One word? When seven would do…

Today I spent most of the day either fretting that I was a cross between my own mother (very, very shouty when we were children, retrospectively she was clearly struggling a lot but we were terrified of her and she seemed to be in a perpetual state of near hysteria) and Dave Peltzer’s mom or making plans to run away forever. I feel utterly drained now :(.

We were off out to Pulborough Brooks again for a Wandering about Wildlife event – and no, that isn’t one of my classic wandering/wondering misspellings, that was what they called it in a clever twist on the whole wonder / wander thing as we were wandering while we wondered or even wondering while we wandered or something. But actually we mostly just shivered. And some of us whinged a bit. And there was altogether too few wonderings or wanderings and altogether too many windings and whinings.

It all started off well, we arrived, wellied and waterproof coated up and met the rest of the wanderers, were issued with binoculars and warmly welcomed (lots of w words in this post isn’t there?). We set off and stopped fairly quickly to look at a trodden down area and try to spot clues. There were none but at the next area we found both tracks and poo which identified the perps as deer. We then found fox droppings, rabbit droppings and various other clues around the walk, stopped and spent some time in a hide looking at geese and ducks before working our way back to the centre, stopping to look at various birds along the way. Well that was the idea and in fairness that did all happen. But it was extremely foggy which hampered our view of a lot of things and it was absolutely bloody freezing, which meant a brisk walk would have been fine but lots of stopping to inspect droppings and consult spotter sheets for track references was less enjoyable. About halfway round Scarlett started crying and said her legs hurt and she was too cold to walk any more and Davies was shivering so hard if we could have harnessed the energy outout we could have lit up Brighton Pier off him! They both wanted to be cuddled / carried / have endless amounts of sympathy directed their way and I just wasn’t in the frame of mind for any of the above. I did decide that they must both be coming down with my cold and reasoned that if someone had been dragging me round in the freezing cold on Friday when I was going down with it I would have been less than great company – oh wait, that’s exactly what happened on Friday when I was going down with it and indeed I was less than great company :lol:. So I felt a bit sorry for them and when Scarlett spotted a dead and part decomposed rabbit on the way back and they were both cheered up and far more animated I decided they were poor brave soldiers rather than ungrateful brats who couldn’t tolerate minor discomfort for the sake of nature.

We got home and I was all set to make hot chocolates and stuff when they both dramatically recovered and began endless rounds of squabbling, shouting, being boisterous and rowdy and generally not doing anything I asked. Which led to me totally going off on a rant about behaviour and using the tone of voice I know echoes the one my Dad used to use with us when we had been really naughty and I don’t use with anyone else in the world other than my children (although maybe I should, it is very menacing and dark side) – I should add in the disclaimer that unlike Dave Peltzer’s mom I didn’t throw acid at them, lock them in the cellar or even hurl abusive words at them. I just shouted a lot. Til my throat hurt. And my head ached. And I started to seriously question what the bloody hell I was doing living anywhere other than a quiet hermit cottage all alone with no human contact and just a cat that I occassionally kicked when I was having a really bad day.

We did redeem the day by walking to the post office and on the way back we spotted loads of bees, took a picture of all our shadows (I told them about my lone shadow picture of yesterday)

We got home and I did make them hot chocolate and myself a cup of tea, which sat and got cold while we painted the hands and faces of our puppets then chose various materials from the old clothes we use as rags / dusters to make clothes for them. At this point I got fed up again and they ended up going off to play primeval while I did a bit of material fixing and sewing together. Until I got bored and gave up for today on that project. I can see a few errors in the design already but we’ll finish making them and then work out what we’d need to change to improve them.

I’d utterly worn myself out by then so cuddles were had by all and I made pancakes for their tea while they watched Primeval and I looked at readers group notes online. Ady got home, made all the right pacifying noises about my bad day and I headed off to the library.

It was reading group tonight and as the librarian is on holiday I’d been asked to run it. We had a full house of ten people and talked about The Kiterunner. I’d read it way back last year when it first came out in paperback which felt too recent to read it again, which was the case for at least three others in the group. We covered the ‘we all read the book and we all liked it’ bit fairly quickly so as often happens when there is general agreement over the book within the group we moved to talk about something else related instead. This time we had a very interesting discussion about terrorism and freedom fighters, society and revolution / reform. It’s a very interesting group of people; all ages and with all sorts of political leanings and lifestyles, brought together once a month solely because we all enjoy reading and then talking about books, so some of the discussions the books lead to sometimes are very interesting for all the differing viewpoints and opinions. This time was no different.

The cleaner happened to arrive just as I was clearing up which meant I didn’t have to turn all the lights out or set the alarm, which was good as that was the bit I was jittery about doing alone, so I was happily home by 830pm in time to see both children before they went to sleep and chat a bit about the day (and make up!) before having bath, lovely dinner cooked by Ady and a restorative glass of red wine which always puts things back into perspective and makes me all mellow again.