Productivity

I’ve been really tired ever since we got back from camp, sleeping on the sofa in the evening and having to drag myself out of bed in the morning. I’m sure it’s just catching up from being away but in honour of that and a Save Nic’s Liver Campaign I’ve sworn off midweek drinking again for a while. So expect me to be either perky, bright eyed and up with the larks each morning or simply in an evil frame of mind without my alcoholic crutch Monday to Thursday :lol:.

This morning I was determined to do something productive and had either the playroom with it’s desperately in need of attention table to deal with – see that is why we didn’t have a table, it’s nothing but bloody trouble. It sits there all inanimate, covered with homeless clutter just waiting for someone to come and deal with it. Fucking needy things, tables. Or the ebay pile which currently resides in our shower. I know, I know, it’s a funny place to use as a storage solution but what can I say, we’re zany us, wacky, alternative, up until a week or so ago we didn’t even have a table so using a shower cubicle to keep the ebay pile is just par for the course round here – you should see what we keep in our bathroom cabinet ;).

So rather than trail everything downstairs I took the camera, the laptop and a very big mug of tea upstairs and sat and photographed and listed a huge pile of stuff. This was hampered slightly by three things. The first was my camera being a bit poorly. It has a slider button to change settings from still, movies or playback and it keeps getting stuck on movies, so it only takes stills every so often. It also fell off my leg onto the floor with a big clatter last week and the lens cover thingy doesn’t work properly so it’s in semi retirement really while I decide whether it’s worth taking it to a camera repair place or not. The second thing I was hampered by was Davies who had decided his productive day would be ‘getting further on all my xbox games than I have ever got before’ and needed me to find a walkthrough online for the next bit of the Wallace and Gromit game he was playing and then read it out to him. I did that and he disappeared off again. The third thing was Scarlett who had decided to come and plead the case for approximately half the items I was intending to ebay and to ‘check everything is there’ on the rest. Which largely involved scattering stuff across the floor, declaring she was bored, distracting me from writing things like ‘perfect to take your little space ranger to infinity and beyond this Christmas’ about Toy Story cd roms on my ebay listings (I used to be in marketing you know!) and generally being a pest.

When the laptop battery ran out I brought the remaining stuff downstairs with me and sat and did a load more. By now the children had tired of X box so they did some drawings and then got the geomags out. They started to watch War of the Worlds, then started to watch some of the WWII in colour dvds I’d got out and finally we put Nightmare Before Christmas on because we decided that NOW was the optimum time for viewing it midway between Halloween and Christmas. I listed dressing up clothes and letterland flashcards and games laughing to myself at how easily phrases such as key stage one, early literacy, pre reading skills and the like tripped from my keyboard.

We had cinnamon french toast for lunch, I drank lots of tea, we had the heating on all day. The bantams came out to eat their layers pellets, shivered awhile then said ‘cluck this, it’s bloody freezing’ and went and huddled back inside again. It rained. Me and the kids had plenty of interesting conversations not one of which I can recall now, they drew me lots of pictures including keys on the front to tell me what the picture would be like inside and Scarlett helped make the cinnamon toast by ‘fighting the eggs’ (she meant beating! :lol:). We had a frantic me loading the kids into the car with Ady pulling round the corner home just in the nick of time so me and Davies got into his car instead and he and Scarlett went back into the house and I took Davies to swimming lessons. He was commended at being the best at jumping in the pool – which was good as it was something the rest of them had been doing last week when we’d not been there but Davies didn’t falter when she said ‘right everyone stand on the edge and jump in’ and just went for it :). He is making some headway generally actually, to the point I was enthused enough to pick up a timetable for public swimming times with the idea of maybe taking them during the week so he can get a bit of practise in. He won’t be olympic standard anytime in this incarnation but I’m very proud of his tenacity and ‘if I try hard enough I can do anything’ even when it’s bloody tough and doesn’t come naturally attitude. 🙂

Home for tea for him and I had an early bath while Ady put the children to bed. I’d had a real yearning for a curry last Friday night when we got home from camp, I wanted something really spicy and Ady had cooked a fairly disappointing one so I did one tonight and it was lovely, exactly what I’d wanted :). We watched Down with Love, well I did, Ady got pissed off with it and went off to watch something else in bed instead. And now, because I’m working in the morning and partaking of an Autumn Walk in the afternoon I’ll be off to bed too.