Monster & Teeny

Monday A still off work for a second week which meant he spent lots of time in the garden tidying up and gardening. This meant the children could spent most of their days out there too - I hate sitting in the garden, I’m a sun avoider rather than a sun worshipper, I’ve got no interest in gardening and I hate being too hot, so as the garden is too open for them to play outside without an adult out there with them they don’t get much chance to play out all day and get left to investigate garden wildlife, dig mud up and generally get grubby.

I also had a nice one to one interlude with both children. Monster came to the vets with me to take our cat back for an after the weekend check up. He was excellent with her, having her cat carrier on his lap on the way there and talking to her and comforting her on the journey.

 Teeny and I walked to the post office together to post an ebay parcel and some ‘thank you for having us’ cards to our variety of hosts from last weeks Tour Of The North. I love being with just Teeny as she never, ever stops talking but when you have Monster or even A around too she tends to fade into background noise rather than actually being listened to. So it was nice to walk along holding hands with her and hear her chatter and observations. I’m stunned to realise quite how many plants and flowers she can identify and what a lot she does have to say which is interesting, intelligent and often quite profound. We made friends with a ginger tom cat on the way back which followed us for a while so we chatted about the difference between male and female cats and speculated on where he might live and who his owners might be.

Monster had Badgers in the afternoon which he enjoyed as usual.

Tuesday Plenty of baking and batch cooking in the morning with some reading of library books due back too. Monster had a good go at reading a Dr Seuss one, although a large amount of it was guesswork at least it was educated guesswork with him spelling stuff out rather than wildly guessing like he used to.

More garden play too with A finding a spider carrying a massive sac of eggs with her and bringing it to show the childen, and them searching the garden for snails which they then lined up on the wall of the house and set off on a snail race, excitedly at first charting their progress dwindling to resignation that this was not to be any sort of high speed activity!

After lunch we walked into town, A and I taking it in turns to walk alongside Monster who was on his bike (much too small for him, far more suitable for Teeny actually, it has stabilisers but he’s still mastering steering and pedalling so we’ll wait for the balancing to come in it’s own time) or hold hands with Teeny.

In bed Monster spent some time playing with a VTech Notebook thingy we’ve had kicking around for ages and composed some music which A and I were invited to come and listen to.

Wednesday At the childrens’ request we headed off to the local dinosaur and gardens place with a picnic lunch. A fairly speedy trail round with a stop to eat our picnic and then we went over to see my Dad for a couple of hours too. Monster really impressed A and I by correctly identifying 10 dinsosaurs on one of the interactive displays - particularly as two of them I didn’t know myself!

Thursday Our cat was back at the vets for the whole day to have her sewn shut eye opened again. This time Teeny came with me to drop her off and collect her again and showed lots of interest in all the various things on show in the waiting room (animal food, toys, beds and clothing!). Monster stayed home with A and played Zoombinis.

We packed up another picnic and set off for a walk up the downs (The South Downs, we live in Sussex) which was lovely. Lots of shade, lots of butterflies, bugs and birds, plants and flowers to see and talk about. We also walked round the very pretty local church, spending ages in the graveyard reading headstones and talking about the people who’s lives they marked out, the difference between cremation and burial and different reasons why people die. Then we went inside the church and I dug out more than I thought I’d remembered from GCSE RE and told them what various bits of furniture in the church were for, admired the windows and the organ and talked about who would stand where for various services.

Later Teeny and I went to a couple of supermarkets for various bits and pieces of shopping. We are on a pretty tight shopping budget and experimenting with one large shop per month with small top ups of fresh food to see if it saves money buying most stuff in bulk.

I read them ‘bedtime’ stories while they had a long soak in the bath to wash off grime from walking. We’d borrowed a childrens’ Bible from the library as Monster has been asking about creation and evolution recently so I wanted to read him the creation version but found the children’s Bible really annoying. I like the language used in the Bible, I think it adds to the stories and I hate the summing up and interpreting of the text that this kiddie-fied version had so I’ll have to keep an eye out for a ‘proper’ Bible.

Friday Loads more batch cooking and baking for me - the freezer is nicely full atm. A did some more gardening and a couple of runs to the tip while the children played in the garden. They did some digging, some finding creatures inlcuding what they thought were baby snails inside a dead snail’s shell and I explained were maggots. So lots of talking about life cycles and how it is not just butterflies which hatch as caterpillars from eggs to metamorphosize to flying creatures but various other things including ladybirds and flies.

My Mum appeared in the afternoon so she joined us on our late afternoon trip down to the beach where we chased waves, paddles, collected seaweed and had a lovely hour or so until the children got wet and shivery so we came home again for tea.

Saturday  First thing we headed out to buy a digital camera as a joint present for my Mum from us and my Dad, then A went and helped my Dad cut their hedge then we headed over to BIL and SIL for the afternoon. The children all played with sand and water and the climbing frame with their cousins while grown ups chatted. Lovely afternoon.

Sunday My Mum’s Official Belated Birthday. We took a picnic and started a walk over the downs which it ended up being too hot and without shade to complete. We stopped about 1/2 a mile short of the final destination and had our picnic, then walked back again. Lots to see including all sorts of farmers crops which we talked about end products for, birds, bugs and butterflies including some stripey caterpillars which we brought home several of to put in our butterfly garden from last year to see what they become in the next phase of their lifecycle.

Home for birthday cake and a big bath for the children, who despite being totally worn out by the walk were just too hot to sleep so ended up getting out of bed and sitting with us while we had our dinner and going back to bed finally not that long before us in the end. They also had their first ever taste of the delights of a coke float and were instantly hooked!