love was such an easy game to play… Actually that has nothing to do with yesterday but having used the title I couldn’t help continuing the lyric! 🙂
Had a really nice day yesterday, one of those one’s where you are so thankful for being a SAHM and being able to drink tea and eat cakes and chat instead of having to go to work! 😉
The morning was a bit of a blur as despite being up at about 7am and thinking I had ages to do everything I wanted to do we ended up being about an hour late for going to Lucy’s and I had thought I had enough time to stop in Lancing and get my watch battery replaced but I didn’t! I did manage to get two loads of washing out, two baskets of clean washing put away, two lots of frozen stew out to defrost for dinner, a couple of batches of chocolate chip rock cakes made (as promised to the children who were all upset about having to take the cakes made on Monday to Badgers instead of keeping them here and eating them all! :roll:) and the first load of emails sent out to advertise the new HE group.
We got to Lucy’s about 11.30am and it is a new rented house that they are thrilled with. It is quite lovely actually, about five minutes (child pace) walk from the beach and five minutes in the other direction from a nice park, quiet cul de sac road and a nice big lounge with patio doors to a small enclosed garden with patio and lawn area. Although it is smaller than our house and some of the layout is a bit odd I did find myself being very envious of the garden accessible to children without supervision aspect. Our garden is arranged all the way round the house (we’re on a corner) and if it were all grouped together in one patch would be a nice size but it has slopes and walls steps, and can be seen into from the road most of the way round so there is no way the children could be out there without me for a few years yet. As I am really not an outside in the garden type of person this is wearing for them and me. Our original plans for the house included changing the garage into a kitchen diner extension or even a conservatory, losing our current drive and making it a more enclosed ‘back’ garden which would have given us that but it is unlikely to happen any time in the next 82 years! 🙁
So I sat there happily recommending she get pavement chalks for the children to draw on the patio, some sort of child safe water feature so they can wash it off again, a sand pit and so on. Love planning other people’s houses for them. 😉 Davies and Scarlett happily set off to explore Rebecca and Richard’s bedrooms. They have both had birthdays in the last week so there were plenty of new toys to acquaint themselves with too. Rebecca although she seemed to enjoy having them there was not really playing with them as such but they can be an akward duo to infiltrate sometimes. We had lunch and they played a bit more and then Lucy suggested we walk to the park for a play.
It looks either newly kitted out or rarely used as there was a distinct lack of grafitti and broken glass kicking about. The equipment was a couple of sets of swings and one of those challenge type set ups where you have to get round all of the equipment without touching the ground. Davies was very good at the balancing and the using ropes and bridges to get around but couldn’t do the heights or the leap of faith type jumps. Tarly was excellent at balancing and risking big leaps and heights – so different those two! I had a go at a couple of things too and hurt my hands with the stupid monkey bars, which I couldn’t negotiate as a very slight and skinny school girl so why I thought I could hulk my weight across it now I really don’t know, but it was funny! 😀 We enjoyed a windy but sunny hour there and I gained a pocketful of daisies picked by Scarlett then we headed back to Lucy’s for tea, cakes, play and chat for a bit longer. We were both surprised to realise it was nearly 5pm so we headed for home where the children had strawberries for tea and carried on some game with plasticine.
Ady arrived home followed closely by my parents who were over for dinner, Dad and Ady put the children to bed while Mum and I finished her training preparation for her session tomorrow and drank wine. 🙂 We had dinner – the first time my Dad has eaten stew since he left home 50 years ago having sworn to never eat it again (apparently he pretty much lived on stew as a boy made either from rabbits which they caught or old non-laying chickens). He did eat it all and said it was ‘alright, not bad’ but I don’t think he’s about to start having it on his five week meal planner anytime soon! 😉 We watched a taped couple of episodes of ‘The Way We Were’ which led to long discussions about who was the little girl in the Birds Eye advert where the ‘pod went pop!’ with me insisiting it was Patsy Kensit and Mum insisting it was ‘the woman on the TV’ who we eventually worked out was Julie Peasgood. Much googling ensued before deciding as they both seemed to be credited with it in various places we were both right.
They left around 11ish and we went straight to bed.
This morning the children have played with the megablocks and still are doing so in their pjs. I’ve got a couple of loads of washing out and watched some TV with them. We watched a cartoon version of Mr Bean which prompted some discussions about art galleries, baddies, statues of nudes and trying to work out what might happen next.
I’m about to persuade them to get dressed and sort out some lunch and then we are going to Highdown Gardens to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie and have a couple of hours walking round / getting fresh air / burning off energy so they’ll sleep!