Quickish Blogish

I had a plan to take Davies and Scarlett out for the day somewhere today. In celebration of everyone finally feeling better (see how I’ll jinx that for tomorrow now ;)) I decided last night in the bath to go somewhere with them. I rang my Mum who is currently on a Being A Better Mother To Nic drive which pushes me into a Being A Better Daughter To Mum drive to ask if she wanted to come too.

My two possible ideas were a local working museum which I know is very good but is also very expensive so we never go to but has an offer running currently for cheap entry for local people or Paradise Park the dinosaur place where we’ve not been for ages and is a good day out and also has a fair bit on fossils and minerals which fits in with stuff we’re talking about at the moment.

Mum couldn’t do today but said she really wants to go to Amberley so we rearranged that for a different day next week. Ady reckons he can get discount on an annual pass to Paradise Park as he sells to them and is going there on Friday so told me to hold off and he’d see what he could set up. Which successfully scuppered both my plans really. So I went to bed deciding to see what the weather was doing this morning and make a decision then.

The weather was nice but I slept in and so was still pottering about dealing with breakfast and clothes and chickens at 10ish when Lucy sent me a text and we arranged to meet at the park. We were predictably late as I foolishly only allowed the 5 minutes it should have taken to put shoes and coats on, get into the car and drive the 2 minutes it takes to get to the park and it somehow took closer to 15 minutes :rolls:

The four kids all played really well, Lucy and I got to chat and when they started to get hungry an hour or so later they were all keen for everyone to come back to our house for lunch. Scarlett’s been a bit of a minx today, behaving trickily and then saying an airy ‘oh sorry’ and expecting that to put things right which has made me cross with her. I also totally overreacted to walking into the lounge and finding Davies touching a blanket which had been put over the telly, which is stupid enough on it’s own let alone the fact the box of museum fossils had also been put on top of the TV and fallen down the back 😯 I sent both my kids to their rooms and went to get the full story. Scarlett said she’d put the blanket on the tv as Davies had turned it on and she didn’t want to watch it. I stomped upstairs to find Davies sobbing because he had just been trying to put right the fact that the blanket was on the TV and the fossils had fallen down the back (Lucy had moved the fossils which were on a chair and didn’t realise what they were or consider putting them on top of the tv might be a bad idea :rolls:).He was really upset about getting the blame for something he hadn’t done and was trying to actually put right. 🙁 I managed to calm him down, apologise and get him to concede that while I’d been wrong to do so jumping to that conclusion was easily done and that he should have come and told me what was going on rather than trying to deal with it himself.

Peace was restored. I made some cookies because we didn’t have anything ‘nice’ to offer everyone after their sandwiches but I don’t actually think any of the children had any in the end. They mostly played in the garden and aside from Tarly doing a couple more unthinking acts and Richard struggling to keep up with the older ones a bit it all seemed to go okay. Which was nice, I’ve missed sitting and chatting to Lucy.

They left, and the kids and I went into the kitchen to wash up and cook their tea. While I was chatting to them Scarlett suddenly said ‘oh look, there’s a pheasant on the garage roof’ in a fairly casual way. I was halfway through saying ‘well obviously there won’t be a pheasant on the garage roof’ when I too looked out of the window to see a pheasant on the garage roof! It them got spooked and flew down onto the patio.

We raced upstairs with the camera to see if from Davies’ bedroom window and then went downstairs to look at it. It seemed fine, was a cock bird (the pretty coloured ones, hens are just brown) and wasn’t quite as giddily scared of us as pheasants normally are. Scarlett had a theory that maybe one of the ones Ady’d brought home hadn’t been properly dead which made us laugh! It then went through the hedge into the chickens area causing mayhem in there and flew off from the front. No idea where it came from or indeed where it went but the children are hoping it returns with a hen to live in our garden! 🙂

The kids had tea and got ready for Badgers. We had to put the chickens away as it was still daylight but would be properly dark by the time we got home so that was a comical few minutes as they kept jumping back out again as we put them in so in the end I stood holding the door shut and Davies and Scarlett grabbed them one at a time so we could shove them in.

They both seemed to enjoy Badgers – not sure what Scarlett did but Davies learnt about the Chinese years and what animal they all were (he’s a dragon) then they had to pick up sweets using chopsticks. He has managed to befriend the two boys who were causing him some strife (proper word, strife ;)) and was full of happy chatter about it.

Ady met me there and we went for our usual walk about taking in the Co Op (where I bought some socks for Davies who never seems to have any and a few sewing / knitting bits which were reduced to pence each including a mini sewing kit each for the kids as Davies has been asking for one since he made his ewok) and then Waitrose where we got loads of reduced to clear bread rolls from the bakery and some almond croissants for breakfast in the morning.

Scarlett went home with Ady and Davies came with me (hence I know what he did but not what she did) and we enjoyed a surreal moment when he told me I should over take Ady so we could beat them home while we drove down a 30mph road with a speed camera. I asked if he thought that was safe or sensible and he replied ‘of course not, but probably worth it for the fun!’. He then reminded me that we’d been overtaken by someone on that road coming home from Badgers once and said it was really bad and we should report him. I asked quite how he thought we should do that and his reply was ‘well just, you know, tell everyone’ so I wound down the car window and yelled it out into the night which had Davies giggling hysterically and wondering whether it would make the news! 🙂 I love my boy:)

Home for a few chapters of Mr Gum & the Biscuit Billionaire then bed for them (Davies took sewing to bed, not sure H&S Ady would be happy about that if he’d realised. Needles? In bed?!), bath for me and then I made toad in the hole and we watched Location, Location and Grand Designs. I love Wednesday night tv :).