Ady was home this morning and he and the children got some old photos out. We have a big box of photos from pre-digital camera days which were deemed not quite good enough to go into the photo albums but Ady is a bit superstitious about destroying even quite crappy photos so they reside in a box. Davies has a couple of photo albums he wanted to fill up. Apparently they found a scary one of me – on my 21st birthday when I was slimmer and paler and wore lots more heavy eye make up, looking into the camera with my – in those days – trademark wide eyed scowl which had given a red eyed effect with a very curly, very red hairstyle. Davies said it was scary, Ady agreed, Scarlett said she didn’t think it was scary but wanted a copy to keep so she could terrorise Davies with it when he annoys her! 😆
In the afternoon Dad was here and I don’t know what the children did but I do know it involved glitter. We’ve not done the MP christmas card swap for at least 2 years now but my carpet now looks like we’re participating! 😆
I was at work for the day. In the morning I did storytime – I read Six Dinner Sid which I quite like and a book called A Chair for Baby Bear which was nice too. I had 18 children, one of whom has taken a shine to me and chose to come and hold my hands to do Row, row, row your boat rather than her mummy’s. Obviously this is far from ideal as far as I’m concerned and totally contravenes my ‘No Touching The Singing Library Woman’ rule 😆
I had a lovely lunchbreak all alone in the staff room for a whole hour with two cups of tea, both drunk while still hot, sandwiches made lovingly for me by Ady, a copy of Heat magazine (one of my still mourned sacrifices in the Great Frugal Clampdown of 2005) and best of all complete and utter silence. 🙂
In the afternoon we had an educational 15 minutes when I asked Sian what the little hat thing above her ‘a’ was called and she didn’t know. Carole said she thought it was a circumflex and so we googled and learnt all about circumflexes, carets and more. I remembered learning about grave and accents at school and while looking at wikipedia I noticed ampersands and confided that I’d only learnt what they were a couple of weeks ago as a result of Deb brightkiting about them. If I had a circumflex in my name I would have known what it was called so I berated Sian about it and for the rest of the afternoon we all adopted one for our names as we all had an ‘a’ (Abi, Carole, Sian, Nicola – which is what I am called at work ;)).
Emilie’s parents had been in with her note left to us at the library – she left a full set of notes to various people. It simply said ‘I am sorry to end working with you all in such an abrupt manner. You must not blame yourselves, this is something I have carried with me for a long time’. Her obituary is in last weeks paper and the funeral is tomorrow, several of us are attending from work, myself included. We’re all still very shaken by it all and reading the note was very strange.
I came home to find the house with lights blazing, curtains open, glitter adorning many surfaces and the chickens still not away so dashed around sorting all that out and getting the kids tea before sitting down with a cup of tea myself. Ady arrived home and I read a couple of books to the children; The Birth of the Earth which we thought was fab (and I was amazed and impressed with how much Davies already knew) and The Man Whose Mother was a Piratewhich we rather liked aswell.
Tomorrow is a lazy morning at home with the children and maybe a spot of baking.