Sunday, Monday

I was taking an all-age worship service on Sunday, so Lfish decided to miss Eucharist and Mattins and come along to that with the rest of us instead, coincidentally (but not!) getting an extra hour or two in bed 😉 Having worried about a service which I had had relatively little time to prepare (given a shockingly busy time beforehand!) it was fine and we stayed for tea, biscuits and chat afterwards before returning via a supermarket (naughty, I know, but sometimes needs must) to buy burgers to go with the buns we already had at home. We dropped the older children off at the playground near our house for a quick burst of letting off steam and had a big cooked lunch ready for them when they got in. A quiet afternoon of pottering, dozing and writing newspaper articles (Lfish and Afish have both been doing this as part of their English work this term) and then Jfish was back from his weekend away and it was time for a quick tea and bed.

This morning we had a bit of rushing around and last minute prepping then some HE friends arrived for the first session of a new club we’re trying out. One family were already well-known to us, but the other two are fairly new. It was good to have the chance to get to know them better and do things together. The idea is one the girls came up with, that we should have a few different activities going on and make it half social and half educational, but hopefully all fun. We’re calling it the XYZ club, to reflect the fact that there are different things to choose from, and hoping that some older children might want to come along and that we can build up a little peer group of children to grow up together. My ideal would be to have enough friends nearby to keep all four children from feeling that they need to go to school for companionship. There are many good reasons to go, but that shouldn’t need to be one of them. I’d also like them to get to do things with other parents and to learn with other children – we do some of that already but it’s a thing I can’t imagine having too much of, really! Today we made Roman libum (having first made the ricotta) and also shaped lots of bread dough (cheatily made in the bread maker before everyone arrived), played a number of different board games, made Suffolk puffs with Christmas buttons sewn on the front, wove little paper heart baskets and talked about what direction the group might go in future. We’ll see how it develops…