Tip me up and pour me out

Work all day for me today. It was all fairly routine and normal aside from being in charge of Baby Rhyme Time. We used to do Storytime every week and Baby Rhyme Time every month but the changing of children going to school so much earlier (as in pre-school at 3) has altered the demand for the under 5s story time to less and the demand for the up to 18 months Rhyme time to more, so experimentally we are doing it fortnightly to see how it goes. We had about 12 babies and 12 adults last time and today I had 19 babies, 21 adults and 5 older siblings as it was an inset day locally with children off school. Which is actually quite daunting picking your way across a packed floor of mothers and babies in order to sit infront of them and sing songs for half an hour. I learnt a few things today for future reference:

1. I need to learn more songs. I managed to fill the whole half an hour by singing several songs twice and offering requests at the end. It would be good to have some slightly longer songs and be able to ring the changes a bit

2. Cleavage is less succesful when you are sitting cross legged on the floor doing the actions to incy wincy spider in a room full of possibly breastfeeding under 1s than in other locations in the library. I was wearing one of my nicest bras (black and red lace, present from A) but that was possibly something only people related to me need to know rather than all the mothers in Lancing 😆

3. I need to ensure I know all the words very well to I’m a little teapot, Miss Polly had a dolly and that we don’t lose count of how many ducks have gone swimming that day midway through the songs. Fortunately one of my greatest skills is coping well with cocking up by laughing, so I was able to make jokes about the different versions of I’m a little teapot (we had kettles boiling, seeing kettles, seeing teacups and all sorts), the difference in doctors coming back with bills if they were not NHS or yes they will, will, will if you are lucky enough to get continuence of care and how on earth we can be expected to raise the youth of today if we can’t count backwards from five and have people laughing with me instead. And we mixed up wheels on the bus with some really s l o w buses and some really fast ones too. 😆 Hey if I’m not going to get to be a stand up comedienne any time soon I can still milk my audience of milk drinkers! 😆

Ady had been home with the children in the morning and my Dad in the afternoon and all seemed to have gone well. I got home slighly after Ady and he supervised tidying up while I got their tea ready and micro managed Scarlett eating hers speedily ready to go out again for Rainbows. Davies stayed home with Ady and enjoyed a long bath.

Rainbows seemed to go without incident tonight. They played with the toys, made air drying clay hedgehogs with shaping the body, cutting the spines with scissors, pushing glass beads in for eyes and putting them on bits of card with their names on. Scarlett’s is here drying out. They had further play with the toys, followed by a circle of talking about nocturnal animals and a game called rabbits up, rabbits down which seemed fun for them all before they trooped into the smaller room for what I presume is called ‘circle time’ which involves sitting round in a circle with a Rainbows doll passed around and them only talking when they have the doll. There seems to be some sort of show and tell type arrangement to this with some of them bringing things from home to talk about and others boasting about their skiing holidays or upcomming trip to Disneyland. Scarlett is planning to take something next week. There was also some other game where they had to get into pairs and she was paired with a nice little girl who she bounced around with for a while. There was no nastiness tonight and she seemed to slot in just fine so that was good. I think she probably has the right mix of not giving a shit and being confident about herself to fit right in really. She thinks the circle stuff is ‘a bit silly’ and flatly refuses to announce herself as ‘Rainbow Scarlett’ in the circle or show any interest in learning the song about loving god and learning about the world but she says she likes the games and the making stuff. 🙂 She reckons she’s not ready to be left next week but maybe the week after although aside from telling her to shush at one point her and I had no interaction for the whole hour.

Home for a bath for Scarlett followed by them helping assemble pizza for mine and Ady’s tea and several chapters of MNLS, a documentary about tigers and bears and then bed for them and pizza, alcohol and Friday night tv for us :).