One word? When seven would do…

snow is a-flurryin’ but I can’t do Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow as a title because it just reminds me too much of Alison’s birthday 🙂

A pretty good day today. We had to be out early so I managed to get lunch made and packed and the children and me out of the door not that long after 9am, I think the children were still in shock at being out of pjs even at 11am ish! We were off to an Activeo event which was drama. We had gone once before, way way back last year, or possibly even the year before and the children had quite enjoyed it. It is very cheap (as in a quid a child!) which is probably what will convince me to return as frankly it was fairly uninspiring…

The woman who runs it is apparantly ‘HE sympathetic’ which to me seemed that instead of getting pissed off with the 7 and 8 year olds who basically ignored her she was tolerant and patient because lots of the parents of these children are all for free-ranging them, taking them seriously and allowing them to conduct themselves with no basic manners at all just incase it might stunt their development – or something! Can you tell I’ve been mixing with the area of the HE community that makes me turn on all my educated and closely cherished views on taking children seriously (the concept rather than the actual TCS way) and be out there campaigning for them to be send to military school at age 7 and not let out until they’ve turned into good citizens with something to offer society aged 18! Because OK I accept that if something is not interesting then children should not be ‘made’ to sit and listen to it but I would expect my children NOW at just 3 and 5 to show respect to someone who was clearly ‘leading’ something they were participating in, to listen when someone else is talking and having been asked politely to stop a certain behaviour to bloody well do it if it was a rational and sensible request. Argh! Anyway this puts me in mind of a blog I sometimes read which always puts my back up so I’ll stop ranting, based on the fact I am probably not even making my own point let alone sense to anyone else! 😉

So we arrived early, wandered round in the bitter cold for a while and then finally got let in when the teacher and the organiser of Drama arrived (had forgotten we were on ‘HE time’ so 10am prompt actually means any time after about quarter past 😉 Then we went into the first session which is for under 5s. There was me and my two, Julie with Jack and Maisie, another mother with a baby and a 2.5ish yo girl and 4 yo girl twins who were there without parental supervision. We did sitting in a circle and rolling a ball to each other calling out a colour, then rolling a ball and calling out an animal, then makingourselves tall, small, spikey, wide and so on, then moving round the room to music making shapes (reminded me somewhat of a dance we used to do to the Tetris music that got released as a single when we used to stand in the cages at my frequented nightclub and throw Tetris shapes 😉 Ooh flashback to skinnier days in unsuitable clothing having drunk too many diamond whites! 😉 ). Then she got out some ‘dressing up’ stuff – I use the term loosely as it was more straw hats and various sizes pieces of material – and the children had to choose stuff to wear and move about accordingly – Davies had 4 incarnations actually – a scarecrow, a cowboy, a farmer and finally a peacock. My wunderkind 😉 It was interesting!

Julie then took Jack and Maisie and Scarlett out and I stayed in with Davies while the next age group came in 5-8 yos. I think there was 4 more boys, two small girls and a bigger girl with learning difficulties. The boys were sort of 6-8 age and the two smaller girls were both around Davies’ age. She was not sure about Davies staying but I said I’d like him to, unfortunately he’d been wobbling slightly anyway, what with the others trooping off to do some colouring (which he decided he’d rather do instead) and the group of other children all knowing each other he was nervy anyway. The activity was basically the same with slight changes – the ball rolling was things like ‘something you’d eat for breakfast’ and ‘a country’. Actually I was more impressed with Davies who had his turn last and came up with ‘rice crispies with milk’ when all of the others had copied the teachers suggestion of ‘toast’ but just changed the spread. I then backed away to the edge of the room while they did some miming, some splitting into pairs and mirroring each others hand movements, some more moving round the room to music and finally repeated some text after the teacher and tried to make their voices have emotion in them.

The teacher came over to me about half way through and said she thought Davies was right inbetween the two groups but I explained it was more about him not knowing the children than not being able to do the activities and also that I was keen to seperate him from his little sister and cousins rather than hold him back with them. As mentioned she really struggled to contain the group anyway and I was not hugely impressed with what she had them doing. I know nothing about drama really – I was in all of the school productions but always in the chorus doing singing and dancing roles so I could be being way too critical but when we had a drama teacher come in to WAG once he was excellent at bringing in a huge age range of children and had even the shyest children participating. It is only £1 but perhaps that’s all it’s worth! There is a Drama thing here in Worthing every Friday afternoon so I might look at that and see if it is feasible to take Davies along without Scarlett and see if that is better.

Anyway, after that we had a play in the park outside – Julie had already taken the younger 3 out there and they were all looking purple of nose and watery of eye so after about half an hour more I felt at risk of losing digits due to frostbite and we headed back to Julies for lunch. We went via a little farm shop place run out of a shed in someone’s garden. All organic fruit and veg but sold at pretty much supermarket non-organic prices. I didn’t realise til Julie paid and we were leaving how cheap it was acually but given it is 20 miles away from us it wouldn’t be cost effective to go back really. Looking forward to pick your own re-opening in the Spring though. The children all got out of the cars and ‘helped’ Julie select her stuff though – as ever despite the fact they don’t actually eat them my children’s many trips round supermarkets with me meant they knew the names of everything! We also caught some ‘natural world in action’ education too when the semi-feral cat that was hanging about caught a mouse. She toyed with it for ages and finally ate in. I thought Davies might be disturbed by it (Scarlett was merely fascinated!) but he was quite stoic about it all and accepted it as ‘food chain stuff’.

Chris arrived home shortly after we got back to their house so the children played (noisily – it was mostly bouncing on Jack and Maisie’s bed I think!) while I helped them with some stuff on their new laptop – installing Norton which they’d bought and actually connecting them to the internet – oh how a whole new world is about to open up to them! 😉 Then they brought out a risk assessment form they have had through for one of Chris’ gardening job contracts so I helped them fill that out (I was SuperNic there today, wearing my pants on the outside!) and we headed for home around 3.30pm.

On the way home we listened to Charlie & The Chocolate Factory soundtrack (the original) and we were discussing the new vs the old Oompa Lumpa songs and we created some fusion ones of both:

Augustus Gloop, Augustus Gloop
The great big greedy nincompoop
what are you at getting terribly fat?
What do you think will come of that!!!

And;

Chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing all day long
The way that a cow does

Ah it was fun 🙂

Soup for their tea and then Ady arrived home so I shot out in the snow to go to Tescos to get all the food shopping for next week out of the way. We’re planning a restful and restorative weekend with no plans other than maybe heading over to my parents for a free lunch on Sunday 😉 Don’t know if the snow will settle – it was very wet out there but if it does then I guess there might be a bit of snow playing on the agenca too.

Happy Birthday Barbara 🙂

Hope you have a fab day and look forward to seeing you very soon! Oh and don’t go overindulging in the sweet cheese 😉

was once again in attendance at our house today. It was a concerted and deliberate effort but it really didn’t come so hard to do so somehow we broke the viscious circle today anyway 🙂

The children played with lego pretty much all day on and off which aside from a few foot on lego type injuries made for peace, creative play and nice educationally valuable toys.

While they were playing they watched some Nick Jr, some Class TV and Nightmare Before Christmas – twice! Oh and Shrek 2 again. Scarlett came upstairs with me to get dressed and assist with putting on makeup and then she stayed upstairs in Davies’ room playing with his castle making up stories about dragons and highest rooms in tallest towers (except of course far from the Disney Princess take on such things Tarly is more of a Shrek kinda girl so the princess is likely to beat the dragon up and go on to be Prime Minister than run off into the sunset with her dashing prince – after all the prince would be at work! 😉 ).

I took advantage of them being otherwise engaged to mix up a couple of batches of dough – one for rolls and one for a loaf which took us to about 11.45am at which point my Dad appeared – cunningly well timed for lunchtime! 😉 Davies has been after making jam tarts all week so I made up some pastry and let him do the rolling out, cutting out and jam filling (well with some assistance), got him to set the timer and let him open the over door to check them a couple of times to see if they were ready. Davies always takes responsibilty really seriously actually and we’ve been doing lots of letting him do stuff Tarly is still too small / young to do as sometimes the age gap between them feels non existant and I’m aware that is more because we’re all at home all the time than any real smaller gap than there should be between them. We’re letting him stay up a weeny bit later than her at the moment too – which is no big deal as she falls asleep by 7 at the very latest anyway so she doesn’t know but he feels very mature and special. 🙂

So we had fresh baked rolls followed by jam tarts for lunch, Dad was most impressed at my housewifelyness and we joked about it being all I’d ever dreamt of since girlhood 😉 and chatted generally as much as the children would allow. Nice to see him though and the children were all over him so that was good – I like them having a close relationship with him – when he’s not teasing Tarly or being concerned that Davies is not ‘hard’ enough and should be in school to ‘toughen him up’ he is excellent with them and Davies in particular is very good at drawing him into educational conversations where he ends up ‘teaching’ him stuff ;-). Nice to watch him playing the grandee!

He headed off around 3pm and then I spent some time wrestling with my old laptop and printer/scanner set up, eventually uninstalling and reinstalling all the hardware and software for it until I finally got it to work. Ady’s mother had passed some scanned photos of him as a child to Chris to give to Ady and he wanted them copied so he could see if he could print them off at work on the A3 printer but as they are scans of scans of pictures from the 1960s the quality is crap. We got Sky magazine in the post and there is a kids mag in with it which we gave to Davies to look at and there was a Wallace and Gromit competition in it. You could enter online so we went to the website and you could actually enter all the competitions in one go – about 15 or so. So I read them all out to Davies and he not only answered them all (mostly either kids tv trivia – like what shape are Spongebob’s pants? Or stuff like what doesn’t rhyme with Green? bean, mean, seen, potatoes.) and also managed to select A, B or C by working out what the first letter of the right answer would be and finding the word that started with it. I know there are many children out there his age and younger far ahead in their reading but he really has gotten to where he is in his own sweet time and whilst I might have sneakily put stuff infront of him for him to get learning by osmosis apart from a brief dalliance with 100 EL way way back we’ve not really done any alphabet stuff. I don’t think I could have seen it through to the great ages of 9 or 10 that some autonomous HEers have managed to have faith that ‘it will happen in it’s own time’ for but I’m glad my assurances to my Dad and Ady that ‘it will come’ are starting to hold true. Hope he wins something from one of the competitions too! 😉

Not entirely sure what happened to the rest of the afternoon but suddenly Ady was home and the children were eating their tea and that was their day gone. Scarlett went off to bed, Davies stayed up and watched Masterchef then Ady took him up to bed and he fell straight asleep too. Regular readers (as opposed to the rest of you Johnny come latelys!) may recall that we have a friend who split up with his long term partner last year and is very quickly getting married to his new love. We had yet to meet her despite the wedding being the day after Melrose so tonight he brought her over to meet us. Apparantly we were high on the list of people he was nervous of bringing her to meet and she was scared of meeting (well I say we, actually he said me specifically!) but she actually seemed very sweet. We rushed to get out dinner cooked and eaten (and failed actually, they arrived while we were still eating) before they got to us so that was a bit of a Challenge Anneka moment. They headed off around 10pm ish, Ady’s gone to bed and I’ve been very happily playing at database creation on the camps list 🙂

Way better day today 🙂

First thing Scarlett did some painting – really coming along in a 100% autonomous way her painting – she pretty much fills a sheet of paper with colours, there is a main object (usually me or Ady) and then a full background of sky and grass. Davies was on the pc playing Green Eggs and Ham – he seems to be doing a lot of stuff with words oblivious to the fact that he is actually learning how to read as a result. So thrilling Home Ed in action in a very low key no effort on my part type way. 🙂 Prior to that he had been watching The Nightmare Before Christmas which my Mum had gotten us on dvd for Christmas. Didn’t catch enough of it myself to pass verdict yet but I imagine I will do sometime very soon given how done to death films are in this house! 😉

I went up to get dressed and Scarlett came with me and ‘helped’ put my make up on for me. Actually she’s not bad really – she rubbed in my foundation, had a pretty good go at mascara (I know, how brave am I allowing a 3yo near my eyes with a wand!?!) rubbed in blusher and did my eyeshadow – and I didn’t look remotely like I belonged in a circus wearing oversize shoes and a water squirting flower afterwards either! 🙂 Then she came downstairs with me and helped me peel and cut vegetables to make beef stew while Davies swapped from Green Eggs and Ham to Nick jr.

Then we headed off into town for a few bits and pieces – I tried to take the slow cooker back but failed as it needs to be returned to the branch I bought it from, picked up a few bits and pieces of food and had a charity shop trawl which turned up nothing but was nice to be out browsing just the same. Davies went in the £1 shop by himself armed with his £1 to buy bird food for a making bird feeders activity I saw on the BBC website the other day and we have the perfect tree just outside our lounge window for hanging bird feeders off of to watch them eat so we’ll probably do that tomorrow.

We came home and had lunch and then Ros and co arrived. There was playing although there also seemed to be a fair amount of interupting adults chatter but the girls played with glitter make up and the Dora house, the boys played at dressing up and then they all ended up playing some form of Narnia game which judging by all the coathangers strewn about Davies’ bedroom actually did involve getting into his wardrobe! 🙂 Ros brought cakes and an ear and very importantly Heat magazine, which I have gorged on all evening! 🙂 Ok so I’m shallow and flippant but I know the important things in life!

The children then amazed me by both eating beef stew for their tea!!!! Ady arrived home, Scarlett fell asleep almost instantly after her milk, Davies got to stay up and watch Masterchef Goes Large with us which he considers a real treat – to get to stay up after the kids tv has been turned off, after Scarlett has gone to sleep and to listen to us chatting and to join in too really makes him feel all grown up. 🙂 He fell asleep pretty quickly too once in bed and Ady and I have had our beef stew and had a good long chat about plans for the future, what’s important to us and where we would like to be. We have plans – nothing firm or any more than speculation and dreams but at least we have those and from such starting points great things could just happen…

Happy Birthday Chris 🙂

Have a good one Mr. P, with lots of love from all the Pikeys – you’re beautiful, it’s true 🙂 xxx

But thankfully I have an excellent crash team who swept in to pick up the pieces. One I am married to, two of you are reading this and know exactly who you are and the fourth is a five year old boy.

So we’ll box all that up and put it firmly to one side and talk about the rest of the day.

We went to see Lucy, Rebecca and Richard today, we got there around 11 ish and the children played while we attempted to chat, we had lunch and then headed off down the beach for a walk / run around. The beach is literally at the end of her road (one minute walk). There is a small cafe and gift shop there just as the coast juts ever so slightly inland and it’s called Splash Point – because that’s exactly what used to happen there. It used to flood and splash over the road at storms and high tides so about 20 years ago they put loads of huge boulders there to break the waves before they head up the beach. Despite all the signs saying Danger No Climbing I remember clambering about on them when I was a child myself so when Davies started to do so I gave him a warning to be a bit careful (which he is by nature frankly!) and let him get on with it.

Initially Scarlett hung back with Rebecca walking along walls and playing with small stones:

But very predictably where Davies leads Scarlett follows – only with altogether less care and regard for personal safety! They enjoyed a good 15 minutes before she fell down one of the gaps between the rocks and scraped her cheek 🙁

I dashed across the rocks myself to hook her out and then realised that I was actually far less able to clamber than the children even without the hindrance of a 3 year old who flatly refused to let go of me. I could barely stand up on the surface let alone attempt to climb down. Davies managed to scramble down himself and then he watched Richard and Rebecca while Lucy came out to me and Tarly and we managed to get down by passing her between us as we got down ourselves. Huge comedy value for all the drunks and druggies who sit in the shelters along the beach anyway!

We then wandered round the ornamental gardens along the beach and past the closed for the winter playground and outdoor paddling pools. Lucy and I stood chatting while Rebecca jumped around and D & S headed off into the emptied paddling pool and found a bit of disused wooden pallet and a strip of roofing felt to make some sort of pirate ship and invisible water sprayer to assist them in their game of being Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. Reassured me once again of what a 5 year old would choose to do if left to their own devices – clambering over rocks, imagining bits of beach rubbish to be props in a game, assisting in rescue operations and getting quite a hefty slice of real life drama at home too – who need school eh? 😉 We headed back to Lucy’s for another cup of tea and a play before coming home.

We’ve been thinking about getting a slow cooker for a couple of weeks – we used to have one when we were both working at B&Q and between us were doing 4 late shifts a week and it got lots of use. Whoever was working the late would stick something on to cook before going to work at lunchtime and then we could either eat seperately when we got in from work or wait and eat together without anyone needing to start cooking so late. The children are getting ever more adventurous with what they will try and eat so things like curry, stew, casserole would be something they would try at their tea time and if it’s being cooked for us anyway it doesn’t matter if they don’t like it. Also of course it is frugal to buy stuff like cheaper meat and cook it longer, and to be running one small slow cooker rather than have the oven lit for 8 hours. Not at all sure what happened to that orignal slow cooker but we no longer have it. So we had a leaflet through the door with supermarkets special offers last night and in the one from Co-op there was a half price slow cooker. When Ady got in from work I dashed out to both local branches of Co-op and picked one up in the second one I tried. Unfortunately when I got it home and unpacked it it is very small indeed. It would probably just about fit a dinner for two, but certainly not the batch cooking ready for freezing or the cooking a bit extra for the children I had wanted it for. So that’s a pain 🙁 Will have to take it back and also see if I can track one the right size down someone cheaply too. Anyway, that was a very boring last paragraph 😉 so as it is my predilection to leave my posts on a high here is one last photo which is from a while ago but always makes me smile 🙂

Lots of model Home Educating Mama behaviour going on here again today. Of course in my usual totally inconsistent parenting style I have also done stacks of ‘against all the rules’ type stuff too 🙁

First thing we did milk and breakfast and Backyardigans viewing. When I went to head upstairs to get dressed I put Class TV on to which Davies had a fit and followed me upstairs demanding Nick jr went back on. I told him it was on channel 618 and if he wanted it then he better sort it out himself. And having checked with me on a calendar in our bathroom (Ady got about 7 freebie calendars from various work contacts and we seem to have one in every room of the house!) which was 6 which was 1 and which was 8 by pointing at them all he set off downstairs and managed it. Not sure whether to call that Maths and tick a box or to be in despair really! 😉

When I came back downstairs Scarlett and I made up two batches of dough and then brought them in the lounge to knead. Scarlett didn’t really get very far with hers but Davies was very effective and chucking it about and beating it up – there was nothing to differentiate between his and mine by the end of ten minutes. My Grandad was a pastry chef at Harrods for a time so clearly baking is in the blood 😉 We shaped 15 rolls and a loaf of bread and the children each made a few small baby rolls too. We covered them all up with muslin and left them in the lounge near the radiator to prove then headed off to the library. I had a couple of books to return, the next book for Reading Group to collect – which I’ve not looked at at all yet but is Graham Swift’s Last Orders – anyone read it? – and I wanted to have a look at a few reference books to chase up a few ideas I have tossing about in my head and see if I can summon up any enthusiasm for them.

Our local library is very small but does have quite a community feel to it, there are always loads of old people sitting round reading the papers and the children’s area is quite nice and inviting. The staff are always really friendly and helpful too and it is just small enough for me to let D&S go and be in the children’s area looking at books and browse the paperbacks while keeping a distant eye on them. So we had a quick look round the fiction but nothing appealed to me, then we headed upstairs to the reference bit where I grabbed a few books and then back downstairs to the books for sale area. I chose a couple from there (which I was really pleased to discover at the counter were all at 10 pence, just as well I hadn’t realised earlier though or I might have selected more!) then we settled down in the childrens’ area for a while. Davies had said he wanted books about bugs and insects so he chose a couple of nice ones including one with some ideas of bug related projects like learning how worms move by handling one, the cheap version of observing life cycles of caterpillars (i.e catching them yourself in the garden and keeping them rather than paying a couple of quid per caterpillar from Insect Lore!). Then they both chose two stories to be read to them there and then and five story books each to borrow. As we were leaving Davies spotted Robin Williams on the front of the video Flubber and recognised him as Peter Pan from Hook so we picked that up too. I did try to dissuade him as I was not really sure it would be his sort of film from reading the back of the case but he was adamant.

Once home we bunged the (by now very well) risen rolls and loaf in the oven, the children settled down to watch Flubber and I pottered until the rolls were done then we had those for lunch with cheese and grapes. The film was not great and didn’t fully captivate either of them all the way through like some films do, indeed plenty of the storyline was a little beyond their comprehension but they watched it to the end and then Davies asked for it again and proceeded to watch it more intently the second time. I think he particularly likes Robin Williams actually so I might try and track down some more of his work – I’m thinking Mrs Doubtfire and Mork & Mindy might appeal, rather than Good Morning Vietnam or Dead Poets Society 😉 .

While they were watching it Davies was asking for some playdoh so he could make flubber of his own so I took it a step forward and Tarly joined me in the kitchen to make some real flubber. Davies was thrilled and set about chucking that about on his table and smashing it up then glooping it together again while watching the film.

Scarlett then had a complete melt down with me about my insisting she got some clothes on. Now Tarly likes to be naked, always has done and generally I have no issue with it. She has gotten better about staying clothed while at other people’s house with a few notable exceptions where the hosts are cool with her nudity (and indeed one particular house where they often join in 😉 well the children anyway!) and manages to stay fully dressed at soft play centres, the supermarket and the library, but once home as soon as she uses the toilet off come all clothes never to be put on again. Normally I let her get on with it, I think it’s probably very healthy both for her to remain unselfconscious for as long as possible, for her and Davies to be used to seeing each other naked and be aware of the differences in their anatomy and it saves me loads of washing 😉 but it is bloody cold here today and she was all goosebumpy and shivery. I told her to get her clothes back on and she went off to get some pjs. Retrospectively I simply cannot tell you why this was an issue for me or indeed why I continued to make it one long after even I had realised this was one of the battles I had picked unwisely, but having made the point and wound her up to tantrum status it became more important to not give in to her by then bad behaviour. She was eventally persuaded into trousers and a top and we kissed and made up. I know it was a stupid argument, I know it was a mad thing to be making a stand over, I generally don’t let her ‘have her way’ on every mortal thing but whenever possible I do try to listen to the children’s voices – wearing pjs in the house is something I do after a bath every night (although the children don’t know that as they have gone to bed by then!) so what on earth I was doing insisting that she put clothes on I really do not know! I have noticed of late that both the children talk to each other in a really nasty tone and Scarlett particularly is quick to shout, which I am all too aware is a reflection of my behaviour. The shouting is something I know I do and make attempts to modify but sort of accept but the nasty tone is something I am going to work really hard to stop and hope they follow as it is very unpleasant to hear in small children. 🙁

So Davies was happy with his flubber and his Flubber, Tarly came and sat with me and we read some books together, one of which was The Big Book Of Little Children which is a favourite here and has a couple of mentions of ‘school’. Davies as ever piped up about not going to school and so Scarlett asked what happens at school. I didn’t want to do a hatchet job of it but neither am I desperate to sell it particularly so I ran through a few activities and things one might do there, explained that you stayed while mummies left, there are lots of ‘friends’ there to play with and so on. Unfortunately she picked up on her favourite thing in the world which was one of the activities I stupidly mentioned – painting! So now she wants to go to school on the basis that she’d get to do painting there! Davies was horrified and desperately tried to convince her that it would be awful and listed all the things that would be awful about it (which was both accurate and amusing, if a little one sided!) and we ended up deciding that she can go when she’s five if she still wants to! 😉

Then they both played with flubber for a bit and watched some Nick jr having gotten too wriggly to stay on my lap anymore after The Gruffalo and The Smartest Giant in Town had been read to them. I made them some tea, they assisted in the tidying of the flubber at which point my patience with them ran out about 15 minutes before Ady came home so he got to witness the end of what was predominantly a very nice day and got a very clouded view of what it had really been like by them running amok and me being grumpy and shouty 🙁 . They both just about won a reprive from the 6pm bedtime I had planned and watched Animal Park and Masterchef Goes Large with us instead – the downside of this is that they are both still awake, the house still needs a major tidy up from the day and dinner is far from planned let alone started. But anyway…

Been thinking today (in the background to everything else) about blogging and diaries, what the difference is and how much my computer is a tool of communication over and above anything else. Even on a day when I don’t speak to another adult in real life I interact with about 30 online on a daily basis via blogs, IM and email alone – more if I am reading or posting to lists or forums. I mentioned elsewhere that the urge to blog is waning slightly, actually that is not strictly true. The urge to write with constraints of knowing who is in the audience and sometimes censoring what I write accordingly is waning but to lose my voice by not blogging would be something I would struggle with a lot I suspect. The word of the day is incommunicado – I’m not going to try and cleverly pull it in – it’s one I know and use anyway and it’s a state that when enforced upon me is one I struggle with hugely.

Mainly cos I need to use up some of the words of the day which have been backing up as emails in my inbox 🙂

So we had our lunch (sausage rolls and mini chocolate eclairs – healthy or what?!) and then the children wanted to watch a home video from 2004 just before and just after we moved home so that was nostalgic for us and entertaining for them. As always when watching stuff like that we speculate on how amazing it would be to have that sort of footage of us as children. Last weekend we were looking at baby and early childhood pictures of me and Frazer round at my parents and even the ones taken when I was about 2 I can clearly recall, mainly because I have looked at them so many times over the years and heard my parents recount the story of them being taken so that instant has stayed in my mind and the memory is triggered when looking at the photos. My earliest memory is of being at Frazer’s christening so I would have been nearly 3 and I remember sitting with my Dad and being very bored by the whole thing, not to mention fed up about it all being about my boring baby brother too! Wonder what my two’s earliest memories will be when they are grown ups?

The children got bored of that so we played KerPlunk for a while and then I decided to bake some bread. Ady was going to dig out the breadmaker for me (there is not enough worktop space to have more than one kitchen appliance out at a time and we currently have the toasted sandwich maker using the space so the breadmaker had gone to the under stairs cupboard where all resting appliances go to recharge their batteries and wistfully recall their heyday when they were new, or indeed the good old days when we lived in Manchester with a large kitchen and all of the appliances saw sunshine every day! But I had a sudden fit of muffinicity and decided to bake it from scratch and take Davies with me to show him how it’s done. With guidance and my expert tutelage (first one in there!) we made a loaf and 8 rolls for the princely sum of about 40 pence worth of ingredients by following the recipe on the side of the flour packet. I’d love to think that we could keep that up – we are paying 40 pence a loaf for horrid value white sliced and that involved trekking to the supermarket more or less daily, whereas for the same money we can have fresh baked, yummy bread and rolls, the house will smell divine, it will have educational value (maths in the weighing of ingredients, PE in the kneading, Science in the whole rising and cooking process and is undoubtedly healthier) but I think I know myself too well and the evidence is irrefragable that I am an unlikely freshly baked bread every day kinda gal! (strike 2) The rolls were lovely and we ate half fresh from the oven, the bread has not risen as well as it could, which Ady tells me is down to the kneading – which if nothing else gives me renewed enthusiasm for kneading tomorrow 😉

It’s been a really nice day actually, Ady got to do his tidying, I got to laze around a lot and drink tea and eat all the chocolate mints Ady had brought home having collected them from his pillow at the hotel each morning, the children have stayed in pjs all day and just got changed into new ones and it’s been lovely to just be the four of us. I’ve got roast lamb and various vegetables in the oven roasting, we put the carrot and parsnip tops I chopped off in a dish of water to see if they’ll sprout (I am *so* HE today!) and COOT is on shortly – we missed it last week 🙁 And I am sure I hear the susurration of the siren call of the white wine whispering my name. (Three and I’m out!)

First of all Scarlett allowed her weekly hairbrush to happen this morning 🙂

Also here are a couple of yesterday’s basket creation – including some modelled by Tarly for perspective (and skipping merrily through woods potential!)

I’ve been food shopping this morning where I felt like a real grown up bumping into a friend I’ve not seen for ages and catching up on her being married, how old our children are and arranging to get together – just the sort of thing I used to listen to my Mum doing in supermarkets when I was a child! And now we’re having a pj day for the kids with a dvd viewing marathon, a bizarre lunch consisting of various things I cleared out of the freezer when sorting it out in attempts to start being sensible about budgeting and menu planning (still no lentils 😉 ), Scarlett’s painting, Ady’s been doing all sorts of hoovering and Ady machining and I think we might be off out for one of our woodland walks later, using my new basket to collect fruits and nuts and berries we have foraged for as we go! 😉

I know, it’s lazy 😉

Had a nice day today, rushed around like crazy to arrive at Julie’s a mere five minutes later than arranged and left Ady and the children there. Not at all sure what they were up to and actually it’s quite refreshing not to be able to account for every moment of my childrens’ day so I’ll enjoy that ignorance I think!

The course was good – done by the same woman as the one last Autumn but a different style of basket – I will flickr it tomorrow when I’ve taken some pictures and it’s fully dried out and the colours are true. I did attempt a fairly large basket though and have had to finish it off at home and all of my fingers are very sore. It was pretty physical work actually using your shoulders and arms and hugging the basket into your tummy aswell as using muscles in your hand that simply don’t get that amount of exercise from typing or moving a mouse ;-). Really pleased with my creation though. I’ve yet to decide on a use for it, infact I’ve yet to decide on a use for the one I made before. When they asked me on the course what I was going to use it for I said ‘skipping merrily through woodland’ because it does have that sort of Little Red Riding Hood feel to it, so you never know I may take up geocaching just to give me an excuse to be in woodlands and copses! 😉

There were only two other women on the course – both retirement age so it was nice and intimate with lots of group chatter during the day which was lovely. We also had an inspector with us for part of the day viewing the teacher so we were chatting to him a fair bit too. Very relaxing and indeed slightly more rewarding to be battling with reluctant willow than reluctant children when attempting to get something or someone to do what you want it to do!

The course was held in a school – it’s a big secondary school thjat is also used for adult education and I think may even do the more non-academic types of post 16 qualifications too. It was odd to be back in that sort of environment after many years since leaving school myself and I was slightly saddened by looking round the art block room that we were sitting in at how exciting some of the students work on display was. I think I have blogged before that I used to really enjoy art and creative stuff but was encouraged far more towards academic stuff and eventually lost the urge to explore artistic pursuits further, but sitting in that room with all these wild and fantastical products of pupils imagination was very inspiring. I then took a walk down some of the corridors to the staff room for tea and looked at the further displays of work on the walls and then noticed various boards full of stuff about ‘community’ ‘citizenship’ and ‘pride’ – all of which sounded rather a lot like Management Seminar buzz words but were insistent that ‘beacuse we have pride and passion for our learning we will commit to : getting to class before the second bell, doing our home work’ and so on….And do you know for a short while I was suckered in by that. I found myself thinking it was inspirational, fretting that my children will be deprived by not getting to make 6ft square papier mache creations to be admired by the whole school, will not get to see posters saying that ‘we are a community and we take pride and comfort from knowing our place within it and feeling our importance to the community’. Suffice to say I quickly realised it was similar to those management seminars because they are filled with spin doctors propaganda too and that actually my children are better off learning their place in the community by being out there in it living and learning that by seeing it on a poster 12 times a day as they shuffle by in a sea of children all going to the next hour long session of life broken down into what you can learn within the confines of this classroom, the teachers knowledge and the co-operation of the rest of the class. And then the basket weaver lady started talking to us about some excellent ideas for creative stuff with the children using willow and collecting our own materials from hedgerows (which I would need some sort of recepticle for collecting them in while out walking in woodland, where could I get such a thing?) so I started to feel better again and wrote it off as the after effects of some residual institutionalising spray from the school week there! 😉

Anyway, we came home via McDs for the children who have both gone to bed very early, I sat and watched trashy Saturday night TV while finishing off my basket and Ady cooked me dinner – which was lovely after doing all the cooking all week while he sat in corporate entertainment style posh restaurants! Tomorrow we plan a very quiet, very relaxing day with no more possible exertion than a walk if the weather is nice and we might not even be bothered to do that.

Ergo I will be offline for the rest of the evening 🙂

and it was very interesting…

ETA (;-)) and I did actually mean something other than my own blog!

I meant this! 🙂

Here at the Goddard residence we often substitute the word ‘Ady’ instead of ‘Baby’ in song lyrics. I know, we’re that wacky us 😉

Anyway, he’ll be home later and despite very lovely and welcome distractions at the beginning of the week we have missed him terribly. The children have both spoken to him on the phone daily and recorded several video messages to text to him but Davies says he just wants to cuddle him and kiss him and Scarlett appeared in the bedroom beside me at 4am saying ‘Mummy, where is Daddy?’ (and I don’t think it was an educational map plotting session she was after 😉 ). Seeing how much they have missed him depsite it being Monday to Friday when they probably would have been lucky to see him for an hour a day anyway has added further clarity to our different life ponderings. Chats with Barbara about perspectives on life and seeing other friends prepared to make fairly dramatic life changes coupled with our own pressing need to do ‘something’ different if we really can’t face the long hard slog back to solvency meaning ever longer working hours and ever less treats and luxuries.

This morning the children played with playdoh for ages while I messed about online. They watched Class TV while they were doing that and were both quite into Words & Pictures which is one I remember watching at school – about a peregrine falcon, so it was very bizarre to suddenly find myself singing along to the ‘magic e’ jingle – strange how something can be buried so deep inside your memory but be called back if needed eh!

Anyway there’s been preparation aplenty for his return. We baked biscuits in the shape of letters spelling out welcome home Daddy and then decorated them:

I particularly like Davies’ ‘o’ in ‘home’ – he did a repeating pattern which I think is the first time he’s done such a thing.

Then Davies and I made a banner, which he is just finishing off. I asked him to write each letter but he did them without any help and then he decided he needed to decorate each letter to ‘make them more creative’ (his words!) so while the actual letters are not quite so clear as they were we now have various creatures and illustrations on each one. Some he’s done with something to do with the letter (Lion for L, Horse for H etc) and some he’s just been totally creative with such as turning an ‘e’ into a picture of Ady driving his car. The last picture on a ‘y’ is Ady leaving his hotel and coming back to our house which I think is my favourite one.

Right, tidy up time and then we’re going to read some stories. Ady should be home around 8pm so I don’t intend being around much tonight…

Tomorrow I have a basket weaving course with Julie which is slightly bad timing really but was booked long before we knew Ady would be away and will at least mean he gets a day with the children and they can be as giddy and noisy as they like without me tutting 😉 I’m also quite looking forward to a day to myself having played at single parenting this week! And I get to bring home a basket too 🙂

Feeling very in the swing of all that is good and fine about Home Education this week, which is probably just as well given the small part of me that is ‘just checking’ it’s all still working well for us in reaction to other friends choosing different lives again. It’s been funny to feel myself and see in others the shock that one of our number has decided that for their family school is the right option. Given that it is actually what most of the rest of the country are doing it really isn’t so extreme and it made me realise just how immersed we are in the Home Ed way of thinking, lifestyle and friendship circles. Oddly the fact that many of our friends are home educators has escaped our notice a bit and hardly seems that much of a big thing about any of them, yet I know that in the social circles where I am the only Home Educator it is generally the biggest defining feature about me ‘you know, Nic, the one who Home Educates’. Somewhere in that paragraph there was a point – you might want to go back and see if you can spot it 😉 I know sort of what it was but I think I made a poor job of illustrating it – anyway…

So we’ve had a good old social week really; the Raines came to stay, we had Ali & Freya over to add to that mix, we had some quiet time yesterday with a spot of nicely demonstrated literacy and art to keep my faith in autonomy and today we’ve done the full on Home Ed group outing thing. Yesterday afternoon Davies played on the pc for a while dabbling with Nick Jr and for once requiring no help at all. I peeked in a couple of times to see him confidently typing his name when required, navigating around the site with ease and clearly ‘reading’ stuff even though it is likely more from memory than actually spelling out the words (which lets face it once we’ve got past spelling out words is how we all read anyway) and he still insists he can’t read at all I am confident there is sure progress happening on that score so will keep the pressure off. While he was doing that Scarlett and I snuggled up and read through the pile of Dr Seuss books again. She was finishing some of the sentences for me even on the books we’d only read once before so coupled with the pictures and the rhyming rhytm of the text she was happily anticipating what words would come next. I was quite surprised at her vocab. on some of the words actually, particularly in Wocket in my pocket where I would not have thought she’d know words like ‘basket’ ‘closet’ and ‘cellar’. We also did some counting of various things where there were several in the picture and she is fairly reliable up to the mid teens with the odd bit of gentle prompting. Davies joined us for the last couple of books and then they had their tea (sausages – and they licked their plates clean!) before both heading off to bed and being fast asleep by 7.30. 🙂

This morning Tarly woke me at 6am which was not too hideous and Davies joined us downstairs around 7am. We had morning cuddles on the sofa then I did them some breakfast and they watched TV while I snoozed 🙂 Scarlett then went on the pc fora while playing on the Nick jr site – not as confident as Davies but more than able to click around it and she also mastered click and drag today too. Davies and I watched Discovery Kids and caught most of some sort of science experiment type show with lots of craft ideas, then he had a play with the red button stuff on cbeebies. They then both started watching schools programmes while I went and put away 3 baskets of clean washing.

We headed over to the soft play near Julie where she had organised an Activeo event and Lucy had come along too. I really don’t go to many Activeo things although I have decided this year I will make more of an effort but I am always chuffed at how friendly the other members are and how included I instantly feel. There are a fair few alternative folk there but also a great mix of really interesting people – real ‘thinkers’ who are up for sitting and having stimulating conversations about life, the universe and education and of course soft play where the children are off safely having a ball (not to mention ticking socialisation and physical education 😉 ) is the perfect venue for such activities. So I had a good old catch up with a few faces from there and arranged to attend a couple of events over the next few weeks. I also spent some time talking to a woman from Worthing who came along once to WAG just as we were finishing up and I had clicked with quite well then. She has a 4 year old daughter and we have agreed to get together soon and also maybe think about holding some events jointly over this way to help bring Activeo further towards us. Also had a quick chat with Julie, which I am always conscious of not spending the whole time doing and sorted out arrangements for our basket weaving course at the weekend.

Davies and Scarlett had a really great time there today, Davies met some boy and they played really well together for over an hour. I remember doing that myself as a child – just teaming up with a random child and having a whale of a time playing with them without ever actually learning their name (might have done the more grown up version of that once or twice in my teens too come to think of it 😉 ) – anyway I am always very chuffed to see that it is certainly not a skill you have to attend school to get, infact maybe in some ways offering children the constant opportunity to make friends over longer periods of time negates the need to ‘get in there’ like the children do at places like soft play. Whatever, it was nice to see him off playing anyway! Scarlett spent lots of time playing with Jack – which was unusual – normally they pair up as the girls – Scarlett and Maisie and the boys – Davies and Jack or they stick to their siblings. Scarlett was very cute with Jack actually she was very solicitously helping him climb up and down and I could see she was doing a fair degree of cheerleading and supporting him too – I was very proud 🙂

We left there having had lunch (Davies decided he didn’t want his chips so Jack had them and Davies shared my panini – chicken and bacon. Ok not the most nutritious food ever but still a big leap forward for him to try it in the first place let alone decide he liked it and eat so much of it!). In the car on the way over Davies had asked to listen to War of the Worlds having found the cd case which has a little booklet in it with all the words and several illustrations. They sat and listened to it all the way there and all the way home and the asked for it to be brought in the house where they listened to the end. For once they listened to it very intently although I could hear them chatting about it too, Davies showing Scarlett the pictures in the book as they got to that bit in the story and Scarlett asking him questions about the martians and the people. They both seem to have a very good understanding of the story and are able to pick out various bits in the music and say what that is representing in the story. We also watched some road works going on on the way over there and as the journey took double the normal time we were able to witness men digging up old road surfaces, men tipping stones out and raking them out and then the steam roller flattening them so we talked about that too. Better to enjoy the educational value than get cross about the delays I guess :-).

When that finished we had some retro TV and watched the Bobinogs which we’ve not seen for ages. It was all about wobbly teeth and teeth generally so having eaten their dinner they are now both sporting a pair of pants over the bottom half of their faces as face masks and are examining each others and my teeth using cutlery as dental instruments. They have opened a box of stickers to give when patients have been good and Scarlett has been told not to have a dummy any more in the interests of her teeth, I have been told one of my teeth is jutting forward a bit but I have been praised for keeping them clean 🙂 I’ve been assured that none will fall out though because I am a grown up and only children lose their baby teeth!

Right, bath and bed for little people and my parents are due to arrive fairly soon. I have persuaded them we should have fish and chips for dinner which should go very well with the bottle of champagne they brought over at New Year and we never drank so is sitting nicely chilled ready for us. And of course you know who’s coming home tomorrow 🙂 🙂

For these Tesco value chocolates last week. The brandy has been kicking around since Christmas but I couldn’t believe it when I saw a box of chocolates in the value range.

I think I’ve only ever bought boxes of chocolates as presents but as strapped as I am I could still never buy someone these as a gift with VALUE splashed all over them. Well except I did buy them for Ady for their pure comedy value and at 99p even we can afford gags that are that cheap! 😉

Barbara did spoil my mirth somewhat by suggesting that actually really grand people sometimes buy boxes of chocolates to put out for guests on plates with doilies on them. Of course really grand people probably don’t shop in Tescos anyway let alone peruse the selection of products with their distinctive No Frills packaging.

Seem to be doing that a lot these days…

Monday

We had a fairly low key morning. Ady left for the week before 6am and as I had been up IMing the night before and not gone to bed before midnight I got up to see him off and then snuck back to bed for a couple of hours knowing that it would be a late night again. We set about getting the house ready for visitors, moving stuff about to make room in Tarly’s bedroom and both of them had various ‘precious’ things they decided they would rather not have out to be played with so we tidied them away. The children watched a couple of films – not sure which ones and I know they did some drawing too.

Barbara, Beth, Ben and Rachael arrived, as expected at about 1.30pm. The children fell on Ben with delight and he was soon spirited away to play, Beth joined in too and Rachael set about amazing us with her sudden leaps in speaking and copying while emptying the cats biscuits into their litter tray (cutting out the middle cat perhaps? 😉 ). Barbara and I started the first of many conversations which we never quite seemed to finish but enjoyed trying to anyway.

Ali and Freya joined us mid afternoon and although Freya was tired having come to us on route home after a weekend away she seemed to mix in with the others pretty well while Ali joined in with as much conversation as three women who are also ‘looking after’ 6 children who seemed to constantly need drinks, food, assistance with bodily functions or mediation skills as their group dynamics veered between pugnacious and comity can manage. We served them tea of tinned goods and some of the never ending birthday cake Barbara had brought with her and then I ran Ali and Freya to the station.

We debated the classic five children in a bath photo opportunity but decided it has been done enough times already to not warrant the inevitable soaked bathroom floor it would result in so did them in shifts with Beth and Tarly sharing and having their hair washed by me, Rachael having a quick dunk and then Ben and Davies having their’s last. Rachael and Scarlett went to sleep fairly quickly, Beth followed and by the time we sat down for our dinner at about 9pm there was only Davies and Ben still awake. Having deduced that it was the fact that they were both awake which was keeping them both awake we brought Davies down to sit with us – where he proceeded to eat a large share of my dinner (!) – which meant Ben fell asleep and we were able to deposit Davies to a peaceful bedroom to fall asleep himself quickly afterwards.

Which probably accounts for a late night really – we started late 😉 Two empty wine bottles and lots more chatting later we headed to bed around 3am…

Tuesday

An earlier start than would have been idea considering 😉 The children woke around 6am, but having imposed conditions on them I think Barbara and I both managed to get back to bed for a couple of hours sleep. I got up at 8ish when Ady rang to say good morning and by the time I made it downstairs Barbara had fed all the children who then scattered off to play again. Scarlett and Beth played really nicely with the Dora house and the Polly Pockets while Davies and Ben played loudlywith pretty much every toy in the house ;-). They were all fairly tired and as Barbara had brought me a pile of books I’d bought from ReadItAgain and had delivered with hers I ended up sat on the sofa with four children sitting on top of me while reading Dr Seuss to them. Rachael had gone for a much needed nap and Barbara was doing the same on the sofa ;-). My Dad arrived to take my car off for a new type so Barbara took over the storytelling while I dashed round the shop for supplied and set about making lunch for everyone including Dad who returned and stayed for a while, mostly chatting to Beth.

Dad left and we decided that whilst they probably didn’t exactly need wearing out due to a sleep deficit already some fresh air wouldn’t be a bad idea having had them house bound for 24 hours, so we loaded them into our cars and went to a local-ish park. We must have been there a good hour and although they were fractious towards the end they mainly enjoyed having the playground to themselves and making up and acting out various games.

We came home and allowed half an hour of Nick Jr and big bowls of fruit before sending them off to play again before tea. Scarlett was fairly capricious not really sticking with any one playmate, flitting from playing role play dollies games with Beth (which were actually very nice to watch), to running around yelling with the boys and then occassionally being very caring and nice to Rachael, whereas Davies consistantly stuck next to Ben.

In the interests of winding them down for an early night we let them eat tea infront of Dora and The Backyardigans before packing them off to various beds and bedrooms in cunningly worked out shifts. And it worked 🙂 Scarlett did end up coming back and falling asleep on my lap rather than in my bed but as I’d already got dinner prepared while cooking the kids’ tea and Barbara was having a bath that was fine. I deposited Tarly in bed just as Ros arrived at 8 and then ducked in for a quick bath myself, so by 8,30pm we had all kids asleep, wine opened, dinner served and choir practise commenced 🙂 – with affectionate mentions to those who would have been worthy and welcome additions to the evening.

We had a lovely evening actually with chatty aplenty before Ros headed off shortly before 1am and Barbara and I congratulated ourselves on our ‘early night’ of 2am having finished the end of the wine!

Wednesday

Nicely self sufficient children got up and entertaine themselves again until I rose around 8ish and sorted breakfast out for them – I don’t think they’d been that far ahead of me actually and then we had a fairly low key morning with Barbara packing everything up and heading off around 11. It’s been a lovely visit – the children have really, really enjoyed having them, I always enjoy talking to Barbara who comes at things with often such a different perspective to me and always leaves me thinking about things slightly differently, particularly in terms of educational approach and so on. It’s also nice to have spent more time learning about each other pre-dating a first meeting and chatting about childhood, families and stuff, cementing friendship type chats. Lovely.

I now have fairly subdued children, but in a good, tired but happy sort of way. I’ve sorted out all the bedrooms and put everything back where it belongs, tidied up the playroom, made a few phonecalls, spoken to Ady (obviously 😉 ), got some washing dealt with and caught up online. The children have played with magic maize, Davies has drawn a picture for Ady, they’ve watched lots of Nick jr and now Tarly is using a magic maize damp sponge bowl as a swimming pool for her Polly Pockets and Davies is playing with some train track. While tidying up the playroom I came across some Letterland flash cards and when Davies appeared in the room we sat together and looked at them. I wouldn’t say he amazed me because I knew he did know all the letters and their sounds but I was surprised that he sat and demonstrated it so happily as he is normally very reluctant to do so. He also have me at least one example of a word beginning with each letter. 🙂 A quondam non-reader maybe we are slowly making tracks…

So I’m pretty much half way through Ady’s absense and despite company have missed him lots – and not just for his hoovering ;-). My plan tonight is early tea and bed for the children, who I don’t imagine will have any objections to that. Then a long, very bubbly bath for me, some indulgent food and a toss up between an early night myself or watching the first in the new series of Desperate Housewives (which actually even if I stay up and watch and then go straight to bed will be an early night by recent standards!).

Tomorrow we’re off to soft play for an Activeo event and my parents are coming over for dinner and then on Friday Ady will be home. Can’t wait!

Happy Birthday Alison (Big) – hope you have a great day 🙂

Just took a little longer than I expected 😉

So a two day round-up then which will no doubt leave out loads of what I had planned to say but never mind.

Yesterday we went into town for various things – Scarlett needed new shoes and I wanted to get something in the sales before it was only hooker boots left 😉 Managed to get some lovely peach suede ones with embroidered flowers on – can’t find an online link so you’ll have to be eagle eyed in future flickr snaps of her to spot them. I think they are nice and appropriate though, and they’ll go with her clothes which several of the other pairs didn’t. There was a lovely pair of bright purple DM style ones which we also liked but they were just too clumpy to look right with skirts, which she wears rather a lot of of, so these seemed the better choice. There were also plenty of black shoes, which I refuse to buy either child on principle as they are ‘school shoes’ so until they beg for black shoes themselves I shan’t be buying them, and several pairs of patent shoes which I just personally dislike and have done since my own childhood – aside from anything else little terrors like Tarly are never going to retain the patent-ness of them so they’ll end up looking scuffed and scruffy far quicker than even peach suede will do.

Davies had a book token which he’s had since his birthday and we kept forgetting to take out with us so we went between the 3 bookshops in town with me trying to persuade him to actually spend it on a book and him adamant he wanted a Wallace and Gromit Activity book with press out characters. I did struggle with it but let him have what he wanted in the end 😉 and I guess we’re not short of books round here, and he has played with it endlessly ever since… grumble, grumble, give in with bad grace, mutter, grumble… Also got some laminator pouches as we ran out ages ago and have a pile of things that Davies is desperate to laminate.

We parked out of town (frugal and good exercise) and walked in along the seafront. The tide was really, really high when we arrived so we went down to the sea to look for washed up ‘treasure’ although there was little there aside from fish heads (minus the eyes and bodies – good for explaining food chain and precisely why the seagulls hover round the sea) and seaweed. There was also seaweed further up on the actual promenade so there had been even higher tides earlier this week.

I love living near the sea, I really missed it when we lived in Manchester and hadn’t really realised what a backdrop to my childhood it provided. I have always lived within sniffing distance of the famous summer stench of the seaweed (one of the less pleasant aspects of it I admit!) and it is literally at the end of our road here (you could walk it in 10 minutes or so at grown up pace, drive it in about 3 minutes). Pre children we often used to go down to the beach if the weather was extreme as it is very exciting to be so close to the sea when it’s tossing about and blowing a gale. I used to drive along the coast to work for a couple of years and watch the seasons and the time of day tell reflected over the ocean – funny how you can somehow tell if it’s spring or autumn just by looking at the sea. The children are endlessly fascinated by it whether it is what colour it is today, if it is low or high tide, what you can see out at sea (boats, swimmers etc) and of course combing the beach for exciting stuff. I think proximity to the coast would factor highly on location for moving if we do – doesn’t really matter which strip of coast and in many ways I’d rather avoid the resort type stretches really but it’s scenery I’d be keen not to lose again.

We came home via my parents on a bit of a whim really and ended up staying ages. I nipped up to the supermarket to get some cakes and my Mum happened to be driving past their house (she was out shopping) and let me out of their road then followed me to the supermarket to see what I was doing, so she came round shopping with me and then came home instead of carrying on shopping. I have to commend her actually on trying really hard with the children – we’ve been there again today and after her fairly bad behaviour with them over Christmas and a bit of a drunken lecture I gave my parents the night before my birthday about missing out on their grandchildren she made real efforts with both of them. She spent time playing with Scarlett and they really seem to have patched things up. If I was being critical I could say she went slightly OTT with the all singing, all dancing, sweetie providing Granny act, but I’ll assume that was a charm offensive to get them back on side before returning to some sort of normal Granny behaviour.

Anyway we got home from there yesterday and I’ve already described the evening I had planned and the evening I actually had so we’ll not go over that again.

Today was a bit of a shadowy start really. Scarlett woke about 4am and came into our bed but she refused to go back to sleep so when she got no entertainment value out of either Ady or I she went and woke Davies up instead to play with her. This was about 5.30am. 🙁 Superhero Ady (oh, how I’ll miss him next week) got up with them and gave them milk then came back to bed and we left them to it. I got up around 9am and they had gotten themselves bread and youghurts (actually we knew about the yoghurts as Tarly had brought them up to our bedroom to check she was allowed them!) and were happily watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and commenting to each other that the Daddy in that was also Bert from Mary Poppins! 🙂

Sat and had some cuddles with them both before Ady got back up again and then we headed over to Mum and Dad’s for lunch. Dad and Ady went out to get some logs so I won’t freeze next week and my Granny came up aswell. Frazer was there but when we left at 4pm he had still not surfaced after a heavy night’s partying – oh to have such freedoms! 😉

Since home Ady had packed up everything he needs for what has turned out to be a full working week away – he leaves tomorrow morning and won’t be back until Friday – I had previously thought he was going tonight and would be back on Wednesday 🙁 I have got a roast dinner cooking (which is smelling fairly ready actually, must get off the computer and go and sort it out) and I’m about to have that long overdue bubble bath and a glass of wine. Tomorrow we have Raine Drops arriving much to the utter delight and excitement of D & S, who will no doubt be fighting over young Ben as soon as he arrives, although I am hoping that Tarly and Beth might just find something in common to bond over and leave the boys to do their thing! Or maybe Rachael is toddler-y enough for Tarly to be persuaded she is not actually a ‘baby’ any more and play with her instead. Whatever I fully anticipate late nights chatting with Barbara and much noise and chaos from 5 children in the house (more if Ros and Ali come too!), so that will keep me occcupied while I pine for Paul 🙂

I was supposed to have had a bath about 4 hours ago, then I was supposed to have enjoyed my dinner, then I was supposed to have sat and blogged – I even had it semi planned out in my head.

But oh what an encumbrance the whole computer thing has become of late. The network wireless connection has been wobbly for ages and today I attempted a quick tweak which went ever so badly wrong. So my bath is sat there gone cold, my dinner was wolfed down, I never did drink more than the first glass of wine I poured and I have no energy or inclination to blog really despite having stuff to say.

It’s my turn to get up with the children in the morning so I plan to have a speedy splash in that tepid bath, go to bed having pretty much fixed the pc problems and when I’m up at the crack of dawn in the morning I will blog about today properly. Was a pretty good one though 🙂