One word? When seven would do…

And to celebrate I’d posted up that we’d be in a local park for a couple of hours today on the local Home Ed list. The only person who’d said they were coming along was Tasha and we’d arranged to collect them. Tasha sent me a text to say she’d forgotten to get the boys’ car seats out of her partner’s car so they’d meet us there and then another text a while later to say she’d realised just how far it was to walk and wouldn’t make it after all.

I felt obliged to go just incase anyone else came along so we went via the shoeshop to get some shoes for Tarly. We found some denim canvas shoes which were what I wanted for her and when I paid for them at the till they were reduced from £10 to £3 so that was a bit of a result. Scarlett fell head over heels in love with a pair of clogs in there though. They were reduced from £15 to £10 and very pretty with a house on one shoe and a cupcake on the other. She was all dreamy about them and kept trying them on ‘one more time’ and stroking them. She so doesn’t need them but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so desperate for clothes or shoes so I said she could have them :). She’s worn them all round the house and only took them off to go to bed. I think she wants to wear them indoors first for as long as possible to get maximum wear out of them 🙂

The park was lovely – totally empty apart from the odd dog walker, sun shining, birds singing that sort thing. I sat on the bench and read my book, and even had a sneaky go on the swings and the slide while the kids played. They started on the swings but them moved onto using the roundabout, climbing frame and slide as props in their windmill game. They gathered up earth and grass as corn and took it all the way round the areas processing it and nominated the climbing frame as the windmills sails, the slide as the chutes and the roundabout as the millstones. It was really indepth and though I didn’t pay much attention as I was reading my book I was still amazed at how much of yesterday’s visit had clearly gone in. 🙂


We were there for an hour or so before we started to get hungry so we came home for lunch having allowed plenty of time for anyone else who might be coming to arrive. Noone did, which was fine, we enjoyed it and I’ve suggested various other events most weeks for the next month or so so hopefully we can go and enjoy places we like going to anyway and if anyone is keen to meet up there is the opportunity for them to do so.

At home we had lunch and I had said we’d text Tasha and see if they were still at the more local park (about midway between our house and theirs, walkable in 15 minutes) and walk down to join them. We’d been talking earlier about doing some more work on their wildlife action awards stuff and looked at the next couple of activities one of which is noting all journeys for the week and seeing whether you could have biked, bussed or walked instead of using the car so they were keen to walk somewhere I think.

We watched Earth on dvd while eating which we’d seen at the cinema as a filmeducation screening when it first came out. Then the children moved on to playing a complicated game based around Humphrey – an air drying clay hamster than Tarly made at Rainbows once. She was making her new shoe box into a home for him and Davies had set up a shop,complete with home made till and barcode scanner and a selection of Hamster accessories and food, all very reasonably priced. There was fruit and vegetables, an easter egg and a box of ‘nutri nibbles’ all beautifully drawn, coloured, cut out and labelled with prices. Scarlett went and got her money box full of coppers and silver change and was working out how much she had and what she could buy.

When Tasha text back to say they’d left the park but we were welcome to go round there neither of them were interested as they said they were too busy playing :).

Scarlett counted in 2s which amazed me and with only a bit of prompting managed to work out what was needed in each coin denomination to make piles of 10pence and then count 10 of the piles to get a pound. Davies decided business was slow in his shop so he introduced a promotion of Free kiwi fruit to get the punters in. We discussed various promotional giveaways and how it could be used for advertising purposes if branded with his logo. They collaborated to create a water bottle for Humphrey’s house and together made one and attached it.

I took advantage of the peace to get loads of laundry done, do some coughing and play on Davies’ DS for a while. Oh and some more coughing 🙁

They requested pancakes for tea and wanted to help make them so they tidied up the lounge while I dealt with some more laundry and then we made pancake mix. It was one of those times when for no apparent reason a recipe you could make without looking at a book with usually great results just wasn’t happening. No idea what went wrong but I suspect all three of us trying to do it together resulted in a mis-weighing somewhere so after several failed attempts I added some more flour and another eggs to the mix and we turned out a load of perfect pancakes in the end. They demolished the lot and I settled down to do some more coughing til Ady got home.

I cried off of reading stories on the basis it would just make me cough more so while Ady was shown all the things they’d made today I nipped out to the supermarket. Back home I had a bath and cooked dinner while Ady tidied up. It’s been a nice sunshiney day, the children have played together really nicely and been creative and imaginative and happy.

Didn’t feel the need to do any VR or NVR tests with them but you never know what tomorrow might bring 😉