Category: MuddlePuddle

This summer I shall be mostly wearing waders (and a cloak)…

We left Kentwell later than we’d hoped, and so didn’t arrive at the camp site for Muddle Puddle until 10.30! It was dark, raining, very windy and generally unpleasant. Fortunately Merry was about doing her pot-holer impersonation with her head torch, rounded up Nic and between us we tried and failed to put up a couple of small tent’s of Merry’s that we thought would be easier than putting up our big tent. No, I managed to rip one fatally, so Merry took further pity on us and put up a party of refugees from 1584 in her lovely cathedral of a tent.

The wind, rain and nice people pretty much summed up the rest of the week. The camp site turned into a bog in places, cars got stuck and tents submerged and so were lifted up and re-sited on drier ground. I still had no coat and so had to use my Kentwell cloak to Nic’s amusement. More than once during the week we thought “Let’s go home” particularly as this was by then our second week of camping and so we were all starting to fray around the edges. But then this turned to “We’ll leave tomorrow unless the weather improves” and we limped through the week like that – the bad weather being outweighed by the nice people.

There was the customary trip to Africa Alive, which was nice as ever (plus had the added attraction of being less boggy than the camp site). There was also the customary tie-dying (the weather held off just long enough) which was also good.

On a couple of nights the rain was joined by very strong winds. One of these nights produced a hole in the tent! We had a folding-up set of metal shelves to put food on, and the wind blew the side of the tent inwards so much and so hard that it impaled itself on a bolt holding the shelves together. The ever-helpful Beans produced a set of patches in the morning, which made us water-tight again.

The cabaret / talent show had the usual good efforts from the children. Our boys did some jokes, L sang Je Peux Frapper with some help from me and Jan sang a very appropriate song from Flanders and Swann (solo and a capella, which was very impressive).

We left a day early to avoid bad weather forecast for the final day, and fortunately the rain at the start of the day was blown off by the wind later so we packed a dry tent. There had been less milling about in a friendly sort of way by children and adults than last year, but it was worth enduring. Time for a better-drained camp site next year, I think though! Despite the weather we managed to take some photos – on Flickr as ever.

UPDATE: I added a bit to the title to make it more accurate!

Bordering on the contagious

So, we are now back (but not unpacked) from our first Melrose MuddlePuddle camp. We didn’t fancy doing the whole trip in one go, so we Stepped off the Path with Jan, Jonathan, M, C and J. Lovely company, lovely food – including Jan’s magic trick of producing more tins of scrummy cake than appeared to fit in the cupboards, nice cats, dry stone walls, shaggy cows, an impressive computer-filled office overflowing into the airing cupboard and a suspension-testing drive (home to the shaggy cows).

The music-playing pack of chewing gum and FM transmitter worked well enough, particularly when we realised that turning off the radio’s RDS would stop it trying to be too helpful. There was occasional interference from local stations, but just bumping the frequency up or down by a little usually sorted it. The battery lasted nowhere near as long as we were expecting, so we were glad we’d brought some spares and a charger. We’re solidly working our way through the Roald Dahl canon – Simon Callow reading the Twits and Geoffrey Palmer reading BFG were probably the best so far.

Melrose itself didn’t start well as K and I were both sick in the night, so we quarantined the whole family as no-one wanted a repeat of the nasty pass-the-vomit-bug of previous Melroses. Fortunately we had a room to ourselves and had brought the laptop with us (obvious thing to pack when youth hostelling 😉 ) so I had the very pleasant experience of snoozing on my bunk listening to the children laugh at something (The Incredibles) that I knew was completely suitable for them. We read books and played with plasticine and when the bouncing off the walls got too bad fortunately there had been no repeat performances and the weather was nice, so we headed out (avoiding others) for swings and a walk. We got a bathroom to ourselves for the day, just outside our room, which was a consolation, and all tummies were feeling robust enough to end a day of plain bread and water by enjoying some of the Beans lovely cooking for tea (courtesy of Merry’s room service 🙂 ).

The next day was K’s birthday. We went back to plan A (celebrate on the day) rather than the plan B cooked up when we were poorly (postpone 2 days). So, cake baking and decorating (with help from J and L), J making some posters to let everyone know about the party (including a mysterious request for party-goers to bring a spare pair of clean socks) and preparation for pass the parcel. Katy wrapped lots and lots, and J wanted to help with the music. Laptop to the rescue again, and we chose some music together. Unfortunately at the party itself it didn’t go as planned. My laptop took aaaaages to boot up, I tried to get the MP3 player to start before all the usual start-up crud had finished and as a result it took even longer. The natives were sat in a ring, the parcel wasn’t being passed and they were beginning to get restless. We declined the offer of singing, but the kiddy-keyboard thing which I think belonged to the Beans came to the rescue with one of its pre-cooked tunes. Eventually the MP3 player was ready but even at full volume could not compete with a roomful of excited children. I fast-forwarded to the noisiest track we’d chosen, that I’d thought probably too loud, and this was only just loud enough.

Despite these technical difficulties it went OK, and then we had a properly loud and frantic game of Tidy Your Room and the mystery of the extra socks was solved. Through to the other room for cake and other nibbles (see Flickr).

The only other fixed things were a trip to Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh and swimming in Galashiels. Dynamic Earth was nearly thwarted by poor signs in the City Centre – the SatNav crew got there on time and the rest of us had a bonus tour of the streets around Holyrood with complimentary extra stress. It was almost very good – lots of good content in a nice setting, but just too full-on. The exhibits competed with each other in flashing and/or volume, rather than building on each other. The soft play area was great, and L impressed us with her confidence on the climbing wall.

Swimming was also shortened by poor signs, but still very enjoyable and featured nice staff and interesting rocket pack style floats.

Apart from that there was lots of children playing somewhere or here (doing Fimo, playdough, Hama, dinosaur or boat building…), lots of parents chatting, and it was very nice.

The trip back was broken in York and godparently fun was had. Lots of playing with train sets and bubbles (including some nice bubble mountains by J). More yummy food and lovely company, and for once not being late with presents for my godson 🙂

Today was a very good family service at church which included doing sign-language actions to one of the hymns, and then a mini birthday party at the Grad Pad with K’s godmother Hannah – someone I ought to make an effort to see more. Unpacking still looms, and work tomorrow :).

G-G-Gruffalooooh!

As requested, I’ll actually get us up to date for once, with no mention of phone networks either.

We had a pleasantly hassle free journey up north once we’d actually packed (:oops:) to my room mate Paul and family, gradually gave T all the birthday and Christmas presents we’d not got to him (:oops: – although the rocking elephant would have been tricky to post!). It’s all a bit of a blur, but there was much wooden railway, lots of great food, a stomach bug (unrelated to the food!), swings in the rain, bubbles and bird feeding in the back garden, a few pieces for accomplished pianist with under-5 orchestra (dancing while playing optional but encouraged), trying to explain Quicksort to an obliging linguist and bemused wives using T’s set of alphabet books even though sleep deprivation had addled my brain, J exploring Uncle Paul’s tripod and the timer on our camera, and generally having a wonderful time as usual. After a bedtime story from Auntie Carol it was into the car in pyjamas and heading in the direction of home but stopping first with the Raines in Sheffield for B’s party.

We finally met Chris and the identity of the mystery ex-MethSoc Kate who knew both Barbara and us was revealed: Kate who did Japanese. Barbara kindly extended her culinary repertoire to include a very nice veggie savoury crumble and then we did the obligatory staying up late chatting and hoped that the the children wouldn’t be up too early the following morning.

The day started far too early given how late we’d stayed up talking, although much less full-on than it could have been due to children’s TV. I was treated to the impressive sight of R eating a large fraction of her body weight in Weetabix, then everyone bigger had a very pleasant breakfast, hurried dressing and off to church for most of us. This involved a lot of questions about the bells and smells, which weren’t the non-conformism that our lot were more familiar with. But they all behaved very well and an educational experience (R.E.: tick) was followed by a theological discussion with J on the way back to the car, about how different styles of worship stress different aspects of God and our relationship to him, and all the mystery of God is best communicated through something like a Catholic Mass.

Back at the ranch we gained some more children, shuffled seats between cars, built a dinosaur, watched more children’s TV and then headed off to Nottingham. Nice conversation with B and his mate T about B’s new watch, steel, and why Chesterfield church’s spire is twisted (as it passed by on the M1), and I was given a long list of things that people apparently didn’t have in the olden days.

We arrived in Nottingham, bounced around the centre for a bit playing hunt-the-car-park and then were completely underwhelmed when we actually found it due to the long game of hunt-the-space, followed by bonus games of hunt-the-working-ticket-machine and hunt-the-change-machine and also hunt-the-pizza-hut.

Barbara started down the slippery slope of baby slings, Chris showed R how to adapt the eating-a-large-percent-of-your-body-weight trick to pizza, and then off to the theatre to see The Gruffalo. It was excellent – everyone enjoyed it. It was lovely to see J, K and L all laughing and smiling, plus Katy and I liked it too. 3 extra MuddlePuddle families arrived for the theatre bit and it was great to see them too. Given Nottingham was on our way home, we headed straight off from Nottingham (although not before Barbara had tried a different sling) and put three tired but happy children to bed.

Sports, research, drama and lots of friends more dear than near!

It’s been another terribly busy week, with CHEF activities (sports on Mon, drama on Wed, P&T [not officially CHEF, but heading that way!] on Thurs), research project (the boys helping out with the development of a video to help autistic children to learn about emotions) on Tuesday, followed by a visit to the Museum of Earth Sciences and meeting up with E, O, M and F (J decided this even took precedence over his beloved French club – I hope you feel duly honoured!) and then on Friday a (fairly – not quite enough advance packing done 😳 ) early start and a drive up to York to stay with Bob’s old room-mate from Uni and his family. Hopefully Bob will blog more about this as I spent much of the time almost catatonic with tiredness – L enlivened this somewhat by being sick in the night for no apparent reason, which then left us wondering what to do about the rest of the weekend, when plans had included going to Sheffield straight after lunch on Sat to spend a little extra time with Barbara and co before going to see the Gruffalo on Sun. In the end we decided to wait until evening to see if anyone else succumbed (fortunately not) and then travelled with children in pyjamas ready for immediate transfer to bed to avoid contamination for as long as possible!
We had a lovely surprise when we discovered that the mysterious “Kate who thinks she used to know you in Methsoc, but doesn’t expect you’ll remember her” turned out to be someone we knew, liked and remembered very well 🙂 and that she was there for dinner and chat on Saturday evening, then stayed up far too late talking – something which seems to happen regularly when we see Barbara! – and got to bed rather later than we should, especially given that the children decided to go in for an amusing array of nocturnal disturbances, from J turning R’s crying into a bad dream which woke him up (so of course he had to wake me up too!) and meant he had to be touching me to get back to sleep (not enough room in the bed, so had to hold his hand as he slept on the floor next to me = good recipe for a dead arm) to K, disturbed by J and we think also seeing Barbara’s shadow as she walked past our door, shuffling his sleeping bag towards the wall (like an enormous cuddly inchworm 😆 ) muttering “I think there are wild animals on the landing!” all the while about 90% asleep and then L, disturbed by all this action and by coughing fits, standing up, tripping over J and throwing herself onto the bed so that she could scrabble up and demand “Mummy milk!” in a hoarse but nonetheless loud voice! Ah, the joys of motherhood – and why on earth did I let Bob sleep near the wall, leaving me next to the children?
Time has caught up with me again, so Bob will have to blog about Sunday!

Kessingland

I have been meaning to write about last week since we got back, but first I had to set up this blog, upgrade our Flickr account, go to work a bit and so on.

The simplest thing to say is that I had a really good time. About 45% of this is due to the fact that the children enjoyed camping. Our only previous experience of camping with them did not go well, and so this was a big unknown. Fortunately the kids loved it, which meant we could enjoy it too, and we can do it again in the future. Another 45% or so was the other adults there – normal people, who accepted us as we were and who didn’t panic when we talked about home education (as you’d expect for an HE camp!). What the other 10% was, I don’t know.

I was trying to think why our local HE group hasn’t produced warm fluffy feelings as much as MuddlePuddle camp did. I think there’s nothing wrong with the group, but I haven’t done many activities with them, and each activity is for half a day or less and so all the normal stress of logistics and child shepherding mean that I’m so busy with all that so I can’t get much out of it myself. Maybe I should do more, like the Beans?!