weatherwise it’s such a lovely day…

But the rest of it was a bit wobbly!

Early Saturday mornings (i.e. before 9am) are never my strong point but I stagger downstairs dressed before 8am this morning to throw away a lovingly cooked sausage sandwich which I just could not face (don’t really do breakfast and if I do then I need to have been up for at least an hour first) before heading out before 9am to the airshow.

We parked, made the trek across the fields to nab a good spot to arrange our stuff and ask the kindly looking old geezers with their radios and folding chairs if they would watch our stuff (they certainly were not going anywhere!) while we took a look round the stalls. The kids were not on best form really after a long day yesterday and both were suffering from strong attacks of the ‘I want’s’ so we returned to our chairs and sat for a while, taking in the arrival of the Red Arrows, who were supposed to do a few stunts before heading off to Biggin Hill but actually just flew by the once due to some low flying seagulls or other such aviation specific version of leaves on the track.

Davies and I headed off to the craft tent where we recalled from last year you are able to purchase some rather good fudge and were on our way back having admired people’s wood carvings, leather goods and coffee with irish cream flavouring type produce when my phone rang and it was Ady with a very loudly sobbing Tarly in the background asking if ‘we could come back NOW please’. Did the closest approximation to running I ever do back to where he and Tarly were and found her hysterical, him not far from it and a story about the umbrella (being used as parasol) hurting her and Ady’s theory about a wasp stinging her. She was then convinced by this theory and wailed even louder about a naughty wasp. She got so hysterical that people all around were starting to look at us to work out in what way exactly we were ritually abusing our child to produce such extreme crying so Ady took her off to the St Johns ambulance to get her ‘seen to’ and returned with an ice pack which seemed to do the trick in calming her down and eventually sent her to sleep.

She then had about half an hours restless sleep during which time Davies and I headed off again to buy some ear defenders from the army surplus stall. When we returned Chris and Julie and the twins had arrived but decided we were sitting too close to the tannoy to come and sit with us so went off to find their own pitch.

Tarly woke up and was still crying and yelling so Ady walked round with her, spent some time with C&J and paid another trip to the St Johns before I decided enough was enough and took her home.

I had been feeling that she was pretty much ok and while certainly hurting somewhere was putting a lot of it on for effect for Ady’s benefit. Sure enough we were not five minutes away from him and Davies before the wailing, incoherant child who a stranger would decide needed to go to hospital imediately metamorphasised back into my girl and we were talking happily about the chenook helicopter putting on a display and planning to make one when we got home from sticklebricks.

I debated taking her back in but Ady was really looking forward to the air show and was getting no peace at all with her there, I was not desperate to stay really and I thought some one to one with Davies and Ady would not go amiss so I took her home and we had a very pleasant couple of hours with sticklebricks, playdough and other Tarly directed activities.

As I left I walked past Chris and Julie and saw them talking very seriously to two policemen. It turned out that Jack had been whacked by a falling sign at one of the stalls and was eventually taken to hospital (another trip to St Johns – Goddard will be listed there three times today 😉 ) with a suspected chipped bone in his arm 🙁 So they left early too.

Ady rang every half hour for an update bulletin and we went to collect them at 5.30pm. They had had very nice time making friends with another lone dad sitting close to them with his two children who Davies had played with. Tarly is a real minx for winding Ady round her little finger and Davies hardly gets a look in with him when she’s around so it was nice that they had that time and they are planning some more father/son stuff while we are on holiday, which will be good for them.

Not sure what we’ll do tomorrow as we have some ‘work’ to do – CVs for me and H&S report for Ady (well me actually!), would quite like to see my parents and also want to ensure the children do some running around getting fresh air type stuff too – we’ll see what sort of night we have and how inclined or disinclined we feel to do anything at all in the morning.