh to hear Scarlett say it with total sincerity! 😆 It’s not even like she’s not used to twins, but I guess it’s a measure of how little she considers any of the twins we see lots of as twins or even siblings and more that she sees them all as individuals, maybe.

A bit of a frantic morning with me faffing about with houseworky stuff and then realising we needed to leave the house in about half an hour and the children were still in pjs and we hadn’t made cards or wrapped gifts yet. They were dispatched to making one card each – thankfully no rows over who made who’s – Davies claimed Rei’s and Scarlett was more than happy to do Eve’s. Davies drew a tiger and a rainbow for Rei as he ‘knows they are her two favourite things’ and Scarlett drew a picture of a person who was not Eve for a while but then became Eve after all. 😆 They both wrote inside them – Davies with me just calling out which letter came next and Scarlett with a bit of me showing her, a bit of her telling me she knew that letter and a bit of looking at what Davies had written which was a faintly chaotic few minutes with me calling out different letters to them both – they both did really well though, while I sellotaped lots of paper together to wrap the presents and then wrote ‘Eve’ and ‘Rei’ all over them in crayons. I managed to remember bottled water and changes of clothing but failed miserably on bringing food other than a packet of rice cakes. Thankfully Lucy had brought sufficient food for four children so that failing wasn’t a problem.

We stopped for petrol and then collected Lucy and The Rs before heading off to Ipswich. Similar to when we drove to Nottingham just to see The Gruffalo for Ben’s birthday last year driving 300 miles and spending about 7 hours in the car for the sake of 4 hours with friends does seem a little crazy really but worth it to see those friends and for the children to have such a good time. Ady had handed over his Sat nav so we used that to navigate us there which was fine until the A12 was closed due to an accident which meant we had to make a decision about which way to go. We thought we’d cracked it with a road which seemed to run parallel to the A12 until I foolishly listened to the sat nav telling us to take a left, followed by another left … you get the idea. Although we didn’t actually end up back where we started, we drove through a small village and suddenly the traffic started moving again and we were back on the A12. Mileage wise we didn’t seem to have gone too far out of our way and when the sat nav got bored of telling us to ‘take a u turn as soon as possible’ with four children and two adults yelling back at it (Scarlett at one point called it a ‘bloody thing!’ but none of us acknowledged it :lol:) it surrended and gave us directions in front of us rather than behind. It did sterling work guiding us to the actual party destination in Ipswich though – I’m converted and impressed with it. 🙂

All of the children were really good considering it was a very hot day, we spent a lot of time in a car and aside from Richard getting himself into a state just before we arrived and Davies and Scarlett having a few very minor sibling spats – oh and Davies managing to stay awake even when all the other children had fallen asleep and wanting to chatter to Lucy and I on the way home, they all were really well behaved. Seasoned travellers 🙂

The party venue was great, fairly new I think, a big soft play shack place which Davies and Scarlett instantly disappeared into and were swallowed up for an hour without me catching more than a fleeting glimpse of them, then we all went back to Em’s house for tea, a fab spread of party food and lots of running round the garden. D&S were delighted with their rabbit and tortoises (very cute, I love tortoises 🙂 ) and I got to catch up with Chris & Helen and Em. We could have happily stayed for hours more but I was very aware of the drive infront of us so we left just before 6pm and had a really good run home, dropping Lucy and The Rs home and getting back here before 9pm. Ady presented the children with a bath, me with a can of red bull followed by a pint of cider and a lovely dinner. The children took ages to get to sleep, Scarlett having slept for over an hour in the car and Davies just full of everything he’d done and seen today but now the house is quiet aside from a Buzz Lightyear toy which goes off for no apparent reason every so often on a constant loop of ‘Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger’ and ‘To infinity, and beyond!’ which I may have to throw in the garage before I go to bed!

Some photos on flickr, all of which seem to have red eye which I can’t be bothered to sort out just now, I see Em’s already flickr’d and I’m sure Helen won’t be far behind. Thanks for a lovely day Em, hope Eve and Rei have a fab birthday tomorrow and thanks to Lucy for the company (and petrol fund!) on the drive. 🙂