which brings us nicely to….

today.

Which was supposed to be a seeing Tasha and Toby day. But Tasha text me to say she was feeling rough and needed to cancel. This was no bad thing really as we were all pretty tired and I’d wondered whether it would have been particularly harmonious between the kids today anyway. I also had various things I really wanted to get done so this morning I did lots of householdy stuff such as laundry processing, some online banking and so on.

Davies and Scarlett watched WALL.E, well I say watched, I think it was more like background music to their playing actually. They did some DSing – the current favourite game is Harvest Moon which they seem to be working in a collaborative fashion to progress on :).

The other thing I wanted to get done was some baking, for which I needed some butter; the icing of the Christmas cake, for which I wanted a cake board or container and some ragrug making for which I needed some string. With this small shopping list in mind we decided to go into Lancing and I let the children decide whether to drive or walk. They both voted for walking (Scarlett: good for us AND the environment!) and I even remembered to bring the cloth bag too for real eco-friendly bonus points :).

As we walked we sang ‘Santa Claus is coming to town’ and had interesting conversations about what cockroaches could and couldn’t survive, whether his outer body is his shell or skeleton and other such stuff. We got our string, and butter and some crumpets and pancakes for lunch. We didn’t manage to get a cake board or a container due to the only shop selling them being incredibly overpriced. I was very pleased about this when a proper rummage in the cupboard in the kitchen turned up my cake container from last year :).

On the way home we retold the Very Hungry Caterpillar with Scarlett cast in the lead role as she was claiming to be very hungry and asking what would happen if she ate all her lunch and then ate all of what I suggested she could have after lunch and so on.

Once home everyone did have all the lunch they’d said they might and then the children went off to play with the chickens (and run around the garden shrieking) for a while. I think they’ve been a bit fresh-air deficient the last week or so. I iced the Christmas cake and then they came in and made holly berries while I made leaves and then decorated a little Christmas tree I made to go on top with coloured balls as Davies insisted it have a ‘3D centrepiece’ 😆 It looks lovely :).

Ady arrived home in the middle of all this as he had the dentist this afternoon. He is having a very stressy last few days at work so took some of that out on chopping some firewood and then went off to the dentist. Davies and Scarlett had a mad half hour while I made some mincemeat muffins which really are divine :). Ady sorted the kids’ tea as it involved going into the garage where 10 dead pheasant are hanging waiting to be made oven ready which freaks me out a bit as they dangle just where the freezers are and brush against my head.

They ate while watching the first 3 episodes of Stig of the Dump (2002 BBC series) which Davies got completely immersed in straight away and Tarly was slightly more reticient about but still very interested. I’m guessing that will be finished with by tomorrow :). And henceforth will follow Stig playsets made from cardboard boxes, plasticine and bits of old tissue. There will be geomag creations of Stig and Barney made and we’ll be trawling car boot sales for memorabilia before you know it! ;).

Then we were off to Asda. We’re spending Christmas Day itself and therefore having roast dinner at my parents so don’t need to buy any of that food – although we have already done all that once so I don’t feel as though we’re getting off the hook that lightly! But we do have Boxing Day at home just the four of us and Ady is off work for over a week so we wanted to have plenty of nice food in. It was busy and there were things they had run out of so we still have a few things we’ll pick up if we get a chance but we have food – real food to make dinners out of and party food to snack on – to last for a couple of weeks so we can avoid the shops now unless we want to visit them.

The kids were great, really patient and actually quite enjoyed the chaos and we were not only way quicker than we expected to be – no queues at the tills and we were home about an hour before I’d expected us to be – we also spent loads less. Ady and I always play this game of guessing what the total will be before it shows on the screen. I said £230, he said £280 and it was actually £165 so we were very chuffed :).

Home for dinner, Gavin and Stacey overload and overuse of the ‘delete all messages’ function on my mobile – I hope no real messages have been sent to me today because I’ve been mass deleting everything unread. It has finally stopped now so I can go to bed safe in the knowledge my phone won’t explode in the night if I’m not there deleting messages every few minutes.