One word? When seven would do…

Had a very unsatisfactory morning at work. 🙁 Kessingland is causing me headaches which I’m really pissed off about, it’s a long time since a job stopped me doing stuff, let alone one for just 11 hours a week 🙁 I checked the dates of the two proposed weeks on Saturday as I realised that the middle Saturday would be a definite day I’d need off, either being the first of last day of the week away and also realising it was my Saturday to work. Turns out there is someone off both of the weeks so with the camp being the second week I need to get someone to cover my Saturday afternoon shift and my all day Friday shift (my Wednesday morning is fine, I don’t clash with the other people off that week then). Worst case scenario we’ll come after I finish work on the Saturday and I’ll have to either come home to work my Friday and then come back to pack up on the Friday night ready for Saturday, or we’ll all have to come home on the Thursday ready for me to work on Friday. Either way will be a bugger and I so don’t want to miss the last two nights :(. I’ve already asked one person about swapping shifts with me and got an outright no, I have two more possible colleagues who could swap so I’ve left notes for them and will have to see. Grrr. And this is before Ady has even thought about seeing if he can get time off – it’s always a bit ‘wait and see’ for him as the season doesn’t end by a certain date particularly, it’s all to do with the weather and how stock sells from now until the end of June. We’ll see…

Davies had had some X box related emergency in my absence, which turned out to be fine but had had him upset and wanting to talk to me, my phone was on silent and hadn’t vibrated so I’d not known and although he was fine I felt a bit crap at not having been here for him. Things have been loads better the last week or so, on the surface at least but I’m keen not to cock it up with one isolated set back. Which sounds like I’m walking on eggshells and I’m not at all, just a bit pissed off that on an occassion when he really wanted me I wasn’t here. 🙁 (particularly when I was having a bad morning somewhere else instead :roll:). So I came home really keen to chat to Lucy and the children were not at all up for leaving us to do that. Everytime we got one or two of them sorted out the others would start to interupt, we even hid in the kitchen for a while thinking that would foil them but they all followed us out there :roll:.

I took Scarlett across the road to the doctors for her pre-school booster jabs :lol:. I recall ‘over-preparing’ Davies for his at the same age and him being all keyed up ready for it to be far more dramatic than it was and surprising the nurse by asking ‘is that it?’ when she’d done it. I’d clearly done the same with Scarlett, explaining that she was going to have injections with a little needle into both her arms to put some medicine into her to make sure she doesn’t get ill with certain diseases. It might hurt a little bit but won’t be nearly as bad as things she has suffered before and been fine with. She was slightly reluctant but almost seeming like she felt she had to rather than because she was genuinely worried. We got to the doctors and she was all happy in the waiting room with me reading her a couple of stories and then we were called in. She sat down, chatted with the nurses, stated ‘well that didn’t hurt’ and barely flinched (they’d insisted I hold both her hands ‘really tight’ as in ‘can you physically restrain her’ 🙄 and she didn’t even tense as the needle went in) so she got two stickers with lions on saying ‘I’ve been brave at the doctors’. The same age little girl who’d gone in before us and come out howling was still wailing in the waiting room when Scarlett bounded back in saying ‘well that was fine Mummy, can we go now?’ while we sat for a few minutes to ensure she didn’t have some dreadful delayed reaction. I explained that lions are supposed to be the bravest animals and that’s why they were on her stickers so she’s been telling everyone that ‘lions are the bravest animals on the earth’ and instantly gave Davies one of her stickers :). So that’s that done.

Scarlett and Rebecca played really nicely for an hour or so, being very girly and having to go everywhere together including to the loo while Lucy and I attempted to continue our chats and eat lots of flapjack. Scarlett ate about 3 bananas and then they left and I did the kids some tea and Davies got ready for Badgers. Ady arrived home with seconds to spare for us to dash off and I sat in the car again eating humbugs and reading. Felt better today than I did on Monday doing it though, thankfully.

I’ve heard back from the animation workshop people and it sounds excellent but is probably too expensive to be a feasible thing to do. The cost is about £250 a day with a further £120 per day charge for final edit / dvd production etc which I’m assuming would be at least a days work. They reckon 12 is a good number and I would need to sort a venue too, which would be at least another £50 for the day (thinking of somewhere like the hall we use for our parties). So it would be a good £30 plus per child and I can’t think I’d manage to find another 10 or 11 children up for paying that. 🙁 Will carry on thinking on that though, there must be some way of sorting it, it looked so good and exactly what Davies would love to do.

Tomorrow Ady is working from home and the children and I are supposed to be meeting Julie, Jack and Maisie at Fun Junction. Davies has said he wants to stay here with Ady which I think is an excellent idea so I’m hoping he does just that and Scarlett still wants to go to soft play – it’ll save me Davies’ entrance fee and mean he gets some time on his own with Ady.

Davies and I had a good conversation about childhood in the car tonight. We were in Ady’s car and he has some Carpenters songs on cd so I put one on and said it made me feel happy and sad at the same time. He asked how that could be and I asked him how it made him feel. He said it was a sad sounding song (Rainy Days and Mondays) and I agreed but said it reminded me of being a little girl of about Scarlett’s age – I have a very clear memory of being in the house we moved from when I was four, with my Mum doing housework listening to The Carpenters at full volume singing her heart out and being happy. I told him that it made me remember being small and being loved by Granny and Grandad and not worrying about anything, having all my toys and my little brother to play with and just being a child. I told him that childhood should be the best time of your life because you have nothing to worry about, you should be loved and protected and not scared of anything and that is what my childhood was like, so it made me feel happy to remember that. He said that as he is a child he knows about these things and that actually there are some things for him to worry about and listed things like ‘having to be careful crossing roads’. I had another similar drag back to the past moment last week at work when someone walked past me wearing the perfume my Mum wore when I was little and used to love because it smelt of her. My Mum has said a few things recently about things she regrets in terms of me and my brother and our childhood and it struck me how so often the things we think we are doing wrong are rarely the ones our children hold against us. Even at my shoutiest, most resentful of the children, bad days they still defend me as ‘the best Mummy in the world’ and forgive me a whole morning’s crapness for one story or cuddle, their faces glow with joy when I tell them I am proud of them and like the scent of a perfume, or the opening bars of a Carpenters song taking me back to wonderful memories of my mum at her best I am so pleased and proud of how we are extending that period and giving them even more memories and time to enjoy their childhood.

Can you tell I’ve been reading loads of articles on naturalchild today 😆 ?