A moosium. This blogpost title is brought to you for the sole interest of making Ali laugh. Along with where do cows go when they want to see jazz hands? A moosical. Where do cows go when they want to see a film? The mooovies? And what is a cows favourite song? I like to Moove it, moove it.
Today we had arranged to meet Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna at Worthing museum and art gallery. This was planned incase of my non starting car not starting as it is (just) walkable or certainly bus-able. In the end my car has now decided if Ady has some degree of mechanical ability it will behave itself after all :). I rang Julie as we had a tenant viewing booked for midday so I wanted to either cancel or arrange to meet earlier if possible. We did arrange to meet earlier but Julie came over on the train and was not only late for the newly moved earlier time but was late for the original time too!
Davies, Scarlett and I had a good look round though, we went to an event there last year but didn’t go to the actual museum in 2010 so we had a refresher look at the permanent exhibits and a look round the art gallery exhibit and talked about our favourite picture, different art techniques, how they made us feel etc. and looked at the archaeological finds of which there are many locally. Was very impressed with how much of flint knapped tools knowledge has gone in and indeed mining generally from our visits to mines in Wales in 2009 too.
Finally Julie & co arrived so we had half an hour with them. The four older children were initially a bit rowdy so I gave them a brief lecture about Museum Behaviour Etiquette and they calmed down. I listened to them for a bit and they were playing an excellent game where they were able to jump into the exhibits and telling each other things about them. Lovely to hear D&S sharing with J&M the stuff we’d just been talking about on our first look around. I walked with Julie and Lorna and we managed a brief catch up with each other before we had to go.
Back home Davies and I fell out about bedroom, specifically his bed. He draws, plays with plasticine and generally hides things in his bed including todays finds of several discarded contact lense wrappers, the containers Scarlett’s bouncy ball granules came in, loads of bits of tissue, pencils, one of my wool needles (being used to model plasticine) etc. I yelled, he cried, I came downstairs to hoover while he power-tidied and then the tenants were at the door.
Three of the four people who will be sharing attended, the fourth is on holiday but has left it to the others to find a house. They looked all around including a second look round the downstairs, out into the garden back and front, asked questions about the chickens, feeding and bedding etc and were very interested in breeding them and asked lots of question about them. They seemed very nice and after they’d left the kids and I said we’d be very happy for them to be our tenants.
There followed a tenterhooks afternoon waiting to hear back. Davies played with Lego and made a lego Willlow, Scarlett did some drawing and then played with the animals and they joined up for an animal and lego game together. I blogged, fretted, spoke to Dad, Ady and the letting agent on the phone several times each and then got the phonecall from the agent to say they would like the house :).
Loads of finalising details still to do including start date of tenancy, notice for Ady and I at work and quite where we will live in the interim. Dad is talking to Mum about storing our stuff – he’d not actually mentioned it to her previously… eeek. I phoned and gave notice on the sky tv and we’re now waiting for final confirmation to go ahead and cancel things like BT landline, broadband etc. The earlier leaving the house date should mean we set off with slightly more in our contingency fund but will effectively leave us homeless for the last 2 weeks of working. We’re debating the most sensible option (thankfully we have several) for that period.
Ady and I spent lots of time looking agog at each other and I’m not sure it’s fully sunk in yet 😯 Davies & Scarlett seem to be taking it in their stride, so far…
We did bad, good, learnt today:
Davies:
Bad: Set up Gruffalo theatre for a play but had to tidy it up
Good: Made a lego Willow
Learnt: Giant Earthworms can grow up to 3metres long (wall chart with animal facts may be responsible for lots of learnts in next few days!)
Scarlett
Bad: Maisie was scared of a skeleton display in the museum so we couldn’t walk past it
Good: Saw Jack & Maisie
Learnt: About various types of helping dogs including dogs who predict epileptic fits and cancer
Ady
Bad: Condensed time to get a lot of stuff done
Good: Nic’s car started today again (and heavy frost!)
Learnt: About the most expensive coffee in the world, eaten, partially digested and then excreted by an animal!
Nic
Bad: Probably be paying for a couple of weeks worth of landline, internet & Sky tv that we won’t use as have to give months notice.
Good: We’ve (probably) found a tenant!
Learnt: what a waxwing looks like (googled after it was mentioned on ff)
I read the pre-history section of which the kids may have been feigning interest in to prolong bedtime but I suspect grabbed their attention, particularly after a museum visit this morning.
Successful!
Comment by Ali — 20 January 2011 @ 12:26 am
Hurrah 🙂
Comment by Nic — 20 January 2011 @ 12:29 am
so is your mum ok about storing things then?
Comment by Kirsty — 20 January 2011 @ 9:09 am
Absolutely no idea! Quite akward really. When we first started talking about it we were thinking we’d literally just store our bed and a few boxes and get rid of everything else. Dad said that was crazy and we could store stuff over there and to keep all furniture as they have plenty of space (still not a lot of stuff really & we have filled our loft spaces, will put some stuff in our garage & my car can be stuffed full of things too so we have small amounts of storage space that way). Except he never quite got round to telling my Mum! I’ve asked him several times and he’s said that she’ll moan anyway so he might as well reduce the moaning to once we’ve actually gone!
Worst case scenario Dad can prob pay for proper storage tho’ so I’ll leave it to him & wait to hear when he’s told her. We’ll prob have 2-3 weeks of needing to stay somewhere too so will either stay with them or find cheap campsite near here & live in van. Would be nice to stay with Mum & Dad but don’t want to have a fraught last few weeks and part on tetchy terms with them.
Comment by Nic — 20 January 2011 @ 9:17 am
might be a bit cold in the van though and would be good to have a parents house to retreat to to warm up, but no not worth everyone being grumpy with each other before you go.
So excited for you all, hoping that the paperwork all goes through ok and you all hear really soon that it’s sorted.
Comment by Kirsty — 20 January 2011 @ 9:25 am