Wobbly Wednesdays

The wobble is in honour of Tarly who has her first wobbly tooth. I forgot to mention in yesterdays epic blog that she was complaining of it being hurty yesterday at the motorshow and when I checked it was slightly wobbly. But she’s eaten about 4 apples since then and now it is proper wobbly :). I suspect she will pull it out or certainly spend all her free time wobbling it whereas Davies has wobbly teeth for months before they finally give up and jump out of his mouth lemming-style. He’s only lost two so far so she could well catch him up!

Today was a working morning for me and Ady dropped Davies and Scarlett off to play at Liza and Andrew’s house – you’ll remember their full postal address from last week ;). Liza assured me that they behaved well and were nice to have around. She did look utterly drained and I suspect it is no coincidence that her blog I know about disappears and she claims not to have started a new one just at the time she would be ready to blog The Truth about my children – if anyone finds horror stories splashed across the internet about them please do let me know so I can shriek at her in public and send it email lists etc. 😉 😆 Davies and Scarlett were full of what a fab morning they’d had anyway so thanks again Liza, really appreciate it 🙂 xx

My morning was fairly frantic with many children either coming in to sign up or coming in to talk about books for the SRG which I manned for the first couple of hours. Some of it was actually quite enjoyable when I got some shy children to talk passionately about stories and agree to do pictures of their favourite bits and bring them in to show me so I can put them up on the wall. I was amused to have 2 different children come to talk to me about the Little Red Hen and her grain story, particularly as that is one of Scarlett’s favourites too (not I said the cat, not I said the pig) and another little boy brought in the same Meg and Mog book Davies had read to talk to me about too so I knew that story well :). I was saddened by the childminder visiting who I remember from last year with her young charges – a brother and sister a few years older than D and S who she claims the parents refuse to bring to the library themselves even to join the children so she gets all the books on her own card. The children were really chatty but she had another younger charge with her this year, not a sibling of the other two and he so didn’t want to talk to me about books :(. He had a big tantrum at the very prospect, sat on the floor in the middle of the library yelling and crying and throwing his shoes at her. At one point she was holding him restrained on her lap trying to get him to talk to me while he fought and struggled, still yelling his head off. Eventually I told her is she wanted to take his stickers etc then she could but that as the point of the SRG is to inspire and encourage reading and sharing books, promote positive library visits and make library staff more accessible, friendly and clearly there to help this was rather a counterproductive exercise. There are small things I have to overcome my personal feelings and beliefs about at work but that was something I was not prepared to be a party to or compromise my own opinions on forcing children into things. I also get cross at the parents who push the children to ‘tell the lady’ and talk across me or answer for them. I don’t think it is all about demonstrating to me whether the child has read the book themselves or indeed how good their reading it – for me it is about getting something, anything from experiencing that book for the child whether it is laughing at the silly bits, enjoying the illustrations, being inspired to go and draw some scenes from the book or act it out in play, find more books by the same author etc. I also got annoyed with a couple of older people who thought it would be okay to interupt a child talking to me about books to ask for a newspaper when they wouldn’t dream of doing that if an adult had been talking :(.

I collected Davies and Scarlett, stopped for a cup of tea with Liza and then we called in on Lucy and The Rs on the way home for a couple of hours. The children all went off to play really happily letting Lucy and I chat which was nice. 🙂

We came home for tea and then Ady arrived with a little tent. Davies had suddenly decided he’d quite like a little tent of his own to put up in the garden so Ady got one of the little £6 ones from Asda and with minimal help Davies put it up himself :). The children had a bath and I read stories to them while they were in it as I have a blood test in the morning and needed to fast for 12 hours beforehand which meant a very early dinner for us tonight.

We’ve watched the first two episodes of Gavin and Stacey on dvd as we missed it on tv the first time round and have heard enough people rave about it to be curious about what we’d missed out on.