Swimmingly

Today has been most productive :).

First thing we all lazed about watching Cbeebies which we like to watch sometimes for it’s retro appeal 😆 I was telling Frankie at work on Saturday about how there was a time, way back when, I used to play fantasy shag or die with stars of Balamory, have a favourite Wiggle (yes I know that’s not Cbeebies) and idle away many a happy hour planning violent and evil deaths for Sarah Jane off Tikkabilla. She laughed at me and said that was yet another good reason for nursery and school as far as she was concerned, never having gotten as irate about Tico the Squirrel off Dora wearing a waistcoat because she was busy sewing on nametapes and packing her charges off with their lunchbox and bookbag while she got to watch Trisha instead of the three times a day repeats of children’s TV that us HE folk are subjected to 😆 I didn’t bother telling her that not all HE folk just watch kids tv all day and some of them follow curriculums and go out on seasonal walks and stuff, it would only make me look slovenly :lol:.

I did four loads of washing, wrote out postage labels for a load of ebay and amazon marketplace parcels I’ve sold and then sat and packaged them all up while Davies and Scarlett got dressed, turned the tv off and played DSs for a while.

Then we headed out. In the car Davies and Scarlett were discussing the sun and Davies explained, using props how the world turns and it looks like the sun is rising and setting and night and day happen. It was not only technically correct he also used jargon and demonstrated it and answered her questions as they went along 😯 Apparently some of it was stuff I’d told him and the rest he learnt at Badgers. As we drove along the seafront we observed how very high the tide was and agreed that in previous years before the sea defense rocks were put in the coast road would have been flooded and closed. It used to happen fairly regularly when I was younger and after high winds and high tides there would often be seaweed and pebbles strewn across the road. We moved on slightly to talk about why the poles were cold and the equator was hot and what the equator was and whether the middle of the planet is a ball of melted metal and why all the deserts are around the equator.

We needed to go into town to pay their Christmas cheques from my Granny into their bank accounts (she gets all anxious if the cheques haven’t been cashed within a few weeks and I didn’t have a trip into town planned for any other reason coming up so thought I’d get that done). We managed to park in the road outside the bank and as there was a lurking traffic warden I paid the minimum of 20pence for a 15 minute ticket. We dashed into the bank, discussed the evil bank pen thieves who might have stolen all the pens on chains and what their motivation might have been. I didn’t like to mention that when I was about 14 we all had pens nicked from the bank with as much of the chain still attached as you could manage to yank off 😆 We had a quick peep in the charity shops next to the bank, ever conscious of the time ticking by and counting down what we thought we might have left before returning to the car. On the way a huge great bee buzzed past us and I mentioned that people say the first bee of the year you spot is the sign that spring is on the way so something was not right with it only being January. Scarlett wanted to know if bees hibernate then and I said I didn’t know (I do now!) and actually I wasn’t sure how much truth was in the saying anyway. Which led us onto talking about hedgehogs and quite specifically the one we found in our garden and took to the vet a couple of years ago. Then Davies commented on the funny way conversations have of taking turnings and moving onto completely different subjects.

We went to the post office for me to post all my parcels and catch up on the latest gossip in the whole prospective closure of the branch – they’ll find out on 22nd January, which means that could have been my last visit there, hope not :(. Then we went to the libarary. I’m rubbish at taking Davies and Scarlett to the library these days just because I pick books up for them all the time when I’m at work and then we are too busy with other stuff for it to be somewhere I think of taking them when I’m not working. But they do love it there and actually choosing their own books is a real pleasure that I shouldn’t be denying them really. Plus they wanted to see my display :). So they started by choosing five books which stretched to seven and I think they ended up with about 20 between them 😆 Scarlett chose all story books, Davies chose mostly stories and a couple of non fiction including something about maps and mapping, something about water cycles and something about energy and forces. I tried to interest him in one about the earth and sun and equator and stuff but he was over that whole thing already :lol:.

At the counter Scarlett asked if she could ‘beep her own books’ so Frankie obliged with that. Scarlett said she’d like to work at the libary but only if she could work there with me. This sounds cute but actually is the whole dark side of libraries really isn’t it – spinster daughter not only never leaves home but works with mother at library where they take it in turns to make the packed lunches for work and devise ways of using the dewey decimal cataloguing system around the house on their tinned goods, dvds and bathroom cleaning products. Davies said he wouldn’t want to work there so Frankie tried to tempt him with the idea of all the sweets we have behind the counter and said she’d been so bored at work yesterday she’d wanted to carry out a challenge to find out how many maltesers she could fit in her mouth at once. She reckoned 10, Davies was keen to up the stakes to 20, so we left before he tried 😆 We did take a couple of chocolates from the tin behind the desk before we went though :).

Home for pancakes for lunch. I planned a late, big lunch to keep them going through swimming and a lighter tea afterwards (although they ended up with a big tea anyway, need to remedy and hone that plan for next week really – eating at 7pm and going to bed soon after isn’t a great idea). They watched the dvd extra disc from The Incredibles and then moved into a game which lasted a good couple of hours. I was fairly oblivious to it but it involved the blocks coming out and buildings being built. I was busy on the phone and the internet to YHA trying to organise some 2008 NicCamps.

Davies has been playing on brain training a bit. I showed him (and Scarlett) how to play suduko so he was doing some of them and he also worked through the 20 calculations one. He’s all still about working stuff out on his fingers and clarifying what ‘times’ means but he now recognises most 3 figure numbers written down and reckons he can count up to a thousand and from having no interest in numbers at all really he is suddenly doing lots of playing with them so that’s good. He’s really enjoying his DSing generally, doesn’t bother asking me for any help and is very confident at finding his way round games. Scarlett played her cooking mama for ages (she is great at it) and some purrpals too with equal amounts of confidence and ability, stuns me how they manage it, and without reading too – I struggle to navigate round the things even when I can read the instructions! 😆

We had a period of electrical related excitement when the fusebox tripped out and then kept tripping out. So by process of isolation and elimination I worked out it was something in the garage so kept that circuit turned off and having checked there was nothing on fire out there waited for Ady to come home and investigate further as I didn’t like the idea of messing around with electricity with just me and two children home incase something went wrong. It appears one of two chest freezers isn’t working and is tripping everything so we’ve emptied it out, eaten loads of frozen food for dinner and it’s defrosting and will hopefully be okay again after a defrost and clean out. If not we’ll be keeping an eye on freecycle for another as our two freezer status has been very instrumental in our frugal monthly shop so we’d struggle without it.

Then it was time to get ready for swimming. Scarlett has been beyond excited about swimming since I confirmed she was starting last week when she recieved the news by coming and giving me a spontaneous kiss and cuddle such was her delight. She has been desperate to go and show off her ‘diving tricks’ that she’s been practising in the bath for months, she also seemed to expect to be swimming by pretty much the end of the lesson. I talked to her about how in the swimming pool the instructor is in charge and she must listen and pay attention the whole time. I was exoecting her to enjoy it but also prepared for it to go wrong and for her to be disappointed at not being a swimmer straightaway. I was also prepared for a sudden last minute attack of nerves or shyness. Ady came with us as he managed to be home in time so he took Davies off to get changed and I took Scarlett and we met up again at the poolside. I think Ady was all prepared to stand next to her til she got in the water but I dragged him off to the seating area and by the time we’d sat down Scarlett was happily standing next to Davies and chattering away to a little girl and comparing the lengths of their plaits with each other :lol:. There was only six of them in the class today which I’m sure helped as we had 1/3 of the attention :). She put Scarlett at the shallowest end with Davies next to her and the lifeguard alerted to watch her closely. This had the negative effect of making Scarlett chatter away to the lifeguard 🙄 but she got straight in there with the first task of going underwater :). She actually did really well, made a good effort to listen, tried to do as she was asked, paid attention to the others and most importantly loved every minute of it :). She didn’t try and get my attention once, no waving or shouting which was something I worried she might do. She was great at tasks such as diving through a hula hoop underwater and so on. She wasn’t fantastically coordinated but looking at Davies tonight made me realise how far he has come in just two terms so I’m sure that will come together pretty quick. I had a quick chat with the instructor who said she was fine and clearly was ready and ok to be there which was good as she is about as young as you can be there, they start lessons only when they reach 5, only at the start of a term and the waiting list is so long I would imagine most new starters at 6+, infact Scarlett was only just tall enough to reach the bottom comfortably. So I was really proud of her. I was also really proud of Davies, he was really, properly swimming across the pool for a whole width with ease really, it’s all suddenly clicked for him. 🙂

We rang my parents when we left the pool so Tarly could update them on the lesson (well they are paying for them!) and then home for tea for the children. I sat and read them the whole pile of library books (which is good, it means they can all go back tomorrow) while they ate and then they headed off to bed. We watched the HFW Chicken Run show.

Tomorrow is another first – back to Badgers for Davies and the start of Badgers for Tarly. Once again she can’t wait and is bouncing with excitement about the whole thing. It’s so nice :).