One of those days which remind you just why you have made the choices you have :).
Thanks to at least ten late nights in a row and a real inability to get to sleep early anyway Davies, Scarlett and I were all in need of a late morning. I can’t deny I am to be heard telling Davies and Scarlett to ‘just go to sleeeeeeep!’ at times, but the truth is this is more to do with my desire to be Nic or maybe part of Nic & Ady rather than Mumma for a couple of hours in the evening. Ideologically and philosophically I know that I have a natural sleep pattern which has me awake til the early hours of the morning then sleeping til the later hours of the morning, Davies seems to have something similar going on. He is at his best sitting in bed after he should have gone to sleep, churning out the best drawings, doing the best reading, coming up with the most interesting ideas and questions. In short, he has the brilliant professor about him in the hours when the rest of his age group are fast asleep.
And how great is it that our lifestyle means actually he doesn’t have to go to sleep because he doesn’t have to get up for school in the morning :).
We had arranged to meet up with Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna today so I talked to Julie on the phone and we arranged to meet at the beach for some firelighting. Jack is a bit obsessed after helping light the campfire last week and has been wanting to do it again ever since :). We arranged to meet in a couple of hours as Davies and Scarlett were busily DSing and still in pjs despite it being after 10am, Scarlett had brought her DS up to Davies’ bedroom when she woke up and they were happily involved in some communal DSing while I sorted some washing and checked on the birds. Eventually everyone got dressed and had breakfast, we watched some Horrible Histories and some Deadly 60, chucked some food in a bag, gathered the fire steels and drove to the beach.
We found the others who had already constructed a stone circle to be the fire pit on the sand and were searching the beach for bits of wood. We all joined in and gathered quite a pile of sticks, twigs and a couple of bits of driftwood before laying a fire. Scarlett and Maisie found some crabs which we all had a good look at too. Then we set about making some sparks and getting the fire going. Julie had bought some bread dough to make bannock bread so we toasted that on sticks which was very delicious :).
It was very lovely just sitting on the beach looking out at the sea with family, laughing, chatting and playing, renewing the smell of campfire about us and learning about starting fires, cooking bread and finding wildlife. Love that that is our life 🙂
We hung out there for about 3 hours before Julie needed to get Lorna to swimming lessons and Davies, Scarlett and I needed to get to Badgers. We arrived home with enough time for me to swap some laundry on the line, clean up the kitchen, make some tea for the kids and a huge cup of tea for me while perusing the Badger programme and checking what I was doing tonight. The schedule showed handwashing, kitchen safety and some games based on germs and handwashing. I was supposed to have some disposable gloves and paint for the handwashing exercise but assumed it being SJA they would have disposable gloves on site so didn’t bother.
It turned out they didn’t have gloves either so Tarly and I did a dash to the local garage hoping to nick some of the diesel gloves but they had run out. When we arrived back all of the Badgers had arrived including two local girls who are HEd and were at the picnic on Monday. Scarlett particularly gets on with Indigo so she was pleased. I think the reason she likes Indigo most is because ‘both of us have names that are colours’ 😆
I had seven kids including Tarly in my group today so we all sat on the floor and I got those who were there last week to talk about what they’d done then, then we chatted about Hungry Badger generally and talked about food allergies, dietary choices such as vegetarian and veganism and handwashing. I explained (once again) that I don’t need them to put their hands up to say something, just to respect when someone else is talking – I hate hands up!
We moved into the kitchen and did kitchen safety, looking for danger in the kitchen and then I demonstrated how easily germs could be spread around the kitchen by all the things I touched. Back in the main room again we played a couple of games of germ / handwash inspired tag before sitting down again and talking about food groups briefly which don’t seem to be mentioned at all on the sheet, touching also on healthy eating and why it’s important. I’ll be better organised next week and ensure we have plenty to cover as we almost ran out of things to talk about tonight, but the kids were really enthusiastic when the other half of the group returned to us and were full of ‘we learned about X’ which was nice :).
Back home again I put the birds away while the kids got in pjs and then we snuggled up and read loads of King of the Cloud Forest as we’ve not had any stories for ages. We left the final chapter to finish tomorrow as it was getting late and both kids went off to listen to some HP audio books in bed. Davies also did some excellent HP pictures using oil pastels in bed. Which sort of brings me full circle really I guess.
A good day 🙂
ahh the day at the beach sounds so idyllic. (wonder how many of my comments are beach and envy related 🙂 )
Comment by Kirsty — 16 September 2010 @ 8:18 pm