Super early start today which is always just horrid. Actually it probably isn’t early by Normal People Standards but anything before 8am, particularly involving alarm clocks is early for Davies, Scarlett and I.
I got up first, staggered around with no clothes on but contact lenses in and got them breakfast then went back upstairs to get dressed myself while calling timely reminders to get dressed back down to them. We left home at about 815am and drove to E’s. My car was booked in for 2pm, some 25 miles away from E’s so I made clear to Davies and Scarlett that when I arrived to collect them at lunchtime they would need to come straight away, not beg to finish a game / have ten more minutes / stay for tea and they both agreed.
I dropped them off, explained the need to collect them and dash off again when I was picking them up later and headed off back eastwards again. I was working at Shoreham (our nearest branch) library today; partially as respite from Nightmare Colleague and partially as career development in working at other branches and learning branch specific stuff in other places. I’ve worked there about 4 times before and the staff are very nice and friendly but it still feels all odd and to be honest I’d rather be at Lancing although being given the travelling time and being nearer to the kids than in my usual branch was helpful today. I also got to browse their slightly different to ours selection of books. Obviously everthing they have is available to me to reserve from Lancing but some of the kids books I don’t know even exist until I see them on a shelf. The staff there all said they’d seen me in the paper / on the news over Home Ed. I’m still shocked by just how many people do infact watch the local news / read the local papers!
I whizzed over to E’s to pick up Davies and Scarlett and was really pleased with my timings. It looked like we would have time to nip home for me to get changed, call by a cash point and still be at the mechanics for 2pm. Except…
Davies not only asked if he could stay longer /finish what he was doing, he also asked if they could just stay there while I went and took the car off. NO! Because that’s really rude to ask to stay at someone’s house past when you’ve been invited. Because it would make no sense at all for me to have driven to Brighton to pick them up, then to leave them there after all, drive all the way back to the other side of Worthing, then all the way back to Brighton again to pick them up etc. He also couldn’t find his coat. It turned out it had been hung up as he’d left it on the floor so I was possibly irrationally cross with him about this but my reserves had been drained by the fact that…
Scarlett was MISSING!
E sent M (8yo) who had been playing with Davies off to fetch Scarlett and T (who is about to turn 6) as they were off playing in the street. Davies and Scarlett don’t play in the street at home.This is partially because I’m not 100% happy about kids playing in the street, partially to do with road safety but mostly to do with the fact no other kids live anywhere near us and we have a perfectly good garden so there is nothing to play with in the street anyway. I think I’m fairly liberal in listening to what Davies and Scarlett are comfortable and ready for in terms of letting them out of my sight, sometimes leaving them home alone for a short period etc. I know E’s boys play out and Davies and Scarlett have previously played out in their street too which I’ve been fine with as they are in and out and visible from the front door.
Today though, S and T had gone missing. M couldn’t find them so E started to look worried and I joined her in walking up to the alleyway she had said they could go as far as. They weren’t at the alleyway, we walked all the way through it and they weren’t there either. That came out on a rather busier street and the other two roads flanking the block are pretty busy and Very Busy so none were desireable to have them wandering about on. E suggested going back to get a car to drive round the block so I said I’d do that and ran back to get my car. I drove round the block, now conscious I’d been there for 25 minutes and they’d not ‘just left’ when I got there so had not been seen for upwards of half an hour, they are two six year olds wandering the streets alone, in school hours and for Scarlett at least, in a totally unknown area. I was torn between my default ‘it’ll be fine’ stance and mentally recalling what clothes Scarlett was wearing, what would be a good recent picture to release to the press and an even half decent reason for what the hell I was doing letting someone I’ve not got a CRB check for look after my children :(.
I came across the two of them fairly quickly, wound down my window and in what I imagine was a fairly terrifying tone told them to get in the car. I ranted at them and drove back to E’s. I left E talking to them both in the car as I collected Davies from the house, thanked her for having them, apologised if I’d traumatised T and we left with me still shaking and asking Scarlett precisely what she would have done if a stranger had asked her if she wanted to see some puppies, if someone had grabbed her and bundled her in a car, if a police officer had walked or driven past and asked her name, what she was doing there, where her mummy was and why she wasn’t in school.
It took 3 hours before I stopped feeling sick and E rang me later to apologise again and assure me that is not what I should expect when I have entrusted the care of my children to her while I’m at work. I’m fairly sure this was kids pushing boundaries and taking advantage of freedoms but it did strike me as odd when Davies was telling me that the boys have egg timers to monitor their time on DS and Wii and why did I think that was when I let Davies and Scarlett use their DSs whenever they like that we often end up with very mismatched approaches to what is and isn’t okay for our kids. I’m guessing that all the various ‘what could have happened’s will be giving me nightmares / keeping me awake for the next few nights.
We whizzed over to the mechanics, only a few minutes late and he actually pulled up a couple of minutes after us. He asked me to leave the car for a couple of hours and that it would cost ‘not much, about £30’. His workshop is not quite in the middle of nowhere and has the garden centre Ady used to work at about 10 minutes walk away so we went there via a handily located cashpoint. We had a really good look round all the Christmas decorations, looked at the fish in the indoor pool and waterfall, looked at the guinea pigs, mice, rabbits and hamsters and the aquatic section and then went to the coffee shop. I bought us a hot chocolate each and the kids chose a chocolate cake to share, all of which came to nearly a tenner 😯 Very nice hot chocolates though and not the sort of treat we normally have. We sat and chatted while drinking them and I was struck by how lovely it is to be able to do that with bigger children as there were two mums with young babies at the next table and I overheard them looking forward to when they were big enough to sit up and drink hot chocolate!
We walked back to the workshop and the work was all done and complete and he only charged me £20 in the end – result! And meant the hot choclolates were sort of free ;).
Back home again to put the chickens away, reheat stew from last night for the kids tea, chivvy them into Badger clothes and go back out again to Badgers. Ady joined us there after about 15 minutes. We’d been officially asked to be Parent Helpers tonight and actually assist with the activity which was dreamcatcher making. They were BakerRoss kits and very good but a bit ‘this is the right way to do then’ or maybe that’s just Julie, the leader’s way. Whatever I got the impression it was like that famous quote HEors like about a grade school teacher getting pupils to draw a tree and then telling kids they’d got it wrong when they did their own versions of trees, all crazy coloured and shaped and the author realising what she’d actually meant was not ‘draw a tree’ but ‘draw MY tree’. I encouraged with colouring (and sympathised with the kids moaning about using coloured pencils on shiny paper as they didn’t really show up) and then helped with threading the middle to the outside. Some of the kids got this straight away, others didn’t get the hang of it at all and several wanted to do it their own way. One of the lads who has all sorts of ‘behavioural issues’ and conditions with letters was head down, focussed on doing something he clearly had a vision for. I asked if he wanted my help or to be left to get on with it and he insisted he was fine. He did something totally different to everyone else in the way he’d threaded it but it looked great and was really creative. One of the other girls told him it was ‘wrong’ and his was ‘bad’ which had him about to crumple so I stepped in and told him how great his was because it was His dreamcatcher, different to everyone else’s and really creative and individual. I then had a posse of children around me all keen to tell me how their’s was different to everyone else’s for X, Y and Z reasons which was just fab as they were all so proud of the differences and uniqueness. Over on the other table I heard Julie telling someone they had done it wrong so I suspect if I’m not around next week those I bigged up might be made to feel bad. I hope not. At times like that I think I am quite good with kids after all, I had them all wanting to talk to me and chat about stuff and feeling good about themselves but then they have to reintegrate to the rest of the group and abide by the rules. What I sometimes wonder about with Davies and Scarlett I guess but on a micro-level. Ah well, Ady tells me he was doing similar and told someone who was getting a hard time from another girl about her string being too big and not tight enough that it didn’t matter because obviously she had very big dreams and that was a good thing! :). The whole thing was a world away from the Book Club yesterday where a mish-mash of ‘junk’ was made available and kids came up with amazing creative works of art all under their own steam. Wonder if there’s a market for St Johns Anarchists?! 😆
Back home again and in the re-telling of the Scarlett went missing story to Ady I slumped and decided the whole day had really been far too much. I went off for a bath, cooked dinner, chatted to Davies about an idea for a blog for him for a series of stories he’s worked on (mostly told through pictures) about adventures of bits of litter at a landfill site. He’s loving the drip feed of stuff I learn at my course each week and integrating lots of it into new stories. I think it is all excellent on every level and want to help him push forward with it as I think it has loads of potential.
We’re supposed to be going to London for the day tomorrow. I have to confess that financially (train fare) and generally I don’t really feel that enthused so we may make a last minute decision not to go in the morning.
Scarlett being missing sounds absolutely horrible. How far had they actually got?
My kids have never played out in the street here, because there are very few other children. My brother and I used to, but it was to see friends down the road – I remember one summer of obsessive snail-collecting by us all – but mostly we would be in each other’s gardens or go to the park.
I can’t see that I would let e.g. Buttercup and Scarlett play out the front here (or WHY!). Buttercup and Ernest is a bit different, perhaps, but I don’t let just those two go to the park alone – I don’t like the idea of one small child having to be responsible for another. And I think we all have experienced kids doing stupid things because they’re getting carried away together that neither of them would have done by themselves.
Whole thing sounds grim – the fact of not knowing where she was, and the possible fall-out from the event.
Comment by Alison — 19 November 2009 @ 3:37 pm
I’m probably completely irrational, in that I let Hannah do stuff that I wouldn’t let other kids do while they were here, simply as I wouldn’t know if they were likely to do it safely. Not sure if that makes sense?? I tend to wrap other people’s kids in cotton wool, a bit.
Comment by Joyce — 19 November 2009 @ 8:11 pm
No, that’s rational (in my eyes!) Joyce 🙂 E.g. I wouldn’t send a random 6 year old down to our corner shop, but that’s the age all mine started going. (Roughly – I think with Violet I managed to hold out uintil she was 5 1/2 – she’d been desperate to go since we moved in at 3 3/4.)
Comment by Alison — 19 November 2009 @ 11:14 pm
I have rules for mine and rules for when others are here. Playing out would be one of them. Mine go to the park at the back of the house but aren’t allowed when friends are over to play unless *I* have the say so of their parents. Even at Pea’s age! Buzz would not be allowed to do anything at age 8, to me it’s just too young. I was have heart attacks at a friends the other day when he was playing out and I could actually see him! Hugs for a very rough time xxxx
Comment by Roslyn — 20 November 2009 @ 1:47 am
Yeah, ours play in the close or at the park if i have their parents’ permission but it’s a really safe walk there and back. At 8 Joe has recently started going to the shop on his own, because there are main roads to cross, he’s always been with the others until now.
But argh! Mine have always had to have a watch with them, too, and come home ON THE DOT of the time I tell them otherwise the privilege of ‘playing out’ is removed. I have had occasions where one of them has been late and you immediately think the worst and start worrying.
Anyway not surprised you were exhausted at the end of it, that sort of episode really takes it out of you, I find. Lots of love.
Comment by Sarah — 20 November 2009 @ 9:45 am
Ugh to Scarlet missing!
Comment by Barbara — 20 November 2009 @ 6:27 pm