One word? When seven would do…

For once, this weekend went by without my mentally composing a blog post as I went along, the sheer volume of people around me at all times, the fretting as to what might possibly go wrong and the enjoying being with friends left me little or no headspace for such frippery!

So, this will be more the bits that stick in my mind than a full blown minute by minute account of the weekend. (Don’t think for one second it will be brief as a result though 😉 )

Friday – The journeys of various people were charted via emails and text alerts with the eager anticipation of Joyce and co arriving in Sussex given particular excitement! After the baking frenzy we managed to get the children bathed and to sleep pretty early, then enjoyed some quiet time doing last minute bits and pieces in an empty house – something we appreciated the novelty value of several times knowing what was to come!

Chris and Alison arrived with mainly sleeping children around 10pm and we had curry with visits from various non- sleeping children at various points. By about midnight all children were asleep once more, Ady and Chris headed off to bed with Alison and I fully intending to follow not too much later… I remember thinking at 2am that we really should get some sleep as it was going to be a big busy day on Saturday but somehow it was 5am before I crawled into bed 😉 Enjoyable evening with lots of interesting conversations and some photo memorabillia dragged out too!

Saturday morning some two and a half hours after I’d gone to bed I was back up again. Fortunately the lack of sleep meant I needed very little cosmetic assistance to pull of the red eyed witch look! Ady did his usual bacon sandwich and endless tea and coffee duty, I made up some goodie bags ably assisted by Tilda (with less able assistance in the form of Scarlett!) and then with much considering the best way to ship everyone to the hall Ady took Alison, Tilda (honourory adult for party decoration preparation) and I to the hall with food and decorations. I think we did a fab job actually, we had all sorts of pumpkin, skeleton, spiders webs and ghosts draped around the place, the Happy Halloween banner we’d made at group last week and various bats, spiders and snakes scattered around the place. Tilda and I mixed up some fizzy punch set off beautifully by the severed ice hands and set up tables which were soon groaning with food as people began to arrive.

All the children looked fantastic, we had a huge selection of home made and shop bought outfits, some Halloween themed and some not – I think I did a headcount of 32 children at some point. Although Alison and I were fading fast by 3pm groaning at the prospect of a further three hours I think the party carried on strong til the end. We had a variety of games and activities all of which seemed to go well (particular mention to the popcorn game which I know to some may have looked like encouraged lunacy but I thought was hilarious and much enjoyed by the children. Sorry if anyone’s offspring now thinks they should ‘try this at home’ on that one though!), we had plenty of controlled sitting in circles type stuff like the Trick or Treat and the Pass the Parcel and of course Ali’ spooky story (which made no sense at all given the various contributors – it had clearly bothered Lije who had listened to it all the way through, dwelt on it and then asked me about it last night wanting to know why there had been children in the beginning, then the main characters had not had children and then by the end they were children themselves!! – but provided a calm, sitting down moment half way through and had several adults in hysterics!), we had hyped up competition from the make the skeleton game and the apple bobbing (or as my daughter thought it was called Tarly Bobbing!) and much fun with the toilet roll wrapping game. We finished off with Barbara’s skittles outside while grown ups started stripping the hall into bin liners.

Thank you so much to everyone who came, everyone who brought stuff along (food or games), made such an effort with their costumes, helped to tidy up or generally just contributed. It was a great day 🙂

People started to scatter back to wherever they were spending the night and we had a smaller continuation back at ours with Chris and Alison, Chris and Helen, Simon, Steve and Sarah and all children coming back for tea and to witness the comedy moment that was Elijah and Claudia sharing a birthday cake!! (We had planned to do it at the hall and include Ben but no one had any matches to light the candles – and frankly Ben would have been at risk of physical injury as it happens to probably best he was not around! 😉 ). The Clarkes watched X Factor and slowly people melted away and children simmered down until it was just The Beans and Chris and Alison left with us. We had pizza delivered and a relatively early night at 1am ;-).

Sunday was lovely. I was woken by Tarly at 8am ish who clearly shares her father’s hostess gene and wanted me to ‘come downstairs and talk to the grown ups!!’ I had sniffed my way through Saturday and realised upon waking that actually I am infact ill, I think it’s just a cold which has probably not been helped by late nights but the morning spent lounging about, drinking tea, eating bacon sandwiches, painting nails of various small girls and generally not doing an awful lot seemed to restore me a little.

We headed off to Brighton and eventually met back up with the others – Brighton is a nightmare for parking so our arrivals were staggered over about an hour I think! Tilda came with us and highly amused me by listening to War of the Worlds and deciding that was where Davies’ DaDaDerrr had come from! We had a lovely time on the beach, looking at shells and seaweed, playing chase the waves etc and then on the pier. We had chips for lunch and then said goodbye to The Beans before carrying on to the end where we allowed all children one ride each (although the little four got an additional go somehow!). We got our self timer group shot, which was Ady’s one regret from the party 😉 and then headed for home. Joyce and Ros caught up with us at that point and everyone came back for dinner 🙂

I was feeling slightly spaced out by that point so I suspect I was not my usual witty and charming self but I’m sure Ady’s dinner (assisted by his commis chefs, The Lovely Ros and The Lovely Alison) made up for my general intolerance of children and being tucked behind my laptop for much of the time uploading photos to flickr! I’m always amazed by just how many people can fit into what we always think of as a pretty small house without it feeling that cramped really. The children tend to scatter between the children’s bedrooms and the playroom (and briefly the garden! Oi! In!), I think everyone who came here must have watched Wallace and Gromit at least seven times each 😉

Everyone left around 10ish, we got Davies to bed, Ady managed to put the house back together somehow in record time and headed off to bed.

It was a lovely weekend. I’m so glad we did it, the children had a whale of a time (although Tarly was very upset this morning when she woke up and Lulah had gone ‘I want Lulah to stay here FOREVER!’) and we’ll definitely be doing it again next year. It was lovely to meet some new faces and to get some of the other bloggers together for the first time (Dani & Allie and Ali), nice for some of my other friends to meet some of my online friends and I’m sure nice for some of you to meet some of my other friends and finally, ever mindful of The Cause it was yet another triumph for blasting away that stupid myth that HE children don’t get to socialise enough – those kids mixed and mingled better than a martini in a silver cocktail shaker shaken by a person with a very strong wrist!