One word? When seven would do…

Blah day today really, the weather was grey, my mood was grey. All grey.

The children did a fair amount of playing, as usual, first thing which predictably included watching disc 2 of C&CF and doing more Oompa Lumpa dancing. Tried to explain to Davies about there actually only being one actor playing Oompa Lumpas in this modern version, as opposed to lots of actors playing them in the original. He sort of grasped it but the whole camera trickery / computer generatedness of it was a bit beyond him. Tried to explain further using examples of Monsters Inc and Toy Story etc as cartoon / computer generated but I fear that may have confused the issue further. Hmmm…

Then we headed over to Chris & Julie’s. We had planned to go out for a walk but I confess to having little enthusiasm for it and I don’t think Julie did either. At the point we would have packed them up after lunch they were all playing nicely together so we left them to it and decided if they needed to run around yelling we’d chuck them in the garden. Predictably within about five minutes of deciding this they did – so we wellied and coated them up and chucked ’em out there. We stood in the kitchen drinking tea and watching them through the window which to my mind was far preferable to actually having to be out there – it was bloody freezing ;-). And I’ve come down with a sniffly, sore throated malady too. 🙁

Tarly was being a bit of a horror, she has a tendancy to shove Jack around a bit anyway. She gets frustrated and loses her temper – she does know better though and I always leap on her for it . Then after they’d all come in of their own accord (it really was freezing!) she walloped their dog! She got really leapt on for that and I was really surprised at her. She adores animals, is always stroking and cuddling our cats and has always been lovely to Wolfie (their dog) before. She was wobbly about him when we first got there and said he ‘wanted to eat her’ which I put down to reading her Little Red Riding Hood yesterday but it was still not excusable. 🙁 So that was a bit of a blight on the day really.

We left soon afterwards and the children sat eating fruit while watching the film again and I got the dinner going (beef curry). Ady arrived home just as I reached the end of my good parenting skills for the week and they are now both sound asleep. It’s been a tough one really being home all week with them being ill at the beginning of it and me going down with this (which explains the general headaches most evenings I hope) so hurrah for Friday really! 🙂

Next week, that’s going to be a better one!

I’ve gone to great endeavors to use the word of the day. I have made concentrated and cogitated and contemplated efforts to weave it into the daily musings that are a blog post from myself.

But sometimes a word comes up which simply does not apply to me at all. It is not relevant, pertinent, applicable or suitable. Today the word is sesquipedalian and I just don’t know what to do with it…

I’d meant to come back here yesterday to boast that I had indeed done some thank you cards with the children so we could tick off reading and writing too but wine, a bubble bath, my turn to cook dinner and the last double bill episodes of series one of Lost all contrived to keep me away.

Ady left at 5.30am today for a day trip to the place (in Leicestershire somewhere) he is away all week at next week, I’d asked him to wake me to say goodbye which he did and I had only just fallen back to sleep at about 6am when Tarly woke. She stood at the bottom of the stairs yelling for Ady and shrieked at me everytime I appeared or called to her. After about 10 minutes during which time she stamped her feet, yelled in rage, tried being devastated, gave up and was merely a bit cross and then went silent for a good five minutes before saying in a very sweet and girly voice ‘Mummy? Please could you come downstairs and give me my milk please?’ Noisy but effective 😉 Of course this all woke Davies too so I sorted them out for milk and breakfast and then told them they could watch whatever they wanted on TV if they were quiet and let me doze on the sofa (I am completely ineffective at anything at all before 8am, regardless of what time I went to bed, and of course last night it was later than ususal anyway.). So we did that 🙂

Then Tarly did some painting and drawing while Davies played on the Nick Jr site, the Cbeebies site and Bear & Penguins Maths Adventure in the playroom. Then Tarly ended up snuggled up on my lap so I grabbed some books from her shelves and we read a book full of fairy tales – Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rumplestiltskin, 3 Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the 3 bears which she really enjoyed.

My Dad then appeared having been in the area and was followed about a minute later by Ady arriving home for the day. We took the opportunity of him being here to ring yet another of the scary finance related people and for once I came away feeling really quite hopeful that all is not as scary as we had feared and at the very least we have bought ourselves some serious consideration time in which to decide what we *really* want to do with our lives. Feeling quite excited although I’m not yet sure what about really! Anyway, facing the whole financial stuff in a renascent way again, which is good – this week has not been a good one for all things cash wise really. Despite only having left the house once and getting my whole week’s shopping so cheap.

The children then played some highly imaginative game involving rearranging their cube table and chairs into a bus and decorating it with wikkisticks. They seemed to have a very clear idea of what their aim was and were working together towards it so we left them to it and watched a guess the year show on one of the music channels.

Then the children had a bath and I read the rest of the bookpeople version of LW&W which Davies has really enjoyed. He was sitting and retelling it to Ady afterwards and aside from a little mix up between the words Aslan and Narnia (and when he explained that he’d thought it was Asland it sort of made sense really!) he seemed to have got the jist of it. Might well see it on dvd when it comes out but I don’t think it would hold him enough at the cinema.

While Ady and Davies were chatting about that I persuaded Tarly to let me brush her hair so she is looking princessy rather than hobo again – well until tomorrow anyway 😉 I’ve sort of given up battling with her and about once a week she will sit and let me do it and will tolerate it being plaited or otherwise tied up in the meantime so I can live with her not being the immaculate little doll I had cherished hopes of! While we were doing it there was a love songs show on the music channel which seemed to mainly consist of couples walking hand in hand along beaches (hadn’t realised quite how overdone that scene is in love song music videos til now!) and she was asking me how come the man was walking along the beach and shouldn’t he be at work!! It struck me that in most of the homes she spends any amount of time in the Daddy does indeed go out to work and the Mummy is at home doing HE with the children – which is not to say that the Mummy’s don’t work infact several of our friends work from home. Don’t know why it made me feel a little uncomfortable that she so vehemently insisted that it is *always* the man who goes ‘out’ to work but I do think I need to read her some stories to redress the princess / mummy / defenceless maiden balance somewhat. Not that I’d be in any way disappointed if she never did anything other than married well and went out to lunch, but it would be nice for her to know she has not failed if she simply has to earn her own shopping money 😉

Early night for both of them as we are indeed venturing out of the house again tomorrow, meeting up with Julie and weather permitting we’re off for a wintery walk. Infact I was looking at an excellent page on the bbc website about outdoor ideas for activities so I might have another look at that in the morning and see if we can do something slightly more obviously educational while we’re at it.

Been a rather good morning thus far. I’m on my second load of washing – after which there is only one more load before I get to the 4 sets of bedlinen which have been building up since the weather changed to make outdoor drying impossible. I hate trying to get duvet covers and sheets dry draped over radiators, but as we are on our very last clean set on the bed now I know it cannot be avoided until Spring – and of course my previous answer of buying another set (which accounts for us having the five sets!) is no longer a possibility! 😉 Anyway, I digress…

Watched The Backyardigans snuggled up with the children on the sofa first thing then they started some game involving baby dolls and a soft toy frog, some tissues and some felt tips where they were decorating pillows and sheets for their toys. I decided that it was not the best use of tissues when the floor started to resemble some sort of blizzard scene so they tidied that up and got the geomags out instead. I went and put away a load of clean washing which had been doing a fair approximation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the corner of our bedroom having grown to about two and a half times the height of the basket it was resting in.

Then we headed off to Sainsburys for a few bits and pieces. The children faithfully promised to behave under threat of being sat in the trolley and they stuck to their promise so well I ended up doing a full week’s shop. I was super extra frugal and managed to bring the total in at just over £50 – then the cashier asked if I was saving my rewards so I told him to take them off, hoping for maybe a fiver off. (In the style of Viz) Imagine my surprise when it brought the total down to just £22 – there were £27.50 worth of rewards on there! 🙂 🙂 Ady buys all his work diesel from BP where they do double reward points, and of course as we’ve been using his work car all the time he’s been putting more diesel in – so hurrah for that! 🙂

Sainsburys are doing more and more items in their ‘basic’ range which has IMO rather clever packaging and marketing. I think Sainsburys are doing some very clever things all round ATM generally but the basics range is very well done. Super cheap and with slogans explaining precisely what the difference is that makes the range so much cheaper. So for example I bought the crumpets from that range (kids adore crumpets for lunch and erm, actually so do I!) and they are about half the normal price but as it says on the packaging they are all funny shapes and sizes – misshapes, which let’s face it, unless you are planning to lightly toast them and serve them with butter curls and the finest loose leaf tea from bone china cups is hardly likely to bother you! Anyway, as I said, I’m loving Sainsburys today! 🙂

The children were so well behaved and I was on such a frugal high we loaded the shopping into the car and then went for a wander round the aquarium shop next door to Sainsburys, which as a free alternative is not too much of a far cry from a Sea Life Centre really. 😉 Spent ages oohing and ahhing at the pretty tropical fish, the coral and the seahorses and so on. Tarly decided what fish she wants for her fourth birthday (which is when Davies got his two – Fred and Albert) and that she wants two, both called Scarlett. We finished up looking at the clownfish, which thanks to Finding Nemo they both knew the name of.

Predictably we got home for lunch and they put Nemo on to watch (we’re now watching it for the second time!). Thanks to the Oompa Lumpa dancing on the second C&TCF dvd disc Davies has started to explore all the addtional features on all his favourite discs. Which gives Ady heart failure as he is convinced he will break the dvd player but I am happy to see as I can convince myself it involves some sort of reading skills. 😉 And erm, fine motor skills with the remote control too! We had our crumpets, I rang Ady to share with him the joy of the weeks food shopping for £22 story, he rang me back to say he’d got his payrise letter – not going to make huge difference but as someone recently said ‘every little helps’! And the children are now eating up every bit of fruit in the house, predictable as I didn’t buy any more…

Davies, who can never seem to just sit and watch a film and always needs something else to be doing at the same time has just brought in our marble run boxes. We’ve had a plastic one for years which gets occassional use before being forgotten about for months again. During the last playroom tidy up I shoved a wooden block marble run in with it so that has been cause for delight and he has spent about an hour now building ever more dramatic runs, testing them and then modifying them. Very interesting to watch (if tricky – I am sitting on my hands to not go over and just do it myself when I can see something is not going to work!!) and he’s coming out with some fantastic words to describe it aswell as talking me through what he’s doing. He’s also brought out his Matchbox Haunted House toy which was probably the only present he actually asked for at Christmas and despite being proudly brought out to show guests has not really been ‘played with’ as such. They are both playing with a tape measure and keep bringing it to me at certain lengths to ask what it says and then telling me that’s how tall / wide something is.

I had planned to do some very overdue Thank You notes for Christmas presents from the children with them this afternoon but I am loathe to disturb them when they are playing and frankly nearly 3 weeks after the event is so late another day or two is unlikely to make much odds!

Today is meant to be return to Tumble Tots day but after lots of thinking about it and a chat with the children this morning we’ve decided to stop going. I’ve chatted to Tarly about going in without me and she is adamant she doesn’t want to move up classes where she goes in without me. I have to say that although I would be interested to see how she did get on without me the skills that it would be growing are ones I don’t place much value on anyway – certainly not in a 3 year old. I’ve known that Davies was not enjoying it as much as he used to ever since he moved up classes in September and it has become very very schooly since he hit five – again something I am by no means desperate for him to be exposed to.

I also cannot deny that there is a cost issue – TT has to have annual membership at about £20 a child and it is £4.50 each per session – for that money I could take them to soft play centres once or even twice a week. Once they had both said they didn’t want to go any more I did tell them that and they were thrilled. As Davies said at soft play he gets to do whatever he wants on the equipment and can play at pretending games too – at TT they have to do everything exactly as they are told. I’ve also decided that if Davies should be focusing on anything it should probably be his dramatic inclinations so we’re going to start going to the Activeo drama sessions which are once a month (and frugally cost just a quid per child!) and if he enjoys them then I might start taking him to the drama sessions in the town later in the year. I will also look into the Badgers for him again and look into the timetable at the local swimming pool with a view to taking them there once a week. So in all feeling quite positive about stuff really.

While I’ve been doing this post Scarlett has disappeared off to her bedroom where she is allegedly ‘cleaning’ her dressing table and Davies has got out his magicians set from Christmas and a magic set he got for his birthday before last and is wearing his top hat and pulling rabbits out of places – yep, definitely think drama is the way to go for that child 😉 .

Plenty of food for thought there. Will come back to it shortly.

So yesterday we had lots of playdough and drawing and painting, they watched Peter Pan and role played at being Wallace & Gromit, Peter Pan & Tinkerbell (which included dressing up) and played with the megabloks, dolls and k’nex. So plenty of boxes ticked there 🙂

I did indeed manage to clear off the whole of the bookshelf which resulted in the two lists posted below and a far more acceptable view of the bookcase which I can see from my normal sofa in the lounge. I also set the printer up to run from the laptop so that’s useful – still can’t get the network connection to behave mind you which is very annoying when trying to IM with someone!

The children were back to normal healthwise really and Davies returned to his usual volume of Very High. Those of you who have spent any time with him will no doubt be aware of what I mean, he is ineffably loud… normally I can either zone him out or encourage him to play out of earshot but I was grateful to the children for keeping out of the way while I managed all the phonecalls this morning so I let them carry on and so consequently had a splitting headache by the time Ady arrived home. 🙁

Managed to update him on the phonecalls, sort the kids tea out which they were esuirent for, cut Davies’ hair and trim a fringe back into Tarly’s so she at least looks less wild from the front, bath them and still get out of the house in time for the first meeting of the new book group at the local library.

Now I had this vague plan of dressing the part – I was going to wear my glasses, hair up, long swirly skirt, little cardi – that sort of thing 😉 But didn’t manage it so the best I could pull off was a clean top (old one had soup splashes and lots of Davies’ hair all over it) and some lip gloss before leaving.

I think there were 13 of us in total. I was by far the youngest, probably by a decade at least. There was a retired bloke who writes poetry and spoke about this at length, at every given opportunity. I need to ensure I never get sat next to him as the poor unfortunates on either side of him were leant towards with asides and comments every time someone spoke. He kept butting in and the first few times everyone listened but eventually we gave up and just kept talking. There were a group of 3 women who came together – career women types, two of whom had teenage children. Two retired women, one very glam and loud and one very plain and quiet, a married couple in their 40s, quite hippyish but very articulate and a couple of other women.

I actually felt very out of my depth really – I tend to read frothy, trashy books rather than anything too challenging. I remember reading that 100 reads that spawned all the reading blogs and being horrified that despite reading a lot I am not very well read. Ady and I were talking about the difference between being intelligent and being educated the other day and this was a perfect example of the difference for me.

To be honest I went along mainly because I happened to see it advertised when I called into the library last week and the book being discussed tonight was My Sister’s Keeper which several of us read during the summer and I had spent a fair bit of time thinking about and chatting to others about afterwards. I have also since read several more of her books and although I could possibly be critical of whether or not they are beatifully written I have enjoyed the challenge to my ideas that each of them has offered. I also went along because I was very curious about what actually does happen at a book group!

Now, it’s not often I put myself in situations where I feel uncomfortable and I don’t actually remember the last time I felt shy or decided that shutting up and listening would be preferable to talking and possibly embarassing myself but as I did sit there feeling like a little kid in a room of grown ups (not entirely unpleasant being 32 now and all!) and was very aware that these were mostly people who devour books like sweets and were tossing words about like ‘Classics’ ‘Dickensian’ ‘genre’ and ‘beautifully crafted’ I felt I had little to add to the conversation. I did speak confidently when it was my turn to discuss the JC book – I had most of them nodding along with what I was saying, I made at least one of them concede a point about the purpose of the book and reading in general and two of the people who spoke after me said ‘well I agree with Nicola’ (yes, it was definitely a place to be Nicola, not Nic! Infact I should probably have been someone far more exotic like Philomena actually), so all was not lost!

I didn’t contribute to the discussion about recommending books for the next few groups, mainly because all of the books I have read and enjoyed have either been made into motion pictures or have brightly coloured covers and are about women who spend too much, have holiday romances, are single but get the guy in the end or involve them having a baby, adjusting to that new state with comic effect and then managing to run a successful business, meet new friends who support and love them and having a fantastic marriage too. Hardly the right sort of fodder to be pulled apart for deeper meaning and character analysis by the people in that room!

The woman who runs all the book groups for the district came along and chatted about how it would all work, gave us a goody bag with a book, a book readers magazine and a voucher for free dvd borrowing from the library and then headed off. She mentioned just how many books are published each year and of course sitting in a library crammed with them brought that home nicely.

So, it will be a couple of hours during an evening once a month. My plan is to give it 3 books – so 3 months. Unless I have a 2 out of 3 hit rate of having gotten something out of the reading of the books I will give up and decide that actually I’m far better off sticking to what I know. I don’t want it to feel like homework – one of the chief reasons that we’re HEing is that I want the children to develop a love and passion for learning things rather than viewing them as work so if it starts to become a chore for me then I will leave it. But weird mix of people, book snobbery and indeed my own dubiety aside I think it might just be something I end up loving.

Happy Birthday Beth 🙂

Look forward to seeing you next week!

Love, Ady, Nic, Davies & Scarlettxxx

The Baby Trail – Sinead Moriarty
King of the Castle – Martin Plimmer
Only in America – Dominic Holland
Perfect Day -Imogen Parker
Hubble Bubble – Christina Jones
Fallen Women – Sue Welfare
With or Without You – Carole Matthews
Seven Sunny Days – Chris Manby
Before we were thirty – Katie Agnew
Mr Maybe – Jane Green
Cuban Heels – Emily Barr
A nice girl like me – Abigail Bosanko
Babyface – Fiona Gibson
Funny Valentine – Amy Jenkins
The Wedding Girl – Madeleine Wickham
Dating Big Bird – Laura Zigman
The Reluctant Landlady – Bernadette Strachan
Don’t try this at home – Katie Pearson
It could happen to you – Isla Dewar
Dawn – The new Virginia Andrews

I’ve cleared the bookshelves of all sorts and there are two distinct piles. One is the baby related books that as I now have a 3 and 5 year old and no possibility of any more babies coming along I have no further need for (and it could be argued I didn’t use much anyway! 😉 ) and the other is chick-lit novels.

I’d love to offer them free but I am officially frugal so for a quid a book or 6 for a fiver plus postage if I have to send them to you. (Bear in mind Melrose is soon so if there is a way to get them to you via that then we can sort it out). Not sure if any will be of interest but comment / email if they are:

Potty Training in one week – Gina Ford
Potty Training – end of nappies, start of pants (sponsored by Huggies, can’t find it on amazon but it has £5.99 price tag on it).
The Fat Ladies Club
Help Your Baby to Sleep
Babies! Christopher Green
Baby Wisdom – Deborah Jackson
Wipe – Penny Wilson
A Life’s Work – on becoming a mother – Rachel Cusk
What to expect – the toddler years

Medical update first then – S is fine now, D is certainly better than he was yesterday. They have both eaten, played and been as noisy as normal today, but I’m glad I cancelled our plans as a day at home was much needed all round.

So far they have done some painting, spent ages playing with playdough – we seem to have quite a wealth of playdough moulds and cutters and stuff now as they both had a few related items for Christmas. There is still some of the Christmas stash of ‘real’ playdough too and the combination of stuff to actually make and me saying that as soon as they mush it all together to make muddy brown I will chuck it out has made them a little more creative and imaginative in their play. 🙂

They are now playing some complicated games with megabloks and baby dolls. I’m planning to let them get on with it for another hour or so and then to try and calm things down with some reading aloud before a bath and an early night for them again – they’re both still quite some way from catching up on the weekend’s late nights.

I’ve bitten the bullet so to speak with more financial stuff. Infact with the exception of a phonecall which Ady needs to be sat beside me for I have done as much as I can in that direction. Our loose plan is to buy (ha ha!) ourselves some more time and have some serious chats about what we are going to do long term. Several options and ideas have been tossed around but we need to research them a bit more, maybe chat them through with friends to get some different perspectives and basically take control back for ourselves so that whatever decisions we make are ones we chose to make rather than one’s we felt forced into. Feeling better and more settled about that anyway.

In other news, I can reassure Merry that being 32 doesn’t appear to be much different to 31, from the benefit of my 4 days greater experience than her 😉 I certainly have not managed to pull off being a grown up any more proficiently than I managed at 31 and despite edging ever closer to 40 I still have not turned into the Shake n Vac woman yet, which is what I always assumed would happen at some point in my 30s!

Right, the children have moved onto playing with the Dora house, I’ve managed several loads of washing and drying, washed up the lunch plates and I think I’m going to tackle the bookcase in the hall.

Happy Birthday Merry!

Hope you have a lovely day 🙂 x

I’ve spent the whole of today – since about 5am 🙁 – sitting on a sofa cuddling one or both children, holding a bowl or wiping a bottom. None of which has been a great assistance when I was supposed to be making about 10 really important phone calls today. I’m just about to cancel our arrangements for tomorrow and hope for a decent night’s sleep all round so I can do it in the morning instead.

Suffice to say the only educational value here has been from dvds and some playing from Davies on the pc when he’s felt up to it in the odd half hour interval.

I had a lovely birthday 🙂 Thanks for the various emails / comments / texts etc and if you were one of the lucky recipients of the drunken phonecalls during Friday evening thank you for any birthday greetings offered then too 😉

Right, my attention is being loudly requested again…

Slogging the dead donkey

Furthermore

the recondite diktat is that It’s Margueirta Time

One of those days where you’re not sure where to put the spin really today – I’ve touched depths of despair (well as close as I personally get to it anyway), I’ve had moments of total hope and passion for the future, I’ve spent time with a very dear friend and spent time with my family.

So, lets get the negative out of the way – I chased up some financial stuff by phone and when I finally got the phone call back it was far from the comfortable if slightly unwelcome news I was hoping for – far more like the worst case scenario actually. But I don’t intend to dwell on it, certainly not right now, so I may come back to that at a future point. Suffice to say far more introspection, serious chats and grown up stuff will be happening in real life so I’m sure a proportion of that will be making it across to the blog (or one of them at least! 😉 ). Besides which it’s all so complicated and needs so much further thinking I could really do with some sort of expert or exegete to help me out with some words of wisdom.

So, the children spent the morning watching the original Charlie and the chocolate factory (which I think might be called Willy Wonka actually so perhaps I could discern between them that way?), painting and drawing, playing with K’nex and being generally free range while eating about 4 bowls of cereal each and a couple of bananas! I spent all morning on the phone alternating between mobile and landline until Ali rang to say she was at the station at which point I gave up on all matter serious for the day and we went to collect them. I abandoned her to the mercy of three small children while I ran round the Co op getting stuff for lunch, and then made further use of her fantastic childminding skills while I dashed into the library before returning home. Whilst in the library I put my name down for the Book Group which is starting next week discussing Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper. Really like the idea of something like that, it’s free, it’s some exclusive Nic time and it’s a 3 minute drive from home. Have not actually mentioned it to Ady yet however and I know I can’t make the following week as he’s away from home so I don’t really know how feasible it is but if it goes no further than putting my name down I will at least cherish the idea of it for a couple of days!

The children were in full on post holiday mode and acted as though none of them had been in polite company ever, let alone for just a fortnight, but I think me and Ali managed to largely look past or plain ignore it and chat just the same! We ran them back to the station and came home for a Cat in The Hat fest of the animated variety with Green Eggs and Ham and Grinch Night getting an airing. I took down a couple of my younger days diaries from the bookshelf and read entries for 5th January 1992, 1993 and 1994 which were fairly illuminating! Wonder if I’ll be doing the same with my blog 13 years from now? 🙂

Ady arrived home while the children were in the middle of a full on fruit eating competition and was closely followed by my parents. The children took ages to get to sleep, needing lots of reassurance that Granny and Grandad were NOT here to babysit! Finally got them both to sleep and my parents were easily persuaded to stay for dinner so Ady cooked while me and Dad got fairly merry and I made the most of my audience by holding forth about No Regrets and so on!

Right I want to be in bed before tomorrow and I don’t know how much I’ll be around over the weekend, so birthday monitor says HAPPY 32nd BIRTHDAY FOR TOMORROW NIC! I hope everyone has a good weekend and I’ll be back after the break! 🙂

The sine gua non of my word of the day! 😉

The most used present from Christmas for the children have been these art sets I picked up in The Works months ago. They sat in the playroom for ages and then I decided in about October that actually I might as well put them away for Christmas as they’d not been used yet. They contain about 30 felt tips each, a set of watercolours and a paintbrush, some crayons, some coloured pencils, some oil pastels and bits like a ruler, scissors and a pencil sharpener. I think Scarlett has done some painting pretty much every single day since they got them and is now just getting a little pot from the kitchen, filling it with water from the bathroom and setting herself up to paint without any assistance.

And far from what I would have anticipated giving the messiest child I know such weapons of destruction she keeps the paint on the paper, is very careful with it, actually produces recognisable representations of things and uses all the colours. If this keeps up I might well get her a set of watercolours and teach her about colour mixing too.

So this morning she was doing painting while Davies was on the old laptop on the Nickjr site which was all very nice and educational and childled 🙂

We headed off to soft play and as it was the first time my car’s been driven in nearly 3 weeks all of the cds were still in Ady’s car. It was lovely to drive mine again actually, and to drive generally. I like driving and when Ady is with us he *always* drives. I’m not keen on his car anyway, it’s a VW Golf and although it’s very whizzy and has lots of buttons and stuff I like a big car, so my Sharan gives me all the buzz of driving a tank *and* being high up too – lovely! I once cherished a dream to learn to drive a bus or a HGV and I still think I’d like to do that – like Long Distance Clara on Pigeon Street! 🙂 So, anyway, we had to listen to the radio instead of cds and as all I could find was Bucks Fizz we gave up and talked instead. Have now forgotten what we talked about of course but I know it was an interesting 3 way conversation, which we have more and more these days. Scarlett constantly amazes me with how she is able to be *such* a toddler still at times and then such a grown up little girl at others. The questions she asks (far above and beyond the basic ‘why?’) and her thought processes just stagger me. I remember thinking the same about Davies actually so there is every chance that I just have low expectations of your average 3 yo and mine are nothing special but I like to kid myself they are anyway! 😉 She also has a very good sense of humour and is excellent at teasing. Listening to her and Davies chatter away about the world and stuff when they don’t think we’re listening often has me and Ady in fits of laughter.

The last couple of times we’ve been to soft play I’ve really resented the money as they have not made any use of the facilities but for once they were raring to go and as soon as they took their shoes off they decided who was going to be which Backyardigan and ran off together! I cashed in my ‘free’ ticket for a cup of tea (free when you pay the obligatory entrance fee of a quid for an adult!!) and was then summoned to deal with a little shit of a child who was out to make every other kid cry or so it seemed. It takes a lot to make Scarlett cry but this kid managed it twice and then sat on Jack when Julie and the twins arrived so in the end I told D&S to just play somewhere out.

Anyway, they had a really good couple of hours clambering about, yelling and playing with Jack and Maisie and each other so that was really nice as they have been a little fraught with each other of late. Julie and I chatted and gossiped about Activeo, Tumble Tots and extra curricular activities for D & S.

We needed a few bits from Tescos so with promises of excellent behaviour I let them both walk with me instead of going in a trolley and we strolled around getting everything we needed. And they were excellent – and I don’t even have the money to bribe them with gifts anymore! 😉 But they were still high on the thrill of a 5 pence lollipop each when we left soft play I think!

We got home and put the shopping away and then we all went upstairs for the first leg in Operation Davies’ Room. Although we were at it for the best part of two hours it doesn’t feel like much happened but I did persuade Davies to let me bin the sad remains of the Peter Pan Island from last Christmas and shove some of the many, many, many soft toys in the loft so there *is* less clutter. Tomorrow (maybe!) I’ll finish off with dusting and stuff like that which should give it the air of the newly tidied room it seems to lack. TBH I don’t think it will feel anything special until it’s been repainted anyway really, so hopefully that will be sorted soon.

While tidying up the books I came across Just So Stories so I read the whale one aloud to them while they put all the figures back into place in the fort. I have to say they were unimpressed and I was too really. The language seemed so old fashioned and unnecessarily stumbling but not in a charming way like Dr Seuss and there was just little or nothing to capture their imagination. Even I got bored reading it! So that went back on the shelf again! It was probably not helped by me inwardly giggling remembering a tirade about Rudyard Kipling that Richard Herring had gone into as part of his stand up routine we went to see last year actually! We also found a couple of Cat in the Hat activity books and a Space book so we looked at some of those and did some spot the difference, some code breaking stuff and some pairing stuff. Left those out to take downstairs for a later date.

It was teatime by then so they found Cat in the Hat on dvd while I sorted their tea out and then they watched that before bed. It does sort of grow on you that film you know, it’s probably the first time I have actually watched it rather than been in the room while it’s on and some of it is quite funny in a taking the piss out of itself sort of way. Makes a change from C&TCF anyway!

So Ady went back to work today and much as I missed him it was sort of nice to return to normality a bit. In many ways I’d love to have him home more, or infact all the time, but because he’s not and it is a temporary state there are irritations which would be sorted out if we knew it was a forever state. The children are not that well behaved when he is around, they order him about, play on the fact he is not 100% up to all their tricks and aware of what they can and can’t do and of course they try and play us off against each other. What then ends up happening is I get cast as the ogre because my usual rules and standards of behaviour still stand but they try and push it that bit further with Ady, who ever conscious of being Fun Parent and Limited Period Only tends to let them get away with more than I do. Anyway…

Spent the first hour of the day cuddled up on the sofa with both children, we watched The Backyardigans which is a firm favourite with both children – both to sit and watch and then to recreate again later. They often draw pictures of the characters and wander round singing the songs from the show. I actually quite like it too – not sure why as it offends many of my all singing, all dancing animals wearing clothes and being the wrong colour type sensibilities but I do think it is well thought out and covers lots of educational spin off type stuff. Infact if I was of a mind to do so I could probably create a curriculum based on it! 😉 But I’m a bit busy creating my alternative to Flylady one just now, so I’ll have to put it on the back (yardigan) burner.

The children then put C&TCF on for some Oompa Lumpa dancing while I had a quick catch up online and dug out that inspirational piece about animals starting a school again to remind me why I want to HE the way I do. Might ponder more on that later, then again I might not! Ady and I did some trillianing (very Paul and Linda I know, barely 2 hours apart and we needed to catch up! 😉 ) and then we whizzed round the house getting dressed and tidied before Lucy, Rebecca and Richard arrived at 10am.

The children were as I had fretted they might be and far from gracious hosts really. Richard is 9 months old and classically ‘into everything’ so Davies trying to put on a magic show and Tarly trying to build something from sticklebricks was never going to be peaceful. Scarlett veered between wanting desperatly to play with Rebecca and insisting she was ‘not allowed’ to touch any of her toys :rolls: and they both kept talking across me and Lucy every time we tried to have a conversation. Rebecca is fairly shy so was clinging to Lucy’s legs which was challenging for her when she was trying to breastfeed Richard or remove him from eating sticklebricks! But we managed a bit of a chat somehow 😉 We had some lunch – gastronomes that we are Lucy had brought star shaped peanut butter sandwiches to which I added chocolate spread star shaped sandwiched and cheesy footballs, and then got everyone wellied and coated up and headed to the park. Davies was stroppy because I wouldn’t push him on the baby swings for very long (he’s really too big now and refused to do the swing thing with his legs so his feet were scuffing the ground all the time and also Rebecca kept running infront of the swings so I was cautious of getting him too high that I couldn’t grab him and stop the swing if she darted infront of it) so he was skulking about looking like a kid playing truant! Did some different life musing type chatting inbetween and then walked home and they left. Lucy is really keen to foster the friendship between Scarlett and Rebecca and is also keen to get time to do stuff with Rebecca that she used to do before she had Richard so we have a bit of a plan to go to their house next time and if Scarlett is up for being left there to play for a while then Davies and I can head off. They live in town and are near to the beach, the swimming pool, the shops and the main library so there is plenty of stuff me and Davies could have a great time doing if Tarly is receptive to going there to play for a morning. Rebecca is definitely not ready to leave Lucy’s side but I could probably tolerate babysitting Richard for a few hours too every so often and actually Davies would probably quite enjoy helping to ‘look after him’. We’ve made an arrangement to see each other the same day every fortnight (in an Ali style forward planning sorta way!) so we’ll see how that pans out. I think it might be good for Tarly to spend time with a gentler soul sometimes – she is so used to either being with Davies or the equally feisty small girls she is friends with that she can be a bit overpowering for same age girls who are quieter, so putting her in their environment rather than her own and taking away the ‘back up’ of Davies might be an interesting experiment providing she is comfortable with it and enjoys it.

Once home the children settled back infront of C&TCF again so instead of going online I made a cup of tea and retired to Tarly’s room to give it a really good tidy and sort out. I didn’t seem to actually get rid of much – although I have earmarked a whole shelf of books to be disposed of when she’s not looking as they are just too babyish to be read to her anymore and I don’t even think they will be suitable for early readers for either of them, besides which we have pretty much every early reader scheme the Book People have put out so I think we have that area covered anyway! Are we doing any sort of Melrose bring and buy – they might be good for that… Anyway it felt productive just the same and looked tidier to the point that Ady noticed and remarked as soon as he came in. 🙂

Tomorrow the plan is to do Davies’ although that looks to be a slightly more mammoth task. It needs redecorating although we already have the paint so I just need to remind Dad to do it while we’re at Melrose and he can do it uninterupted by little people. I’m sitting in it now debating having a move round of the furniture again to better fit in the colleseum and fort that seem to be dominating it at the moment and there is a dark corner where toys go to die aswell as 3 micro machines which I just know don’t have the right bits and pieces in each one and these are the sorts of things that bother me! 😉 Thursday I want to do the two bathrooms and then I will have done every room in the house over a month period as I did the kitchen cupboards and my wardrobe just before Christmas. The final task is the hall which only consists of a coat rack, shoe boxes and a book case, but oh what overcrowded areas they all are. There are coats long outgrown or out of season on the rack which need ebaying, clothes banking or storing til the Spring, shoes which need binning, cleaning or putting away for the summer and the books may take a week all by themselves to sort. 🙂

While doing Tarly’s room the children appeared and carted the Dora house off to play with, then both came back and sat on Tarly’s bed and asked me to tell them the story of Little Red Riding Hood using a doll Tarly has had for years with LRRH on one side and the Granny / Wolf at the other end, so I did that to their delight :-). They had their tea watching Backyardigans again yhen to achieve my final goal of the day I started reading them a Book People version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe while they were in their bath. I don’t really like bathtime and now they are bigger I tend to leave them to it a bit and just bumble around doing other stuff while keeping an eye / ear on them (bathroom is downstairs so that is not as casual as it sounds!) but I could get to love it if they would sit so captivated every night! Scarlett was not quite so enthralled as Davies and wanted to see the pictures for every other sentence but Davies really took it all in and even repeated some of it back to me and wanted more although he then started watching Little Bear when he got out of the bath so it was forgotten. I don’t think he’d be ready for it as a cinema film but perhaps when it comes out on dvd we’ll look at it if he continues to enjoy it.

And that was the day really. Nice, a little frustrating, very productive and over all a good one 🙂 Also very cheap!

Tomorrow will be less cheap as we are off to the Soft Play place with Julie so admission and lunch will be costly, but as they would normally be at TT tomorrow that is a tenner we’re ‘saving’. I’m doing some pondering about the future of TT at the moment too but I’ll save that one for another day.

Happy Birthday Anna 🙂

Have an excellent day and look forward to seeing you at the weekend 🙂

This morning Davies reminded us of the one request he made way back on Christmas Eve when we said how Ady would be off work for over a week, which was to go to ‘the dinosaur place’. We’ve not been for months and infact I’d let the season ticket lapse without renewing it but had intended getting one again as it is less than double the price of normal entry which makes it well worth while given how often we went there last year. So we had an early lunch and headed off to Newhaven.

We rejoined for the year and Davies certainly paid a little more attention to some of the more educational bits of the displays than usual. We still dashed round quicker than I would have liked and I was surprised at how many of the dinosaur names Davies has forgotten given how obsessed he was a year or so ago but I’m sure they would come back given a bit of focusing on them again.

We walked round the cactus gardens and some of the outside area but by no means all of it as it was pretty cold. We played for a while in the playground, possibly more me and Ady than the children who were despairing of us having fun on the ‘get all the way round the wooden bits without touching the ground with your feet’ when they wanted us to be pushing them on the swings! 😉 Davies was disappointed that the sandpit was covered over but they were both fairly philosophical at my refusal to get any tokens for them to play on the amusements or buy them presents in the gift shop (which in fairness to a 3 and 5 year old who have always had such things is probably a fairly tricky thing to accept, I know I’m struggling with it. 🙁 ).

We left after a couple of hours and came home. Davies and I made up a wooden slot together dinosaur that’s been kicking around for ages and he painted it. This was harder work than it sounds as he is tired, whingey and far too used to having Ady at his constant beck and call for over a week so we very nearly came to blows over it. I tried to persuade him to use the skeleton as the base to make a papier mache model which we could then paint but he refused on the basis that yes, we would need to wait a day or two before painting it. Scarlett painted some pictures of dinosaurs – she really is very good with a paintbrush and has totally got the hang of watercolours in a block, which have totally escaped Davies and then painted some pictures I’d drawn of us all using all the right colours. She has been surprisingly mess-free with the art sets they got for Christmas and has done some sort of painting every day, Davies still prefers his drawing really, he is too keen to finish something quickly and move onto the next thing for the patience required for painting something and rinsing the brush out between colours.

While they were doing that Grease came on TV and although we do have the dvd it is one that they have not really watched before so in the interests of completing their plenary of musicals for the festive season we all watched that. The children were most impressed that I knew all the songs and then Davies danced along with the last two.

Davies adores You’ve Been Framed type tv shows so we watched that next, although I stopped laughing at kids picking their noses in the school nativity or idiots pulling the Christmas tree down balancing on the arm of the sofa to reach the top to put the star on after the third example of each he was in fits of laughter!

Right, they are now both asleep, it’s my turn to cook dinner and a bath is waiting for me. Tomorrow we are seeing Lucy, Ady’s going back to work and I have plans to continue with the general tidying. I also have a vague idea that I want to start reading aloud to the children again a bit more. It’s something we all enjoy and I have let lapse somehow over the months so I think we’ll make the effort to get that going again in a nod towards being educational in our home education. 🙂

My pc really does seem to be dying. I’ve run all of the various system tools which seem to have made it run faster but it still keeps switching itself off. I now dimly recall hearing an odd noise from it last week and have decided, in my capacity of total computer know-nothing- that the fan has gone. 🙂

So, there I sat, pondering how on earth to deal with this until I can get someone who truly does know what they’re doing to have a look at it and suddenly inspiration struck. If I get my old laptop out and connect to the internet with that, transfer the broadband thingy across to it and the wireless broadcaster doobry then hey presto, Bobs the bloke related to your father and alls well that ends well, I might just be able to carry on using IM, blogging and emailing with my shiny new laptop from the lounge.

And d’you know what? It only bloody worked! And I only bloody managed to sort it out all by myself. Hurrah for me 🙂

Welcome to 2006!

I’m intending to live life with vim. I’m also intending to use the word a day in my blog that I get emailed to me from dictionary.com every day 😉

We had a pleasant enough evening last night, my parents were over and behaved true to form, so at least some things can always be relied on! 😉

I think they left around 12.30am, they were pretty patient about the fact that both Ady and I were online around midnight wishing friends Happy New Year and they did bring their own beers so I guess I’m glad they were here ;-).

Both the children were up around 5am, they’ve been awful with Ady off this last week or so and are so demanding of his time and attention, I know it will take a while to shake back down again into ‘normal’ life and one of the things they’ve been bad about is getting up really early, which does make for early bedtimes is true but is certainly not something I’m wanting to encourage. So Ady got up with them at 5.30ish and then came back to bed at 7am, I still was not up for getting up yet and when they both kept coming up and down the stairs demanding stupid things of him I coimpletely lost my temper, marched them both downstairs, yelled at them about all the toys and other things they had to play with and told them to entertain themselves or I would send them both back to bed!!! Nice to start the year as you mean to go on! 🙁

They did take heed however and I managed to climb back into bed again for another hour or so and when I came back down they had taken all the cushions off the sofa, put Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on and were acting out all the dance routines. 🙂

I’ve spent altogether too much time today trying to sort my fairly antique pc out. It keeps cutting out and as all of the laptops and internet connections run through it this is very annoying and a bit worrying. I’ve tried pretty much everything I can think of with no luck so I’m calling in my brother to see if he can shed any light on the matter – if not then I start panicking! 🙁 So if I disappear offline for a while you know why…

We’ve also taken down all the decorations today so the house feels bigger and airier! I’ve tidied the playroom cupboards to fit all of the new presents in, sorted out the craft drawers to accomodate all the new pens and stuff and cleared the big pile of ‘stuff’ which had accumulated next to the sofa, infact the lounge looks about as tidy as it is ever going to look while we live here so I’ll consider that room done! 🙂 Just the kids rooms, our room, the kitchen, bathrooms and the other side of the playroom to do then 😉 Oh and the hall!

We put the second Charlie disc on for Davies who spent ages learning all the dance routines for Oompa Lumpa dances earlier and is now totally cativated by Annie which he’s never seen before but is already singing along to 😉 think I better make the effort to get him to those drama lessons I looked into last year, oh and stupidly we’ve not recorded it so I guess I better try and track down the dvd for the repeated viewings of it he’s already planning!

So that’s it from here really, recycling box is groaning with crushed down cardboard boxes, empty bottles and cans, Christmas cards, with the exception of a few chocolates all the food is eaten and next week is already filled up with ‘getting back to normal’ activities.