Things we did today

I overslept this morning having turned over and gone back to sleep at about 7am when I heard Ady and Scarlett being all cheerful in the morning with a disgusted tsk. They are the resident larks, Davies and I are the owls. So I was somewhat wrongfooted when the phone rang just after 9am and it was Julie being all cheery and efficient and brisk. I daren’t confess I was still tangled up in the bedclothes in a darkened room as a) she has a newish baby so sleep isn’t really a topic we touch on much b) she is in bed by 9pm every night anyway which leads me to conclude she may be a bit lark-y herself and c) I was far too busy concentrating on speaking instead of murmph-ing to her to construct sentences. Finalised arrangements to see her tomorrow, listened to her chatter away for a while and then got up.

I did the herculean task of tidying up the kitchen after I’d cooked dinner in it last night – I’m a bit of a messy cook and it’s normally Ady who clears up after me, got the children’s breakfast, let out, fed and did some inspecting of the chickens. One of the hens is sitting on 7 eggs which must be due to hatch pretty soon. I’ve not yet decided what we’ll do if they do hatch; whether to leave them all to it, seperate her and the chicks, or just bring the chicks inside and put them under a brooder lamp. The weather is pretty nasty and I suspect letting the other chickens have free rein to terrorise them may be a bit foolish. We’re not planning on keeping any so it’s not as though they will need to integrate with them anyway.

I then peeled and chopped loads of vegetables and got the slow cooker going for beef stew. Well I thought I did anyway…. it turned out I had plugged it in and turned it on but not switched the plug socket to on, so when we came home at 2pm ish expecting to be greeted with gorgeous stew smells we were greeted with nothing other than a still stone cold and uncooked slow cooker full of stew in a virgin state. This was fine for Ady and I who don’t eat until 9ish anyway as 7 hours is ample cooking, less fine for Davies and Scarlett who I had persuaded would try a bit of it as it was never going to be ready at 5pm. Ah well.

We wrapped up a parcel, gathered together library books we could return, collected all the various bits to take up the allotment including our now full kitchen waste bucket for the compost heap and headed out.

First stop was the post office to send our parcel and use the photo booth, but when I asked for change the woman leant conspiratorially over the counter and told me to go to the photographer across the road instead as he was the same price and would be certain to take passport-acceptable shots. So we went there where we were ushered into a white box of a back room and had photos taken of each of us not smiling, not showing teeth, showing ears and looking straight ahead. Davies and I were fine with this, Scarlett, mistress of the ever ready photo smile struggled 😆

We popped to the nearby hardware store for some string for my peg loom, to the library to return a pile of books and collect another pile and then back to the photographer to collect our photos. A quick detour to the bakers for lunch and the fishing shop for some fishing line, also for the peg loom and we were off to the allotment. It has rained pretty much solidly all day here today but we were lucky enough to have possibly the only dry hour of the day up there.

The children dug, rescued drowing beetles from their ponds and enjoyed getting muddy. I planted in some bulbs and cursed my choice of tops. I had worn old jeans, dms and an old fleece but not banked on getting hot with the exercise so taken my fleece off to reveal my shirt – a white, cheeseclothy material which gaped at the front when I bent down to put bulbs in and blew up at the back as the wind caught it, more or less rendering my topless (but still with bra obviously). The couple of dog walkers and the bloke cutting down the field next door with the tractor and attachment got to bear witness to my inappropriate allotment-wear anyway 😆 .

Home to turn on the slow cooker, drink tea (me) and play with the geomags (them) at which point Tarly started to wind me up by refusing to go and get her swimsuit and towel for swimming from the playroom (room next door to the lounge) because she was scared. I tried various good and bad parenting methods of dealing with this and rapidly lost patience with her. Eventually she did get them and we discussed whether the things she claimed to be scared of were likely to pose a real threat or not – ghosts; no such thing, monsters; far too scared of me to come and live at our house, aliens; unlikely to visit us when the rest of the world is available given their amazing alien technology 😆 .

We finally headed off to swimming but the damage to my temper was already done. Davies went in the big pool and did some great jumping in and swimming but also did a fair amount of looking like some sort of unaccompanied lunatic by just hanging out in the pool and splashing as hard as he could. Scarlett did some great swimming – she is really coming along and has natural grace and strength. When she really gets how to swim I suspect she will be brilliant. Unlikely to happen of course when she is too busy splashing with her float and picking her nose to listen to what the instructor wants her to do though. Grrr.

Davies then failed to respond to my increasingly frantic beckonings to get out of the BLOODY pool and come over to have his swimming cap put on because the rest of his class was already in the pool having their lesson and just waved cheerily back at me instead. The other swimming mums were pissing themselves laughing at me. He finally realised what I meant and meandered on over and then failed to hold his cap on properly at the front so I could pull it on properly at the back. And then got in late to his lesson. Grrr again.

The pool and then the changing room was packed with foreign students. Worthing has a massive influx of students every summer / autumn who I am sure are individually very bright and sensible people but tend to gather in huge, oblivious groups with big rucksacks getting in the way as they stand, gormlessly in the most inconvenient and chaos causing places possible. They were doing that in the changing rooms and infront of the lockers, just completely blocking the way and mooning about. Grr again. We got out and it was raining again and as I went to open the car door Scarlett did this pushing infront of me by weaving her way around me thing and ended up getting knocked to the ground by me. I was so cross with her I just yelled ‘Oh for crying out loud, get in the car!!!!’ and slammed all the car doors much to the bemusement of various people standing nearby. Having checked she wasn’t hurt I then ranted at the children for five solid minutes before driving home in silence.

Once home I put their tea on and ran them a bath. I told them to go and get in it and they said it was too cold. I told them to pull the plug out and let some water drain away with the hot tap running, possibly in not the kindest and most nurturing tone of voice which resulted in Davies sitting, sobbing, in the bath because it was cold. This I could understand if he was a small baby who I had forcibly plonked in the bath rather than an eight year old who climbed in himself. I showered them both, washed their hair and they ended up staying in a while longer but continued to be rowdy and annoying and subsequently got ranted at more. Fools!

They had dinner, I calmed down and we read the last couple of chapters of George’s Marvellous Key to the Universe. I 100% recommend it for anyone who hasn’t read it. We loved it and me and the children all learnt loads from it. They both went to bed with story cds, we finally had our stew, I drank a glass of wine, watched Jamie Oliver and made a doormat for the backdoor with cut up supermarket plastic carrier bags. Am not feeling altogether more chilled out. 😉