Swimming, stressing and swearing…

I’ve been feeling quite intolerant today. I suspect there is a hormonal reason for it too but I also seem to have had various triggers to set me off too.

First thing (well as first thing as we get round these parts) Davies was being annoying to Scarlett so to get him to leave her alone and her to stop whinging at him I got him to come and sit with me and clicked on to Education city which I’d signed up to a free trial of the other day, more to see if the records of all the previous free trials had gone so I could get another one really ;). Results are in the post below 🙂

We went to Tasha’s where the kids disappeared and sat on Toby’s bed all playing Lego Star Wars on their DSs and passing them round to get each other passed various levels. Tasha and I chatted and it was all very pleasant. I do love her new house, it is right on the seafront and the sea was a murky colour today, really high tide and just outside her lounge window (with the coast road inbetween). I would so love to have her sea view out of my windows. Ady laughed at me when I said that and told me with rising sea levels and global warming living as close to the beach as we do one day we will have! I’m guessing / hoping not quite in my lifetime though ;).

In the middle of all this though I got a text from Liza to say she was ill and wouldn’t be able to have D and S tomorrow 🙁 – hope you are better very soon Liza xx. I made several frantic phonecalls to Ady who couldn’t rearrange meetings at work for the morning and my parens but couldn’t get hold of either of them. I had previously been wondering if Tasha would be up for some sort of reciprocal kids going to play once a month / fortnight as she has been mentioning wishing she had some child-free hours to do various things but she didn’t offer and pretty much made it clear she hates the idea of being in sole charge of other people’s children (which I totally empathise with ;)) so that both answered that question and didn’t help with my tomorrow situation either.

That makes me sound like I view every new potential friend as a childcare prospect which I so don’t but the kids are now at an age where I could see dropping them off to play somewhere and returning the favour for someone would be normal, easy and be something we’d all get something out of. Davies and Scarlett had already said they would like to go to Toby’s for a play instead of having eg my parents over to look after them. But anyway, not to be.

We left there and went straight to swimming. I had offered to go in the pool with them today but they’d both said they’d rather sit and DS than go in the pool while each other was having a lesson so I got a reprieve from that ;).

Scarlett went first and I was getting really fed up watching. The little sad boy from last week seemed much better today, but it was still painfully s l o w and covering the same things she has now been doing for a year. I could see the point during the first term but now she can all but swim it seems pointless doing things like gaining water confidence when she had had a quick five minutes in the pool before the lesson practising handstands underwater! She was at the far end of the row of 9 children and the first ten minutes of the half an hour lesson had already gone before she even got in the pool. I think she did about six widths in total with all the turn taking and waiting around. Several of the other mothers were moaning about the same thing. I think a lesson is about £6 a time which makes that 1/9th of a 30 minute session expensive at best, outrageous when she probably didn’t even get noticed this week for all the zero ability kids in the group 🙁

I asked her when she came out if she had enjoyed it and felt she was progressing and she said she was though. She also said she wants to catch up with Davies quick and be in his group again so hopefully that will happen.

In the middle of all this fuming I chatted to Ady again who was feeling guilty that he couldn’t be home tomorrow but then I finally got hold of my Mum who very grudgingly agreed to come over in the morning amidst much huffing and sighing :(. Davies wasn;t too happy at the prospect, he said he doesn’t like the way she so clearly prefers him to Scarlett (she does) as he wants to feel the same as Scarlett and she treats him as though he is ‘too special’. 🙁 Oh poo!

Scarlett came and sat on my lap while Davies has his lesson which went well, he is doing really well and enjoying it lots :).

We got home and found a huge parcel on the doorstep which I’ve been expecting for weeks addressed to Davies. I nipped to put the chickens away and came back to open it with them. It was the prize – which I’d arranged to be sent to Davies as there is supposed to be a certificate with it (which isn’t actually there) so it would have his name on, for this competition entry.

It is a massive amount of pyrex bakeware – roasting tin, pizza tray, baking tray, large flan tin and deep cake tin along with Wallace and Gromit oven gloves, pot stand, tea towel and cloth bag :). Woohoo!

Scarlett has been desperate to do some fimoing for her ‘Get Creative’ task for the WAA (wildlife action awards, think I’m going to be mentioning them a lot so they can be initials from now on) and make a rabbit. Ady arrived home so he took over cooking their tea and I sat with them to do some fimo creatures. I made a butterfly and a hedgehog, Tarly made a very good rabbit, a hedgehog and a mouse and Davies made a fab dragonfly.

While we were at Tasha’s I also got a text from Rose (my not-swinger friend) telling me that HE was being mentioned on Radio 2, then a BK from Merry to say she had just been on radio 2 so I was desperate to hear it, not least because it was reading group tonight and I just knew Rose would want me take on it all so I *needed* to know what had happened and been said.

The internet was incredibly slow (in fairness it was right in the middle of Obama’s live coverage so I’m guessing that might have been draining it a bit) so listening on iplayer was incredibly frustrating with loads of stopping and starting. It was agonisingly slow just to find where it was within the 2 hours show. In the meantime the kids were being noisy, the cat was trying to sit on my lap or my laptop and I was just getting incredibly stressed.

I did plenty of venting at the idiots on the radio and then left the house to the strains of Scarlett sobbing because Ady had managed to burn all the fimo creations 🙁

Reading group was fine – I’d not read the book but enjoyed listening to others discussing it, we didn’t talk about the radio show beyond a ‘did you listen to it?’ as we said goodbye and aside from getting all the way home before remembering I’d meant to get some potatoes and then having to go back out for them, and a misunderstanding between Ady and I about who was cooking dinner – he very wisely backed down from that one 😉 the evening has simmered back down again nicely.

NB Liza if you’re reading please don’t feel bad, it was my own lack of back up plan I was stressed about and my Mum’s reluctance and Davies’ lack of enthusiasm about her coming anyway. Along with radio 2 idiots, swimming lesson incompetance and the likely imminent arrival of my own peak of stroppiness each month ;).