To scale

Early start all round here which never feels right. Bleary eyed and staggering I wrapped Lorna’s (very) late birthday present, the children got dressed and they all left the house so Ady could drop Davies and Scarlett at Julie’s for the morning. I enjoyed the half an hour or so of the house all to myself and then headed off to work too.

Work was fine, I had quite a bit to do having been off for two full days with my allergic reaction and then working at another library last week. I checked stocks of several suggested reads from book club last night and have ordered books for the next three meetings, finished editing and printed off a letter inviting all the various book clubs that get their books from us to a coffee morning event I’m organising for next month and dealt with numerous enquiries about how to operate the photocopier and several demanding customers wanting help on silly things that seemed to take far longer than they should. I also listened to two colleagues bitching about each other – the atmosphere at work is rather tense just at the moment. But I had a productive and mostly enjoyable morning anyway.

Over to Chris & Julie’s and as I pulled into the road I saw Jack and Davies walking towards me from the nurseries at the end of their road. Gerda (Julie’s mum) and Lorna were at the house and looked mightily relieved to see them as it turned out they had been walking a different path to the others and Julie was getting very worried about just where they were. Julie, Maisie and Scarlett then appeared all looking quite harrassed and equally relieved to see the boys. Sort of glad I missed that drama really although the boys seemed totally oblivious to any fuss they may have caused :rolls:.

Julie was clearly having one of ‘those’ mornings as she then had to deal with Jack getting stung by a bee, Maisie having a strop about something to do with cereal and Lorna whacking Jack with a bag of tomatoes. And a phonecall from someone who wanted to chat. I made tea and waited. We did manage quite a good chat in the end and then she asked if I could help her catch a chicken. They have three hens which are not really handled at all and are pretty terrified of people but have scaly leg which needs treating. Scarlett had helped her catch one of them this morning and held it while Julie rubbed vaseline in to it’s legs so I helped her catch a second and held it. She decided that was enough trauma for one day and we’d do the third one some other time. I was going to hang around and mind all the kids while Julie nipped out to go and collect her car but Chris arrived home so we left when Julie did and followed her most of the way home as the garage was on our way. Very busy diaries mean it’s another two weeks before we managed to arrange a date to meet up again – I miss Julie and wish we managed to see more of them 🙁

Back home it was 3pm and we were all hungry (the kids had had sandwiches but eaten them mid morning and I’d not eaten at all) so I made a pile of pancakes as a tiding us over snack. The winemaking kit I’d picked up yesterday had been minus instructions so we left for Badgers slightly early to swap it for a complete kit.

Badgers was really good tonight which was typical as Davies, Scarlett and I had been chatting about all the reasons why despite thinking Badgers is great for them it is not really that much fun for me. We’d been agreeing that Ady would be far better suited to being a Badger leader than me and trying to decide where my strengths lie instead. Tonight was a much smaller than usual group – just 9 of them and we were doing map making. For once Julie was keen to let the children lead it and her plan was for them to work together or alone and come up with a map of an imaginary place and do some symbols to create a key for it. She tried to demonstrate some symbols and is very crap at drawing so I took the pen from her and did a quick example, which turned into a rather lengthier one as the children started calling out loads of things for me to draw – all felt a bit Rolf Harris for a while 😆

Once armed with pens and paper we left them all to it for a while and then wandered over to see how they were doing. Some were great at it, really creative and imaginative whilst others struggled. I helped those having difficulty by asking lots of questions designed to get them thinking and creating and then did a quick map of my own to show symbols, keys and scale and talked to them about all of those. I quite like tasks like that when you are encouraging children to be creative, come up with ideas and unleash their imagination :).

We finished up with 10 minutes playing games outside and I rather embarrassingly fell down the concrete steps. I did it quite slowly and almost gracefully but will still have new bruised on both knees tomorrow to replace the all-but healed ones from falling over in the campsite toilets the other weekend :rolls:

Home time and Ady had beaten us home. Davies came and did his own dinner under supervision – he’s really taken on board the whole doing more for himself thing :). I stuck on the first six bottles worth of home brew wine which in theory is ready in a week (although it does say it will improve if kept over the next 3 months). I’m going to have a go at a kit chardonnay first to see how it all works and follow close instructions but after that the aim is to use as few chemicals as possible and maybe experiment with flavours and ideas – hey parsnips wine counts as one of the five a day right? 😉

Instead of stories we watched Springwatch and then Davies and Scarlett went to bed, Ady and I had baths and a Nic o’clock dinner at 1030. We’re so rubbish!