August 2009 – In At The Deep End

Holiday Orchestra

J and K were both very keen to do Gamelan this time, especially as there was an Advanced Gamelan for J and a New to Gamelan for K, so we sent the applications in within a day of getting the email. Even so, K was bumped to standard Gamelan as New to was full! That left him doing Music Games, Gamelan and 7+Choir, while J was doing Advanced Gamelan, 7+ Choir and Recorders. The day before HO started Chris phoned to say he was very poorly and could we take SB in too, if Helen dropped her off, so I had 3 musical children and 2 hangers-on on Tuesday 🙂 SB was with K for first session and then with J for the others, so at least there was always someone around to make sure she knew where to go, but we hung around in any case, as K was a little worried about doing two things with nobody he knew. Of course it was fine in the end, and Gamelan left him ecstatic
Meanwhile L, A and I played and chatted with Gina, E and S, went for a wander through Newnham College gardens (lovely to see old familiar buildings and new additions in keeping) and came back via the Sidgwick Buttery, tea and flapjacks 🙂
SB came back with us and Helen picked her up, stopping for a cup of tea and a chat too. Perhaps not much achieved in terms of house-straightening, but lots of soul food in a day like that.

On Wednesday I dropped the boys off and went to do a sling demo/coffee morning, expecting to need to take L and A with me, but Gina mentioned that she, E and S were off to a soft play place and asked if L would like to go too. L didn’t have to think for very long! She did have to borrow a pair of trousers from E though, as her floaty dress was not really suitable attire. A and I headed off to the sling shop, where we played with the owners’ daughter, I got shown how to open up the shop, work the till and other useful things and finally, right at the end of the morning, a customer came in who happened to have a sling with her which she was not quite comfortable using…
After HO pick-up Gina managed to persuade me (with offers of house-sorting help on Thursday) to go along to Milton CP for a cuppa, a walk and a chat, with plenty of play opportunities for the children as well as a wander round the sensory garden trying to work out how many different flavours of mint we could distinguish. There’s lots of really good play equipment which wasn’t there last time we went but offers great scope for future trips 🙂 We picked up a leaflet advertising the Fenland Country Fair, which sounded promising too.

On Thursday we had SB again, this time because both Chris and Helen were ill. I dropped all the musicians off and went to do Tots, which was odd without the older ones, but nice. We even managed to get the percussion out, although both Gina and I dried up a bit when we tried to think of things to do with it at song time. I think we need a list! Old Macdonald had a band filled a gap nicely though 😉 We also did a bit of French, Susan made not-clay pots with L and E and they did a bit of piano. Big Alice came along to Tots and then came with us to do HO pick up and eventually home. By the time we got to HO Gina had already met the children and half of them had decided to go to recorder trio concert, which J tells me was fab. He has now managed to persuade me to agree to buy him a tenor if he gets distinction at grade 3 as well as a nice wooden recorder (suitable for use at Kentwell) if he gets a good pass at grade 4 recorder – the idea being to show me he is serious before we spend serious money! He’ll have to save up for a contrabass recorder himself, I think!) Gina and hers came home with us too, and we sat the children down with a video while we juggled K and L’s room, turned L’s bed round, sorted and shelved books, moved chests of drawers and generally sorted out all those things you can only risk letting a good friend help with (thank you Gina!) – stray children were either grabbed and drawn into the work or sent out to play with Alice 😉 At some point Chris phoned to see when he should collect SB and we suggested it might be easiest for her just to stay over rather than be collected and then dropped off again early the next morning. SB, having established that we could find her a toothbrush and some pyjamas, thought that it sounded like a great idea 🙂 She was especially pleased at the idea that she could then leave the toothbrush here for next time…
Gina left at about 7, I think, although with a rather scraped E 🙁 and we managed to get the 4 older children into bed by 8-ish and all asleep by 9, ready for another early start on Friday. How on earth we would cope with a school run I have no idea; by the end of this week of early mornings we were all pretty much on our knees!

Friday was presentations day, with a few timetable changes to allow for dress rehearsals, one of which necessitated J being in two places at once for two different “priority” activities. In the end, it seemed, Dress Rehearsals took precedence over everything except Gamelan, so K and J each missed a rehearsal to do Gamelan. L was entranced by their presentations (the advanced group did a sampan and then a really impressive piece they had composed themselves, while K was clearly enjoying playing a drum as big as himself) and begged to go to the Jazz presentation at lunchtime too. Gina was being a parent helper, so we got to see her a bit, but E and S were with Dave, which meant A spent a lot of time asking about them. We had intended to go elsewhere that morning, but realising how many presentations and timetable changes there were it seemed more sensible to cancel those arrangements and just stay, even though that meant A was wearing just a T-shirt and pants (having totally soaked her skirt with juice) and we had just the one small box of jigsaws to keep her busy. Each friend we saw (Gina, Dave, E, Emily W-S, SB, the girls from the Cott) was asked to do the puzzles with her and she seemed never to tire of them, as long as there was someone to do them with her 🙂
The lunchtime concert was the jazz presentation L had wanted to see, so I agreed that she could go as long as one of the others wanted to as well. J and SB both did, so they all went and sat in the concert hall. After about 20 minutes I decided I really wanted to be there too and A had run out of friends to do the puzzle with her so K, A and I went in too. It was really good! The conductor was a show by himself! Distinctly hyperactive, he made conducting into a full-body experience, bouncing around the stage, pulling his hair, syncopating with a shaky egg and playing the tambourine as I’ve never heard it played before! The musicians were excellent too 😉 The half-hour concert didn’t finish until nearly 2 though, which left us really very little time to get home, grab something to eat, pick Bob up from work and get back for the evening presentations. Where we were parked made it seem the M11 was a slightly better route – bad move…
Eventually we gave up on trying to get home, looped back on ourselves and went to the supermarket near Bob’s office instead. Thinking it was bit early to eat we bought food for later instead and then went to the cafe for that long-overdue cup of tea. Embarrassingly grumpy few minutes ensued, then I managed to drink enough to get over it, fed the children mini chocolate biscuits and matching cups of tea (milk pots dipped into my cup to fill) to give me cooling down time and phoned Bob to let him know we were there. We picnicked in the car and again when we got to the concert hall, checked the children knew where they were going and went in to find seats, but it was so full that despite being early we still ended up only a few rows from the back. It was a good place, as it happened, because we were next to HE friends, in front of old Roundabout friends and behind one of Bob’s supervisors from Uni. Just across the way was an imaginary friend I had been meaning to email about Catholic churches and whether she might be able to take M with her family sometimes and behind us was another Catholic family who were able to tell us about mass at another Catholic church in the same city. Very useful positioning then, really 😉
The concert was fun. We knew at least one person in all but one of the groups, I think, which always helps. I asked an HE friend to video it for us and we’re fairly sure we saw his camcorder come out at appropriate times, so hopefully Helen and Chris will be able to see everything they missed (and the boys might be able to see themselves too) including the special guest appearance from Trevor the Traffic Cone, who has apparently spent three years at music school in London 🙂
Afterwards we ate strawberries and cream and chatted to people, then headed home, but got so snarled in traffic again that in the end we took SB straight home and came on from there.

And today we made a bed. No really – it was jolly hard work and it took far too long, but it fits in the gap in the fitted wardrobe in our room, so we’ve gained a couple of feet of floor space – yay! Also helped J to complete his move from children’s room to J and M’s room, incidentally teaching him the “this room”, “another room”, “sort out”, “bin” method of getting through a large pile of tut – a useful life skill, surely? I just need to apply it to my room now…

Fighting entropy

I should be in bed as I was nearly asleep several times today, but wide awake now :(.

Err… what’s been happening? I took some time off and my Mum and Dad came down so that we could attack the fence at the bottom of the garden. Because our garden is higher than the land beyond, the soil is trying to flow downhill through the fence. The previous fence was buckled and in need of cuprinol, so when M+D asked what I’d like for my birthday I asked for help with the fence. We now have bright orange new wooden fence panels (not my choice of colour, but pre-treated by B&Q means less work for me). They now rest on new foot-high gravel boards, which should stop the buckling problem. Where the fence goes round the back of the workshop we have just put up chicken wire to mark our boundary as the workshop wall is a proper wall but about a foot inside the boundary.

This involved ripping out the old fence panels with a claw hammer 🙂 , chopping them up with a circular saw 🙂 , and wrestling several established brambles to the tip 🙁 . The gate still needs doing, but the rest is groovy. While Dad and I were being manly, Katy was attacking the clutter and Mum kindly weeded. I think the children did something or other … 😉 .

The downstairs of the house is now sorted largely due to Katy’s heroism, but we just need to fight untidiness fires mostly started by the children. (Constant vigilance!) The upstairs now has all the beds in the correct rooms, but only one of the chests of drawers. K was hiding a mother lode of clutter and junk under his bed, so dismantling it, moving it to another room and then mantling it exposed another job. Getting to the last boxes we moved with is a bit like being on the sea shore after a storm at sea – loads of random things wash up, mostly junk, but occasional treasures. Some treasures have been put back in new boxes of just treasure to sort at some point, as they now take up less room due to less junk.

Yesterday I took the youngest three out to Ely Museum, which is excellent. Small, friendly, enough hands-on stuff, covering woolly mammoths up to world war 2 (so it beats the Festival of History, then 😉 ). Well worth going again, particulary as the children were free.

Bob’s usual lift to work is on holiday this week and next, so we’re having to decide who gets the car (payoff for us getting it is that we have to give Bob a lift in to work and then collect him) and on Monday it was simplest for Bob to have it and us to stay at home. We did a bit of getting back on track HE-wise and bit of sorting the house out and then Chris phoned to ask if I could sign SB’s passport application as there had been some mistake and it needed redoing. Photos etc countersigned the girls stayed to play while Chris dashed back to the Post Office to send everything off. We managed to finish clearing the workshop floor space enough to put down carpet scraps and set up the climbing frame then the children took it in turns to see who could come down the slide fastest, hit the freezer hardest, move the mattress furthest and so on 🙂

On Tuesday we needed the car, so dropped Bob off at work and went on to meet up with Gina and co, starting by watching E’s swimming lesson, then playing outside until J’s. We gave J and E a lift back to their house while Gina walked with S (they had no car that day – there’s a lot of it about atm, it seems!) and then managed a fairly good box-ticking kind of day without the children feeling hard done by as they also had lots of time to play 🙂 A bit of Tots planning snuck in too. I think we are going to have to just work out what we want and then fit the rest in around that, even though that feels a bit like running a private club – as long as the Tots bit works for the Tots mums (which is what the group is meant to be about from church pov; the HE stuff is just there to keep me happy so I’ll keep running the Tots bit!) then any CHEF stuff is a bonus really, and it has to work for my children or realistically it’s not worth doing. The time and petrol expenditure are too great on such a regular basis for it to also feel like a stressful waste of time. We would have loved to have stayed for Molly at the pub, but Bob needed picking up and early nights felt like a good idea, so we came home via a quick shop and had a chip shop tea for the first time in months – and very nice it was too 🙂

On Wednesday Bob took the car again and we had a pinger day – 20 mins bookwork, 20 mins helping work, looong play then start again. More or less productive. I had intended to tackle the spare room, which still needs a bed moving into it from the children’s room so that J and M can have one room and K and L the other, but went out to watch the children playing in the workshop and ended up helping them to put up more shelves so that we can move some of their larger toys out there as well. Using two different kinds of spanner helped with talking about levers and we also ended up finding out more about woodworm than we really would have chosen 🙁

Thursday was Tots again, and after a slow start ended up being quite busy, with several new families and a couple of summer only regulars. We packed away and had lunch then headed over to Norwich to see Grandad and Tadcu. Big black clouds dissuaded us from going out to walk by the river, but in the end the rain never came so the children spent lots of time pottering in the garden and playing football over the fence with two boys next door. We cooked tea before we left (Bob managed to beg a different lift) and got back rather late for children’s bedtime, which presumably explains their grumpy and lethargic behaviour today…

Keeping on keeping on

Time seems to be rushing past in a haze of missed opportunities and unmet deadlines.

The house is now at that awful stage where everything is everywhere and even though we’ve got rid of loads of stuff and created lots of storage space we haven’t yet put all the remaining stuff into the storage and there are several boxes which have been emptied apart from an inch or so of detritus which may or may not be important and so skulks there waiting for us to get round to looking at it properly and making decisions about its fate. Tempting though it is to just throw it all out, I have found enough treasures in amongst the dross to not want to risk losing any vital parts of complicated games… If push comes to shove, and let’s face it, it usually does, then all the boxes can be tipped into one mega Box of Doom and it can wait until I have the mental energy either to face it or to nag Bob into dealing with it 😉

We have listed things on Freecycle and now have the usual dilemma of how to choose who gets the things everyone wants and how long to wait before throwing out the potentially useful things no-one has asked about – big bag of packaging and Jiffy bags anyone? If we can complete one cot-bed jigsaw then I know someone who wants one and we certainly need the space, but we’ve got 2 in bits, it doesn’t look like enough bits for both and we need to end up with a small-size bed for A if we’re to demonstrably have enough beds for our French child as well as our 4. The fact that they hardly ever use a bed each is immaterial 😆

Friday was meant to be a catching up with normals day, with the incentive of painting the Paper of Paris masks we made the other day. It turned into a nagging and grumping day with very little achieved at all until I gave up and went out to the workshop to just get on with chores and sorting 🙁 At least that meant that the children had something to do with Big Alice on Saturday morning while I was sling demo-ing and Bob was taking things to the tip and then collecting some shelves for the workshop loft 😉 The masks look great (shame the lovely pearlised paints they used are now ruined as nobody thought to put the lids on 🙄 ) and by the time we got back Alice and the children had been for a very long walk and were eating lunch 🙂 Except A, who had fallen asleep in a carrier and woke up as we walked in, just in time for Mummy milk.
Sling morning went well again, with the same lady back again to show me how much she’d practised and to learn a new carry. She bought another sling too – I think she’s hooked already and she barely has a bump! I talked to another lady who had just come in to drop off maternity clothes to sell and ended up thinking about which colourway to go for and when she could make time to come and learn a carry, then a couple of friends who thought they both wanted pouch slings, but changed their minds first to ring slings being better and then to wraps (which they had discounted because they knew someone who had one and loved it but it was all stripy and made her look like a hippy – I tucked my Bebina rainbow under the Costa Rica Hopp and showed them the plainest ones in the catalogue 😉 ) because they looked by far the most comfortable 🙂 By now my 2 hours was well and truly up but Bob was still collecting shelves so when a family came in looking for a ring sling I was still handy and able to talk the mum through how to use it most comfortably if she was sure that was what she wanted. 5 minutes later she went out with a Lima Hopp ringsling – green because with 3 boys already and another on the way she said she was tired of blue!

Alice stayed for the afternoon too, which gave us (me!) a chance to put up most of the shelves and sort through several boxes in the loft. Possibly not the best use of time, with the house still a tip, but at least I know they’re done, there’s now lots of space in the loft and it will stay tidy because the children don’t go up there! It wasn’t half hot up there though, and today I feel lousy – not sure whether a bug or the result of too much time doing hard physical work in a hot stuffy environment. So Bob’s in charge and I’m on cola and toast, with 10 minute bursts of activity before retiring back to bed again…

Family and trees

No chance of catching up, but if I don’t start putting things down soon then I’ll forget everything!

Tuesday last week was the first of the slinging coffee mornings at Truly Bumptious since I got my babywearing teaching qualification. The day started badly with a bump from a bus in a hurry to get along a road made narrow by parked cars. Slightly shaken and not as early as I’d hoped we nevertheless made it with 10 minutes or so to spare (and a witness phone number) and enough time to settle the children and look at stock before my first consultation – a 5 months pg buddhist GP 🙂

It went well, I think; certainly I enjoyed it and given that a) we overran and b) she bought a Hoppediz and went away to practise saying she’d come back next time to learn a new carry I think she did too 🙂 It was good too to try out the full presentation, which includes a fair bit of physiology and evolutionary background, on someone who was able to tell me it sounded right 😉

Thursday was a rather fraught Tots, followed by a trip to Denny Abbey, where we had hoped to do some of the organised activities, including pottery, but ended up arriving quite late and, after a quick gallop round the Abbey, spending time catching up with friends instead.

Excellent news for J as his recorder Grade one result came through. Having only just scraped a pass in grade 3 theory he was chuffed to get a distinction this time. PMM!

I was preaching on Sunday, so much of Saturday was spent on service prep. It ended up being a family service in the sense that we all took part, with the children acting out the OT reading while Bob did his usual excellent job on intercessions.

On Monday we had hoped to go and see Auntie Norma and Uncle John, but were stymied first of all by having to get the car checked out and then by my aunt having an unexpected booking which gave her extra work that day, so ended up going on Tuesday morning instead. Tuesday afternoon was spent at the park with the children’s second cousin, playing football and then in the garden playing badminton. A nice relaxed day 🙂

My uncle said that he wanted to take us to Bewilderwood, which the children all thought was an excellent idea 🙂 They had already taken SC there and thought at the time how much fun it would be to have our lot there too, so on Wednesday we set off there with Uncle John, Auntie Norma and SC. We arrived at 10, opening time, but already there was enough of a queue for the boats that we decided to walk round to the park itself, a decision which later left the children feeling cheated as they hadn’t been squirted by the crocodile – must remember that for next time! K and L had a fantastic time and J made a valiant effort at some things well beyond his comfort zone and managed to have lots of fun too. A pootled happily most of the time and wore herself out quite effectively. Uncle John proved to have a talent for den building 🙂

We decided it was worth waiting for the boats on the way back, which turned out to be a good decision as it meant we could find the last two boots on our treasure hunt and so earn a small (chocolate) prize 🙂 We also discovered that the author of the Bewilderwood books was there doing book signings, so bought a couple of books and got him to sign them. That’s bedtime stories sorted for a few days 😉

On the way back we stopped off to see Grandad, taking a picnic tea with us. The improvement in him is incredible now that everything is more settled. My dad is expecting to stay with him now as long as he is wanted, whether that turns out to be months or years, which has given him lots more stability – and company; he is a very sociable man and I think has felt very cut off in the past few years. I need to think about how Daddy gets breaks though…
Going to see Grandad is always good for my ego! He spends a lot of time saying how lovely the children are and what a good job we’re doing – must go more often!

After a late night it wasn’t easy to get everybody up and about this morning, so we took breakfast with us and ate it at Tots whilst doing a few normals. It was a much quieter and calmer session than last week and included a visit from a family who used to be regulars but have now moved abroad. K was particularly pleased to see Sanjay, who used to do occasional science sessions with them, and begged him to do science again today – which Sanjay, bless him, did – cue an impromptu experiment session in the kitchen! We had thought of going to Denny again (kite-making this week) but I was too tired to hurry the children along so in the end we went to the closing down sale at our favourite shoe shop and picked up good shoes for J and K at reasonable shoe prices then came home, the children placated by Big Alice coming round for tea and taking them out to the field to fly kites in the rain 🙂