This is becoming a habit!

Up, organised and out by 9.30am today, complete with two loads of washing out on the line. Days like these I can realise how people manage school 😉 Of course I did forget at least two things and needed to pop home unplanned in the middle of the day, but it was a good start.

We headed off to Brighton to see Hoodwinked as part of Film Educations screenings. I had not told the children we were going but billed it as ‘a surprise’. We arrived at Brighton Marina and Davies said straight away ‘is the surprise that we’re going to the cinema?’ in a really hopeful voice, so it was fab to be able to say yes. 🙂 We headed into Asda first to buy chocolate, popcorn and fizzy drinks at approximately a quarter of the price we would pay in the cinema – I do like to rot my childrens’ teeth and feed them additives in a frugal manner 😆

We were not first in the cinema but Davies and Scarlett still like to sit in the very front row, which most other cinema goers are not so keen on so we still got their favoured seats. I was impressed that Davies pointed out we had gone to a different screen last time. We settled down with our food and drink and a cinema employee came to introduce the film – he talked about evacuation procedures and film performances. When he’d finished Tarly leant over to me and said ‘he used a lot of long words!’ 😆

The film was excellent – I really enjoyed it and it would have been good to have another adult there to watch it with. I thought it was well written with a fast paced script and original and funny takes on the well known characters of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. I’d have been very proud to have written it. The animation was good too – Red reminded me of Betty Boop – I quite like the return to old fashioned very obvious cartoony style characters. Davies sat glued to it and Tarly just got a tiny bit restless about an hour in, but was easily quietened again and whispered lots of intellegent questions to me. They were far better behaved than the group of about 10 eight year olds who sat in the row behind flanked by a teacher at each end of the row.

We left there, blinking in the sunshine and headed to Lucy’s via a post office on the way to send a couple more books I’ve sold on Amazon Marketplace – my un-read parenting manuals are selling a storm ;-). We loaded Richard, Rebecca and Lucy into our car and we popped back to my house so I could collect luncheon vouchers, take sausages out to defrost for dinner, get changed to suit the beautiful weather which had come out while we were in the cinema and collect Lucy’s sunglasses she left with us yesterday. Then over to Chris and Julie’s.

Julie had arranged an Activeo event to celebrate Jack and Maisie’s fourth birthday this weekend but actually there was only one other HE family there in the end. A really interesting woman I’ve met twice before with two daughters, aged 3 and 1. The 8 children had a ball playing in the garden with virtually no intervention while the adults, including Julie’s Mum who arrived this morning and her boyfriend enjoyed plenty of chatting on all sorts of diverse subjects including parenting and education of course.

We left there around 4.30pm and ended the day via McDonalds. I had pinecone research LV to spend so had planned to end the frugal treat for my two with a final junk food top up. They ate in the car and clearly the way forward for peaceful journeys with uninterupted chatting for Lucy and I is to feed them McDonalds in the car 😆 We went in with them for a final cup of tea for me, a further play in the garden for the children and to finalise arrangements for getting together with Ady and Colin too this weekend.

Ady was already home when we arrived and the children were both easily asleep by 8pm having been worn out by two days of being children all day long. Lovely dinner and I’m planning an early night myself.

This week started with a couple of really crappy days but has been turned round with a lovely couple of days. Having listened to myself talking about TCS, reward and punishment and general parenting today I am feeling slightly ashamed at how little I followed any of what I believe in and hold true at the beginning of this week. Less time spent trapped home all day with no fresh air or exercise for any of us does not make for a happy HE home, so I’ll learn from this week and try and work on not repeating some of those errors again for a while.