I waved Ady and the kids off this morning to Julie’s. We were a bit seat-of-our-pants today wrt childcare as I was staying a couple of hours later than usual at work for the My Story event so the plan was Ady would drop Davies and Scarlett off with Julie, spend the morning in the office, collect them during his lunch break, take them on a couple of mystery shopping visits then drop them home to me before doing his last hour or so. He got delayed though and ended up late collecting the kids from Julie and being all stressed about the whole business. He has a new MD and a new direct line manager at the moment and it’s all very up in the air as to how long his flexibility to do one morning a week will be. My Mum starts her new job too so the afternoon a week she does for us could also be a bit iffy but I’m assuming my Dad will step back into that role. I guess we’ll just keep muddling through for now and see how it all pans out though – it’s 3 years since I started at the library next month and it’s worked out so far.
So I had a fairly busy and typical Wednesday morning at work. I had teabreak with Frankie who I like a lot. She is having problems with her 17 year old daughter so we chatted about that and she asked some questions about Home Ed which have clearly been things she’s pondered on for a while. I’m fairly sure she considers me mental, particularly when we talked about me trying not to get Davies and Scarlett do do things ‘because I said so’ and not having a Naughty Step. :lol:She wanted to know what I did when they ‘kicked off’ and my answer of ‘well they sort of don’t really’ just drew one raised eyebrow. I should probably have confessed that the person most likely to ‘just kick off’ in our house is me really 😆
Abi and I spent half an hour or so planning our My Story event and deciding on a structure for the session, some activties and exercises and familiarised ourselves with the competition rules and so on. We had a really disappointing turn out of just two people in the end though :(. The session went very well inasmuch as we looked at the website, read some of the rules, talked about ideas, shared some hints and tips,I read one of the already submitted stories out and we talked what sort of story they both wanted to submit. One of the women had come along with a fairly sure idea she wanted to tell her Grandparents story of narrowly missed being bombed in the Portsmouth Blitz in 1941. A really powerful story of coincidences and how them living means there are now 9 grandchildren alive today. The other woman claimed to not really have a story but went on to chat to us about growing up in Ireland, being in the RAFA, marrying her husband and the rations and food supplies they lived on in their early days together, how she loathed washing his snotty hankerchiefs, how after they retired they bought a motorhome and spent weeks and sometimes months travelling near and far in it before finally giving it up earlier this year (she was very difficult to age but must have been in her 80s). We decided her issue was working out which story to tell in 1500 words rather than whether she had one!
I really enjoyed it and whilst very disappointed we didn’t have a much bigger turn out was nonetheless positive that we’d made a difference for them and shown there is a market for such events in the future. I’m a bit hooked on the My Story website now and am checking it several times a day to read the latest submissions and keep toying with the idea of posting one of my own.
In the middle of all of this the man came to replace my cracked windscreen and then came back a further twice to fix the mirror on. I am now convinced something will happen to the windscreen within the next fortnight!
I got home at about 330pm and rang Ady to discover he was about half an hour behind me. I had some very late lunch and then Ady and the kids arrived home so I did the kids tea too. Then it was off to Badgers.
We were asked to stay again as they were too short of adults to run so Ady and I sat and chatted to each other, to the Badger leader and generally observed the session. They talked about drinking and smoking (which led to some very interesting snippets from the various children about their parents! ;)), then they all had to draw an outfit for the others to decide what season it was. Scarlett cunningly drew someone next to a tree with green leaves so they all assumed it was spring or summer, then declared ‘no, it’s an evergreen and it’s winter!’ 😆 Julie the leader said ‘only your daughter…’ to me 😆
Davies was formally asked if he would lay the SJA wreath on Sunday and Julie very nicely asked if he could have his hair tidied up a bit. I agreed we would either cut it or tie it back :).
Home via the CoOp for more reduced bread for lunch tomorrow and a bottle of red wine to use for pheasant cooking for dinner. I read the kids which we’d not come across before but it the first book for the new local HE Book Group we’re off to in a couple of weeks so I wanted to have a look at it. It’s good, if slightly on the basic side, even if it does come rather too hot on the heels of the whole Jean Auel Clan of the Cave Bear books I read recently.