Seen more blood than a backstreet dentist

We’ve been to Paradise Park today with Lucy and the Rs. I like Paradise Park, it’s been a bit of a staple day out venue for us for several years now and is actually owned by a distant relative of mine so I always feel very loyal to my family going there and supporting them :lol:. We went there a lot when Davies was in the full throes of his dinosaur interest and as the season ticket pass is so reasonable (under £40 and gets in 2 adults and 4 children) we have had one for the last 3 years, last year sharing one with Lucy. I’d decided not to renew it this year as we have bought NT membership and signed up to monthly RSPB subs too and have sort of moved on to other interests. Also as we’re not sure whether we’ll still be living here in a year it seemed shortsighted to spend money on something we may not realise full use of so I thought we’d give it a miss this year. But Lucy has a season ticket so it was an ideal chance to go over and have a day there cheaply :).

We met, only slightly after the arranged time and had a rather cursory walk through the main Planet Earth area, past the dinosaurs and into the cactus gardens with the children barely stopping to glance left or right. We walked through the gardens and Davies did stop to point out the miniature Bodiam Castle and Long Man of Wilmington to me but otherwise they headed for the pirate ship area. We had a good 15 minutes or so of sitting there with them playing before they were ready to move on to the indoor amusements area. We were in that space for a good couple of hours and they made full use of the soft play bits, games machines (they had 4 x 20p tokens and a 20p piece each, the 20pence went in the grabber keep trying til you win a prize sweetie machine, I think Tarly spent all her tokens on the spider stamp game which is a bit like a dance mat and I’ve no idea what Davies used his on but they both came back with fistfuls of tokens worth a penny each in the shop). Lucy and I sat and chatted and ate lunch.

It was really nice, the children haven’t really seen each other for a while and they all seemed to enjoy each others company, Lucy and I got to properly chat which we’ve not managed for ages and although it was a nice day I was reassured that D and S won’t miss having Paradise Park on our list of places to attend for a while, which was good :).

We came home to find two more eggs from the bantams which one of the hens was sitting on. I took them away and infact Scarlett had them for her tea but I am going to read up on letting them hatch as she clearly wants to although I am worried the nights are still way too cold to leave chicks out there and I don’t want to be bringing them inside for weeks if we are going to let them hatch their own, I need to be more learned about the whole thing before we let them start hatching. Tom (Ady’s mate) has an incubator he can lend us and he is keen to have some of our eggs to hatch in return for some of his bantams (another, different rare breed to ours) eggs so we might do that as I want a couple more hens and I think we’d sell roosters quite easily as they are purebred rare breeds so worth having six or so chicks hatch. I think we’ve had 12 eggs in all in the last week which is way more than we’d been led to expect we would get from just 2 hens and is still very exciting to lift the lid of the house and see them nestled there in the straw :).

We had various conversations in the car about various things most of which escape me now. Davies put LSOH on when we got home but then I started playing the evil SHIFT as linked to by Alison and they came to join me with that. They had tea and then it was time for Badgers. Ady arrived home in time to come too and my Mum ended up coming down to sit in the car with us too and catch up which was nice if slighly surreal to all be sitting in the dark in a car in a car park chatting and making plans for Good Friday :lol:.

Home for bed for the children after a few more pages of Relax Max which is all about poetry and they both finally seem to have gone to sleep at a more sensible time tonight. They are off with Ady to a fimeducation screening of The Spiderwick Chronicles tomorrow while I’m off to work.