One word? When seven would do…

Up early this morning with Tarly, so we sat and snuggled on the sofa watching tv together. Davies got up and we sat altogether cuddled up. Lovely 🙂

The children asked to play with the wooden train track today so when I went upstairs to get dressed I brought it back downstairs with me and they sat and set up a track. Lucy arrived with Richard and Rebecca, who both dove straight into the train track playing while Lucy and I stood in the kitchen and I iced some biscuits.

Then it was time for Tarly and I to head over to the doctors to meet our HV for her 4 year development check. Our HV, Jenni, is lovely. I first met her when I was pregnant with Davies and she was pretty much everything you could ask for from a HV for a woman who had never even held a baby let alone changed a nappy or fed one before having Davies. I didn’t have family around to help out or offer advice and Jenni was great with lots of non-judgemental, helpful and sensible advice. She came to HV work from midwifery and between her own children and fostered ones has raised about 10 kids. I know that she is fantastic in being supportive of the young, single mothers in the more deprived areas of the town we live in and although I have heard many horror stories about HV generally I think she is a genuinely nice person in the job for all the ‘right’ reasons. So I last saw her shortly after we moved home for Scarlett’s 18 month and Davies’ 3.5year checks and we had a good old catch up, I sometimes see her to smile or wave to when we’re out and about in Lancing and infact the Health Centre where she is part-based is next door to the library so I imagine we’ll bump into each other there. I was in two minds about the development check really. Partially because I knew we didn’t ‘need’ it, I have no concerns about Tarly’s development, I know the check is mainly a pre-school preparation one so rather irrelevant to us and I remain cagey about the fact we are not known to LEA etc and feel that any contact with anyone could be what flags us up (and I’m not being paranoid, I know of at least one realife case where a well meaning HV refered a family to the Home Ed LEA bod) and clearly however lovely Jenni might be she is part of ‘the system’. But similarly I know I have nothing to hide as such and would rather have gone along and allayed any doubts or fears than prompted non existant ones by not doing so. I still took up Lucy’s very kind offer to stay with Davies while I took Tarly over there on her own though so as to not parade my six year old infront of her and also to ensure it was all about Tarly rather than their usual double act.

So we set off across the road (literally) just before the appointed time, queued at the reception and spoke to the receptionist who gave us a series of blank looks, kept scurrying off to confer with someone else and eventually came back to say there were no developement checks booked in, Jenni wasn’t there today and was I sure I had the right day and right place and right time. I bloody hate doctors receptionists, having had many a row with them over the years so I confess to having something of an attitude back to her and standing there for just a while too long to ensure she had to apologise for the mix up and suggest I ring Jenni rather than just dismissing me without a word as appeared to be her intention. I dashed back home, fished out the letter asking us to attend and rang them. I spoke to another HV who assured me that yes, we were booked in, yes Jenni was on her way to the doctors and that she would ring the surgery and tell them I was coming back over again. So we put our coats and shoes back on and stomped back over the road again. Thoroughly enjoyed listening to the receptionist apologise for the confusion and being all magnanamous and saying ‘oh that’s ok, it wasn’t your fault’ all sweetly to her (which it wasn’t – it was her attitude which pissed me off, not the confusion about the appointment.) and then we sat in the waiting room and looked at books until we got called in.

Jenni opened the meeting with ‘well we don’t normally see children at this age anymore, but I just realised it would be the last chance before I stopped officially being your health visitor and I wanted to see you!’ so she did the checking type stuff in a cursory manner, asked loads of questions about HE, asked after Davies to the degree that I almost wished I had brought him (cos actually, although she has many a baby through her care and clinics she clearly remembered so much about us and all sorts of little details that I think she’d have probably liked to have seen him), appeared reassured at my explanations and ideas on how we do things, seemed interested about the whole national curriculum bashing I did and left me with ‘well that’s it really, but you have my number, so as you won’t have a school nurse please do ring if you ever have anything I could help with’ and that was that. 🙂

She did ask me if I ever get cross. To which both Scarlett and I laughed but it appeared to be a genuine question and she said that in all the years she’d known me I just always appeared so carefree, calm and happy that she couldn’t really picture me losing my temper. I assured her that I do, regularly and Scarlett backed me up that I do indeed shout lots, but ‘I always know Mummy loves me’ :). So either she’s heard me yelling at the kids from across the road into her office and was checking up on it all or she genuinely has only ever seen me on my best behaviour! 😆 Scarlett was looking at a book while we were chatting and kept interupting to either point something out or ask a question and I was stopping my conversation with Jenni to talk to Tarly a lot so I guess I came across at quite patient and child focussed, which I do strive to be most of the time but I’m equally capable of telling them to shut up interupting me when I’m talking and just wait!

Back for lunch and some rapid tidying of train tracks before Colin fetched Lucy and co for Lucy to go and start her new job 🙂 and we wrapped up warm and headed out to meet up with Julie, Jack and Maisie at Highdown Gardens. It was mild and not too windy so we had a nice couple of hours with the children running round and us following at a slower pace and chatting. Although we see each other every week we were saying that it is mostly in the company of other people too which means conversations take slightly different turns rather than our previous cosy sister in law chats, so we caught up properly which was lovely. 🙂 Julie’s also supposed to be staring a small part time job in the new year so although it means our regular get togethers with Lucy might get pushed about a bit hopefully the 3 of us will continue to manage weekly meets and catch up on our new topics of the world of work again. 🙂

Maisie and Scarlett managed to scare us by double backing on themselves and hiding in some bushes. I think it got slightly out of hand from being a little joke which they’d intended to jump out on us with to us fretting that they really had got lost and suddenly we had a full scale search going on for them. There were lots of gardeners in the grounds so Julie and Jack went one way while Davies and I went the other yelling the girls’ names as we went. It was probably less than five minutes but felt longer before I heard Julie yelling ‘I’ve found them!’ and there they were. They had been barely out of sight the whole time and I think as our voices got more frantic they’d started to feel too scared to come out. First time I’ve thought I’d lost Tarly really though, that’s a bloody scary feeling isn’t it?

We left them and came home again. I offered to do Christmas hama bead patterns with them but they turned me down in favour of playing with the geomags together instead so I left them to it.

They both fell asleep really late tonight – gone 9pm. Davies was lying in bed playing with a vtech laptop thing he has typing his name in. He did ‘Davies’ but wanted to know how to do his middle and last names so I showed him.

Off to work tomorrow for the whole day – looking forward to it 🙂