One word? When seven would do…

Caz, Bid, Archie and Elliot arrived at our house this morning while Davies and Scarlett were still breakfasting and indeed Scarlett was still in her pyjamas. It was only about 830am mind you, so still early for us ;).

They were here to spend the morning with Davies and Scarlett while I went off to work. They were meeting some fellow Home Educators off at a local nature reserve for the morning. I had a quick cup of tea and chat with them before dashing off leaving them here as they had another hour or so before they needed to meet the friends.

I had a good morning at work, I like Wednesdays 🙂 Although from May we will be open all day on Wednesdays as our new opening hours have finally been announced. We are currently 930-700 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 930-100 on Wednesday and 930-500 on Saturday. The new hours will be 10-6 Monday to Friday, 10-4 on Saturdays. I don’t know yet how this will effect me but I guess it will either mean losing an hour a week or starting and finishing my shift half an hour later. Neither way is great but hopefully we’ll have new timetables drawn up soon so I will know what will be happening.

I worked on the counter first thing and got everything unpacked, then had tea, then spent an hour tidying up the Chatterbooks admin and ordering in copies of all the books we have used in sessions so far to help with next Monday which is the last session and I have planned a group display (I’ve booked the space from the following week) and some feedback from the group. I thought having all the books we’ve used might inspire some artwork /book reviews / ideas from the group for that and if all else fails I can photocopy the front covers to make the display look good :).

I spent the last hour shelving and then when there were no more books to shelve tidying up and pulling books off the shelves that need new jackets and spines reglueing.

Bid had rung to say that Eliot had fallen in the stream at the reserve so they were heading back to their flat and to join them there after work. I nipped home on the way to get changed and then had a look round their flat. It is very nice, a lovely feeling space masionette built in the bottom of a massive block of flats on the seafront. Ady and I lived in the actual block of flats when we were very first together and loved living there :). We had a cup of tea and then walked across the road to the beach.

Predictably everyone got wet playing chase the waves, but Davies and Archie moved up the beach to play with the stones while Scarlett and Eliot got crazier and waded out to sea a fair bit. It lasted a good 20 minutes before they were overcome with the cold and had had enough. So we stripped them down, wrapped them in the towels we’d brought for that very eventuality and then wandered back across the road for cocoa. I carried Scarlett which is not easy when walking up the banks of pebbles I’ll have you know!

I think we could all have happily stayed there all day as the kids settled into watching dvds together and Caz and I got our diaries out and arranged a few more get togethers but I was mindful of Badgers and getting home, fed and changed so we left just before 4pm.

Scarlett’s nose is very sore from being runny and she had clearly gotten quite cold in the sea so she wasn’t feeling great but it was far too late to cancel going to Badgers, partcularly as Cara, the Childrens Librarian was giving a talk tonight so I fed them and rallied them and off we set.

Scarlett did wobble rather for the first ten minutes but when Cara arrived both Davies and Scarlett were really pleased to be known already to the guest speaker so she perked up and was fine again for the duration of Badgers.

Cara did a good talk, it was mostly for those Badgers doing their Communication Badge and I’d asked her to talk about types of book including large print, braille, books on tape and cd aswell as non fiction to demonstrate how much books can be used to communicate information and stories. She did some reading aloud to get them to use their imagination (very similar to what I did at Chatterbooks this week) and then handed out some sheets with ‘the man walked along the street and he saw a dog’ printed at the top and four boxes to carry on the story and either draw or write what they looked like, what happened next and so on. Some of the Badgers worked in pairs, some worked alone, some threw themselves into the challenge, others really struggled and we had some very different interpretations. I loved Davies’

he had the characters coming out of the boxes and coming to life on the page, telling their own story before going back into the box again. Very, very Davies :). He just can’t stay inside that box ;).

Cara had some braille books which we all had a look and feel of and then she handed me some sheets to write your name in braille which I gave out. It was a good session although one of the more challenging girls really put my back up by being rude and just pushing it for the sake of it. Fortunately Julie had already spoken to her once tonight so I reported that she’d been difficult again and will let Julie deal with that in her own strict way without needing to get involved myself. Grr.

Back home again Ady had arrived and was cooking roast chicken which was very lovely (missed our roast on Sunday). I read the kids another chapter of The Happy Prince and other stories – tonight was The Selfish Giant. And they went to bed, Scarlett looking very much the worse for wear after a long day.

We watched a programme about Tourettes which was very interesting. Davies currently has no tics at all and hasn’t had for quite a while but he is definitely prone to them and I fully expect more in the future. I don’t think he has anything as extreme as Tourettes although he is still young enough for it to develop I guess.