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…