One word? When seven would do…

Ady and the children had a cold the week before we went camping. I was convinced I would not get it by the power of positive thinking alone and having been cold free for two weeks after they recovered I thought I’d got away with it but yesterday I started to feel a bit ‘coldy’ and today I am definitely suffering. I don’t feel dreadful, just generally low with it. Fortunately what I need is something to look forward to and be cheery about and we have plenty of things coming up for the rest of this month to anticipate with good cheer so I’m sure it won’t be long before I am back to myself again. Crap camping, dead chickens and germs aside 😆

This morning we had various things to do including going to get birthday gifts for my Mum who turns 60 tomorrow, cat food, rat poison and new toilet seats for both loos which have broken at the same time – lovely shopping list eh?! 😆 We started in Sainsburys where both children clambered in the trolley which was one of those basket on wheels type affairs. They started holding on to a side each while I guided it round but ended up sitting inside it which meant there was very little room for stuff I actually wanted to buy but did mean it was easier to navigate round the aisles without a child in each hand and a trolley to push. About halfway round they were making sound effects of the trolley stopping and starting and going round corners which reminded me of that Honda ad with the voices making the soundtrack, which I’d showed Davies a video of and the making of a while back so we talked about that and then they did that the rest of the way round, making rain on windscreen sound effects and everything. 🙂

We had a quick walk round Boots looking for potential birthday gifts but found none and then walked round to the pet shop to get cat food. It’s one of those big superstore Pets at Home places which we’ve been into loads of times so as the tills are near the door I went off to get the food while D&S went off to look at the animals and I just called them when I’d paid. I’m really feeling like I have older children this last few weeks, it’s nice :). We were supposed to go to B&Q for loo seats but as I pulled into the car park I realised it is Wednesday which is 10% off for over 60s day and the place was already teeming with mature shoppers so metally scared from working on the tills on Wednesdays for years way back and hating every minute of Wednesdays I decided not to bother and to subject us to another 24 hours of hovering over the loo instead of sitting down. But let’s face it we lived in a field last week, toilets that flush waste away rather than into a seperate bit of the container are still a luxury around here this week. 😆

We got home and Ady rang to say he was coming home for lunch and did we want to go off with him for the afternoon? We’d have loved to but already had plans with Lucy and The Rs so he came home for lunch and then headed back off again. D&S built a house for the dinosaurs out of foam blocks and then played outside for a bit. Lucy and The Rs came round. There were various games including Beauty Salons with hairdressing, painting of nails and applications of eyeshadow, some potion making in Scarlett’s bedroom, Davies put on a show using the toy animals and Lucy and I chatted. Lucy then popped out for an hour to have teeth removed at the dentists while I sat and supervised the continued play. It’s not the first time Rebecca has stayed here without Lucy and she was fine, but it was Richard’s first time of any length and he had a minor wobble towards the end but recovered quickly enough, particularly when noone seemed to panic too much when he did start to wail a bit so he seemed to realise it probably wasn’t worth peristing with it :lol:. Lucy came back, Scarlett and Rebecca carried on playing, sometimes including Richard and Davies sat playing logic puzzles on my laptop. He’s pretty good at that sort of lateral thinking on games when you need to think several steps ahead, definitely not the impulsive type.

Lucy and The Rs left, I cooked the children some tea having helped them tidy up and then went out to do some chick maintenance. I’m a bit better disposed towards chickens again today. I am still fairly morbidly convinced that the remaining four are all cockerels but prepared to wait for first crows before shipping them out as long as we don’t lose any more of them before that. Ady was not going to be home quite in time to leave Scarlett with him and take Davies to Badgers so we all went and arrived at the same time as the Badger leader who left 3 weeks ago on maternity leave coming to show the Badgers her 12 day old new baby daughter. 🙂 Had a quick coo at her and saw Davies in before Ady arrived to take Tarly home again leaving me to sit in the car for a lovely hour or so reading my book and eating humbugs. 🙂 When I went in to collect Davies I heard that she had had a fairly crappy birth experience with epidural, ventouse, forceps and episiotomy from which she was still suffering pain. Poor woman 🙁 She looked very happy though so I’m sure her new baby – Alice – is proving worth it. Davies was very interested to know what all the different words being bandied about were so I explained some infront of the Badger leader telling me and then spent the car journey home explaining the rest. So now he knows where your perineum is and why I was dreading episiotomy more than anything else in labour. One day he’ll make a very sympathetic birth partner I’m sure :lol:.

Back to work for me tomorrow, but Ady’s working from home which has all sorts of plusses, not least coming home to a tidy house and already fed their tea children at the end of the day unlike when Dad is here of an afternoon. We’ve got Mum, Dad and Frazer coming over for a takeaway to celebrate her birthday in the evening and although I have got all the camping laundry washed and dried it is currently in three huge towers waiting to be put away so I doubt I’ll be around much tomorrow aside from perhaps in my lunch break from work.