One word? When seven would do…

Just finished Catcher in the Rye and have utterly failed to see what the fuss might be about. I found it like a olden times version of listening to Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard doing a written monologue (the yeahbutnobutyeahbut teen). The repetitive ‘slang’ and dialogue feel to it irritated me, I’ve found myself wanting to parody it to people and call everyone ‘old – ‘ and start using the word ‘goddam’. It was one of those books I kept wanting to flick to the back page of just to see if it ever really was going to get to a point and of course it didn’t really.

I’ve only read the first chapter of Evil Cradling and book group is Tuesday night so I need to concentrate on that really but I have Catch 22 and To Kill a Mockingbird waiting ready for me so I hope they inspire me a bit more than this did.

With the absence of Chris and Ady the usually most photographically documented children getting together is fairly barren image wise, BUT Davies and Scarlett have both been showing loads of interest in the camera recently. They both had a play with it this morning, Davies taking a load of images around the place which had refelections of some sort in them. So I’ve signed them both up with a flickr account although they are far from being able to do that side of it it is nice to have somewhere to keep them just for them.

A few photos from me of the last couple of days:

I love this one – dancing to Grease, like mothers like offspring 😉

And then some of Davies’ reflections:

Monday

Spent the morning getting in some food shopping (seriously over estimated on the milk, seriously under estimated on the bread, got the alcohol quantities about right! 😉 ), tidying up a bit, getting the children to gather any precious belongings and stashing them in our bedroom and batch baking snickerdoodles.

Layla and Alison arrived by car and train within about half an hour of each other, we banned the children from the room for a good hour and a half and set about drinking tea to line our stomachs for wine later!

Ady got home in time to take over shepherding children away from us, I pulled off a feat of management of pierce film lid type readymeal finger foods, we started drinking wine and Ros and Ali arrived. I think all readers either have first hand experience of such evenings in such company or are able to draw pretty good conclusions as to what it might entail. We pined for Joyce, spoke with great affection for many of the rest of you and of course not having an audience of Chris to perform to didn’t hold us back from making the most of the music channel to sing along to. I recall once saying to Layla that it’s not a good night unless you offend at least two people – Alison and I had to go to the pub to find likely suspects to uphold this law and even then I don’t think we really bothered the barman and the sole customer! 😀

Tuesday

Dawned earlier than it should for people who didn’t go to bed til 3am (which is actually fairly early for such nights really!) – I had no children in my bed but could overhear a very loud conversation about Centerparcs drifting in from Davies’ room and involving children from 3 families all trying to tell their CP stories at the same time. I then had a true HE moment when Claudia and Tilda appeared in the room, sat on the bed and we talked about African tribespeople who stretch their necks with multiple necklaces and Oriental children who have their feet bound to keep them dainty. (Which went some way to restoring my own confidence in my geography, culture and history skills having been laughed at for talking about Indian jungle dwelling tribes living along the River Nile the night before! :roll:).

After multiple toast cooking we gathered ourselves together and walked down to the seafront to the local park. It was every single one of the 15 minutes walking I’d promised it might be, and perhaps rather a few more too :oops:, into the wind but bracing for hangovers and wearing out for children nonetheless so still a good idea (well I thought so!). We did some shivering on a bench while watching the children in the playground and then half decided to spend their £1 each budget on the bouncy castle and the rest went on the train with the 6ft bunny and chick in residence. And then we walked home again.

I dashed out for supplies (including more bread) and the children scattered around the house watching Grease, drawing, playing and so on while we drank tea, ate pringles and then got a very nice dinner of chicken curry, rice, naan breads, poppadums, assorted indian snacks and bombay potatoes cooked. Ady and Simon arrived home within about half an hour of each other, children were sent upstairs and more wine drinking and curry eating commenced. An early night of around midnight was required to restore visitors for their journeys home today.

Today
Garden playing, drawing, indoor playing (using seperate toys to the garden playing, naturally 😉 ) and some film watching for children, further tea drinking and chatting for adults. I went out for more bread and Lucy came round for an hour or so with Rebecca and Richard increasing her real life experience of meeting Home Educators hugely. My Granny appeared at one point, innocently brandishing a four pack of chocolate eclairs and asking if it was a convenient time to call – the chaos and naked children wandering around in the background behind me and me explaining just how many children and how many adults were inside the house and how 4 cakes would not stretch too far was (thankfully) enough to send her packing and will hopefully put her off ‘dropping in’ again for a while (I *hate* being dropped in on).

We waved guests off in two stages but the house feels very quiet and for once in its life pretty large 😉 Davies is putting effort into his parting instruction from Poppy to grow before she next sees him while drawing pictures, Scarlett is painting my toenails, the house has been hoovered and everything restored to it’s usual home. I have six CVs to do which arrived in the post this morning (woo hoo) and tonight it’s The Apprentice. Thanks for coming one and all, it’s been a lovely, lovely few days – looking forward to Chris and Helen’s next. 🙂

It’s been a very long day today, we seem to have had loads of stuff crammed into it.

Scarlett ended up in our bed with a bad dream in the night and around 5am when I woke to find her sleeping on my head – snoring 🙄 – I decided I’d make use of her empty bed instead so I decamped there.

We were all up by about 8.30am and decided to get out early to go car boot sale hunting but somehow we didn’t make it out until nearly 10.30am so we didn’t bother and went over to Chris and Julie’s straight away instead. Ady had a yen to go to Goodwood with a picnic which we’d hoped to persuade C & J to join us on but they remained unmoved so we stayed with them for a couple of hours and then we headed off to Goodwood. We ate our picnic in the cold and had a wander round but there was no racing going on so we gave up on the idea and went to my parents instead. We did call into Tangmere Aviation museum and had a look round some of the outdoor planes and Ady spent some time infusing the children with his enthusiasm for all thing aviation.

At my parents I happily ignored the children and read more of Catcher in the Rye – reserving judgement thus far but will blog when I’ve finished it… Dad and Ady watched the football and Mum ran around after the children with much sighing and eye rolling all of which I happily pretended not to hear. 🙂 She also fed them some tea so we stayed to watch the second half of the match and came home to put them to bed.

So lots of family stuff, lots of fresh air and lots of enjoying being the one to say ‘well she is only three’ and ‘yeah I know, he does it all the time’ to other people having to sort out the children instead of me. Love it! 🙂

Can hardly wait for tomorrow and am quelling the desire to dash about shrieking in a girlish manner as we have a gathering of some of my most very favourite people here so I don’t expect to be around much in blogland for a couple of days. Joyce, you will be missed 🙁

Happy Birthday Helen!

Hope you have a lovely, lovely day 🙂

Look forward to seeing you soon for real life glass clinking xxx

Had another lovely day here 🙂

This morning we mostly lazed around and then I remembered I’d promised ebay buyers I’d get their wins in the post today so I dashed around parcelling up three loads of outgrown clothes and headed off to the post office. Came back for lunch and then Ady took the children out in the garden to mow lawns, ‘tidy edges’ (I put that in inverted commas cos I don’t actually know what it means :oops:!) play in the sandpit and run around getting muddy. 🙂 I stayed in the house and made a bright yellow sponge cake with some eggs Ady brought home from our friend Bruce who has very free range ducks and chicken. I used chickens eggs for the cake and it is lovely. I made some snickerdoodles which I am sure you will all be delighted to hear rose, cooked properly and are delicious, quite the best I’ve ever made.

I decided the weather forecast of light rain was clearly rubbish so I stripped the childrens beds and got them washed, dried and back on again as well as a couple of other washes and then I made coffee for Ady and took it out with a plate of snickerdoodles to my adoring family, pulled up a garden chair and sat reading ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in the sunshine. Scarlett was potting up some herb plants into bigger pots, Ady and Davies were painting a wall in the garden which we last painted when we moved in 12 years ago so was in dire need of being done. When we did it back then we painted ‘Nic and Ady’ on it – it’s a three panel wall of about 8 x 6 foot sections of brieze blocks and faces a fairly main road so we thought it would endear us to our new neighbours to graffiti it like that at the time. It clearly had no impact as the man next door called Ady ‘Michael’ for the whole time he lived next door to us – he died last year – and the neighbours on the other side called him ‘Andy’ for about 5 years too. 🙄 Which reminds me we got an Easter card from David et al this week. Now I never send Easter cards. Ever. But I just know he will take it as a snub if we don’t send him one back, which means we need to send one to at least two of the other neighbours who all talk to each other and David will brag to about getting an Easter card from us and then will make them feel left out – and I bet they all get the kids Easter eggs too. So I must get Davies to make some Easter cards to deliver thus freeing me of the cost and religious implication of purchasing them and providing an educational activity in the art, craft and religious belief and tolerance tick boxes for my child. 😉

So I’ve done baking and Ady’s done gardening. I am further perpetuating this by cooking smashed up potatoes with red onions and garlic (boil the pots to mash stage but then smash them up with a wooden spoon whilst frying off with red onion, garlic, butter and herbs in the pan used to cook the sausages, with a splash of red wine to deglaze the pan) and toad in the hole made with duck eggs. I guess we’ll be calling each other ‘Muvver’ and ‘Farver’ soon like in Milly Molly Mandy and I’ll have to get myself a floral housecoat ;-). My granny sat watching me prick my finger every three seconds and swear bad words at pieces of material while slaving over Wallace yesterday – a tribute to the mother with no feminine skills at all with his badly sewn already needed patching bits and pieces, his one hand twice the size of the other and his much embroidered and over embroidered face (but made with much love nonetheless) and seriously asked me if I’d thought about selling home made toys for a living. Well clearly only if they’d been made by someone else!!!

Scarlett and I came in and snuggled up to read some stories including Dr Seuss ‘Wacky Wednesday’ which for anyone who’s not read it is a sort of spot the odd thing in the picture type read rather than a story, so we enjoyed doing that and I was unbelievably tickled to hear her saying ‘look at that, that’s wacky’ whilst pointing at things. 🙂 Davies and Ady came in and Davies joined us in some books while Ady served up the sausages I’d cooked for the kids’ tea and I carried on reading to them while they ate. Then we all had some of my wonderful cake.

Tomorrow we’re over at C&Js in the morning and are debating inviting my parents over for roast dinner in the evening. Weather permitting we’ve half a plan to take a picnic lunch and go to Goodwood in the afternoon and I am ridiculously excited about a get together on Monday night! 🙂

with four generations of females all in the same room. Ady went off to work at some ungodly hour, Scarlett woke around 6am and a had a fit that Daddy wasn’t there to pander to her every whim. I left her to it and within ten minutes she’d reappeared beside the bed for a cuddle, told me she was tired and needed a nap and snuggled down next to me and we both went back to sleep. Davies woke us both at around 8.30am stage whispering to her that he ‘needed her to help him bounce on the sofas!’ 😀

My Mum rang around 9am to ask if she could invited Granny over for the day too and then Ady rang shortly afterwards to say he had just had a breakfast costing fifteen pounds in a motorway services that was so big he didn’t think he’d need to eat again until at least next Tuesday so to factor him out of the meal planner for a while! ;-). I had a CV to finish and the children wanted to play with assorted things including geomags, plastic animals and hama beads. Davies had a plan to make a Wallace out of hama but our bead supplies are depleted too far to have enough of any one colour – Merry might have to squirrel away coppers and make a small order for Kessingland to save postage 😉

Then Mum and Granny arrrived and the interesting dynamics of four lots of females at various stages with tantrums and mother/daughter stresses was all taken in by Davies 🙂 Actually I pretty much left them all to it actually, when Mum got here I dashed to the Wizard store for a £1 cushion to pull apart for toy stuffing and have spent the whole day making a Wallace for Davies using scrapstore material bits. I now have very sore needle fingers but a very happy small boy 🙂 He even waited until nearly 10pm when I’d finally finished sewing his slippers on so he could cuddle him to sleep.

So I sat and sewed while Mum and Granny engaged the children in a variety of games including snakes and ladders, Monkey Business, Kerplunk, Buckaroo and a quickly abandonded game of Battleships when Davies realised no one except him or I knew how to play it. How can this be? Me and my Dad spent hours playing it when I was a child and I once had an office job in the quietest office in the world where the manager was off long term sick and me and the secretary used to spend hours every day playing battleships across the office. I still have the little grid drawn in gold pen and framed in a little gold frame that she gave me when I left that job…

I cooked a roast chicken for lunch (BOGOF at Tescos atm – clearly getting shot of all their stock before bird flu induced boycotting of chicken sweeps the nation) so we had that in sandwiches followed by chocolate eclairs brought over by Mum. The children both decided they wanted to learn how to sew so I cut out a square of material each for them, threaded a needle and showed them how to do a running stitch. They both did pretty well actually despite me trying not to laugh at the outraged expressions on Granny and Mum’s faces – outrage at showing a BOY how to sew and outrage at giving a sharp needle to a three year old – and not just any three year old at that! Funny how they didn’t blink an eye on Mothers Day when Scarlett was knocking back dry white wine! 🙂

Granny left around 6pm and then Mum kindly offered to bath the children so I could continue sewing, so she did that, got them into pjs and then left about 6.30pm. I said the children could stay up til Ady got home as they’d not seen him this morning so they were very late to bed, which we can only hope means they might just be late to rise too. I now have a catalogue of orders for things they want me to sew for them next (almost all of which are very unlikely 😉 ) but hurrah for ending a pretty crap in places week in a nice way. 🙂

I spent some time being educated in exactly what the Wallace and Gromit on Holiday game was all about. What happens is they gather all sorts of essential items (books usually although sometimes changes of clothing, pens and paper for drawing and assorted toys) and load the stair up with them. A map of the route is drawn with various landmarks and Tarly usually drives which means she sits on the bottom step, while Davies navigates from the map sitting about halfway up the stairs (rather like Kermit’s nephew Robin). Then they arrive at ‘holiday’ where upon they need to check into their hotel, find out their room number and get their key, completing details such as name and nationality for fire evacuation policy at the front desk and then they unload the car (stairs) into one of their bedrooms by which point they have either gotten bored or distracted or I have yelled about safety hazards of books, pens, paper and soft toys on the stairs or we have gone out for the day instead. The W&G aspect was Tarly being Wallace (which explains why she was driving, maybe) and Davies being Gromit. They brought me a few pieces of paper with a room key with the number 10 drawn on it – very well I might add, and their names written on another piece of paper where they’d booked in. I’m fairly stunned actually at how in depth and accurate the game is in terms of booking into hotels – just goes to show how much attention they do pay when we do the Travelodge thing. 🙂

So I did get my washing hung out and I did make a picnic but we didn’t get to the library before going to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie. We drove all the way there listening to Michael Buble really loud and singing along. 🙂 We had a lovely time actually, exactly what I needed. The sun shone, the kids had a whale of a time running around in the woods, playing with sticks, being free and running ahead and sometimes out of sight and not needing to hold my hand or get nagged at constantly to behave. They met and played with dogs along the way, got utterly filthy and muddy jumping in streams and puddles, saw bees, beetles, slugs, snails, worms, birds and butterflies. They followed a little stream, clambered over tree trunks, climbed trees, turned lumps of wood over to see what creatures where hiding and living underneath, both had a go at taking pictures with the camera and generally loved being outside and being children. I walked along with Julie, catching up, having a good old moan about my week and laughing at all the things I’d previously been only able to rant about – very theraputic. 🙂 We spent about an hour walking about, then went back to the cars for lunch and then went back into the woods again for an hour or so.

The children were in need of stripping off their bottom halves by then so I changed their trousers and we drove home the scenic route through various nice little villages and green bits of the Sussex countryside, commenting on the view and playing I Spy. We stopped outside the library and I dashed in to collect the books before coming home. My Mum pulled up about five minutes after we did bringing Hot Cross Buns (now refered to as Jesus Cakes :roll:) so I sent the children to continue their holiday game so we could chat. I called them back down for tea and bowls of strawberries and then Ady came home.

I wanted to go to Tesco for various bits and pieces so Mum ended up coming with me while Ady did the bedtime thing with the children. Depending on the weather we’re doing something with her for the day tomorrow, lots of ideas for outdoor stuff but the weather is forecast to be raining so we may end up staying in.

Had dinner and watched Grand Designs (repeated on More4 at 10pm Thursdays for anyone with the same Wednesday night dilema as me 😉 ) and Ady and I chatted for a bit about a workmate of his who passed away from cancer this morning. Very sad, he has been ill but managing well for a couple of years and his wife also works with Ady. They have four year old twins too. It’s just sent everyone at Ady’s work into shock and sadness and of course puts all of one’s own small woes right into perspective. 🙁 so I am very very glad to have had the opportunity to have had a better day today really…

Had a ranty session at Ady when he got home last night. Ady, like Davies the day before is really rather good at dealing with ranty females. He listened, nodded in agreement at all my woes, smiled reassuringly when I listed things I thought I was doing well and looked aghast at anything I tried to say negative about myself. He shepherded the children away from me for a bath and brought me an icecream cone. 🙂

I then had further fall outs with both children – Davies simply would not stop being noisy and leaping about so I sent him to bed. Scarlett was discovered lying in her bed painting her nails!! 🙄 so she got very screamed at and lay there sobbing for a while. 🙁 I then calmed down and went back to each of them and we had chats about behaviour and how much nicer it would be if they tried really hard not to do stuff which they know will make me cross and grumpy. I know they’re only children, I know they’ve been poorly, I know that I have been a bitch mother from hell all week but even at their tender ages they also do *know* what is and isn’t likely to be acceptable or get them yelled at and threat.ened with adoption.

Then I drank several glasses of wine which I had not done the rest of the week due to feeling ill. And magically I started to feel much better, at peace with the world, fuzzy with love for my children and postive and happy about the future. I shall not dwell on whether this means I have alcoholic tendancies or am guilty of substance abuse, or indeed whether the week had been dreadful precisely because I was not drinking wine. I will decide that I do not have a problem worthy of a 12 step plan or sitting in a circle with other people standing up and saying ‘My name is Jemima and I am an alcoholic’ (yes, Jemima, I wouldn’t use my real name would I? And I’d wear a brunette wig and a raincoat and big tinted glasses too) and clapping everyone else whenever they spoke. I will not fret about my reliance on wine any more than your average woman’s dependance on chocolate, Eastenders or cigarettes. Until the day I am spending more than 1/4 of our monthly food budget on supporting my drinking, sneaking to the fridge before lunch to have just one glug straight out of the box, using wine ‘in cooking’ for baking cookies and snickerdoodles to eat at 10am or tipping a small measure into my bottled water to get me through the day I will pat myself on the back for giving up spending money, shopping for clothes, shoes, make up and Lush products, not reading celebrity magazines any more and being clean of Book People orders for six months now (applause).

Anyway, I digress (and no, it’s not the drink talking 😉 ) so I drank some wine, got two more CVs finished and ate a rather lovely dinner of stuffed jacket potatoes with cheese and bacon and steak marinated in Jim Bean sauce with peas dripping in butter and watched The Apprentice while shouting at the TV and waving my fork around to really make my point! I’ve just been looking at The Apprentice website actually and was reminded of Celebdaq which I used to play loads a few years back, might go and have a look at that later for time wasting potential ;-).

So today the sun is shining, it’s only 9am but I’ve got a load of washing waiting to be hung out, the children are playing Wallace and Gromit go on holiday really nicely together. I’m about to go and get dressed and make a picnic and then we are heading off to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie for a walk in the woods via the library to collect the books I ordered which have come in. I’ve only got about 10 days left to read this months reading group book and so far I have managed the first chapter and already decided I don’t really want to read it, so I need to try a bit harder with that one too.

Back later. 🙂

As in do I really have to say the same things again and again and again. If my middle name was Again then my initials would be NAG which would be very apt right now. 🙄

But let’s do some focussing on the positive shall we? Went to the scrap store today with my Mum, stopping for tea and cakes on the way. It is OK, not really any different to the one on the industrial estate down the road from me here, but it costs £60 to join the local one (unless I can get together enough of us to make a group membership) and only £8 for the one in Portsmouth. I probably won’t go again unless I’m over that way anyway but Ady is there most weeks so he can keep popping in and grab anything worth having. We got various bits and pieces including some wooden boxes (thought they would look good painted or Floamed), some giant sheets of card for Davies to do some poster size drawings, some ribbons and scraps of gold and silver metallic cards and then me and Davies (Mum stayed in the car with Tarly) rummaged through the material scraps and got all the bits and pieces of different colours we’d need to make a cuddly Wallace and Gromit, which I will probably make a start on tonight.

I’m feeling slightly better today and the children seem to be on the mend from their colds so that is good news. I had a letter from my insurance company today to say they will pay an invoice we’ve been arguing over in relation to my departed laptop.

Feeling quite worn out and tired of life in general at the moment. It’s been a long old winter and as much as I normally like the winter I think that used to have more to do with the spending excesses of Christmas, the January sales and the retail opportunities of woolly jumpers and winter boots than anything else. I feel in dire need of a holiday or at least some sort of change of scenery. Weeks like this when I just sound like some sort of 25 years on echo of my own mother with constant mithering at children and the desire to just slam a door behind me and keep walking until I can’t hear anyone saying the word Mummy are fortunately few and far between, but I suppose 10 hours a day, 7 days a week in the company of anyone is enough to make even the most loving of parents dream of long hot summer days lazing in the garden while the children’s presence is merely distant voices playing.

One is good and one is a nightmare!

It’s been a crappy day generally here although not without highlights. I got another CV in the post (bring ’em on!) and Davies has been lovely and wonderful all day long. The sun shone although it has been cold and I got four loads of washing dry. We’ve got home made curry for dinner which I’m really looking forward to and it is Wednesday already tomorrow.

Scarlett has been, erm, challenging in her behaviour today. I won’t catalogue her crimes but they were many and varied. And yes she is only 3 and yes some of it was likely attention seeking and yes I am the parent and her behaviour is a reflection of my parenting and yes I am tired and feel crap so I probably over reacted to some things and placed high and unfair expectations on her and yes the law says that when one child is being lovely the other has to behave like devil spawn to compensate but really… I spent the day veering between wanting to stick her on Freecycle as free to collector and coming with many pink accessories and feeling like the biggest failure of a mother out. 🙄 Still not sure which one of us I blame really, it’ s a tie!

When they had already both been sent to their rooms for little more than just breathing and therefore irritating me, I was a sobbing heap on the sofa and it was not yet 11am Davies came back into the lounge having gathered up a selection of his cuddliest of cuddly toys and my pillow. He arranged the toys and my pillow around me, wiped a tear away and told me how much he loved me. He is so his father’s son that boy! 🙂 So I decided we could continue in the same vein or attempt to resuce the day.

We went to Blockbusters to get some films and some popcorn with the idea of just sitting on the sofa for the day cuddling and watching.

We were thinking of renting Corpse Bride but it is £3,75 for two nights or you could buy an ex rental copy for £5.99 so guess which we did? 😳 Then we chose 3 from their 3 dvds, 5 pounds, 7 nights range. Davies chose a Dr Seuss cartoon one (Horton hatches an egg, Daisy Head Mayzee and others), I talked them into Matilda and Scarlett was perilously close to a Barbie and Pegasus or other such twaddle so I steered her towards Alice in Wonderland which I have been reading to her recently and she dropped the pink one like a brick – hurrah! 🙂

We came home and had toasted muffins for lunch, followed by lots of popcorn and watched Corpse Bride and the Dr Seuss one. That was about 2.5 hours and by then Davies wanted to draw pictures of all the new characters he’d fallen for and Scarlett decided she’d sat still and been good for long enough and wanted to rampage and destruct some more. I had a very ambitious and frankly stupid idea that I might lie on the sofa for a restorative nap but that didn’t happen!

Scarlett was retrieved from her room for her tea which they both ate by which time Ady had returned home, also feeling crappy with the cold we all now have and fed up from a tiresome managers meeting.

Plan tomorrow is to go to a scrapstore in Portsmouth I have just joined with a local-ish HE group. We’re supposed to be taking Mum along too and then I would imagine we’ll have associated activties in the afternoon dependant on what we gather from said scrapstore.

Tired, fed up, feel pants, crap mother. Feel free to insert my name in brackets in the box below!

Happy Birthday to Kirsty 🙂

I’ve spent the last two days with really itchy eyes blaming early hayfever and this morning I woke with a runny nose and streaming eyes. I think I might be suffering with hayfever and the kids’ cold. 🙁 Oh and it’s mooncup time again too. Ace! 🙄 Have also been yawning all day despite having an OK night’s sleep (both kids dosed up on Medised made for 12 hour stretches of sleep for them both 🙂 ) I could have crawled back to bed at any point during the day and gone straight to sleep the instant I closed my eyes. So I think I will be doing just that very shortly.

First thing I got out a make up kit I’d had stashed away for Scarlett so she sat and did my make up for me and a construction puzzle kit thing for Davies which I sat on the floor and helped him with (while having lurid green eyeshadow and very pink blusher applied). It was excellent actually, made of a sort of plasticky cardboard which you pushed out and then followed numbered instructions to fold and slot together to make a digger truck. Then using a plastic screwdriver supplied you used plastic nuts and bolts to hold it together. He wanted cheerleading rather than actual help and I did plenty of ‘so what number did we look at last, what number should be do now? Which bit of it do you think that picture is representing?’. The kit only cost a quid and frankly the half an hour of making it was worth loads more than that but actually the digger itself is pretty good and of course he is very proud of it and has brought it everywhere with him today. 🙂 Must see if there are any more in the same range and get them. Ali and I were speculating abolut meccano for him the other day watching him create stuff with some giant brio meccano-a-like stuff Freya has . He likes k’nex and lego and stuff but the appeal of actually bolting stuff together seems to really do something for him and he loves either following instructions or using his own imagination to create something. Looked on ebay and it is still holding it’s price and I checked in Woolworths at it today – must keep an eye out at car boot sales.

I’d originally planned to go to Brighton today with Mum and the children for a Primark and H&M run. I had various clothes and shoes purchases I wanted to make. With our current financial situation it is actually easier to stick to our monthly budget by making a list of things we need prior to needing them and factoring in the purchases in advance. This coupled with the fact I still love shopping even if it is just for childrens pants and socks ;-). But they children are still fairly snotty and not on top form, Mum didn’t want to be too far from home so wasn’t up for Brighton so I decided to go to Worthing and she came with us in the end.

We had a really successful day. Davies got doodles, sandals (he’d had a meltdown about me putting some outgrown Spiderman shoes on ebay last week so I’d promised if we saw any more Spiderman shoes I’d get them for him and low and behold, there in Woollies were Spiderman sandals, hurrah!), cheapo black shoes for Badgers and then he asked for jelly shoes to wear in the beach / in the sea and cited Kessingland as the example for needing them. For £1.50 I thought his sales pitch was good enough (even without the PowerPoint stylee illustrations and plasticine models of himself wearing said jelly shoes I know he would have worked up to if I’d said no) so he got FOUR PAIRS of shoes today! 🙂 In fairness this was for the same price as a usual Clarks pair in total though, so not too scary, just watch him grow a shoe size in the next fortnight.

Edited to add – And I’ve just checked reciepts and realised there was a 3 for 2 on shoes so the jellies were actually free 🙂

Scarlett got doodles and sandals. She didn’t want jelly shoes as they only had blue ones in Woollies, she liked some pink ones in Mothercare but they were a fiver so I said we’ll look out for some for her over the next couple of months until the time she might actually need jelly shoes anyway. It was after all still snowing only about 2 weeks ago so we are possibly slightly premature in such comprehensive summer stocking up anyway 😉

They both got a pile of new pants and socks, Tarly got a couple of pairs of £2 each summer pjs and as they both already have sufficient shorts / lightweight trousers / skirts from last year which still fit them I got them both enough cheap T shirts to last the summer which completes their wardrobes until the Autumn. Oh and got Davies’ £3 black school trousers for Badgers too. I also sent Davies across from the clothing concession bit in the Co-op where I was buying T shirts to the normal tills to pay for a french stick. I could see him and he could see me, but he was still really bold and confident, chatting away to the checkout woman and being all polite and charming. I’m dead proud of that boy you know. :-).

While out we saw a poster for Joseph & the technicolour dreamcoat which Davies was asking about so we talked a bit about as much of the (Bible version) of the story as I could remember and promised to tell him the rest when I’d looked it up. This led to further debate on God and religious belief, which he then followed by seeing a poster of Elvis and saying ‘oh look, Elvis’ in a really casual way followed by saying ‘I look a bit like Shakin Stevens today Granny, I’m wearing a denim jacket and jeans’ out of nowhere, which he followed up with ‘actually I’m wearing jeans, Mummy’s wearing jeans, Scarlett’s wearing jeans and you’re wearing jeans too Granny. That’s a coincidence’ which just made us laugh loads. Strange boy with all his observations, combination of the very deep and the very inane and his little turns of phrase so far beyond his age!

Retail therapy, frugal shopping and new clothes for kids, sorted! 🙂 Came home and have piled up another batch of stuff ready for ebay too which I’ll try and get listed this week cos if I’m thinking about buying summer wear then I guess other people will be too – and I’m fired up on ebaying again having transfered £50 from paypal to my account from last weeks sales. 🙂

We went back to my parents for a late lunch, where Dad had arrived home too and I spent some time setting up a few bits on Mum’s new laptop for her. They have just had wireless broadband put in so she’s learning all sorts of new skills and I’ve trillianed and flickrd her up which she’s slowly starting to get to grips with. After about an hour the children, who it has to be said were not really on best behaviour all day started to get snapped at by my parents for various crimes such as trailing crumbs on carpet, banging doors and making ornaments wobble and getting their feet on the sofa (honestly – well where did you think my thing about indoor toys came from eh? 😉 ) so we came home.

We had a grand trying on session of all the new clothes and shoes, they had a big bowl of strawberries each for tea, I took reciept of a praisefilled email from CV lady about a particularly challenging one I’d completed yesterday (and another 3 arrived in the post this morning – keep ’em coming!) and I hastily and about 7 hours later than planned shoved a bolognaise sauce in the slow cooker (well it had a good 4 hours or so).

And now, I will retire for the evening.

Is what I’ve got. Davies has been developing his for at least two days but Scarlett has come through to an early lead with hers today. We had planned to spend the day with my parents but they rang early to say their cat who has been having some sort of seizures for a couple of weeks had taken a turn for the worse and they were going to the emergency vets with her. She is back home again now but I think her days are numbered, so all very sad over there. 🙁 So with poorly kids and worried grandparents we felt the mix would be a bad idea and stayed home instead.

I got some CVs done and made some choux buns, Ady did some child avoidance tactics until I had a mini-rant about spending more time with the children at the weekends and trying to build individual relationships with them both. He is an excellent father but still retains the sort of novelty value of a favourite uncle at times rather than a particular relationhip with each child. We had a bit of a chat about it and having taken on board some of what he said to me about being crap at letting him get on with it and not interfering they spent a lovely afternoon doing stuff like playing on websites together and generally talking. Result 🙂

I took Madagascar back to Blockbusters and popped in to see my parents to administer cuddles and choux buns for half an hour or so and then home again to get a roast dinner cooking. The children had a bath and an early night and we’re sitting watching Planet Earth.

It’s been a lovely Spring day here today, washing dried and the drive into town along the seafront was very cheer inspiring with the blue sky reflected in the sea and making the promise of Summer ever more imaginable.

*how* guilty would you all have felt! 🙂

Told Ady that within moments of posting it people had started to laugh at me for even trying to fool them and started to be all righteous about how seriously I must be taken as a Home Educator, how much people must hold me up as a model HE Mom, committed to my children, a paragon of the one try path to autonomy and childrearing and the epitomy of stay-at-home-ness and he just gave me one of his looks and said ‘A – they know you would never hold a job down and B – you could not possibly get up in the morning to get to work anyway’. So one way or another you all know me I guess 😉 😳

This morning the children were rather tired and emotional and for some odd reason wanted my company rather than Ady’s ? so although I wanted to get a couple of CVs done for a deadline tomorrow I couldn’t concentrate and gave up and watched Madagascar with them again instead while Ady cleaned the oven 🙄 but also :-). Then in an effort to carry out a cunning plan I hatched with Ali yesterday to make better use of our many ‘resources’ and toys instead of them playing with the same stuff day in day out I suggested they got out their toy animals and saw how many of the animals from the film they had. We were sadly lacking in anything other than a couple of giraffes, an out of proporionately small giraffe and a lion which had been a Happy Meal giveaway during the Narnia craze (so that’d be Alsan then).

Scarlett wanted to do painting so she did a picture of me and Davies drew a page of ever decreasing squares inside of each other in loads of different colours. He asked me what I thought it was and I said it reminded me of the staircases at Melrose when viewed from the top. We all agreed it was very like that but Davies then wanted to know how people would climb the steps when they were just squares. So I explained about how art is open to interpretation and that it is a representation of something rather than a carbon copy of it. I got him to bring me some paper and a green and yellow pen and drew some lines, triangles and squiggles and asked him what it was – he correctly guessed it was the vase of daffodils on the mantlepiece but also got what I meant when I said it was not an exact replica of them and if he’d drawn it then his picture would not have looked like mine. To further illustrate this I drew two rectangles, one with a rectangle topped by a triangle with a circle above and the other with a rectangle topped by a square with two more offset rectangles above it. I asked him what he though it was. He thought the first rectangle was a church with the sun above (precisely my intention as it happened) and the second reminded him of a ladder. What it actually was was the chimney breast with the fireplace and the clock above it, the TV cabinet, the TV and two pictures on the wall next to it. So we chatted about how that worked and how that was the beauty of art and as he showed quite a bit of interest in that theory we got out ‘Come Look With Me’ which has been on the shelf untouched since I decided at Melrose 2005 that we simply *must* have it. We looked at the first two pictures and talked about them a bit, including a question on how the poem under one of the pictures tells the prince how he should be like his father so in what was was Davies like his parents? He started to lose interest again at that point, mainly due to the Move It, Move It bit coming on the TV again on the film so we left it there, but I’m pretty sure a fair bit went in. 🙂

I left them all to it then to collect my watch which for the first time in nearly 2 weeks is going again – I’ve still worn it every day and have been surprised at how little I missed the telling the time aspect of it actually. On the very infrequent occassions I have neglected to put it on in the morning I have felt very lost without it but I am starting to think that is more the feeling of it on my wrist than the time telling use of it. Having an inherant feeling of what time it is is one of my skills along with knowing which direction we are headed (N, S, E or W) when travelling so maybe I should try and develop that further and lose the watch once a week or something.

I also popped into the Wizard store to get a few bits – some clothes pegs as I was lacking in those, (although I bought 100 wooden ones for a quid and they are shite so I probably need to not be frugal with clothes pegs actually as you seem to get what you pay for there) and some plastic sheets for the childen to do their plasticine / playdough / painting on so that Ady and the Ady Machine get a rest ;-), a couple of cheapo craft kits to bring out when the children need entertaining and a couple of sets of plastic zoo animals which contained same size zebras, lions, hippos and giraffes for recreation of Madagascar for the children.

Then on to Sainsburys where for the very first time ever I was under budget 🙂 Woo hoo! and then home. The children were suitably impressed with the animals although slighly disappointed that I didn’t produce penguins too (unusre whether to be flattered at their confidence in me to provide or irritated at their ungratefulness for the rest of the creatures!) and Ady suitably impressed with my frugalness. He was still cleaning and the children had assembled all the various bits of their lifecycle of a frog animals for me to inspect (frogspawn, tadpole, froglet, frog) and then we looked at the real tadpoles too for a bit.

We had lunch, I hung out loads more washing with my substandard wooden pegs and then we went over to Chris and Julie’s for the afternoon. Had a lovely time there; the children played in the garden with Chris and Ady reminsicing on their childhood and supervising them, while Julie and I chatted.

Tomorrow we are over at my parents for lunch and I will be mostly feeling smug for having got my deadline of tomorrow night CVs already emailed today so not having any work to do. 🙂

But OMG Tony Slattery is on Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes!!!!!!

I’ve just had a letter offering me a full time office based CV writing job. The money is enough to make serious in-roads into our debts and pay for full time wraparound care for Tarly before and after nursery and Davies before and after school. The local school has a Kids breakfast and after school club and the nursery for Tarly is onsite, so I’ll be contacting them first thing on Monday about starting both children after Easter.

Guess I won’t have time to read all those books after all!

And still are even three and a half hours after usual bedtime. 🙄

Had a really nice day today, as indicated in my earlier post things are good for various Friday/payday related reasons anyway so that started the day on a cheery note.

The children played this morning while I parcelled up some ebay stuff and sent Ady off to the post office with it. He went off to work and I persuaded the children to get dressed and we went into Lancing. I had a couple of library books due back and wanted to renew a couple more. I also wanted to get a couple of ‘classics’ that I never seemed to have read at school like everyone else and wanted to see whether they deserved their ‘my favourite childhood book’ tag from so many people including a couple at my reading group. The local library didn’t have any of them so I ordered them in and the children chose a couple of books each. We dropped my watch off to get a new battery and called into the bakery to get some cakes to take to Ali’s.

We listened to Will Young in the car both ways, turned up really loud with the children doing a fine line in in-car seat car dancing and me beating time on the steering wheel :-). I found out that James Blunt is playing Leeds Castle in July on the same basis as me and Ady went to see Will Young last summer and had a lovely afternoon / evening at. It’s actually a very child friendly venue and drugs references aside the children love him too, so a couple of good months of CV work and I might well think about tickets for us.

Had a lovely time at Ali’s. I witnessed the opening of the brand new packet of pasta and watched all lunch preparations closely to ensure she wasn’t secreting chick peas in my pasta quills ;-). The children did lots of stuff as always proving any worries about educational development unfounded by barging in on a discussion in the kitchen about how physics would be taught to ask what some figurines were made of and whether they were china as Davies thought or metal as Scarlett believed. And why they might be so light if they were metal and happily accepting our explanation of paperclips being metal but also light. Also some discussion of size in relation to weight too.

There was chat about perspective, as mentioned already on Ali’s blog. In relation to the space hoppers at Ali’s which now we have our own, which are larger, appear smaller. I likened it to going back to infant school as a grown up and realising how small the playground really was after all, and when my Dad picks them up to his height and the world looks very different. It was them demonstrated by Davies who drew a picture of Wallace, Gromit and a car with them all inverted in size from their normal stature which he explained by the larger ones being close to us and the smaller ones further away. He then made me look out of the window to see chimneys on faraway houses to demonstrate further. I think he’s got that then! 🙂

Ali has blogged about the rest of the day there so I won’t repeat but it was lovely as always and there was lots of drawing, painting and writing went on. Also nice to see how Davies is so comfortable there that he speaks to Ali in the same way as members of our family with utter confidence and naturalness, he’s been the best of himself today. 🙂

We left later than planned so played Eye Spy on the way home to keep Tarly awake and when Ady phoned I passed Davies my ohone to answer and relay the conversation – lovely to have an older child at times like that! Davies announced today that he can count to 24 and then proceeded to count well into the 30s. He stumbled on 13 but after that was flying – he has previously not got anywhere near 20 🙂 I then listened to him in the back of the car teaching Scarlett to do it too.

After a tidy up session at home we went to Blockbusters which has changed considerably since the last time I went there (probably as a teen :oops:) and I rejoined. The children chose Madagascar as their film to watch and we browsed the shelves of 3 dvds for a fiver for a week for future reference (I normally pay £2.50 for one at the library every couple of weeks so this is a far better offer and a two minute walk from our regular soft play haunt so something we’ll probably do quite often I suspect). Then we came home via KFC where we collected a ‘Mum’s Night Off’ bargain bucket and came home to watch and eat. It went really well – Scarlett was possibly most excited about the pepsi (she adores fizzy drinks but they are a very rare treat) but Davies tried everything and loved the chicken. Then we all ate ice cream out of the tub with the supplied plastic spoons before the children got into their pjs and snuggled up on the sofa with me for the last bit of the film.

That ended two hours ago and despite it being 9pm and Scarlett being very tired we honoured our promise of sleepover in Davies’ room. Ady has been threatening to bring her back downstairs to her own room as they have each been down at least four times for toilet or drink breaks, there has been much giggling and stamping about – plenty of it in relation to move it, move it! – and lots of general horseplay. But I have insisted they be allowed to see it through and if they are tired tomorrow then so be it. If we don’t let it happen this time then it will be all the more fraught with nonsense next time. I am now sitting on the floor between them, Scarlett has gone to sleep in seconds and Davies looks to be not too far behind – not very surprising given it’s gone 11pm now – but at least we might be in for a lie in in the morning I guess! 🙄 So Family Film Night – the first one a success and about to be introduced as a first Friday of the month regular feature – and all for around £15!

and if you share the dips then you should probably share the great big uppy bits too.

It’s Friday 🙂

It’s Payday for Ady 🙂

It’s Payday for me too 🙂 🙂

I’ve earned enough this week to pay for the food shopping for the month of April 🙂 🙂 🙂

We’re off to The House Of Lentils 🙂

I made nearly £30 on ebay selling outgrown kids clothes on auctions ending yesterday and Ady has just come back from the post office having gone to post items I’d charged £18 p&p for having only spent a tenner 🙂 (which I would feel bad about but I think packaging materials and going to the PO is fair enough to add 50p or so to each for, and given some of the items only sold for their 99p reserve I’m quite happy to have made a bit extra on postage anyway!), so that’s £40 altogether 🙂 🙂 🙂 With the couple of cheques I’m waiting for as well it will pay for the Kessingland pitch. 🙂

That’s all!

But I’ll say it anyway! 😉

A good morning, I finished my 3 CVs on a deadline for today and just as I emailed them across the post arrived with a further six in it 🙂 So hurrah for work!

Ady’s presentation was today and went very well, he impressed the people he need to impress and was all bouncy and happy about it. 🙂

My Mum (the other person who’s ‘work’ I had helped with) also had her training session which went well too. She’s been tasked with some crazy hypothetical taking on the renovation of a delapidated hotel with a budget of £0.6m next which I imagine I will get called in for assisting with. I think someone at her workplace has been watching too much The Apprentice tbh!

I told the children I would do something with them this afternoon if they let me work in peace this morning so they did some geomags, some drawing and I got out a kit for making 3D pictures by colouring in the background and then adding die cut animals using little cardboard tabs. Davies did well on it but was after constant cheerleading which was slightly wearing when I was trying to get into the mind of a 23 year old who wants a career in the music industry on the basis of 3 years unemployment after a 3 year career as a kitchen porter but did a week’s work experience in a record company when he was 15 🙄 Crazy thing is he’d probably do well and earn more than I ever did. Had a freaky moment too when I recognised the name of the consultant who’d assisted the candidate in completing the application form only to realise this was because I’d written her CV for her 6 months ago. I looked it up and discovered she’d had personnel experience so she obviously got taken on by the Working Links people as a result of going there looking for work.

We walked round the shop to buy milk and I read Scarlett a Poppy Cat book about six times (luckily a board book with only five pages!) but I never did really do much with them today as I got sucked back into making a head start on the next batch of CVs. I also had a very lengthy phonecall with the lady who is starting a load of lessons and bought in tutors of HE children locally. Julie is getting involved and although I have said it is not our thing I had agreed she could contact me to talk through some of the information I got last year about fundraising and grant applications. It was a long phonecall and she is inspirational in her belief in what she is doing and her full on committment to her children and their education. I’m not entirely sure I agree with all she was saying, particularly in relation to autonomy but she was so passionate it would have been crazy to debate it with her really. And she is not wrong, she is just not saying the exact replica of what I believe. She did make me feel slightly guilty about not being very available today though, particularly as D was desperate for me to do drawing with him and I didn’t. I’m torn between wanting to offer the best to the children and not wanting to sit on the floor ‘playing’ with them all day either, infact rarely if at all! I amjust not a sitting on the floor playing kind of person. Anyway…

This evening I went with my Mum to a Health & Beauty evening at the big conference centre along the road from them. It was really good actually, cheap entrance of 3 quid which included a goody bag with loads of trial size beauty stuff and a free ‘relaxing Clarins hand treatment’. Mum talked to the people on every single stand and booked a chiropractor appointment adn everything. I enjoyed being too poor to be tempted into expensive make up and body creams, crystals and tarot card readings etc and just soaked up the girlieness of the atmosphere and the man playing the harp (I kid you not!), oh and the glass of wine Mum bought me when we had a mid point sit down. 🙂 I got stopped by two people who knew me, one from school (was it really 17 years ago!!!!) and one I worked with about 10 years ago which was kind of nice, kind of sad that I am still in the same town and kind of odd as I would never go up and tap someone on the shoulder after 17 years and say ‘Hello, do you remember me?’ but there you go.

Tomorrow we are going over to Ali’s for naked spacehoppering and lentils aplenty and in the late afternoon / early evening we have a first for the Goddard’s planned in the way of a ‘Family Film Night’ – we’re planning to go and rejoin Blockbusters – I have a card but it is very old and in my maiden name, to show Davies that it is true about places with even more dvds than the library, get a film or two out, get a KFC bargain bucket, pop some popcorn and watch films together. Then the children have begged for a sleepover in D’s room so we plan to see how that goes too. So I may well not be blogging and hidden under a pile of Kentucky Fried Grease watching Mrs Doubtfire or Bambi or something. If I’m not back by Saturday send a St Bernard! 😉