So bye bye a miracle pie

Davies and Scarlett love American Pie (and Vincent actually too), mostly thanks to Ali and I making them listen to the whole song while we sang along way back last summer (in the old house!) but we listened to it at the weekend and talked about what the song was about and answered Scarlett’s question about what whiskey was! 😯 Yes I know, if ever there was an area of that child’s education that I was fully confident I wouldn’t leave any gaps in it was alcoholic beveredges – how can she have gotten to five years old without knowing what whiskey is? I am truly ashamed of myself 😆 So today it came on the radio and she came running in the lounge to tell me ‘Miracle Pie’ was on and then proceeded to sing it – all correct apart from it being ‘Bye bye, a miracle pie’, which actually is far nicer and goes with the whole day the music died thing much better, so hence forth as well as singing ‘let it never be said the romans are dead’ along to Kaiser Chiefs Ruby we will also sing ‘Bye bye a miracle pie’ to Don McLean. So there! 😆

This morning was a slow start for me, Davies was progressing further with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Scarlett was DSing, we had an early lunch and watched some more Horrible Histories. Infact we watched even more later while they had tea and they love them so much I’ve splashed out and bought them the full set off ebay for £13.99 which I thought was an excellent price. So I can take the library one back and they can watch their own. They’re really loving them and learning loads of little factoids from them which I’m hearing coming up in their games and other points of reference, it’s totally their sort of thing :).

I’d planned a meet up at Highdown Gardens for this afternoon although I had no idea who was coming aside from Julie, Jack and Maisie and another localish to them woman F with her two smaller children J and S. Infact that was all that came and as J had just woken up in the car and was very grumpy and didn’t get any cheerier F turned back about five minutes into the walk leaving just Julie and I. We’ve spoken a few times on the phone in the last couple of weeks but not actually seen each other for a while so had a good catch up. She was fairly hormonal and ranty (22 weeks :)) and quite irrational about a few things but able to be gently ribbed about them and coaxed into a better mood. I couldn’t have wished for a better SIL really, we have enough in common to be really quite close friends and enough different to keep it interesting.

Jack and Maisie were being menaces though, she has been saying lots lately that she’s struggling with them over various things and they were very odd and annoying today. Davies was in a fairly mature mood and was getting fairly pissed off with them as they do this very irritating pushing and pulling him about thing and rarely seem to communicate verbally. He tolerated it very patiently and with great maturity and I was proud of him but felt very sympathetic towards him over it. They all found a birds wing skeleton complete with feather stems etc. so set about finding as much of the rest of the skeleton as they could.

Davies and Scarlett were really into it and tried to reassemble what they’d found and were speculating on what bird it might have been, how it may have died and so on while J and M made silly faces, ran around with sticks and were just slightly strange. At one point I complemented Maisie on her haircut (she’s had it cut short again after a year or so of growing it longer and Julie was saying how happy M is with it and so on, really making it sound like she has had long chats with her about it, as indeed I do with Scarlett about her hair) only to get a blank look before she pulled a silly face and ran off waving her arms about without actually answering me. I really struggle with that :(. Ooh this is ranty and I didn’t mean it to be really, it was fine, a nice couple of hours it’s just that every so often there is such a disparity between Scarlett and Jack and Maisie that I do wonder about them. Anyway…

We walked on, spotting snowdrops and crocuses and things all starting to flower and it was lovely and mild with a beautiful blue sky and all felt very spring like. Davies commented that he wished he’d brought his watercolours and pad so he could capture some of it so I suggested he take the camera and take some photos. We then talked about how to take a series of shots to stitch together to make a panoramic view too and then he went off to take some macro shots of flowers. Finally he looked around for a suitable prop, assembled the other three children on a bench and set up a self timer and then tried to get them to pose for arty shots tilting the camera and telling them to pose as if they were falling.

There was some rock clambering, some tree climbing and Davies made a boat with a leaf and a small stone passenger and sent it down the small series of waterfalls before we were ready to head for home. On the way we’d listened to Michael Buble and talked about ‘kissing a fool’ (because he thought she really loved him but she didn’t so he was a fool and she had been kissing him so she’d been kissing a fool), Come Fly With Me (did she go flying? why did he want her to go flying? were they really on honeymoon? couldn’t he fly on his own?) and Crazy Little thing called love (did Queen write it? did they mind Michael singing it? Had they asked him to sing it?). On the way back I couldn’t quite face such levels of lyric dissection so we listened to Peter and The Wolf instead.

When we got home Davies got the watercolours out straight away and started to paint one of the pictures he’d taken employing all sorts of techinques including dabbing paint off with kitchen roll, colour washing and so on. Scarlett painted Mars, Earth and a pink space blob type thing and I had a go with some pastels before deciding actually they really are very much like chalk and therefore I cannot touch them at all – my skin has gone all goosebumply just thinking about them and their dust (shudder). Then the children had tea and watched more Horrible Histories.

Ady got home and I dashed off to Sainsburys for emergency supplies like milk and came home to read a couple of My Naughty Little Sister stories. I know I read them as a child but hadn’t remembered specific stories until tonight when MNLS throws a china doll out of the window which I distinctly recall really upsetting me as a child and I was transported straight back with the very first sentence of the story and the one where MNLS and Bad Harry eat all the birthday party trifle too. The children love them and are really liking the idea of half an hour of reading aloud to them without pictures each night before bed so I can start looking out for more sophisicated stories now which is great, what with having a whole library at my disposal and all ;).

Tomorrow is a working day for me including doing Baby Rhyme Time first thing so I’ll be spending 11-1130am with ten babies and their parents singing about the Wheels on the bus – think of me! Ady is here in the morning, Dad in the afternoon and then Scarlett has Rainbows again in the evening so it’s going to be a long day all round. Just as well we have a weekend to recover afterwards!