One word? When seven would do…

Yesterday was an early start with us leaving the house just after 8am (and yes, as far as I’m concerned that is early! I’ve done my share of being at work for 7am in years gone by, now I consider being out of bed before 8am to be extreme!). My parents pulled out of their road to follow us as we drove by and we convoyed over to where Ady works. West Sussex Growers Association were having one of their open days with lots of nurseries in the area participating by opening up their sites for the public to walk round and see inside. Ady had agreed to be onsite for the morning at Roundstone as he had done copious amounts of risk assessments prior to the event and wanted to ensure his dictats would be carried out. The nursery was operational, although some machines were not in use due to safety concerns and lots of it had been zoned off with no public access. My parents, who I don’t think have ever really grasped that Ady’s job has moved on from the Garden Centre Manager role he had at B&Q when we were first together, seemed suitably impressed that he is a senior member of management in such a huge operation and is the H&S manager for the site we were at and a further 2, equally enormous sites. I’ve seen it all before but I was still proud :). Ady gave us the whole guided tour and we ducked under fences to see the whole thing which was great for the kids too as they now have a good idea of where the plants Daddy brings home have come from and the sheer magnitude of machinery and production that goes on there. I also enjoyed catching up with one of my favourite of Ady’s colleagues ;).

We left there and my parents treated us to lunch at a pub on the way home. Sadly the lunch was crap. Mine was all but inedible so I sent it back, everyone else ate theirs but it was really poor quality – glad we weren’t paying for it! Two large glasses of wine made me more mellow than usual though and we had roast Rhonda to look forward to in the evening anyway! We came home for coffee and I sat on the floor playing with Davies and geomags and Scarlett and Polly Pockets while Ady stuffed Rhonda. My parents stayed awhile before heading off. Davies and Scarlett had a bath and then we all sat down to dinner and watched Mr Bean’s Holiday, which we thought was pretty good. Rhonda was nice too 😆

Today – I worked from 9-5, a shift I owed a colleague from when she worked my Friday shift when we were at Kessingland (pah! Kessingland!). My Mum, who had got here by the skin of her teeth on Friday morning and blamed traffic rang me at ten to nine to say she was stuck in traffic again. She lives a mile away!!! 🙄 so I had to ring work to say I’d be late too. She was here just after 9 and I was at work by 10 past but I was really pissed off with her over it. Her having the children at all seems to be made into this big production and happens so infrequently that I’d really hoped she could have made more of an effort on one of the rare occasions she does have them. Ah well.

Work was fine, quite busy and it’s so nice to feel I know what I’m doing most of the time. I’ve been in a bit of a daydream today for various reasons (all good :)) so that made it go quicker. Lucy and The Rs came in so I had a bit of a chat to them for a while and generally enjoyed being there although for some reason it felt like a long day away from D&S. I got home just after 5pm, Ady had been home since lunchtime and had fed them tea and got Davies ready for Beavers. Scarlett was in the nightdress she’s been wearing when I left and apparently had refused to get dressed all day insisting she had a cold and couldn’t possibly wear clothes. 😆 Davies’ beavers were meeting at the park today instead of the church hall and had asked for helper parents. Ady had been going to go – we’ve both been CRB checked but he tends to do Beavers as it’s nice for him to spend the time with Davies. But Davies requested I go as he’d had all afternoon with Ady and really missed me.

What a shambles the Beavers is then. The children are with only a couple of exceptions really unpleasant, wild, rude, disrespectful children. They spent the whole hour ignoring what the adults said, phyiscally laying into each other, shouting and just being really vile. As we have probably acknowledged before I don’t really do big groups of children with masses of tolerance but these kids were awful :(. First we played a game where they split into 3 groups of 3 boys and tied their scarf round their eyes as a blindold one boy at a time. The other two in the team led him to one of the many trees in the park and he got to feel it, then was led away and had his blindfold taken off and had to go and work out which tree he’d been feeling. One of the worst behaved boys there, M, was noticing all sorts of things when prompted, such as cobwebs, and numbers of little branches coming off the tree, but then suddenly lost interest and just started yelling and kicking the other boys instead. Then we walked up the hill a bit and were supposed to listen to see what we could hear and identify whether it was man-made, like traffic etc. or nature, like birds calling, wind blowing through leaves etc. You can imagine that we heard very little. Back down the hill again for a few running around games but even those degenerated into the most rowdy boys being yelled at by the Beaver leaders. They tried to play a game of chinese whispers but it was intentionally ruined by the boys deliberately changing the whisper to ‘smelly pants’ or similar each time. Oh it was dreadful! I chatted a bit to Davies and one other little boy who was really interesting and wanted to talk. We looked at the sycamore leaves and talked about why they are like helicopters, why some things like lampposts stay in one place all the time and what might happen if they didn’t.

We finished up on a big pile of woodchip which is presumably either waste from the park about to be collected, or has been delivered ready to be used somewhere in the park. The lads played on it and one of the most unpleasant children threw a load in the face of one of the other boys, causing huge amounts of tears and upset and gagging. Little git. His mum turned up, smoking her roll up, with a younger sibling in tow (no older than 3) who proceeded to join in with the chucking of woodchips while she held court boasting about her child’s bad behaviour in school and how they can’t control him either. Very sad 🙁 I asked Davies if he really enjoys it and gets anything out of it but he insists he does and I don’t think he was particularly protected by my presence but certainly doesn’t seem to get picked on by the rough boys, neither does he seem to participate. Beaver leader is now added to my fantasy list of jobs to wish on people I hate though, a far cry from the organised calm and no shouting environment at Badgers each week.

Davies and I whizzed over to Asda after Beavers for various bits and pieces including an item from this years Tickled Pink range (clothes sold for breast cancer charities, which I always buy something from each year). This year I got a t shirt for Ady and a set of pjs / lounging clothes for me instead of a top as I now have about 5 of them in my wardrobe so thought pjs would get more use for slobbing around the house in. We’ve watched a prettty good film tonight which even Ady stayed up to see and now it really is very late so I’m off to bed.