Someone – could it have been Chris French? – asked me if I’d still got their metal scissors from the kitemaking at camp. I said no.
However, I have just found the bag of leftover kitemaking bits and bobs and there they were. Sorry! Will happily return them to the rightful owner!
Valdereeeee! Valderahhhh!
Another lovely day today although way, way, way too hot for my tender colouring. 🙁
It was my Mum’s belated birthday celebrations today as her actual birthday was a week ago last Wednesday when we were in Scotland staying with Joyce and she was with a friend who shares the same birthday seeing a show in London for the day. So Malice, holiday and other birthday celebrations all sorted we finally rescheduled to celebrate it today.
Davies was supposed to be doing a tour of the local airport with Badgers today, which he took a lot of persuading to agree to sign up to attend on the basis that I would not be able to go with him and I would not be able to lurk a few paces behind. He was struggling to sleep last night and I think he was hovering between excitement at the propsect of the airport tour and aprehension about being without us for a full afternoon. Personally I was utterly dreading it on oh so many, completely my issue levels but was hiding it really well (I was honestly, ask Ady if you don’t believe me! ;-)) so the plan was for all of us to go to the airport, drop Davies off with the Badgers and head off round the airport and beach (near that scoobidou geocache we did with you, Chris and Alison) with a picnic and meet him afterwards.
So when the phonecall came through last night to cancel it, Davies seemed fairly relieved, I was very pleased and we were free to do something else instead today. We discounted the beach as it is not my Dad’s ‘thing’, Arundel as it would be packed, Brighton as it would be even more packed and any where we’d need to drive far to get to as it was way too hot to be in the car for very long. So we decided to do a downs walk and after checking a very old book entitled ‘walks for motorists – the south downs’ and googling I came up with a five mile walk to Cissbury Ring and back. Which looked idea – about 3 hours walking, middle point break at a nice spot for a picnic, head off around 11.30, stop for 1pm lunch, back by around 4pm, lots of lovely views etc.
Nope!
It was simply too hot, too open with no shade in the blisteringly hot sun, too at the end of a crazy couple of weeks for the children and too incompatible six walking companions with Dad who wants to stride ahead, Mum who wants to walk in the sunshine, Ady who wants to take endless photos, kids who want to be carried / stop for a drink / stop for a picnic / stop to look at every single creepy crawly they spot and me. Who is not built for walking. Who has exercise induced asthma and didn’t bring an inhaler. Who has thighs which rub together in the heat. Who is of fair and gentle complexion which does not do well in open sunlight with no shade and no pimms! 😆
We got to about 2 miles in – a good hours walk in the heat, up hill and along stoney, unforgiving paths and realising we were another mile yet from our destination and every step we’d taken had to be retraced to get home again we fell upon a patch of shade with great delight, decided it was far enough and had our picnic before heading back again. I had applied one lot of suncream to children and self – all of whom have already got a slight tan and have been fine with one application per day of factor 60 but within half an hour it was apparent we were not being protected enough – and had I brought suncream with me in the picnic bag? No I had not. The children were indeed fine and I am only suffering with a feint redness but enough to make me feel very silly. 🙁 I also faired not so well in the heat and was starting to feel very dehydrated (despite plenty of water) sick and dizzy.
It turned out to be one of those retrospective perspective events though and we all agreed once home it had actually been a very nice walk with loads to see, breathtaking views of Worthing, Brighton and the sea to the south and the rolling downs to the north, more wildlife – birds, bugs and butterflies that you get in your average Springwatch episode and a fairly easy going terrain really. The perfect cooler weather route definitely. Photos in the usual place – can’t be arsed to put any here! Loads of educational stuff covered with the children though, we looked at the various crops we walked past and through and discussed what foodstuffs they might be made into, looked at all sorts of wildlife too numerous to mention, collected a small bagfull of caterpillars and their ‘home’ plant which we’ve brought home and installed in our Butterfly garden net thing from last years Insect Lore grow your own butterfly thingy kit to observe. And Ady had a long chat with them about 3rd world countries where heat and being thirsty means a hell of a lot more than it did for the last half hour of our walk when the water had run out…
We got back and as Mum had brought over vanilla ice cream and I’d bought two bottles of coke on BOGOF – one needed for the Nigella ham in coke we had for dinner and the other for spare, I made coke floats all round. A hot summers day staple from my own childhood it was Davies and Scarlett’s first experience of such a delicacy so they were enraptured by it. 🙂 Followed by Mum’s birthday cake which for the first time ever Tarly got to carry in with candles lit from the kitchen to the lounge (actually I’ve only just started letting Davies do it!) and the arrival of my brother the children were in 7th heaven!
They had a wash all the dirt from the downs off bath and I performed my new trick of drenching Tarly’s hair with conditioner and brushing it in the bath to get all the tangles out with the plan being they’d fall, exhausted, into their beds. Ha!
We finished cooking the ham in coke and served it with roasted potatoes, carrots and parsnips, broccoli and shelled ourselves peas for all the grown ups and both children reappeared from their beds to beg gammon from our plates (and beer and wine from our glasses! :roll:). We persuaded them into bed so we could have dessert in peace, they have only just gone to sleep and Mum, Dad and Frazer have just left. Ady is already in bed waiting for morning and his return to work after holiday to come and despite it still being ridiculously hot here at nearly midnight I am off upstairs myself to see if there is any chance of being able to sleep.
|
What Your Soul Really Looks Like |
 You are a wanderer. You constantly long for a new adventure, challenge, or eve a completely different life. You are a grounded person, but you also leave room for imagination and dreams. You feet may be on the ground, but you’re head is in the clouds. You believe that people see you as larger than life and important. While this is true, they also think you’re a bit full of yourself. Your near future is likely to be filled with great successes and accomplishments. You just need to figure out how to get there. For you, love is all about caring and comfort. You couldn’t fall in love with someone you didn’t trust. |
We’ve been super efficient today and got loads done. 🙂
First thing (well as first thing as it gets round here 😉 ) we went to Asda to get my Mum’s very belated birthday pressie of a basic digital camera. We got a nice one which Dad paid 2/3 of and then Ady went over to Dad’s to help cut his hedge. He did that in superfast time and we headed off over to Chris and Julie’s for the afternoon.
Had a lovely time sitting in their new sunroom while the children played, we ate homegrown raspberries with meringue and cream and drank copious volumes of tea. Lovely. 🙂
We’d half planned to go camping with C&J for a couple of nights this week while Ady was off but obviously we’ve been unable to leave Malice so that hasn’t happened. So we sat with diaries and planned a weekend in the New Forest camping. I was staggered to realise that we are actually busy with something every single weekend until September now so we’ve pencilled in the first weekend in September and now we need to find a campsite. C&J have invested in a tent so they are raring to go already. 🙂
Home via McDs to cash in some luncheon vouchers for the children’s tea and I managed to get some videos listed on ebay in my campaign to raise the cash in my paypal account to sufficient to get a tent on ebay for us.
Tomorrow Davies was supposed to be going on a Badgers trip to the local airport which has just been cancelled so we are off to do something with my parents for the day, as yet undecided to be arranged in the morning.
We didn’t make it to PYO today, a variety of events conspired to make us not actually manage any of our planned activities but we had a nice, if slightly frustrating, day anyway.
Ady’s phone didn’t arrive so he spent ages chasing that up and now it’s coming tomorrow. So while we waited in for that I did a load of baking (peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies, banana cakes, cheese scones) and loads of batch cooking (I’d cooked chicken curry overnight in the slow cooker so I dealt with freezing that into meal sized portions, stuck a batch of bolognaise sauce on and made a batch of pizza dough. I’ve since made a huge lasagne with 2/3 of the sauce and pizza for the kids tea and garlic bread to go with tonights lasagna, leaving one portion for a spag bol next week and a second portion of lasagne for the week after. All of which is not remotely interesting reading I’m sure but I’m proud of it so I’ll blog it anyway! :lol:). Ady did some more coal bunker dismantling and taking the rubble to the tip and the children had a whale of a time playing in the garden. We’ve moved their playhouse to the side of our house and it has inadvertantly given it a little patch of garden of it’s own so they spent some time digging that with little spades. They have also spent heaps of time finding all sorts of garden creatures (you know all the species preschools spend months doing projects on ‘minibeasts’ about :lol:) inlcuding rushing in the kitchen to show me ‘baby snails’ that they’d found inside a dead snail so assumed must be baby snails. Hence a lesson in larva as they were maggots. I don’t think they’d realised that pretty much every flying creature starts life as a wriggling thing of some sort not only butterflies, so we discussed ladybirds, moths, flies etc all coming from eggs as larva and undergoing chrysalis stage before becomming their final incarnations. They were filthy dirty but very happy and performing excellent examples of lovely free range autonomously learning children too. 🙂
We had lunch of cheese scones followed by banana cakes and everyone else went back outside again while I made an admirable start on what I am finding a really quite unexciting book for reading group next week. We were supposed to be heading out digital camera shopping for my Mum’s (very belated) birthday present but the arrival of Mum in person scuppered that idea. I stayed inside, Ady did some further garden related ‘stuff’, Mum joined in with the childrens playing and eventually around 4pm we piled in the car and headed down to the beach for an hour.
We had a lovely time there – it was still fairly busy but we found an empty-ish stretch, kicked off our shoes and paddled, then played at collecting as much seaweed from the tide washing in as we could. Great fun! 🙂 For once we had no camera, which meant there are no lovely illustrations of it on flickr, but also means we all gave our full attention to just playing rather than capturing images of it. After an hour or so both children were starting to shiver so we came home and they had a warm bath while I sorted their tea out. Mum headed for home and the children eventually went to bed and to sleep.
Malice is doing well still, she’d not been eating or drinking much today but has surprised us tonight by having ignored all our ‘brought to you on a silver platter in the lounge’ deliveries of food and water and headed out into the kitchen to eat where she always did. She also managed a really quite near miss with the litter tray too, leading us to conclude that just like the children she is probably better left to her own devices really and interfering with her and spoonfeeding is actually neither what she wants or needs. So that’s good. Both for her recuperation generally and our own laziness! 😆
Busy weekend catching up with various family followed by back to normality again next week. Almost looking forward to it! 😉
She looks better even if she can’t look better! She’s had the sewn up eye unsewn today and although it is totally non-functional she does at least look symmetrical again and less like some sort of feline spectre. They had a look at the other eye while she was sedated and it is still too blood filled to see to the back so a complete recovery is very unlikely although she does appear to have some level of vision, albeit very limited. Her jaw is healing well apparently, they checked that too and it is aligned OK so the wire will be removed in about a month when it is completely healed. She has a ridge on her palate which suggests she had an upper jaw fracture too so it is unsurprising she is still struggling with eating and drinking but she is well on the mend and I think it is just a case of letting her find her own pace and learn her way round the house again without sight. She’s back next week for a check-up on the eye and then in a months time for the wire removal. All positive anyway – hard to believe two weeks ago tonight she was prancing about in and out of the house and garden and then never came back when it got dark. 🙁
She’s already managed to get onto the sofa by herself and tonight has negotiated her way on to the precarious perch of sitting on the arm where she always did, and very comfortable she looks there too. So I guess although there’s a way to go and some adjustments to get used to she’s going to be OK :-).
Scarlett came with me to the vets while Ady and Davies stayed home and played Zoombinis. Then Ady loaded the car up with some rubble from our taken down coal bunker and I made a picnic and we set off for the downs via the tip and the church I mentioned yesterday.
We wondered round the graveyard for a while, reading the headstones and talking about the people who were buried there. Chris, we did indeed read pretty much every name just like SB would have had you do. 😆 I explained the difference between burial and cremation when we reached a large headstone to remember people who’s ashes had been scattered and we debated which of our dead relatives had chosen each method. Ady and I both said we’d want to be cremated and the children both said they would rather cremation too. At the graveyard where Ady’s Dad is buried there is a huge section for babies and children which is tremendously sad and always just has me crying so I was quite glad there was no such area in this churchyard as it would have been far harder to explain. Of course the children know that children die but there is something so powerful about row upon row of childrens’ graves. I felt similar when we visited Ypres on a school trip years ago and saw the 100s of war graves lined up in perfect rows. At least most of the graves today were of old people, with lives fully lived and children and grandchildren to have handed their memories down to.
I wasn’t expecting the church to be open but it was so we were able to go inside and look around. I dug around in my memories of GCSE Religious Education and was surprised to recall as much as I did of the names of all the pieces of furniture. We looked at the beautiful stained glass windows, I showed them where a bride and groom would stand to marry, where a baby would be christened, where a reading would be given from and we peeped at the organ, they both had a kneel on a prayer cushion and a sit in a pew and just enjoyed the peace, cool and calm that exists within a church even without the slightest belief in anything spiritual.
We left there and drove over the downs in a big circle enjoying the views (all golds, yellows and browns at this time of year with crops of maize, wheat etc – a contrast to the vibrant yellow of the rape a few weeks ago) then came back and parked in the road opposite my parents to go for a walk over the downs and a golf course. We found the white flowers (don’t know their real names) that pop out when you pinch the base of them – I remember as clear as yesterday my Mum showing me them in a car park when I was about Davies’ age and telling me the rhyme ‘Old Mother Reilly jumped out of bed’ while pinching and popping them. I showed the children how to do that and they were picking them every few steps. Scarlett got the hang of it before Davies did and I said ‘oh you’ve got the knack’ to which Davies imediately said ‘I want a knack, where did she get the knack from, why did you give Tarly a knack and not me???’ which made us laugh lots.
We sat and had lunch looking out over a view of Worthing, the sea and the block of flats on the seafront Ady and I first lived in for the first six months we were together pointing out landmarks to the children. Honestly, I’ve told that many stories to the children about ‘before you were born’ this week I am suspecting I have achieved Grown Up Status somewhere along the line without realising or having a proper graduation ceremony! 😆
We walked back to the car and dropped Ady and Davies home so Tarly and I could go and collect Malice from the vets. Once home and settled I had to go and get a few food shopping bits and Tarly wanted to come with me. We actually went to two supermarkets – the small local Somerfield to get some of the special offers they had advertised in a leaflet with the local paper (half price raspberries, BOGOF extra virgin olive oil etc) and then to Sainsburys for some basics items. I love being out with just one child and Tarly is very entertaining when she has centre stage. She has a non-stop dialogue which leaps from topic to topic but makes me laugh so much. She also looked so kissable today in a lovely flowy skirt, a vest top with butterflies on it, her hair all tangled and her face all covered in grime – gorgeous, grubby little girl! 🙂
We did early baths and bed for the children tonight as they have both been late to sleep all week and Davies particularly has been showing signs of tiredness which coupled with having Ady home has been showing in testing behaviour with me. I love having Ady off work – it does the children and him the world of good to spend more time together, I enjoy a bit of a rest from full on hands on full time parenting and of course I like the time just the four of us as a family but because we all know it is limited period only style life there are inevitable casualties to the temporary shift in dynamics – this time it is me and Davies. We patched it up again and I read them bedtime stories in the bath so they could stay in it longer at their request. It was a children’s Bible I borrowed from the library and I was actually quite disappointed in it. One of the things I like most about the Bible is the language so it have it made ‘child friendly’ just turns the stories into fairy story style tales – which don’t actually scan very well anyway. We don’t actually have a Bible in the house so we really must remedy that and I can just read the original text (well you know what I mean 😉 ) cos I really wanted the full drama of the creation story rather than the diluted ‘and he spread the sky all about like a tent round the world’ stuff they got today. 🙄
Ady’s got an (free) upgraded mobile phone handset arriving in the morning which he is very excited about and the children and I are holding out for PYO fruit picking tomorrow too so we’ll have to see what happens.
says Happy 5th Birthday Freya! 🙂
Hope you’re having a fab day and look forward to belated celebrations at your party 🙂
Lots of love,
Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett xxx
First the good news from today; Malice has started eating food and drinking water herself. This is a Very Good Thing – if for no other reason than it means no more expensive vets trips so she can have nasal tubes inserted. 🙂 We had to put the bowls right infront of her nose and coax her a fair bit but we managed it and she had a really long drink and a fairly good amount of food too. Hurrah! 🙂 She’s back to the vets for the day tomorrow to have her eye unsewn and see what lurks beneath and I’ll be finding out what exactly the state of play is with the cm of wire sticking out from her chin keeping her jaw in place too and whether it is coming out or being trimmed and staying in forever as I’ve not actually asked about that yet. I also think she is getting some level of vision back too. She is ‘looking’ towards the big windows in our lounge which makes me think she has at least some sort of light and shade recognition coming through.
In other news we’ve been doing ever more gardening and garden sorting today including taking down some coal bunkers outside our back door, well OK Ady has, I’ve been reading my library book! 🙂 We went to Paradise Park today at the children’s request, not for long as we go there so often it is a cursory nod to most of the attractions and we wanted to not leave Malice for too long but we had a nice walk round and a picnic lunch in the gardens, Ady thrashed me at table football and air hockey on the amusements 😳 Davies impressed me and amazed Ady by getting every dinosaur right in a name the dinosaur by pointing to it quiz there which we’ve never done before and even Tarly demonstrated lots of retained knowledge on some of the stuff exhibited there.
We popped home to check the cats and collect an old mobile phone handset for my Dad. My parents have gradually accepted there are benefits to carrying mobile phones so every time we upgrade a handset they get the upgrade before last (we like to have a spare each – we brought old phones with current sim cards to Kessingland so that we didn’t fret too much about leaving them in a damp tent or dropping them in the sea!) – so my Dad now has a fairly decent camera phone with all sorts of mod cons which he will use to make and recieve phone calls in the event of an emergency :lol:.
Spent an hour or so with Dad and then came home. The children had pizza and garlic bread for tea again and we had pizza for tea too.
Forgot to mention two nature related incidents yesterday – one was Ady bringing in a spider carrying a bulging egg sac with her for the children to see yesterday which was really interesting and the other was the children spending ages collecting snails – they got about 8 and setting them off up the wall of the house in a race 😆
Tomorrow we’re planning a walk up the downs – something I’ve not done since I was in my teens and the children are only barely old enough to think about really. There is a local church dating to the Saxon age which I did a school project on and the children would like to see inside having driven past it for years, also it has a very pretty and full and old graveyard which is always interesting to wander round and read the headstones in.
Ah more domestic bliss and gender stereotyping abounds chez Goddard today. I have batch cooked chilli for the rest of the month, made two loads of pizza dough (one of which was turned into pizza for Tarly and garlic bread for me, Ady and Davies and eaten today, one of which is ready for pizza for me and Ady tomorrow for dinner). Ady’s done more gardening stuff. He’s done loads actually and the garden is looking fab and really tidy – and as he’s done lots of chopping back hedges and re-establishing edges it is slightly bigger too – every little helps! 🙂
The children and I looked at some library books before returning them – a couple of really good ones. Davies had a pretty good go and reading some of a Dr Seuss one and we really enjoyed this one too. I love that their sense of humour is getting slightly more sophisicated and they ‘get’ stuff like that now rather than needing everything explained to the point of it losing it’s comedy value.
The children are enjoying having him home but I think we are suffering from 10 day in disruption to daily routine and need to get out of the house tomorrow.
We did go out this afternoon – having finally mastered pedalling (and that is simply pedalling with full support of stabilisers) Davies rode his bike and the rest of us walked into Lancing so that we could return some (very overdue :oops:) library books and have a quick mooch round the charity shops. He did really well actually although I have to say that far from the idyllic vision of a small boy learning to ride a bike with the warm and proud encouragement of his parents, riding through wide green safe open spaces it was more of a testing of our patience (will you just bloody look where you are going and manage to steer at the same time as pedalling already?!) and his skills were honed more by the fear of falling off down an alleyway or narrow pavement and falling into dog poo or broken glass – Centerparcs it ain’t!
So that took about an hour and a half and Ady and I took it in turns to walk alongside Davies or walk holding Tarly’s hand which was nice.
Malice has taken some syringed food and water from Ady today, not loads but enough to not be too concerned. She seems ever more settled despite our almost constant experiments to see if she can see anything – we’re getting more scientific with props such as torches and lengths of wool. I got excited tonight when she was following the progress of the hoover until I realised she was just listening to it! Doh! 😳
We’d had half a plan to go camping with Chris and Julie for a few nights this week which obviously won’t happen now so we are planning to get out for the day somewhere tomorrow as the week is starting to go by quickly and nice though it is to get stuff done around the house I think the children (and I!) would benefit more from having Ady around to enjoy time with rather than use him as some sort of handyman while he’s off work.
Davies was late to sleep again – he’s got this little V Tech notebook thing my Mum brought round ages ago and he quite often plays with in bed. He’d found a melody maker thing with a little onscreen keyboard you composed tunes on and was playing with that, so we got invited up to listen to his composition.
I appear to have been going down with a cold the last couple of days. Davies was coughing a lot last week and had a slightly runny nose but we put it down to the air con in the car drying his throat and a combination of hayfever and playing with water giving him a runny nose. It would appear not though. Today Tarly and I have both also been runny of nose and I am feeling distinctly pants. 🙁 Huge apologies if we infected anyone with Goddard Lurgy on our TOTN too.
First thing Davies and I took Malice to the vets. She was kept in for the day while they tube fed her through her nose, injected her a few times with various things and handed her back 6 hours later with an invoice for £35. She’s due back again on Thursday to have her sewn up eye unsewn – which no doubt will come with a further invoice. 🙁 They were pleased with her progress though, have given us food to be diluted and squirted into her mouth with a syringe and a general chat about how amazing it is that she is alive at all given the state she arrived at them in and how she is one tough cat who is intent on using up all nine of her lives before she finally calls it a day! 🙂 She’d been found at a petrol station (the nearest one would be a ten minute walk for me and crosses the main road :shock:) and brought in by a very upset woman who couldn’t believe how many cars were just driving past a clearly dying animal but didn’t leave any contact details so I’ve no way of thanking her. I thought about the local paper but Ady reckons it’ll just open a flood of people claiming to have been her and hoping for a reward (I could needle felt them something perhaps! 😉 ). Her non-sewn-up eye is looking clearer every day and I thought when Ady took a photo of her the other day the flash made the pupil dilate so I think there is still hope of some vision. Fingers crossed and we wait and see I guess. Davies and I chatted about all sorts of things on the drive home – he’d had Malice in her carrier on his lap on the way there and been giving a comforting monologue to her as we went to calm and comfort her which was very cute. On the way back we chatted about stuff the vet had said, some of my own ‘when I were a lass’ stories and finally I told him about how me, Ady and our friends who have since moved to Ireland played a very silly round of pitch and putt at the park we drove past for Ady’s birthday when I was pregnant with Davies. I remember loving those sort of stories when I was a child and D & S seem to aswell. On the long drive home last week I was talking to Scarlett about how she was inside my tummy once – someone that seems ever less possible as time goes by…
Once home Ady did loads of garden stuff, tidying up, a couple of runs to the tip, some strimming and so on. The children played inside and out, watched a couple of films and disgraced themselves by throwing sand at the lounge windows just after Ady had cleaned them inside and out (Ros, you’re redundant! 😉 ). I wrapped an ebay parcel and Tarly and I walked to the post office to send it on it’s way which was a lovely half hour. She talks constantly that child. Much of it simply chatter, but all relevant and with astonishing detail. She is very easily distracted from her topic as Joyce witnessed last week and can easily be sent off on a tangent. Actually I suppose she talks the equivalent of my blog posts really! 😳 😆 She brought two handbags along for the journey with a small selection of soft toys packed in them and two tissues for blowing her nose which we had to stop so she could do every few minutes. She knows the name of loads of plants and flowers though and is very observant. Ady’s car was collected and he was presented with a courtesy car of a two door Corsa – and I thought the Golf was small! On the upside we aren’t able to go far this week anyway due to Malice and because it is petrol it does mean we can fill my car up on his petrol card and use that instead if we want to go out. 🙂 Clearly I won’t be driving it!
Walking home we made friends with a ginger tom which followed us for quite some distance. Tarly was all for bringing him home so we could have ‘three cats Mummy’ and I was starting to think we might need to shoo him back to where he’d come from for fear of him roaming too far and getting lost, when some other people walked by in the other direction and he started to follow them instead. 😆 When we got home we made some tissue paper flowers from an ELC kit that’s been kicking around for ages, Davies played with the geomags and even put them all away himself and then I had to go and collect Malice while Ady gave them their tea.
When I got back Davies and I went off to Badgers. We’d not planned to be here today obviously – we were supposed to be at Barbara’s 🙁 – so they were not expecting us, but having come home it seemed silly for D not to go. He had a great time as usual, I enjoyed my hours peace reading in the car and he surprised me by bringing out a ticket to where he’d liked to go on holiday. He’d chosen America but a Centerparcs holiday 😆 but what really amazed me was that the train on the front was clearly not his work and he said someone had helped him with it! This is Davies, who draws at home on pages and pages of paper every moment of the day! It is one of his biggest ‘things’, not to mention something he is really quite good at. I made nothing of it but did wonder if it was a confidence thing for him or whether he just likes someone helping him.
Davies has got into a new routine of sleeping late and waking late – which sort of suits me and fits in with my own body clock really, whereas Ady and Tarly are more larks than owls. So he’s only just gone to sleep, but despite that, been as it’s my turn to be up with our lark in the morning and I’m feeling pretty lousy I’ll be off to bed myself I reckon.
Happy 6th Birthday Marcus!
Hope you had a fab day, lots of love, Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett xxx
Malice is still doing OK. Not really eating or drinking but fine in herself and getting more adventurous with where she’ll wander. I’m still holding out a bit of hope for some vision but that might well be me and my wishful thinking. We’ll see what the vets say tomorrow but fingers crossed we can keep her at home and maybe try some syringe feeding / watering. She’s clearly far happier here than she would be there and I would imagine that is the most important thing (not to mention continuing cost of residential treatment…).
So we’ve stayed home today. Ady and Davies had a lie-in, Scarlett and I did not :roll:. I’ve done baking (peanut butter cookies and chocolate fairy cakes – peanut butter cookies recipe called for way too much peanut butter so although they are lovely you *have* to drink them with a slug of milk between every nibble and the kids don’t like them – Ady loves them though, oh peanut butter fiend that he is 🙂 ). Ady’s done some gardening and emptied his car out ready for collection (we hope) tomorrow along with delivery of some sort of courtesy car. When the rain from this morning cleared up I did several loads of washing and finally unpacked and put away all the stuff from last week’s holiday.
The children have played with the Film Education W&G disc that Kirsty lent us which has been an instant hit (thanks Kirsty, have not tried to copy it yet, will have a go tomorrow) and Davies proved really quite proficient at putting sound effects to a clip from the film and when I sat with him and read the script he was easily able to construct a story board from the stills images to choose from – so up his street. 🙂
They have also played together loads, done plasticine, eaten popcorn and watched Chicken Run and been out in the garden with Ady. Ady and the children also went through all our videos and we now have a pile ready to go on ebay. Our plan for this coming week as Ady is still off work is to go through the loft, garage and cupboards and ebay everything we can find that we no longer need. A massive declutter and money making exercise which is probably the best possible investment of our time really given all our current possible plans for the future.
Am just about to serve up dinner (roast lamb smeared with mint and rosemary, served with roast potatoes (tossed in flour, salt, rosemary and olive oil to make them extra crispy), carrots and parsnips roasted in honey and rosemary, fresh peas I popped from the pods myself, yorkshire puddings (courtesy of Sainsburys Basics range 😉 ) and gravy made with mint sauce for those of you interested in such things 😆 ) and that’s about yer lot!
| Doctor Unheimlich has diagnosed me with Nic’s Lurgy |
|
| Cause: | influence of the Devil |
| Symptoms: | vague regurgitation, slightly impaired vision, gurgling |
| Cure: | sleep |
But I’ve had enough comments and texts about Malice to warrant an update so I will.
She perked up considerably when I arrived at the vets and despite her usually being a vocal cat the nurses were amazed to hear her miaow very croakily for the first time all week. Needless to say she’s not stopped since!
We’ve managed to administer pain killers and eye drops to her open eye, we didn’t even try with the antibiotics as I was told it would be very tricky (they’ve been injecting her, I’ve got pills). She has not eaten or drunk anything, which is what they were hoping she would do so that continues to be a worry.
She has passed urine and faeces – I suspect the first all week. Unfortunately her blindness means it was on the lounge floor rather than in her litter tray 🙁 But good signs I understand nonetheless.
She is still utterly Malice, which was probably my biggest concern. She might not be able to see but she is still the same otherwise. I am hopeful that she might eat something tomorrow so I have positive news to take with me when she is returned to the vets on Monday – if she doesn’t eat I imagine she will need to go back in for tube feeding, if we can get her to eat at home I guess she may be allowed to stay home.
The sewn shut eye is still an unknown quantity – the open eye is very bloodfilled but we think she may have severly limited but there just the same vision in it. She is cannoning off things round the house but using her whiskers and ears and front paws to feel her way around and has ventured round most of the downstairs of the house. I suppose her future and quality of life rely very heavily on some vision or her quickly getting used to blindness. Very heartbreaking to witness her obvious confusion and struggling though 🙁 .
Candle is bemused but seems far more settled to have her home. She went over and investigated all her injuries and even gave her a quick groom. They seem glad to be together again.
The children have been better than I could have imagined. Davies, who can sometimes be slightly cruel to the cats as it is ‘fun’ to tease or chase them has been fantastic – from a childlike bringing Malice some of his favourite toys to make her feel better, to a very practical and helpful sitting stroking her and talking to her gently. He was sobbing on the Friday last week when she was missing which made me realise that despite seeming to not pay much attention to the cats they have been a fixture since before he was born and he is actually very attached to them.
Scarlett is being noisy, careless and narrowly missing treading on Malice every time she walks past, but she is also being very loving and bringing her food, drink, toys and is happy to sit for ages trying to persuade her to eat something and stroking her and talking lovingly to her.
On the car front the news is all OK – as it was Ady’s work car one call to the work insurance company has arranged a collection and delivery of a courtesy car sometime early next week. It does look bad though and it was the single thing that tipped the balance for me today and had me standing on the pavement outside my parents house along the busiest road in Worthing sobbing and being gawped at by all the passers by until I was gently led into the house by my Mother. 🙁 I rarely if ever do helplessness and breaking down but when I do I like to do it in style with a large audience. 🙄
Tomorrow, tomorrow will be a better day.
Have just collected Malice – she seems OK although very probably blind and with lots of expensive recovery still ahead.
But on the way I went to collect my Mum – who was paying half the bill 🙁 and in turning the car round I crashed into a tree. Fuck.
So I go away for six nights and what happens? A bloody whacking great hole appears in the internet again and your best efforst to fix it are listing what’s kicking around in your fridges? 😆 Just as well I’m back eh?
Six nights, four friends, 1100 miles, 4027 ‘are we there yet?’s, more alterations than a bride who falls pregnant with triplets, has them early and goes on the Atkins diet to lose weight for her wedding’s wedding dress and my full text allowance in one week. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the full and unabridged travelog of the Goddard Tour of the North (including Scotland) sponsored by B&Q, Ady’s company car, Pimms, Guinness, British Beef and Indian Takeaways. Any association with vegan or vegatarian foodstuffs is not intentional and will not be repeated! 🙂
Saturday After further Malice searching and some debate as to whether we should actually go or not we decided to listen to all the tales we’d heard of cats who vanish for weeks, nay, months and come back and the reassurances of my Dad that he’d walk the nearby streets daily looking for her and set off later than planned for our first destination in Cheshire – Lynda and Stuarts.
For those who don’t know Lynda is the lady who looked after the children a couple of days a week when I worked when we lived in Manchester. She came to us through a childcare agency but was with us for well over a year from when Tarly was just 6 weeks old and very quickly became considered part of our family. Her and her husband Stuart are about my parents age and have two sons around my age. They became Grandparents for the first time earlier this year but treat Davies and Scarlett as honourory Grandchildren of their own! Since we have been back in Sussex (just over 2 years) they have come down here several times including once over Christmas and we have stayed with them several times too. They live a few miles from the house we rented while we lived up there so it is a very homely place to stay for us as we know the surrounding area so well and have plenty of other friends locally to visit too.
We arrived around 3pm and Lynda, the children and I lounged around in the garden while Ady and Stuart watched football and drank Guinness – the start to what was pretty much the pattern of our week really. 🙂 We ate dinner outside with the children playing out til nearly 11pm when we all retired indoors.
I also had a lovely surprise from Joyce contacting me to say that some plans of another house guest had fallen through and if we could rearrange accordingly we would be able to visit her after all. So a hasty phonecall to all other tour destinations and a rejig of plans enabled that to be scheduled in. 🙂
Sunday More relaxing and lazing around really. I ventured out to the local supermarket (and very oddly felt all nostalgic about it not being our local supermarket anymore, recalling shopping there with a very small and new Scarlett a few years ago) for Sunday papers and that was as energetic as it got. Ah, apart from the badminton! 😆 Ady and I are, as I believe everyone knows, not built for speed, exertion or physical larks in the main, but the sun got to us (or it could have been the Guinness) and we spent *hours* playing badminton in the garden while Lynda and Stuart entertained the children and all of them were entertained by us! We had such a good laugh – and indeed a pretty good exercise too. I had to use my inhaler at least twice and felt the after effects for a good day or so afterwards! Have resolved to buy a cheap badminton set from Tesco though, it was so much fun! 🙂
We also had a lengthy, interesting and lively conversation about Home Education, education generally, school and childhood and parenting which was all very interesting. I explained about autonomy and we all read the Sunday Times magazine article and debated that. Stuart had been talking to Davies in the morning and had already observed how many questions he asks, how he really listens to the answers and continues asking questions. They had also been playing one of Davies’ latest made up games which we play in the car sometimes where you take it in turns to say a word and the other person has to think up a rhyming word. Not very difficult but always interesting to see what word people will think of first. Stuart was really impressed with Davies’ vocabulary on that and how he came up with words which are not the automatic ‘easy’ ones. Which could be one up for not going down the traditional reading route I guess in that he thinks of words he uses rather than ones which are easy to read so have been linked together in an early reader book.
The children spent the afternoon creating a washing up tub full of water, mud and fallen apples so they required a bathing and were both asleep incredibly early after which Ady and I were treated to an Indian Takeaway – oh and more wine and Guinness!
Monday After a lazy start we packed ourselves off to The Trafford Centre. Dual purpose really – we wanted to have a memory lane style wander round and Tarly needed new doodles as she’s grown a half size and the local Clarkes had none to fit her. So we went to the Clarkes where they both got their first shoes and had the little ‘my first shoes’ picture taken and got her a gorgeous pair of flowery, butterfly adorned doodles – quite the nicest pair I’ve ever seen. Covered in mud and grass stains now of course, but beautiful anyway! 🙂
We walked round for a while and then had lunch there before heading over to Miranda’s for destination number two on the tour. We’d changed to just one night there due to Joyce being added back into the tour and as Miranda’s daughter F is nearly 9 and at school it fitted well to only disturb one night of the bedtime school night routine as it happened. A lovely afternoon for the children playing on F’s climbing frame and trampoline but a sleep for both of them in the car earlier made them dreadful to get to sleep so that was a slightly stressy interval. 🙁
Further eating and drinking (Pimms, followed by wine or beer) outside followed by moving indoors to their beautiful dream kitchen with an entired two walls of windows over views stretching for miles and miles watching the sun set and lights go on all over four counties made a lovely evening. I taught Miranda how to needle felt, she went and got out a load of her hand knitted jumpers and gave us an impromptu fashion show and much hilarity ensued. Can’t quite believe she used to be our boss! 🙂 Much money making schemes, business ideas and big ideas fuelled by drink talking later we all retired for the night.
Tuesday Mindful of the next leg of the trip taking us up to Scotland we stayed fairly close to home in the morning and Miranda took us to a very local ice cream farm and parlour where they keep a small selection of animals (donkey, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, farm cats and a few dairy cows). The children saw probably the youngest kittens they’ve ever seen (two litters, one four weeks with three kittens and one about a week old with five kittens) which they fell in love with. Then we were invited to go and watch the farmers wife feed two day old lambs who’s mother was not making sufficient milk for them. It was done by way of a long tube fed down their throats and they were somewhat reluctant but it made for interesting watching! We also saw turkeys, geese, ducks and peacocks and all their chicks / young too. Then we all had one of the made on site ice creams too. Lovel y:-)
We left there and had a brief but lovely walk along a river bank with the children collecting caught up whisps of sheep wool for me to needlefelt (their idea, not mine!) and I showed Tarly how to play pooh sticks, except we used brightly coloured leaves and talked about currents while we did it. :-). Back to Miranda’s for lunch where the dinner table conversation prompted even Miranda, who pays £10,000 a year for her daughters’ schooling and would never dream of such a crazy idea as Home Education to comment that she could finally ‘get’ what it was all about! 😯 We said our goodbyes, having been plied with a marketing proposal for me to read through and comment on 🙄 and set off for Scotland.
It was a straightforward journey with just one stop for sweeties and just as we pulled past the sign annoucing we’d arrived in Joyce’s area and I spotted her road sign the local radio we’d tuned to announced a workday request for someone of The Proclaimers, 500 miles. So, radio blaring with all the windows down so they could hear it we pulled into Joyce’s crescent! 🙂 Ah the Goddards have arrived!
The children imediately decided Hannah was possibly the best possible playmate by virtue of not being a grown up so still being fun, but being bigger and older than then so able to lift them about and make good suggestions for games. Ady imediately realised that Joyce and I wouldn’t mind at all if he took himself and his dinner and (another) Guinness inside and watched the football so Joyce and I could gossip and drink Pimms! 🙂 Perfect evening!
I seem to recall we continued serious and fairly sensible conversation into the night although I suspect we were just making the same point over and over again. When we had drunk a whole bottle and the clock struck 2 we called it a night.
Wednesday The children got dressed into their sun suits and aside from a brief flirtation with her ‘Lulah dress’ as it has now been renamed forever on Tarly’s part they stayed in them all day. They played with sand, water, water, sand, the trampoline, sand, the climbing frame, water, sand, water and the sand. And they could not have been happier children really! 🙂 We started wine at lunchtime and full details of everything are patchy but we all had a good time! 🙂
I didn’t have to eat a single lentil, mushroom or chick pea. And I got to see what has to be the tidiest under the stairs cupboard I have ever seen in my whole life! 😉 Oh and the biggest pile of cushions!
Thursday Another hard to get going morning, Scarlett (usually the noisiest morning child in the world) had managed to sneak out past Ady, Davies and I and we woke to find her happily chatting to Bob and Hannah. 🙂 We set off to Kirsty and James’ for the final destination on our Tour.
We arrived in time for lunch (sandwiches, beer and bacardi breezers naturally!), the children scattered and we had a lovely afternoon with plenty of bouncing on the trampoline and running around in nettles and tall grass. They have a lovely house which is so perfect for HE and I can’t think of a more deserving family to have such a fab location and exciting possibilities infront of them. We had a final meal (another takeaway, how treated and lucky are we? 🙂 ) outside before finally going in to let the children bath in shifts and go to bed, where they categorically didn’t go to sleep 🙄 while we chatted and Ady and James enjoyed a jenga battle. 🙂
Friday After a very nice couple of hours sitting watching the news, looking at pictures and having breakfast we collected ourselves together and set off on our homeward journey. We’d been invited to Barbara’s (which would have been the final two nights of our Tour if we’d not needed to come home for Malice) for lunch but a quick look at the routefinder showed it to be 40 minutes further via her house so reluctantly we’d decided to just drive as fast back as we could. Kirsty packed us lunch and we managed it with three very brief loo stops. 500 miles. It should have taken 8 hours and despite being totally on schedule to do so, which would have allowed a just before the vet closes quick visit to Malice but we hit the M25, not much more than 50 miles from home and stopped. And there we sat for over two hours. The vets closing time came and went and we finally arrived home at gone 8pm – some 10 hours after we’d set off.
I have flickr’d and may well add some in to this post tomorrow but for now we’d all four like to thank everyone we stayed with this week so much for their fantastic friendship, warmth and hospitality. We felt like such honoured guests and it was apparent how much time and thought had gone into catering for our stay. You are of course, all welcome here any time and we’d love the chance to repay your hospitality but your company, homes and kindness were so greatly enjoyed and appreciated. Thank you. 🙂 xxx
And not entirely surprisingly I have a lot to say!
So I think I’ll break it into chunks to make it easier.
Firstly we are actually back earlier than planned as Malice has been found.
She had been hit by a car and taken to a vets sometime either Friday or Saturday last weekend. I’ve yet to get full details of who, what, why and how but it would seem that she was found by someone on their driveway, very injured and taken to the vets who treated her without knowing who she belonged to. Through ringing round all the local vets and asking if an unidentified black cat had been handed in my Mum tracked her down.
She was in a very bad way when she arrived at the vets – both her eyeballs had popped out and prolapsed – she still has one sewn shut and will probably lose sight in that eye. The other is still touch and go but appears to be healing OK so we’re hopeful she will have some, if limited sight. Her jaw and inside her mouth were very messed up and she has been unable to eat or drink due to injury and a wired up jaw so has been tube fed and watered and heavily sedated.
The vet is very hopeful that in having us home and bringing her home for at least the weekend she may well pick up although she will probably have to go back there again on Monday. My parents have been visiting her every day but clearly she will be very confused wondering where the hell we are (if you credit cats with such thoughts and attachments, obviously). Candle, our other cat has also been fairly bewildered with Malice disappearing and us buggering off for six nights so despite it being very sad to cut our Tour of the North (including Scotland) short we ended up coming home three nights earlier than planned for Malice.
So very good news that she’s been found, very bad news that she has been so badly injured and we were not here and very, very bad news that the vets bill is already running in excess of the bonus Ady was so pleased to get in his pay packet last week – ah well… not meant to be obviously. 🙁
We’ve had a lovely if busy day today. An early start due to missing Malice induced loudness from the children. We left home and headed into town to the post office to get 8 ebay parcels on their way and tax my car before going over to Ali’s.
A lovely time there as usual with the children having a great time playing in the garden (with a very brief interlude of them slipping out of the garden resulting in them being slightly restricted as to where they could go after that!), playing with the sandpit, some water, various large bubble making equipment and some time with the gears toys. They all had a great time and allowed Ali and I loads of time to chat about all manner of things. Thanks for a lovely day :-).
Ady’s been at a work end of season bash so I put the children to bed, dealing with Davies’ sudden hysterics about Malice and loads of drawings of her from him. I simply couldn’t be bothered to pack tonight and don’t feel remotely holiday-ish so it will all have to wait until the morning.
And now, cos I am wiped out – I’m off to bed.
She’s still not back and has been missing for nearly 24 hours. I know she may well come home yet, I know she may well be locked in someone’s shed or garage, stuck up a tree, nestled on the lap of an elderly neighbour being hand fed freshly caught fish. But she is 14 to my knowledge, prior to last summer she had a been a full time house cat and never really wandered further than the side of the house where she had a sunny spot in some tall grass so I am slightly less than hopeful that she is about to nochalently walk in having suddenly decided to prowl a whole day and nights worth away from home.
I sincerely hope she does though.
My first experience of grief was when I was about 9 and out family cat Sammy died. I sobbed for hours and had to be taken out of assembly in school two days later when the headmaster read out the lyrics from The Nine Lives of the Ginger Cat from Captain Beaky.
As soon as we bought our own house I wanted two black cats and we had kittens called Colgate and Malarkey who were charming, cute, bundles of personality. They were both run over on the road outside our house within a month of each other just after they were a year old. 🙁
We vowed not to have more cats living on such a busy road but within three months I was desperate to have more so we went to the local RSPCA rescue home and sought out cats who would stay inside. We chose two black cats who had been resuced from the same place and were semi feral. There had been about 30 cats living in one house with an old woman, running wild and continuing to breed and breed and breed. Some had been put down as just too wild to rehome and the two we chose had already been at the RSPCA for six weeks with no one interested in them. They cowered at the back of their cages, spitting and hissing at anyone who came near them with their ears flat to their heads and evil glints in their eyes. We thought that if we gave them any sort of life it would be an improvement so we brought them home. They were already fully grown and had been aged at two although I actually think that Malice at least was older than that. That was 1994.
They were originally called Candle and Bell (from, I assume the film Bell, Book and Candle about a witch and her cat Pyewacket) as they did look like witches cats. We kept the name Candle but Bell was so utterly unsuitable for such a spitting, hissing, ball of black fur that we rechristened Bell with the far more suitable name of Malice. Candle was Ady’s cat, Malice was mine.
For the first six months they only came out from behind the sofa or under the suitcase to eat, drink or use their litter tray. Usually under cover of darkness at night and woe betide anyone thinking they might give them a friendly stroke as they risked having deep lacerations cut into their arm. I very clearly recall the first time Ady lured one of them out with cat treats and got to stroke her while she ate them. There then followed a period of a whole year when Candle lived in our bathroom because every time she snuck out Malice attacked her. She ate in there, had a litter tray in there and simply never ventured out. This went on until one day, just as suddenly as they had started this weird relationship they stopped and got on fine and were often to be found cuddled up together asleep.
Given their history we were slightly concerned when we had Davies that they might attack him or smother him or any of the other horror stories you hear about cats and babies but aside from being very cautious of the new addition to the home they were fine. Candle has on occassions scratched both the children, but never unprovoked. Malice mellowed with age and has been the gentlest, most patient cat who puts up with all sorts of pulling and prodding and frequently is to be found being carried around the place by Scarlett.
Over the years she has gone from a small cat to a small but rather fat cat, her once black whiskers have one by one all gone white and she happily spends her day curled up asleep in a sunny spot. She nearly died just before Davies was one when she walked across a worktop just sprayed with antibacterial cleaner and licked it all off her paws, she’s had all but one tooth removed as they were rotten, she coped admirably with the move up to Manchester and then back again two years later. She sat by my head for the duration of Scarlett’s home birth and has on many occassions purred round my legs and been cuddled and soaked my tears up in her soft black fur.
There’s a lovely pic of her here and here she is enjoying the sunshine last week.
I’m feeling very bad that we’re off for six days tomorrow morning but Dad has promised to keep looking for her while we’re gone and I really hope I’m blogging with happy news about her very soon. 🙁
Can’t find my cat 🙁 She was around last night but went out during the evening and despite me accidentally leaving the back door wide open all night she hasn’t been seen since (although I suppose she could well have been in and out all night).
Our cats have only been going out very recently (they are old and decrepid) so hoping she is just snuggled up in our garage or a cosy hedge or something and will be back soon.