Woo hoo Wednesday

Now I *thought* I had the dentist this morning. Infact I am still fairly convinced I was supposed to have the dentist this morning. I’m sure when I was there two weeks ago she sent me away with a prescription for ABs, a form to take to the hospital to get my Xray done and an appointment for two weeks time. Which was today. But when I arrived the receptionist looked at me all puzzled and said ‘are you sure it’s today?’ checked my name on her computer and said ‘no, it’s next Wednesday at 9.30am’, so I came away again. I’ve not bothered to check the appointment card as I imagine it does indeed have next Wednesday’s date on it, what I think happened was that somehow the appointment got booked for 3 weeks time instead of 2. Which is not a serious problem as I am now pain free anyway.

All of which meant I was well on track to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie at Highdown Gardens on time. But I sat around til the very last minute before going to sort out a picnic to take and then Ali rang. So I made a picnic while talking to her and while I was talking to her she was talking to Freya and while she was talking to Freya I was talking to Davies and Scarlett. I do like phone chatting :).

We arrived a mere ten minutes late, which almost qualifies as prompt for us really 😉 and they had only just got there anyway. Another HE contact from Activeo was there too. I’ve met her a few times, the first when Scarlett and her daughter Maddie were both tiny and subsequently a few times since, she now has a second daughter Jessie who is nearly 2. We’ve always gotten on well the few times we’ve met before and this time we really clicked and as we’re not bothering to renew our Activeo membership (along with our EO membership, our HEAS subscription and my subs to Home Education Journal actually) next year I said to her at the end that we really should get together again.

We had our usual good time walking round the gardens, went back to the car park for lunch which we ate on a couple of picnic benches there, it was warm enough but pretty windy. Then Julie trekked off round a corner with Jack, Maisie, Davies and Scarlett and I was left chatting to Elaine for about half an hour. We covered all sorts of topics and I bonded with Maddie by virtue of letting her play with my camera and take loads pictures of the grass! 🙂 So much so that she walked the rest of the day holding my hand when we went back in for another walk round – very irregular :lol:. I was really pleased at my two heading off with Julie actually as she is one of the people who will be occassionally child minding them when I start work and although they adore her it was nice to see them happily wandering off with her under their own steam.

I got a couple of nice shots of them in the gardens:
Not at all sure you’d correctly identify which were the two sets of siblings here, particularly given one set is twins, but I guess those Goddard genes are strong 🙂

This one just sums them all up so well!

We left there around 2.30pm and we’d been invited to pop round to Lucy’s so we did so. On the way I made full use of the hands free function on my new phone headphones which I was very impressed with talking to Ady about his (ongoing saga of the) new company car 🙄 Had as much of a catch up with Lucy as the children would allow (Tarly found their copy of The Gruffalo so I *had* to read that to her, followed by another two books as she insists on always having stories in threes), but we have got tomorrow together so I’m sure all the many things we meant to say to each other will get covered then. 🙂

Ady had beaten us home, got the lounge tidied up, run a bath and got the kids’ dinner cooking so they stripped off their muddy jeans and leapt in the bath, then had dinner and are now in bed.

I had a phonecall back from the St John’s Ambulance as I’d left a message with them to try and find the nearest Badger group for Davies in the new year and it happened to be going there tonight so she went and got the Badger leader for me to talk direct to. It is on Wednesdays and is in town, but not too far away, it is a later start and finish time which actually probably suits us better and as it is held at the County HQ building I imagine it will be very well run. She has about 13 in the group, the youngest being another 6yo boy and has already had a phonecall today from one of the other mothers from the Lancing group signing her two children up for that one from January so there will be at least two familiar faces for Davies, which is good. So that’s a relief :). Also he should get into swimming lessons from January too which is more than enough extra curricular activities per week in my opinion :lol:.