Everybody woke up late today, and all seemed rather tired, so I had pretty much given up on the idea of MEACHE/Friday Club. J did violin first thing, so I knew it was done 😉 and then proceeded to be so grumpy and grudging about everything, while the rest were amiable enough but on a go-slow, that my plan B of staying at home and getting jobs done was obviously doomed to failure and we reverted in haste to plan A and Friday Club. Today was to be a nature walk, so we dashed about and found watercolours (paints and pencils), brushes, the children’s old nature sketch notebooks and some spare watercolour paper. Then we printed off some pages from Nature Detectives which J laminated while I got snack, lunch and water for painting. We knew we would be late, but thought that we could do our own short walk and collect things to paint then met up with the others when they had finished their walk and do the sketching and painting together 🙂
In fact, we got there to find that Z had somehow got left behind, so he came for a walk with us too, L ticking off the things we found on her list and everybody looking out for nice things to collect: J spotted a butterfly, sadly dead, with beautiful wings, K wanted a feather, L found a conker still in its case, A spied blackberries (and ate most of them) and M produced a half brick from somewhere 😆 but fortunately replaced it with some beautiful leaves. When the others got back we all had lunch together and adults chatted while children played. It was nice to catch up with old friends and also meet new ones, but the general age range is quite young. We were hoping to find a few more older children, but they seem to be few and far between 🙁
The painting went well, and everybody settled down and produced something – even A 🙂 then as the children finished they went to the other side of the hall and started to play games. It developed into a fairly raucous but fun session, including a birthday cake for one of our old Friday Club friends, then we closed in prayer and dragged the children reluctantly away.
On the way home J asked if we could have pancakes, so we popped into the Co-op for eggs (must get chickens sorted, now we have the Eglu for them!) and I cooked up a huge pile while L and M did violin and piano, J did piano and recorder and K did piano and cello – it has to be a musical carousel or they can’t all get everything done!
