One word? When seven would do…

We have returned from our expedition out of the house 🙂

We went to the library and waited for ages for a carparking space. This is a particular parking rage incident inducing car park actually – I myself have had at least two altercations in it with fellow motorists. Today I refrained from yelling at anyone though, so that was good. Scarlett chose 3 story books, I had a very quick peek at the fiction but found nothing to inspire me. I borrowed The Time Travellers Wife a while back but the library does this Top Ten thing where they have the top ten books available to borrow but you can only have them for a week and I never started it so ended up taking it straight back unread – It hasn’t been on the shelf ever since, so I came away without anything. Davies found an Usborne book on puppets – which on first glance looks pretty good, I picked up a book on the food chain as it’s something we’ve briefly touched on but I wanted to pick up on properly and Davies chose Stuart Little 2 on dvd to borrow, which he is watching right now and appears every bit as dreadful as Stuart Little but has both the children rapt and as it features no bad language or physical violence and even Scarlett is aware that mice do not infact wear clothes, talk, drive or are available for adoption into human families I suppose it can do them no harm 😉

After the library we headed up to Boots. I needed some magic balm tissues, we needed to get birthday gifts for Liam and Lily who are coming over for tea tomorrow – it’s actually nearly a month since it was their birthdays but we were away for their parties and so I posted their cards and I had shoved a fiver each in them but had to open the cards and steal the money back before posting them due to financial crisis! So I’d told Mel I had presents for them here for next time we saw them. Scarlett chose some Barbie perfume for Lily – she has some herself and her and Lily always play for ages with all Scarlett’s dressing table make up stuff so I’m sure Lily will be pleased even if Mel isn’t! Davies chose some art straws with little connectors for Liam which seems appropriate – I know he loves arts and crafts. Scarlett also had a £7 gift token from an inflatable Dora chair that she got for Christmas and had split at the seam (Ok this was mainly as a result of her and Davies jumping on it but Ady took it back to exchange and they’d sold out so he got a gift token instead) so she chose a remote control Polly Pocket car which was in the sale. She’s been coverting Davies’ Herbie RC car so is delighted with this and is currently driving it all round the lounge. Gotta be good for co-ordination or something surely :-).

Scarlett has had a growth spurt – I noticed first last week when she was standing clearly taller than both Jack and Maisie and also realised that all of her knickers were on the snug side (which could also be down to tumble drying) so bought her some new ones at Tesco last week. I notice today that all her skirts are now knee length where they were long or knicker-skimming where they were short – admittedly most of them are age 2-3, so I think a grand trying on session of the stuff in her wardrobe is in order and maybe some ebaying of anything outgrown.

Right tidy up and tea time, might be back later but then again I suspect I will have nothing left to say!

Spent the last couple of hours reading all the library books we borrowed last week so we can take them back and get some more. Loads of story books although none which stand out and were all a little on the babyish side really as the children still make their choices based on the pictures 😉

Davies and I have read books about bugs, camouflage and crabs and crustaceans, so we’ve both learnt loads about them, Scarlett has messed about with her leappad, worked out how to put a dvd on all by herself (Dora and the city of lost toys – I know I have your sympathy for the song now repeating in my head Merry 😉 ) and we’re now having lunch.

I have sandwiches made with a couple of leftover slices of last night’s gammon which Scarlett (the carnivore – she’d eat it raw 🙂 ) is filching from the bread. She’s trying every sort of food imaginable at the moment , yesterday it was egg mayo sandwiches – which she loved but won’t be eating lots as I don’t like either the taste or the smell so it won’t be a dish I make lots at home ;-). Davies who was amazed at us cooking ham in coke last night before he went to bed just asked me ‘so how was the cooked coke last night then?’ with the look of a far older person laughing at an idiot, I said it had been lovely and offered him some of the gammon but he said ‘ah no thanks, I think I’ll stick to just drinking it!’ – that child has way too much of my father at his most condescending at times 😉

I think that’s what it’s going to be…

My cold has broken today so while I still feel fairly pants I don’t feel all woolly and full of ‘something’ any more.

Anyway, Ady got up with the children and I stayed in bed until 8ish with them downstairs watching Nightmare Before Christmas on full volume. When I came down Davies told me he had sorted out their breakfast – they’d had water to drink (he can read the tap with the aid of a stool) and bread rolls. I gave him a cuddle and told him he was getting so grown up he hardly needs me any more. He looked quite shocked, clambered onto my lap and said ‘of course I still need you Mummy’. Warmth flooded my heart, relief that five year old boys do still need their mummies washed over me and then he continued ‘I can’t possibly reach the cereal!’

Davies and I have been playing Battleships. I forgot to mention yesterday that he appeared with it – a plastic version with pegs and little boats that someone had bought him as a birthday present but we’d never got out before – and asked me to show him how to play it. I really like battleships actually, I used to play it with my Dad for hours when I was a child and then when I worked in a very quiet office for a few months and the boss was off long term sick leaving me and an admin. assistant to our own devices (well we were hardly going to work under such circumstances 😉 ) we sat and played battleships every single day for weeks. Infact when I finally left the job she presented me with a little battleships grid in a gold plated frame to remember her by! So we played a bit yesterday and we’ve played a bit more this morning – I’m not utterly convinced by his ‘hit’or ‘miss’ responses to my guesses (yesterday I managed to get a single hit surrounded by misses on all sides so we had to call Ady in to adjudicate (and no, that’s not a word of the day 😉 ) ) but getting to grips with the numbers, letters, grid references and the idea of graphs generally is all very educational I’m sure.

He’s now sitting watching The Making of Nightmare Before Christmas on the extras bit of the dvd and seems fascinated by all of the animation and puppetry and the concept of storyboards. Infact I’m fairly sure I forgot to mention the other day that he’d created a whole book using illustrations to tell a fairly complicated story. He did use a few letters (initials of himself and Scarlett, me and Ady mostly) but flatly refused to do any more writing when I offered to write the story out if he narrated it to me for him to copy. And now he’s negotiating his way round deleted scenes from the movie and asking me if we can get all the things they use in the making of bits to make our own puppets – argh! Way out of my depth here… off to the library later anyway, might see if they have any books to help make puppets or indeed some ideas on animation or film making.

Scarlett is playing with fuzzy felt faces and some convoluted game with a variety of soft toys including a pink puppy, a purple unicorn, a dolphinn, a centerparcs teddy and one of her many Dora toys.

Whatever it was that ailed me yesterday has taken hold with a vengence today. I am snotty, coughing and maybe a little whingy! 😉 I am in need of woolly cardigans, warm lemon drinks and methol chest rubs. I require a bubbly bath drawn for me, a roast dinner cooked for me and lots of people saying ‘ahh, are you alright darling?’ with a sympathetic cock to their head and a kindly look in their eyes! Well OK it’s just a cold but I’m gonna milk it for the rest of today before Ady heads off to work in the morning and leaves me to the mercy of the small people 😉

Anyway…the children both slept in past 7am this morning (believe me this is good!) and I enjoyed a lazy morning with them cuddled up to me watching TV while I read the book I mentioned in the post below. Then I heard Sheryl Crow on the radio while I was cooking some toast and was reminded about a whole load of cds I used to love and hadn’t listened in ages so I dug them out and have started to listen to them on the laptop while being online. So expect plenty of Alanis Morisette, Sheryl Crow, Meredith Brooks lyrics to be popping up as post titles for the next week or so.

Then we headed over to my parents for lunch. Dad and Ady went up the downs with the chainsaw to get another week’s supply of logs, Frazer entertained the children, Mum and I made lunch and then after a lengthy discussion of the fors and againsts of emigrating to New Zealand which upset my Mum at the thought of us moving anywhere at all she spent the afternoon playing with the children while Dad, Frazer and Ady watched football (Utd, Frazer’s team won 🙂 ) and I finally managed to get into the book I’ve got to read for next reading group at the library. I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve finished it – I’m about midway – but I’ve certainly been way more tolerant with it than my usual three chapter to grab me or I won’t bother rule.

Mum had found a Shaun the Sheep footstool in a charity shop for Davies – who is more than a little obsessed with all things Wallace and Gromit but particularly loves Shaun as he adores sheep anyway (dating back to the South of England show last summer where he fell in love with one for sale) so he is thrilled with that and has been carting it with him everywhere.

I started to feel worse as the afternoon wore on but given I was made tea and had the children minded and Ady distracted it was probably the best place to be really! Dinner is Nigella’s coca cola cooked ham which we saw on TV once and pondered over and then enjoyed as cooked by Alison on my birthday. So that’s to look forward to, as is a bath and some pjs sprinkled with olbas oil, vaseline smeared all round my nose and lips (bet I sound very attractive don’t I!) vicks rubbed all over my chest and a toss up between drowing it with wine or taking some beechams…

Oh, yeah, and finally education. Davies asked me loads of questions about dangerous animals during lunch. Mainly snakes and spiders and how they kill you so we talked about venom and bites, about snakes that squeeze you to death (and how exactly that would kill you!) about snakes that can dislocate their jaws to swallow something as big as a person and then he started talking about which countries which animals might be resident in. He already knows that we don’t have any such creatures in the UK but he wanted to know about China and Africa. When I explained that I was not sure myself but we could look it up tomorrow in books and on the internet we started to talk about creatures that live in packs or groups too which led on to stuff about mammals and reptiles – and indeed got dangerously close to mating and reproduction, so I think I might just read around the whole subject a bit more tomorrow before introducing any more of it to him. Davies seems to be having a bit of a leaps and bounds time at the moment educationally. I’ve noticed this happens every couple of months and it always seems to happen in the same way. Scarlett will make some giant leap forward in something and suddenly the gap between them will clsoe up loads, then they’ll be a bit of a power stuggle between them as they reassert their positions until eventually Davies will take a leap forward again opening the gap back up wide again and they won’t be in such competition with each other and will find an easier relationship again. I think we’ve consciously helped it this time by specifically dividing them at times with Davies staying up later, Ady taking Davies off while I spend time with Scarlett and also the staying to a later drama session for Davies. We’ve also started to allow Davies to do some things which we’ve had to say no to Scarlett on because she is too young or too little – e.g. Davies checked the progress of things cooking in the oven and is allowed to open the oven door whereas I wouldn’t dream of letting Tarly do that. Anyway, as usually seems to happen when you start to question the validity of some decisions and choices something happens to reassure you and at the moment I am feeling very pleased with the progress Davies is making in all sorts of areas. 🙂

A line from one of my all time favourite songs…

I was not sure whether this was the right place for this but I’ve decided this is where I want to put it. I’ve just written it, I’ve not even read it through as I’m about to go out. It’s been written with lots of interuptions, I’ve lost track of my thread several times so there is every chance I’ve not said everything I meant to or got the tone right. But I wanted to get it out as it’s swimming in my mind and I want to capture it now…

I’ve been reading Hannah’s Gift last night and this morning and been hugely moved and inspired by it. I’ve not finished it yet but as it is not a story and it is not going to have a happy ending as such but so many things about the message in it have resonated with me hugely.

Obviously on a personal level the fact I am a mother, and indeed have a small daughter the same age as Hannah has been particularly heart wrenching – Scarlett was snuggled, naked (split coco-pops and any excuse!) under my dressing gown with me this morning while I was reading it, stroking my face as tears rolled down my cheeks telling me how pretty and sparkly my eyes were with tears in them…

I have several friends who have first hand personal experience of sick children – some have had the happy ending, some have not. I also have several friends who have lost children before they were ever born – a different sort of pain and sorrow again. So all of these friends have been dancing about in my head as I’ve read the book but that’s not what the book is about really, at last not what I’ve got from it.

For me reading the book has come at a time when I’ve been on a slow journey to realising that in our one life we need to grab every opportunity even if some of them are very well hidden, sometimes you have to get yourself dressed up warmly, put on one of those hard hats with a miners light on the front, pack yourself some kendal mint cake and go searching for an opportunity. Sometimes you might think you’ve found your opportunity and later realise it wasn’t it after all, sometimes that opportunity is what takes you the next step of the way to the next opportunity – a bridging opportunity if you will.

So what I’ve taken from the book is a sense that length of life means very little really. I have every intention of growing old and being that old lady running my walking stick up and down the railings, living in a house with 22 cats and scaring small children at bus stops – but just as I suspected when I was a child life actually doesn’t all move at the same pace throughout your life, it actually moves very differently.

When you are a child it’s like your life is a dvd on fast speed (although it feels slow – a summer holiday feels endless, the space between two Christmasses feels way more than just one year) – in just one day you have crises and victories, you know great joy and great sorrow, everything is magnified, colours are brighter, sounds are louder, love is enormous. Great drama can be experienced in a dropped ice cream, great miracles of healing witnessed in mummy kissing it better.

When you are an adult the dvd is in real time – a year is precisely a year, you have good days and bad days, you summarise your years, you feel the changing of the seasons. Bad things take far longer to recover from and sometimes you never do. Good things are celebrated and more life changing. You think choices are your own, actually you have probably never been less free.

In your latter years it might feel like life is whizzing by, you don’t know where the years have gone, let alone the months, weeks, days and hours. But actually you are now on very s l o w s p e e d. Nothing much ever changes to you, just to what you observe and who is around you. 20 years could pass and your daily routine could remain unchanged, although the world is moving on and up around you your basic beliefs and ideas and knowledge base remains the same. You have already become you, that happened years ago and the chances are your time of self discovery is over. That makes it sound grim, infact providing you have good health and comfort I would imagine this is the most enjoyable period, time to enjoy the fruits of your labour and relax into the person you are.

Or you could split life into decades – in my first decade I was a child and life was as I described in the earlier paragraph, in my second decade I did being a teenager and all the freedom that that offered. I was able to be selfish, grow into myself and enjoy being who I decided I was going to be. In my third decade, my 20s I did a lot of foundation laying – I had a career, I married, I had babies. I’m now just a couple of years into my fourth decade – my 30s. This one is a pretty even split of being all about me and being all about my children. At the moment the two halves are very complementary – we’re very bound up by each other but as much as they need me I also equally need them, they are teaching me who I am right now at this stage and what I learn from them will help me into the next phase of my life. My aim is to leave this decade – in 8 years with a clear idea of what the next decade is to be about, who I am in what could be the midpoint of my life and what I want to gain out of whatever time I have left.

Back to the book – the message I have taken from it is that truth or life happens regardless and what you can change is the way you view it and what effect you allow it to have on you. In the same way as the worst thing that can ever happen to us can also be the very best if it is the catalyst for reaching for the moon having hit rock bottom with up as the only way to go. Even the worst comprehensible things could be made worse in some ways. I can choose to be humbled by how positive people can be in the face of having dealt with some of the worst situations I can ever comprehend dealing with, I can choose to wallow in my own misery, I can choose to feel lucky that my life is actually really rather fantastic, or I can grab it and work out how I can make it even better than that.

Guess which choice I’m making starting today, right here, right now…

Told Ady I’d had a bad day today, but when he reminded me of some of the stuff we have done I realised it was actually not such a bad one after all!

I felt a bit like Snow White this morning in that I woke up sneezy. Also feeling generally blah although it hasn’t seemed to come to anything so not sure whether it was genuine illness or just me feeling ‘morningy’.

I made some bread and some rolls, Ady headed off to take back the slowcooker and then took Davies off wearing wellies up the downs to where they collect logs (a man who has a tree cutting / gardening business owns land up a lane where he brings all his waste and burns it down. He has always let Dad go there and chainsaw up logs as it simply saves him burning them), me and Davies made some bird seed and suet in tins bird feeders then me and Scarlett tied string to the tins and hung them on a tree outside. Scarlett wiped down the worktops (not hugely efficiently but it’s not really my strong point so who I am to criticise!) and they both played on the pcs.

They played with k’nex, did some drawing, watched Nightmare before Christmas, Flubber and Mary Poppins and we had some classic gender stereotyping activities when Ady and Davies played a rowdy game of keepie-uppie with a balloon in the hall while Scarlett and I sat in the lounge and I brushed her hair and put it into an elaborate plaited style, all the while tutting about the ‘noisy boys’ in the hall! 😉

My Mum appeared for an hour or so on her way to Tescos – she tried to persuade me to join her but I declined 😉 we’re heading over there for lunch tomorrow and Ady and Dad are going to fetch more logs in Dad’s van. Late afternoon was taken up with me getting very grumpy as Ady’s work laptop keeps knocking my laptop off of our wireless network so I tried to fiddle with some settings and ended up cocking the whole thing up so I couldn’t access the internet at all from my laptop. The children kept coming to ask me if they could go on the Nickjr site and I lost my temper with them and Ady and shut them all in the lounge together having yelled that they all complain they don’t see each other enough so why the hell were the children coming and hanging around me when I’m always with them!?!? . I eventually got it sorted by doing system restores on both laptops to yesterdays date which put all the settings back as they had been and got it working again, so I put my inner dragon back inside and pulled off Lovely Mummy again until bedtime!

Ady cooked a chinese takeaway style chicken curry with noodles for dinner in celebration of Chinese new year which I intended and failed to do something with the children on and we’ve watched back to back Friends on a sky channel all night. I was about to head off to bed at 10pm ish (Ady asleep on the sofa now) but the phone rang and it was my friend from NZ so we’ve just spent a happy hour on the phone catching up on each other’s lives. Feeling very motivated having spoken to her and ready to do further thinking and planning in our different life dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And;

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

Ah it was fun 🙂

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

Happy Birthday Barbara 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Way better day today 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Birthday Chris 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know, it’s lazy 😉

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

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

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

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

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

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

and it was very interesting…

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

I meant this! 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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