One word? When seven would do…

We’re back from NicCamps Hunstanton 2007 🙂

Had a lovely week, the hostel was a nice one. It had loads of living space – a proper lounge with comfy chairs, tv and video, a big enough to seat us all at once dining room / conservatory – rather hysterically decorated with displays of lentils, beans and pulses 😆 and even more hysterically an ‘Education Room’, decked out initially with school room style tables and chairs (which Ady and I rearranged before anyone else arrived), educational posters all over the walls and lego, puzzles and board games. The kitchen was easily the worst / smallest YHA one I’ve come across so far though with just one normal sized, not very efficient at cooking even jacket potatoes oven, 12 hob rings (which rather dictated our menu choices) and bugger all worktop space. It did have enough fridge space for a non-meat fridge, freezer space for garlic bread and actually there was another secret fridge in the foyer which would have become the beer and wine fridge if I could have worked out where to turn it on. Oh and we had a hot water on tap boiler machine too which was ace for making copious quantities of tea. 🙂

Bedrooms were fine, most had sinks, ours had sufficient floor space for the kids to take the bottom of each bunk and Ady to fashion a double bed on the floor for us with the top bunk mattresses – so much more convenient when staggering back to one’s room at 3am to just fall asleep on the floor and warm your cold feet on your husband than to have to negotiate climbing into a bunk bed on the other side of the room to him I find. 😆 We had a garden, which the kids made full use of and we were about two minute walk from the beach, and possibly more importantly a five minute stroll from the open til 10pm Tescos (which we did indeed make full use of at 9.30pm on the last night when we realised in true NicCamps fashion we had practically drunk the place dry :lol:).

There was some dissent in the ranks with NicCampers bringing contraband resources for swapping and sharing in the style of Latin books, Maths manuals and the like but I managed to resort to my tried and tested method of ignoring anything potentially mentally damaging to myself by singing Rick Astley songs in my head (and often out loud) to drown out such evils. (For the whole of senior school when they recited the Lords Prayer in assembly each morning to prevent myself from joining in with the words I would sing ‘Never gonna give you up’ to myself instead). Ady was not so lucky and did get caught looking at latin books and even ate bloody cauliflower curry one night but redeemed himself in many other ways, at least one of which was buying a Mr Blobby video and showing it to all the children at least three times a day – bring resources to NicCamps and we will ensure your kids drive you insane with shouting ‘Blobby, Blobby, Blobby!’ at you from the back of the car all the way home again 😆 And if the threatened hooking up laptops and having kids doing Education City starts to happen at the next NicCamps then we will go through with teaching all your offspring ‘I know a song that’ll get on your nerves!’ 😆 😆 😆

Marcus, Ben and Davies ‘enjoyed’ the, erm, attention that being the only 3 boys in an otherwise rather girl heavy camp brought (Jasper was there too of course, but he escaped the bulk of it) by being hand delivered love notes from various of the girls throughout the week, which I know Davies found initially entertaining and maybe slightly flattering but perhaps rather tiring by the end of the week. He did at one point come and ask me to escort him to the toilet as he was struggling to get into there without female accompanyment – when we unlocked the door there was a queue of 3 girls waiting outside :lol:. Being without the older girls changed the dynamic quite a lot and it was odd to see Catie, Fran and Beth as the ‘bigger girls’ this time having first met them as all not much more than toddlers. Scarlett mostly enjoyed the week but as always when Ady is around wasn’t always quite as self sufficient as I know she is capable of being. She was very cute on the Thursday with Rachael though who she appears to have recruited as her own apprentice 😉

It was nice to spend time with a slightly different mixing of friends than normal although I hope noone present will be offended by my confession of missing absent friends dreadfully, particularly the two who should have been there and had to drop out at the last minute :(. When talking to Davies about friends we wished were there too he also mentioned Kit so there were definite gaps in our numbers. I think we’re all looking forward to being a bigger group at Kessingland.

We had a midweek trip to the (very) local Sealife centre which Kath, Mark and Luke came up and joined us for, which was lovely :). Babs, Beth, Rachel, Tarly and I had walked over there the previous day to properly book and make arrangements and been given a complimentary ticket to wander round there and then so we particularly enjoyed going and revisiting it the next day with Tarly very pleased to be a minor expert in what was coming up next. We had a talk and a ‘touchpool’ session with crabs, hermit crabs and starfish with the children (and adults) getting the chance to hold the creatures and ask questions, we also watched feeding time for the penguins. It’s a fairly small and unimpressive centre compared to some I have visited but upon learning that it costs about £3000 a year just to feed the penguins and realising that it acts as more of a sanctuary than a tourist attraction I felt the vastly discounted rates we got were more than value for money and that we were actually assisting in the running of the place rather than just going to see what we could get out of it (Comic Relief sentimentality still affecting me a week on, obviously 😉 ).

Ady, Davies, Scarlett and I had a couple of trips wandering round Hunstanton, perusing the local charity shops and being amused at the odd combinations of shops you get in an almost entirely seasonal town like Hunstanton. On Tuesday Babs, the girls and I had been caught in a really viscious hail storm coming back from the Sea Life centre and indeed on Wednesday when we walked over there it was bitterly cold but on Thursday morning the weather was far less blustery, more calm and mild and the four of us had a lovely long walk along the beach just as the tide was going out. We found jellyfish, starfish and lots of other shellfish and enjoyed poking around in the rock pools and looking at the different colours of pebbles to the beach here at home. I always feel really ashamed of how much people appreciate being so close to the beach and making the most of it when I know we have a really quite nice beach just a ten minute walk from us here so as ever have vowed to spend more time at the beach in future at home. We’d started our week with chips for lunch when we arrived on Monday getting to Hunstanton an hour earlier than planned so we ended it in the same way with chips for lunch again to warm us up after our beach walk on Thursday.

We had some very pleasant evenings, with the viewing of Kirsty and James’ wedding on video, a showing of James Bond, much drunken silliness and vast topics of conversation over wine, beers and home baking. Babs didn’t once take her trousers off but I think it’s safe to say we created a few new in jokes and enjoyed those few hours after (most) children had gone to bed spending time with people who’s lives we catch up on daily in blogland but always manage to learn something new about in real life company.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, (or should than be women?) is what NicCamps is all about 🙂

D woke me before 7am whispering ‘Mummy, it’s your day!’ I agreed that indeed it was and fell asleep again. Ady woke me at 8am with a cup of tea for which I issued grateful thanks and went back to sleep. They all appeared at 9am so I got up 🙂 My Dad arrived shortly afterwards for a lesson on maintaining Hatchwatch in our absence next week.

Both children had made me Mothers Day cards – complete with explained pictures and lovely writing inside 🙂
Davies’

Scarlett’s

I got a box of Thorntons and a flower made by D at Badgers last week

Dad gave me the money for Davies’ swimming lessons due to start weekly after Easter (having been on the waiting list there for the best part of 2 years his name has finally reached the top – hurrah! 🙂 ) and then went home. I made some cards for my Mum and Granny with the children – Davies drew my Granny and Scarlett drew my Mum – I love kid’s interpretations of people, their pictures are just the best caricatures picking out one or two features on someone, I think in every picture my kids draw of me they focus heavily on my orange hair and always dress me in a green top – sort of like a different coloured, female version of Bod :lol:.

We called in to the swimming pool to pay for Davies’ lessons and then went to my parents house. My Mum was in full on hostess mode and insisted I did nothing (my Dad did jest that I probably wouldn’t struggle too much in achieving that :lol:) so I sat on the sofa chatting to my Dad while Ady and Mum cooked, Davies and Scarlett sat in the kitchen drawing and playing shops with my Granny and Frazer. It was great. 🙂 Dad and I spent some time on the internet looking up his relatives on the 1851 and 1901 census online service which was interesting, and checking his premium bonds online too. Dad is perpetually amazed by the internet and how you can just do anything on it.

Mum cooked a really lovely meal and the kids not only ate everything on their plates they ate with wonderful table manners, plenty of compliments for the food and were just so well behaved :). After eating Davies spent some time playing on the nickjr website with various adults watching over his shoulder, Tarly wandered between adults spending some time sitting with me playing online jigsaw puzzles and the rest of us drank tea and enjoyed family in-jokes. It was a lovely day. 🙂

We left there just after 6pm as the children were starting to get tired and I didn’t want the loveliness to be spoilt by an unpleasant last half hour. The kids had a bath (showers only for the rest of the week, but I think that youth hostel showers are ok 😉 ), I packed our bags ready to go in the morning and wrote down routes etc. Kids were asleep pretty early and I think we’re all set for the off tomorrrow morning. 🙂

all you mothers 🙂

It was a lovely day today, can’t quite equate nearly T shirt weather with snow warnings for 48 hours time somehow. We drove along the coast and if time had been in greater supply would have spent some time there today it was that lovely.

I worked all day yesterday. It was very quiet and pretty boring. Ady was at home with D&S so I came home for lunch which I don’t usually do. They had a nice day though, although I’m not actually sure what they did. So coupled with the fact I didn’t actually have a lot to say and the fact that I spent the entire evening weeping my way through the films on Comic Relief I didn’t get here to blog last night. Davies sat up and watched the first hour or so of Comic Relief. We’ve talked a bit before about those less fortunate than us and various issues as tackled last night such as domestic abuse, starvation and famine, third world issues such as disease from sanitation and lack of medicine, child carers and all of the other things that had me sitting with my hand over my mouth and tears streaming down my cheeks for about four hours last night. Who knows how much of it sank in, who knows whether it is right or wrong for a six year old to be excused knowing about how other six year olds around the world suffer in favour of having their own priviledged childhood. I think the overwhelming thing that he and I both got from it is just how bloody lucky we are. And maybe that’s the most important message of all – count your blessings, because through some sort of lottery of birth we live here, in this country, with a family who love us and don’t want to hurt us, we have more than enough of pretty much anything we could ever want and probably the most respect we can show those who don’t have it is to enjoy what we do have I guess. We can’t change the world, we can change how we view it though…

So, today. We did massive amounts of washing (Ady started with several loads and I took over when I got up) and got it all dry again too – hurrah :), Ady emptied out his car ready to be loaded up on Monday morning, we had a fairly lazy morning and then set off to Brighton to call into Asda to get various Mothers Day related bits. Ady and Davies went off to do secret things together, while Tarly stayed with me and we got a few bits for my Mum and some batteries for our maglite torch for candling purposes.

Then we went over to collect the Susumama order and drove for a while along the coast enjoying the lovely weather.

I did some baking (flapjacks, fairy cakes and chocolate rice crispie cakes) for NicCamps and once it was dark we candled the eggs as it is day 6 of hatchwatch. Despite not really knowing what we were looking for we were all really interested in what we could see. It looks to us like we have two definite possibles, perhaps a couple of non starters and a whole load we couldn’t tell about. We’re going to have another go tomorrow and hope that none of the non starters explode while we’re away. We’ll be back with a full week to go before they should start hatching so we should be able to easily indentify which are likely to hatch by the time we get back next Friday.

Looking forward to a nice day tomorrow over at my parent’s. Frazer will be there, as will my Granny so hopefully the children will be on good form and we’ll have a nice family day.

I have this daughter Scarlett. She is small and very funny 🙂

Sometimes she likes to wear her jeans round the wrong way. She always likes to be ‘just like you Mummy’ which extends to allowing her hair to be put up if it is the same style as I am sporting on that day and wearing my shoes pretty much the instant I step out of them.

Oh yeah, you already did! 😉

We went to Arundel today and met up with Julie, Jack and Maisie at Swanbourne Lake. As we were walking round I recalled that it had been somewhere Ady and I had gone on one of our very first days out together as a couple – there is home video footage of us there which is now some 14 years old. We spent a lot of time in Arundel in our early days together actually as it was on the way to lots of Ady’s friends at the time and it is somewhere my parents would often take Frazer and I on Sundays as children to look round the antique shops or have Sunday lunch out at a pub. Arundel is best avoided during the summer and at weekends though as it is so very touristy now so it’s not somewhere we’ve spent much time in the couple of years since we moved home. We did however spend a day there on a visit back to Sussex when we were living in Manchester and there are some self timer shots of us sitting on a bench we walked past today with me pregnant with Tarly and a very young (about 22 months old) Davies wobbling about feeding swans.

Can’t quite believe that photo is nearly five years old 😯 – told the children about visiting there and that there were photos of it and showed them when we got home. Funny to think that we walked round there today with Jack and Maisie who were also still a bump when that photo was taken. How come it all feels like it was only last week?

It was something of a bedlamic morning (not sure if bedlamic is a word? think it should be though if it isn’t already. I like it 🙂 describes our life well at times) with Tarly shrieking for the best part of half an hour because I asked her to get dressed. She pulled the same stunt tonight when asked to put her pjs on actually – it took half an hour, child abuse type levels of sound effects (thank fuck we don’t have neighbours!) and her telling me she hated me before collapsing into my arms telling me over and over again how much she loves me. She was awake in the night and in our bed again last night too. Whatever it was that knocked her out for the last two weeks has regressed her in all sorts of ways, as illness tends to do to young children, so we’ve had a couple of episodes when previously we’ve had months of peace and harmony (well almost 😉 ) – at least this time I know it will blow over and I feel way more condfident in dealing with it (and of course I know Ady is off with me next week too :lol:). We did all have a cuddle before we left the house and agreed to have a good day though and indeed we did.

I can’t recall what we talked about on the way to Arundel but I know it was nice, pleasant conversation. We arrived, parked and went to buy some duck food from the cafe and then set off on a lengthy walk round the lake. Davies, Jack and Maisie all went ahead and did plenty of clambering and scrambling up hills and down ditches, Tarly was less adventurous (see I told you she wasn’t herself :lol:) and mostly walked along holding my hand. Julie and I had a great time, loads of chatting, loads of laughs and loads of surreal speculations about situations that will never happen but gave us plenty to giggle about lending the whole day a slightly hysterical air. We deviated from the path round the lake so we could cross a stile and venture further round a corner (leading to more speculation about whether we’d find our way back before nightfall and may even return having discovered previously unchartered lands and learnt new languages and life skills – but in fairness Julie and I have gone off track on so many of our walks and turned short meanders into miles long hikes, ending up carrying children and practically on our knees with exhaustion it probably wasn’t too ridiculous speculating really :lol:). We found ourselves in something of a valley which we realised might echo well so we all spent about 10 minutes seeing which noises made the best echoes – yodelling works well, as do siren type noises and anything of a low pitch 😆 Very entertaining! We spotted a landmark in the distance so walked on to that before stopping for our picnic lunch.

The children wandered off to play up a hill while Julie and I basked in the sunshine and chatted. We sat watching them for about half an hour playing together, working out some elaborate game involving gathering larger than them sticks and carrying them together up the hill, climbing, delegating, inventing, exploring and learning. We spent happy time telling each other that this, this was what childhood should be about and how school can only hope to replicate a small amount of that in an artificial classroom environment and left to their own devices children cannot help but entertain, enlighten and educate themselves. Twas blissful :). It was also one of those days for counting your blessings and I was feeling particularly sentimental about family. I do so adore having Julie as my sister in law, we’re so different in many ways and Chris and Ady still stumble over a fraternal relationship in many ways, as two different family units we are very, very different but the four children really do adore each other and I just love that they are growing up so close and so part of each others’ lives. I love that the children see each other at least once a week and they all feel so at ease in each others’ company. I’m so glad that Julie and I have developed a bond between us which means all this happens and that I have such a close friend too as a result. See, told you I was schmultzy today 🙂

We then walked back to the stile and continued our path round the lake. This side was more steep up to the side so the children did various levels of clambering up the slopes and tree roots and feeding the ducks along the side of the lake. There are some pictures on flickr but even they don’t capture just how lovely it was. Davies spotted the grey feathers and downiness of the swans and told me that was because as cygnets they were fluffy and grey and that’s how one got confused as an ugly duckling so they mustn’t have totally changed to their graceful white feathers yet :shock:, Scarlett found a caterpillar, several ladybirds and other creepy crawlies and talked about what stage of their life cycles they were at. And then, big excitement, Davies spotted some lizards sunning themselves on the grass. To my shame I had no idea we had lizards in this country and tried to tell him they must be newts to which he insisted they were indeed lizards and Julie confirmed it. Then we spotted several more before moving on with plans to come back again with nets to catch one and look at it more closely. (Julie says she spent many a happy hour as a child catching lizards with nets to observe them – she is an only child though :lol:). We finally worked our way back to the beginning and back to the cars. Davies had been wearing a pair of very old, already mud stained with a hole in one knee jeans that I’ve kept for walks in muddy places but this time due to sliding all the way down a very steep bank on his bum and going ankle deep in the mud they were beyond being worth washing, so he got changed into a spare pair of jeans before I let him in the car and then we came home.

On the way we got to talking about counting in twos – it was because of me telling them about how we’d been to that lake when Davies was nearly 2 and Scarlett hadn’t been born. Then they both wanted to go and look at the castle and I promised I’d take them when they were a bit older and could get enough out of it to justify the very expensive admission charges. I’d been with the school at about 11 or 12 and recall it being very interesting, but very indepth guided tour style which I don’t think they’d get much from just yet. I said maybe when they were 6 and 8 or 8 and 10 which led to ‘when Scarlett is 8, how old will Davies be?’ type questions from me which I kept going up in 2 year increments with. Davies suddenly said – you are missing a number out each time, so I explained I was counting in twos and then they shouted out other numbers to count up in and I did – rather rustily on the 7s and 8s actually 😳 funny how I know don’t rely so much on the times table reciting as just using number bond type stuff with the units instead (eg, adding 7 to 42 I wasn’t going up in my 7 times table, I was adding a 7 to the 2 of the 42) – I guess in day to day life I have more call for knowing that sort of sum that for having to know 8 x 7 etc.

We got home and looked at photos of today and the trip I’d been telling them about, I drank lots of tea and we watched Shaun the Sheep. They had tea and we all snuggled up until Ady got home and then Tarly had her pj moment. 🙄

Tomorrow I’m working all day again and Ady is working from home to be with the children. And then… HOLIDAY 🙂 🙂 🙂

Yesterday. Ah yes, yesterday. Hmmm.

I was on a full day training course at Worthing library about Children’s services. I’d allowed half an hour for driving into town, parking and then walking to the library. I’d thought I’d park in the carpark next to the library but on checking the details of the carpark on the internet the night before I realised it was short stay only (maximum 4 hours) so that was out. I’d also looked at going into town on the train but the course was supposed to end at 430pm which was always going to mean getting home and getting Davies back out again for Badgers at 545pm would be a tall order so I knew the train wouldn’t be any good. So I revised my plan to the slightly further away (about 5 minute fast pace walk) long stay car park instead (bargain at £1.50 for all day). Which meant, by my precision timing I had 15 minutes to drive to the car park, five minutes to park, five minutes to walk to the library and five minutes for composing myself / going to the loo / contingency fund.

The drive took slightly longer than planned, eating a good two minutes into my contingency fund and then I pulled up to the car park behind a man leaning out of his car arguing (quite literally, he was actually shouting at it) with the pay and display machine. Odd set up – you pay as you go in and then display the ticket in your car but there was no barrier. So he started gesticulating to me that the machine wasn’t working and then his reverse lights came on. I duly reversed back out too, then he seemed to change his mind and went in anyway. I didn’t bother with the machine as by now I had used up a further minute of my contingency fund and I thought I’d park near him and see what he was going to do about the broken machine. He was super speedy though and had disappeared down the steps before I’d got out of my car. So I went and checked to see if he’d left a note in his car only to find he’d got a ticket after all and was proudly displaying it on his dashboard. Trickin’ cheatin’ no good man! By now I had seven minutes to get to the library – and I was on floor 6 of the car park. Deciding it would be quicker to run than get back in the car and drive I dashed down the stairs, bunged money in the machine (much to the confusion of people coming in in their cars – clearly the machine brings out the loony in people!) got a ticket and ran back up the stairs again. I now had four minutes to get to the library. So I did that hurrying sort of semi run that people do when they are late but don’t want to / frankly are physically incapable of running. Should probably mention that I was wearing shoes I’ve not worn for ages yesterday. I normally wear boots if I’m wearing a skirt and some flat black shoes if I’m wearing trousers to work, but with the sunnier days on the way I decided to dig out some different footwear and found a pair of cute mary jane style black shoes. They are flat, black with a t-bar style front. Only trouble is they are a little on the narrow side and when my feet get hot and swell slightly bits of flesh poke out of the space either side of the t-bar. They are sitting down in cool conditions type shoes really. Not semi-running in warm weather type shoes.

I got to the library with seconds to spare. I was purple of face, mottled of cleavage, wheezing and panting (forgot my inhaler :roll:) with a feminine glow and puffy bits of my feet poking through the cute bits on my shoes. Clearly my colleagues couldn’t help but be impressed 😆

There were 8 attendees on the course – 2 of whom were on the last one (one of which impressively remembered my name, rather less impressively remembered the wrong name and called me Nikki all day :roll:), a youngish girl with very odd ringletted hair, a girl who sounded exactly like Tara Palmer Tompkinson with a very husky voice but had this weird habit of pulling lots of faces and laughing too long after every sentence she said. A woman who worked at Lancing for the first week or two I was there but then moved to another library, a couple of nice women and then this utter cow of a woman who seems to have been demoted in the recent reshuffle and clearly felt she shouldn’t be there for ‘refresher training’ as she sneeringly refered to it. She was really rude to all the rest of us and clearly felt we were too lowly for her to talk to.

The course was terrible. Really, really boring. Clearly there was a lot of information to impart but it was like attending a lecture and we just sat there being talked at for hours. And hours. In a hot room in the basement with no air and no windows and no natural light. Delivered by people who I’m sure are very nice but had no passion for what they were talking about, no enthusiasm for their jobs, clearly a lot of resentment for the changes and restructuring that’s recently happened throughout the local area and adhered to all the stereotypical ideas of what librarians might be like.

We were talked at about Every Child Matters (oh did that put my back up!) and how our work fits into such government initiatives and ideas. Very at odds with many of my personal beliefs lots of that so I really struggled not to sneer in places and to remain looking interested and nodding in agreement. Then we heard about Bookstart and similar schemes – again something I can see all the reasons and benefit to but delivered in such a way to feel patronising, prescriptive and so bloody contrived – here is what you should be doing with your baby aged 0-1, here are the books to read – it’s like the whole country’s being run by Gina Ford! Things like bookstart are great initiatives but should be rolled out with passion, vigour and a belief in free books and invitations to join the library for everyone in a positive, attractive way rather than the big brother style of ‘every child shall receive these books and be read to by their parent’. Probably not making any sense here but somehow it annoyed me.

We were shown how school project loans are put together from the schools library service library and then we looked at some book selection, which was easily the best part of the day. We all got to look at a load of childrens’ books and decide whether we’d buy them for the library or not. That was fun 🙂 I think I’d like to be a book buyer for a living, well anything that involved shopping really 😆

During the lunch break I wandered down into town. I’ve not been into Worthing for ages and despite it being my home town and having worked in the town centre for several years a while ago I felt like a total stranger. I had really itchy feet yesterday I think (aswell as painful feet from the pokey out bits in the cute shoes 😉 ) and would happily have come home and packed us all up to leave for somewhere else. Just as well we’re on holiday next week I think, I was pretty disillusioned with everything yesterday.

In the afternoon while we were looking at the schools library area the snooty woman managed to knock a metal shelf down that was propped up against the side and I didn’t notice it falling until it landed on my foot – nicely pushing the pokey out bits back in again true, but not doing a great deal for me otherwise. And she didn’t say sorry. Cow 🙁

The course finished early so I was home at 4.30pm, as was Ady having been prewarned that I’d be pushed for time to get home and feed Davies before Badgers. So Dad was let off childcare very early indeed 🙂 and Davies got to eat a proper dinner rather than have sandwiches shoved down his throat while we drove to Badgers. And I got to sit in the car and eat humbugs and listen to the radio for an hour, so that was nice 🙂

Will be back to blog today a bit later.

Scarlett planting her seeds the other week


and then clearing up the soil afterwards with the Davies machine

they’ve not taken long to start rewarding her work 🙂

And here’s Hatchwatch Day Zero 🙂

We’re on day five now, we’ll be candling them on Saturday to check progress so far but I’m not sure how well that’ll photograph.

Well no one seemed to be ill today. Although Davies ended the day with a sticky eye 🙄 and Tarly was demonstrating how quickly she can regress to toddlerdom when the mood takes her. Fortunately along came Ros with a real live toddler and made her look all big and grown up and oversized so that pretty much put paid to that 😆

We watched a load of Class TV this morning, some stuff on Famous People in history which Davies was fascinated by followed by something I’d not seen before with an animated robot getting out and about finding out about things – a bit like Bits and Bobs for the next key stage :lol:. Scarlett painted my toenails and then Ros and co arrived. The boys disappeared with a film, Scarlett stayed mostly in the lounge doing puzzles but was fairly good about letting me and Ros catch up and chat. Ady popped home for lunch and then everyone left again.

Davies wanted to know how long before Shaun the Sheep was on and I replied ‘an hour and three quarters’ to which he asked what that meant. Thinking back to a conversation with Alison last week about maths concepts and autonomy I grabbed the geomags (as we are a maths manipulative free household 😆 – and I read about Lucy using them for a similar purpose) and got him to split 12 rods into half, then showed him quarters, thirds, sixths etc. Then I wrote some of them down and showed him how they work and explained a little about lowest common denominator (although of course I didn’t call it that – just showed him how 2/6 is the same as 1/3 and that we would always write down the smallest possible numbers above and below the line) and that the whole idea of bits of numbers smaller than one whole is called fractions. Then he wrote down a few demonstrating it had totally gone in and made sense to him and then we drew some shapes and drew lines to split them in halves and quarters and shaded in things like 3/8 of the shape etc. We did a square and a circle which brought us back to telling the time where we started. So I explained that one hour can be divided into half and quarters and what 3/4 of an hour would look like. Our big clock in the lounge has roman numerals which although Davies can make sense of is not easy to read at a glance so he was asking for a watch with numbers on it. His Wallace and Gromit one he got for Christmas has lines instead of numbers so I really must get him a cheapy one for learning to tell the time with actual numbers on as he’s asked several times now. We did have one somewhere but I suspect it’s long since gotten lost in one of my clear outs. 😆 We then touched on units, tens and hundreds, again using geomags to demonstrate and writing down numbers but he’d gotten bored by then and wanted to just write numbers with lots of noughts so we called an end to that. I put Cats on that I’d got from work thinking Tarly would like the costumes, make up and songs so we had that on as background for a while.

Scarlett did some drawing and colouring in a princess activity book and Davies did some drawing too, then he watched Shaun the sheep and did some more drawing. He asked for a subject matter so I asked him to draw me things that reminded him of spring. He drew a sunset and a rainbow, a flower, a butterfly, a paddling pool and the sun. Then with fairly minimal help he wrote the word ‘spring’. He was in the right frame of mind for something more so I wrote ‘candle is a black cat’ and he read that, then he asked for a word game where I draw pictures and write the words and he has to draw a line to link them. I did star, triangle, circle and square. He got star and triangle fairly quickly but stumbled over circle (understandably) and then seemed to be working on trying to spell out square despite obviously knowing it had to be that word anyway. Then Ady arrived home.

The kids had dinner, I escaped to Tescos for an hour before coming home to cook dinner for me and A.

One word? when seven would do is brought to you today by the letter C for circle and the numbers 5, 517 and 3/4.

Utterly fed up of us all being ill. Struggling with general apatheticness, not a lot of sympatheticness and a huge amount of general patheticness. I still can’t decide if I am actually ill or just hayfever-y, Scarlett seems to be pretty much back to normal (see how just typing that sentence jinxes her health by tomorrow) and Davies has got a killer cough. And of course you all know how I feel about coughs. Sigh.

I’m tired. Tired of being tired, tired of being grumpy, tired of not having Ady around enough – he didn’t make it back in time for Beavers tonight which meant a last minute dash to get Tarly’s coat and shoes on and drag her round with us to drop Davies off. I just feel generally wrung out and weary. I feel like I’ve taken on too much (although I’d struggle to actually list what it is I’ve taken on, but everything feels like such a mammoth effort) and I just want to go and hide somewhere quiet for two days.

I was thinking earlier about that TV show Cheers. I used to love Cheers – I loved Sam (although when Ted Danson did that awful made for TV film Something About Amelia I was rather put off him – bad, bad role to be typecast in that), I loved Diane and I loved Carla, I loved Coach and I loved Woody, I loved Cliff and Norm and I even loved Rebecca. But most of all I loved the theme tune – where everybody knows your name. I used to drink in a bar like that – I’d walk in and the barmen would chorus ‘Nic’ and a bottle of Red Rock (my poison of choice at that time) would be cracked open and sat at my usual place at the bar before I’d even worked my way round to sit there. It was great. 🙂 But today, just for once I wanted to be living the total opposite to that. I wanted to go where nobody knew my name, where noone gave a shit whether I came, I wanted to be where you could see, people were all the same, and because of that nobody even knew my name (plinky piano music to fade). I consider myself a sociable enough person, a caring wife, an engaged and loving mother, a daughter you can call on in a crisis, but today I really wanted to put my hands over my ears, close my eyes, sing ‘lalalalal I’m not listening’ change my name by deed poll to anything but ‘Nic’ or ‘Mummy’ and go somewhere where coughs, home education, parenting, marriage and who’s turn it is to cook dinner had never been invented.

Of course I didn’t do that. What I did instead was take two small children to a clothes shop, then collect another child and an adult and take everyone to a Home Ed group. Where because it was a nice day lots of the people went outside which meant my children wanted to go outside. Except I don’t let them go outside at that Home Ed group for all sorts of various (legitimate) reasons. So instead I found myself justifying that to my children with an audience then slumping over the counter because there were only two bloody stools to sit on while my children passed the baton of neediness between them while trying to find things to do which required the most parental input until eventually I decided that maybe we should all go outside where I could sit and make a daisy chain in a basket weaving, repetitive, requiring no brain power type manner while the children brought me daisies and STAYED IN MY SIGHT AT ALL TIMES! Did I stress that sufficiently? I think I did, but then I thought I did earlier and clearly I didn’t because within moments both children had indeed left my sight heading towards the rusty barbecue with rancid water in full view of the dinnerladies supervising the children in the playground of the school next door to home ed group. And then Davies found some chalk. Which he drew with until his hands and trousers were all chalky and then he came and sat on my lap in all his chalky glory (and just typing the word chalk is giving me goosebumps) and coughed. Lots.

So that was nice.

We left shortly afterwards, with an uneventful drive home where I secured peace by making the children promise not to talk to me or ask me for anything, preempted all their potential needs by aying out drinks, food and the tv remote, drank three cups of tea back to back and watched Shaun the Sheep with them. In silence. It was good.

And I think that’s all I have to say about that.

I forgot to blog earlier that we have been Victims Of Crime.

When my Dad arrived this morning he couldn’t ring on the doorbell because the bell push was missing!!!

Da da dahhhhh! (as Davies once said 😉 )

We have a wireless doorbell and the bell push was just hooked on by a screw. About 11pm last night I heard the letterbox rattle on the front door but assumed it was Ady (I was in Tarly’s room dealing with her), but when I went in the lounge he was asleep on the sofa but I forgot all about it. Clearly there was someone stealing our door furntiture – lucky they didn’t take the letterbox too probably!

Have spent all day wondering quite why someone would want to nick a bell push really? Was it a dare? Is there a series of similarly random thefts from people’s front doors all along the street? Is there attractive house number pottery plates with squirels or Great British birds missing? Wrought iron effect plastic house numbers awol? An obscure collection of items from around the area right now nestling in someone’s ‘den’? Gromes, traffic cones, our bell push, wing mirrors, milk bottles and gate hinges jostling for space with signs proclaiming ‘DOG BITES FIRST, ASKS QUESTIONS LATER’ and ‘NO FREE PAPERS’ and ‘BEWARE OF THE WIFE’.

We had a spare so we’ve put that up but it is programmed to play the first two lines of ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’ instead of the normal ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong we had before (which Davies and I have discussed at length as to whether it is Twinkle twinkle or the alphabet song, with me even wondering if Baa baa black sheep would also fit – I’m spying a lack of originality in nursery rhyme music y’know) and of course we have been trying to think up punchlines to the ‘spate of doorbell robberies in the area’ joke (you know, to go with the ‘police are combing the area’ one for hairdressers being burgled and ‘police have nothing to go on’ for the toilet seat factory and of course the classic ‘dogs stolen from pet shop’ being ‘police say they have no leads’) – best we can come up with is that it wouldn’t have been a lone criminal – it must have been a ring of thieves. Ring, doorbell – get it? 😆

this evening

This tomorrow 🙂

just say the word and we’ll race the birds to Acapulco Bay, yes it’s perfect for a flying honeymoon they say, so come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away (need a musical note smiley, something like :semiquaver:)

Another rough night with Scarlett last night although I think it was more habit than anything actually wrong. We had such a long period of time with her being the amazing non-sleeping toddler that although she is now a pretty good sleeper when she goes off track for any reason it can take a while to get back to normal. And of course her being downstairs doesn’t help because she tends to wake, sit up in bed and just holler rather than coming to find us 🙄 At 6am I got up, told her that while yes, it was indeed morning time now which was what she was yelling there was noone else about to be getting up anytime soon as we’d all had way too little sleep so far and that if she wanted to sit and watch Nick jr she was very welcome but she could sit on her own and do so. Which she took quite agreeably, settled down on the sofa, waited until about two minutes after I’d snuggled back into bed and then started howling for Ady. She ended up in our room wailing for ages before snuggling down next to me and going to sleep. Which woke Davies. Who had a fit about noone being up for getting up with him either and stomped back to bed himself. He then woke hysterical about half an hour later as he’d poked himself in the eye and it hurt. Ady eventually got up with him while I went back to sleep again. They both want Ady in the mornings anyway – this is solely because I think they are old enough to be entertaining themselves now if they want to get up hours earlier than the rest of us, they can operate the tv and dvd player, access all their toys, reach things in the kitchen and so I let them get on with it whereas Ady is normally up with them anyway getting ready to go to work so if he’s in the house they expect it of him whether he needs to actually be up that day or not. A work in progress definitely :).

Davies had indeed done *something* to his eye, it was all bruised round the upper and lower eyelid and watering and weeping a fair bit. The actual eye itself looks fine and he insists it is because he poked himself in his sleep so I don’t suspect an eye infection. I did get him some eye drops but he squealed like I’d poured acid into his eye when I tried to put them in so we didn’t try that again. He did lots of walking round with dampened cotton wool pads looking mournful and occassional bouts of crying and whimpering but it did seem to coincide with Scarlett acting up too so I am slightly dubious at just how painful it is, although it certainly looks quite sore.

My Dad appeared in the morning for an hour or so as he has done the last couple of Sundays, it’s quite nice, I wish he’d come over more. Scarlett had a long bath and hair wash as she was quite stinky from sweating the last couple of days with her fever and I changed her bed, we did loads and loads of washing and we put all the eggs in the incubator. One was cracked so we start with 18 potential little chicks. They need to be ‘candled’one third of the way into incubation according to the manual with the incubator so we will have a look at them next weekend if not before, then we hand them over to Dad to do daily turning of the eggs along with his cat and fish feeding duties while we are at NicCamps, with us coming back for the final week of the 21 days incubation. Excited at the prospect of little chicks, slightly daunted at the idea of breeding some sort of mutants or having no hatchlings at all. Will post further ‘hatchwatch’ updates as they happen :).

I got Tarly and Davies some seeds last week – Davies got a Wallace and Gromit pot and cress seeds and Tarly got a butterfly garden which is a mini greenhouse with 3 different butterfly attracting flower seeds. Tarly and I did hers earlier this week but today we were watering it and Davies and I sowed the cress seeds in his, so we’ve done lots of starting new life type stuff here today. 🙂

Davies did some more playing with his IQ science toy (it’s similar to this one) including dismantling and rebuilding it. It’s funny how children go from having no interest in something like that to loving it almost overnight. I was expecting loads of play with the gears gears gears! stuff but it didn’t really happen, this has been a huge success. I almost wonder if it’s because it isn’t brightly coloured and ‘kiddified’ – Davies has always seemed suspcisious of stuff that is supposed to be played with and gone for the less obvious choices as toys 😆 ( and yeah I am thinking ash and paintbrushes here 😉 ). Bring on the science I guess.

Ady went out to mow the lawn and the children followed for a play in the garden. I had intentions of hiding inside with my laptop and making the most of a brief hour window without a child on my lap – a real rarity this week. But Davies rang the doorbell and invited me out to play his canabalised game of tennis / badminton he’d set up in the garden, stringing a length of net across between two bushes and finding a table tennis bat and a badminton racquet to bash a ball pool ball over. We messed about with that for a while until Ady came along and he and I had a go. Most of the balls ended up in the road though with all four of us helpless with laughter. 😆

We had roast beef while watching Eight Below which I’d got from work but neither of the children were particularly bothered to be watching. It was quite a long film and they both drifted away at various points once they’d finished eating, but they both came back for the ending and we sat snuggled up together watching with me sniffling through the end as they both clarified precisely what had happened several times. We walked round the shop to get ice creams for pudding (wearing no coats – yay!) and then came back to watch the making of dvd extra of the film.

Finally we put on Morph and I got the plasticine out and made a Morph for Davies and a Delilah for Tarly, then they made some bits. Davies made an Ady dressed in Wallace’s clothing and Tarly made a me in the style of a Morph character. Davies then made a dinosaur and a mini Morph while Tarly and I collaborated on a blue cat with pink whiskers. Davies then put on a play for us all to watch with his creations before we packed them off to bed.

My nose has been streaming all day coupled with regular sneezing fits and I am hoping it is merely early hayfever caused by lawn mowing happening all around me rather than yet another phase in The Goddard’s Plague Of Illnesses or indeed an allergic reaction to all the flowers we picked from the garden and brought in the house. Anyway, weird assorted ailments aside it’s been a mostly nice day with Spring well and truly on it’s way. 🙂

After I blogged last night Tarly was up and awake loads, including perking up quite commendably around 11pm and requesting custard with chocolate sprinkles :lol:. She finally went to sleep around midnight but was awake again a couple of times in the night, albeit fairly happy and not in any pain.

By this morning she was in pain again and complaining it hurt when she laughed, coughed and breathed which led us to suspect a pulled muscle but doesn’t really explain the acute pain she seemed to be in last night. She took to her bed around lunchtime having finally been persuaded to take some calpol and had a temperature and specifically pain in her throat and back. Ady was all for calling the doctor but as I said they would tell us to calpol her as a first action anyway and if she was too stroppy to tell us what was the matter with her she would be unlikely to respond to a doctor I’d rather wait until I felt something was concerning enough for proper medical attention and then take her straight to hospital. She has perked up considerably this afternoon, picked at an eclectic mix of food and although she is still awake now (11.30pm) she is in good spirits and this would be more to do with daytime sleeping than anything sinister. I think it probably is more than a pulled muscle – kidney infection? rumbling appendix? something was very wrong with her for a couple of hours last night so we’ll keep a close eye on her and see what develops. I’m a queer mix of mothers instinct mixed with utter faith in modern medicine with no room for homeopathy and little faith in a gp for much more than dispensing prescriptions I’ve already decided I need really. I know in the past my Mum and Ady have been cross with me for not taking the children to the doctors when they’ve felt I should have done but having bowed to pressure and always been either proved right in my diagnosis or simply asked ‘what do you think is wrong with them?’ and ‘are you worried?’ on more than one occassion I feel fairly confident that if something is serious enough to warrant more than a splash of medised I will be able to tell and take appropriate action (I have to say this same attitude does not extend to anyone else who I will always tell to go and see their doctor rather than complain about their ill health to me 😉 ) .

Anyway, in other news. This morning Julie and I went to the NCT nearly new sale, leaving Ady with Davies, Scarlett, Jack and Maisie. They had a good time by all accounts – Scarlett took to her bed (as her name suggests she should every now and then 🙂 ) and Ady led the other three in a rousing game of sound effect bingo before settling them all down infront of cartoons (oh how we corrupt our niece and nephew – he also offered them crisps and flapjacks :lol:). Julie got loads of stuff at the sale, I was more restrained getting a dress and couple of pairs of summer trousers for Tarly, an animal jigsaw, a Morph video and an IQ Science kit thingy for Davies, all of which were very well recieved.

We came back and Julie took the twins off home while I got ready for work. Ady and Davies spent some time playing with the IQ kit which contained various component parts to build a robot type creature using circuit making, cogs and gears and propellers. There was an instruction leaflet discussion kinetic energy and energy transferance but they seemed to rub along just fine without it. When I got home from work they’d built an impressive creation different to the instructions but in full working order and were playing at making it go forwards and backwards together quite happily.

Scarlett had woken mid afternoon and answered the door to me when I got home from work which was nice. I’d had an uneventful afternoon with some training, some pottering and a (fingers crossed) agreement to have the Friday of Kessingland off but I’ll get that confirmed next week. I’ve booked anyway including the Saturday night at the end in case I do have to come back in the middle to go to work so I’m feeling very upbeat about that. 🙂

And that’s probably our day really. Davies is being fantastic at the moment, nothing specific just very patient and mature about all sorts of things – worthy of mention mostly because I blog the gripes too :). Fingers crossed for a better nights’s sleep and not too early a morning – no idea what Scarlett will be up to doing tomorrow but our orginial plan of a whole day out looks fairly unlikely.

Slow start to the morning with a very prolonged breakfasting of the running buffet variety. I got several loads of washing done and pegged out and a mammoth tower of clean stuff put away with assistance in sock matching from Davies :). Scarlett has been in bad humour all day and had plenty of ‘moments’ which unfortunately she continued with pretty much all day. It has culminated in an hours screaming with clutching at her stomach having gulped down two cups of lucozade on a pretty much otherwise empty stomach. I’m putting money on trapped wind and she is now sleeping peacefully but I did have my Mum on standby to sweep in and mind Davies while Ady and I rushed her to hospital at one point 🙁 Hopefully she’ll remain asleep and wake in better form tomorrow. I have been intolerant and impatient with her in equal amounts which retrospectively didn’t actually shape the day as much as I was sighing about earlier as when I sat down to start blogging I recalled all sorts of nice bits inbetween.

Having listened to the Shrek soundtrack pretty much nonstop for the last few days I got a new batch of cds from work yesterday including Disney’s Greatest Hits and The Proclaimers Greatest Hits (as inspired by I’m On My Way from the Shrek soundtrack). We listened to The Proclaimers first with me singing along to all the ones I knew (that’d be 500 miles, Letter from America and On My Way then 🙂 ) and then listening to their version of King Of The Road in utter delight telling the children what a wonderful spin they’d put on such a classic and speculating on what a great job they’d do on other songs. By the time we’d arrived at Ali’s I’d compiled a fantasy cover versions selection for them including Kylie’s I’m Spinning Around, a whole host of the Disney songs we’d been listening to and more. I’ve since decided that what would be totally fantastic would be a whole album full of cover versions of pop songs sung by artists with very strong regional accents although Proclaimers remain my favourites – can you imagine it? Proclaimers sing songs by Steps, Abba, Oasis, Elvis, The Spice Girls, The Beach Boys and Tina Turner. It’d be great :).

We had a nice time at Ali’s although Tarly took some rubbing along with I think it was mostly me that had to deal with that. Davies enjoyed playing a Labyrinth game which looked a bit fab and then X box – the highlight of that being that J was home and sat talking him through lots of it and explaining it to him as he went. There was a point when he was sat between Ali and J on the sofa playing a game when he looked in heaven at the adult attention 🙂 Ady’s xboxing begins and ends with the racing car games and mine was eclipsed by Davies on about week two of us getting it (quite liked the Wii though 😉 ) so he enjoyed getting some coaching by someone other than Elijah who has been his greatest mentor to this point. 🙂

On the way home we played ‘name that film’ with the Disney album, we’re a bit weak on the Princessy films and the Tarzan / Lion King type stuff but Davies was shit hot on the Peter Pan / Toy Story / Monsters Inc stuff getting it within the opening bar most of the time.

We got home and I cooked them some tea then Ady and my Mum both appeared together so we had a nice half an hour or so before Tarly went rapidly downhill. Now I’m about to have a bath followed by a dinner I haven’t cooked (novelty to that these last two weeks!) and a watch of Click, which may or may not live up to it’s hype laden front cover.

I’m feeling better tonight, having spent the whole day feeling faint and weak. I actually had a low level feeling of nausea all day very similar to the early weeks of pregnancy with both D&S (and no, I’m not, and if I am then we are so sueing the hospital who snipped A and the doctors who tested him to say it had worked :lol:). Work was fine, my last hope of swapping shifts for Kessingland said she would but as she is depserately looking for another job at the moment there is every chance she won’t be working there any more by June so she won’t actually agree to swap at the moment but will if she is still there. Hmmm 🙁

Lucy was here this morning and Frazer did Dad’s stint instead this afternoon, arriving shortly after midday which is at least two hours earlier than he normally gets up when he’s not working. He was an absolute model uncle – when I got in at 5.15pm he had Scarlett snuggled up on his lap watching Robin Hood with him and Davies making him geomag models. He’d walked down to the park on the seafront with them, taken them on the train and bought them ice creams and then walked home again. They had worn coats and shoes and he’d walked at their pace and shepherded them along the busy road and appeared to have actually enjoyed it. This is something even my Mum would have struggled to do. They were full of how he’d pushed them on the swings and talked to them. I’m delighted 🙂 🙂 🙂 Physical exercise, fresh air, treats, time with a relative and an adult male and someone other than me actually enjoying my children and delighting in spending time in their company. 🙂 Hurrah for Frazer!

Frazer left, we tidied up and they had an ecclectic selection of foodstuffs for their tea before getting into pjs and watching Masterchef with me before bed. I had a lovely long bath, a nice dinner and have drunk wine so I must be feeling better. Ady rang just as I was sitting down to eat to say his Travelodge has a power cut so noone can check into their rooms, and the restuarant isn’t serving food – sounds like a nightmare 🙁

I just watched ‘My Life As A Child‘ – really good show and found links to this – mustn’t forget to watch it!

Can’t believe it’s only Wednesday actually, it’s already been a long week. We had plans for Monday which we cancelled due to them both being ill and then due to a massive turnaround recovery we resurected. Probably an unwise decision really but Tuesday was a nice day.

We got home at about 6pm last night, both the children were in bed and asleep by 7pm, Ady got home at 8pm and I went to bed at 9.30pm myself and slept the clock round til 9.30 this morning. I can’t decide whether I am going down with something myself or not – I’m sure with every day I don’t go down with whatever Ady and the kids have I am more certain of not getting it and I’m hoping that feeling so bloody tired is just the result of so many broken nights sleep and being patient and caring around ill and frankly rather whingey children. I don’t recall the last time I’ve had so little time sitting down without a child on my lap as the last week.

So today we spent the morning pottering about and generally catching up on just being at home and being up for playing and doing stuff rather than lounging around in pjs. Still lots of needing to come and have a cuddle even more than usual from both of them but they did some puzzles, some tv watching, some cutting up paper and some looking at books. I did several loads of washing but couldn’t find motivation to do any further housework or tidying (even with the reward of a sticker on offer 😉 ) so drank copious amounts of tea including 2 cups of rose (thanks Alison x).

After lunch we popped to the post office to send a parcel on it’s way that a very patient ebay buyer has been waiting way too long for while I’ve not managed to get it sent, check the prices of vapourisers in Boots (we have one somewhere but can’t find it so I thought I’d get a second one but changed my mind when I discovered they cost £22! 😯 might have to look a bit harder for the one we already have!) and get a couple of bits from Sainsburys before meeting up with Julie, Jack and Maisie at Highdown for an official Spring Walk. I even took a picture of D&S infront of a tree in blossom with daffodils underneath it for proof! 😉

The kids enjoyed it, Davies did plenty of running about yelling and waving sticks – lovely to see him a bit animated after his feebleness the last few days. Tarly was slightly more reserved still (she clearly had a worse bout of whatever it was) and so I sent her off with the camera to take pictures of flowers for me instead. She didn’t get any decent flower shots but did get a couple of nice ones of Maisie who was only too happy to pose for her – very cute, wish I had a picture of the two of them doing that :).

They spent some time rolling down the slight slope and laughing so infectiously that we were laughing at them too before D&S suddenly slumped and both wanted to come home. We got home with time for tea and Davies decided he was up for Badgers so he and I went off to that when Ady got home. He looked quite wan when he came out and didn’t have much to talk about in the car there or back but had enjoyed it and been glad he’d gone. Ady had bathed Tarly and she was in bed, practically asleep when we got home so Davies had a bath and took himself off to bed and to sleep fairly early too.

Tomorrow I’m working all day and Ady is away again tomorrow night. 🙁 It looks likely he will have at least one night away every couple of weeks for the next few months until the season ends in June so if anyone wants to come down and stay for a night or two I’d welcome the company even more than usual :).

Davies continues to recognise words and is making ever more educated guesses at what things might say, he continues to be interested in road signs with us looking and talking about loads on the motorways on Monday and Tuesday – they’ve really helped with cracking the tens written down actually, particularly the variable speed limits round Heathrow on the M25 with him commenting on ‘oh it’s gone slower again’ and ‘hurrah we can speed up’ as we went past each sign. He’s also starting to recognise the odd spelt out loud word too, rather than just written down. Not that we’ve ever practised the spelling words out instead of saying them so the children didn’t understand but if we did then we’d have to start thinking up a new secret code now 😆 so I’m sure that’s a leap forward, being able to picture a word without having to see it written down.

we certainly throw ourselves into it. This season we are mostly being home educating hippies 😆

Featuring Nic and Scarlett and their coats of many colours

Our growing collection of DMs

and our garage wall complete with the beginnings of a family effort mural, naturally kicked off with a rainbow 🙂

I’m thinking some dreadlocks, henna tattoos and macrame handicrafts before we move onto Goddards Go 80s Yuppy style when we will be donning pinstripes and carrying briefcases which I’ve scheduled in for the Autumn.