T-Bird Anni Rides Again

Visitors are somewhat of a novelty here!  Lots of play for small people, lots of gossiping for big people, perfect really!

coo, it’s a bit different!  Wonder what new toys this one came with then……

I have visitors arriving tomorow at some point which Aprilia is getting really rather excited about!  

 and it’s past my bedtime, goodnight!

Due to me forgetting to remind her to drink yesterday, Aprilia has been struck down with cystitis (again!) so didn’t want to move far from the house today whilst she swigged her way through gallons of cranberry juice and thus ran to the loo every half hour!  So she has contented herself with playing Zoombini Mountain Rescue with minimum help from me.  In case you’ve never encountered it, Zoombinis is a sort of logic PC game wehre you need to negociate lots of little blue critters with various atributed (different colours of noses, styles of hair, eyes etc) through various hazards and challenges by playing logic or problem solving games with them.  I got the games as a 3 pack from amazon after she got hooked on it whilst "Off the Path" last year but this is the first time she’s played this particular variation as she’s been too busy trying to beat the others up til now!  She is, aparently, on a mission to complete it…… glad I’m working tonight, I’ll let Duke have that particular battle at bedtime!

This afternoon we were fortunate enough to have free tickets to see Dave Benson Philips on stage locally.  I was given them by the manager who also manages our local hall where me and Duke regularly turn up for Red Cross to cover some desperately boring event or other.  I was vaguely worried that Aprilia may well be too old for all that malarky but for the price of petrol I was willing to "risk it"!  She is, it appears, not even remotely too old for joining in with Going on a Bear Hunt, Dingle Dangle Scarecrow and other such silly songs, and, truth be told, neither am I   There was much silliness, much "he’s behind you" etc, some jokes slipped in for the Grown Ups including him wandering off the song he was supposed to be singing and breaking out into Angels for a few minutes (and you know, I think he sings it better than Robbie does!) and a trip down memory lane for Aprilia when he did signing in Makaton with quite a few of the songs - she used Makaton for quite a while and that’s how we "discovered" Dave B P in the first place as he did a signing, singing nursery rhyme video.   She is utterly star struck now, especially as we got his autograph afterwards and he actually spoke to her!!!!!!  Oh, the excitement!!!!!  And she even managed to talk back to him, which considering she NEVER speaks to anyone she doesn’t know is pretty damned impressive!  She now has his photo blutacked above her bed…….

just so I can get the little tent totally dry and thus in a state to be safely taken down!  It’s not a lot to ask really is it?  I mean, it is SUMMER! At this rate, come September wehn I go away for the weekend (without child….. how wierd is that then?) I’ll just take it down, throw it still damp in the car and re-pitch it at the other end of the journey   Unless, of course, Duke’s numbers come up at some point in the meantime in which case I’ll buy a nice new little tent without the damned silly design fault on the windows that makes them leak in anything more than a gentle shower

Anyway.  Yesterday was mainly spent recovering from the Sleepover.  She needed to have Mummy in sight at all times and preferably reading to her so there was a lot of story time going on, with a few sneaky bits of "learning stuff" sidled in there for variety!  There was a good chunk of DS-ing too.

WARNING  RANT ALERT DON’T BOTHER GOING ANY FURTHER IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR MORE NEWS! 

And then I had a long conversation on the phone with the home ed mum from round the corner.  She is starting up a group locally and is under the rather misguided impression taht I’m in it with her.  This is despite the fact that I’ve said from the start that Aprilia doesn’t really enjoy big groups, is blissfully happy with just meeting up with one or two other families at a playbarn and that I am not in for subsidising every bugger else by joining groups where big families pay the same admission as single child families (sorry, just a personal bugbear of mine, I used to go to a group where everyone but me had LOTS of kids, and whilst I have nothing against big families I don’t think it’s fair that Aprilia only got 1 go at each craft or activity for my £3 when every other mother’s £3 got them anything up to 7 or 8 crafts or whatever)  Her plan is to hire a hall locally, charge £3:50 per family and have absolutely no planned activities, just a nice big space for the kids to run round in whilst the mothers drink coffee at one corner of the room.  She’s doing it because her child has no friends and the kids in the street are nasty and, being autonomous, she doesn’t think that structured HE groups are the way to go.  I said we wouldn’t be interested, especially considering that £3:50 gets us all morning at a play barn with plenty of interesting things for her to do and she has a very good social life courtesy of the kids in the street, Brownies and Kung Fu.  She said "oh well, see how you go after the first time then".  Did I miss something?  Which bit of not interested is it that says "but we will come anyway"?  Grrrr!

well, the houseguest entertainment is going swimmingly.  Duke putting up the swing frame yesterday, meaning that I could whip up a swing today and fit this rather funky bag seat in the gap where the broken swing boat had been, allowed for much outdoor busyness.  The sky also brightened sufficiently to allow for the planned BBQ tea featuring Em’s first experience of toasting marshmallows - how exactly she has managed to reach 11 without ever toasting a marshmallow let alone making it into a s’more is beyond me!  She seemed to enjoy the experience……  they have just showered and are now "top to tail" in Aprilia’s bed playing DS games with the instruction that I expect them to be quiet enough to make me assume they are asleep, otherwise I will remove DSs from the room……

There have been a couple of moments today when I really did feel for Em though. 

Bearing in mind she only sees Aprilia every few months, she counts her as her best friend rather than any of the multitude of girls she sees day in day out.  Seems sad really when she has all those social oportunities of school and associated clubs and yet her best friend is a cousin 4 years younger  that she sees only when 2 sets of parents can manage to co-ordinate a play date.  Makes me realise that actually school really isn’t the be all and end all for making buddies after all which is quite a relief really as i do sometimes wonder if it’s HE that makes Aprilia like she is rather than her personality being what makes HE the perfect thing for her (did that make any sense?)  

And then there were multiple comments about how she wishes that she lived with us so she didn’t have to go to High School next month, I get the impression that she is slightly on the outside of the "in crowd" and is genuinely worried that if the one girl who links her to the "right" people falls out with her then she will be friendless.  How horrible to be starting a new school with that hanging over you! 

Plus several comments on how her mum (who is a teacher by the way) would not be clever enough to home educate her because she can’t do maths and can only "do" the packages on the PC that she has to know which I find alarming in an ICT teacher! 

And that her mum isn’t a great mum because she leaved Em to look after her "baby sister" who is a year older than Aprilia but has multiple, severe physical and developmental disabilities whilst she plays on her laptop upstairs.  And whilst I KNOW that ALL teenagers (and 11 is close enough) are misunderstood, unloved and parented by hopeless cases I do feel for her because I know from other sources that she does indeed leave Ceri alone at the other end of the house but then again I also know that Ceri was born desperately prem, that her mum nearly died and that she had PND for a long time afterwards (she didn’t bother going to antinatal apointments because she was too busy at work so pre-eclampsia was missed until she collapsed on the way to work, critically ill) and I do wonder if she even really registers C as hers so I wonder if it’s just a not coping thing and she "deals" with it by just ignoring that side of her life completely.  Sad though.

Anyway she’s had a riot today, being a little girl, not trying to be a pseudo grown up, and it’s lovely to see, is a bit scary though to think that it’s only 3 or 4 years til Aprilia hits the spots and curves stage! 

so little enthusiasm to start it!

The house is still not ready for Aprilia’s houseguest but as she is in front of the TV I feel little inclined to do much about that - it’s her guest and she should damned well be helping!

My final essay is due in 2 weeks.  I’ve read as far as I need to in order to answer it but it’s one that covers the whole scope of the course and I always feel rather daunted by this sort of thing, it’s a lot of ground to rummage back through and I really have run out of steam on this one.

I have laundry up to my eyeballs.  Which is strange seeing as I made a concerted effort to clear the whole lot before we went on holiday so taht there would only be a week’s backlog.  It appears to have been breeding in dark places whilst I was away.

I have a swing to eye splice to the swing frame as we don’t have the correct width of connector thingie to do it the easy way, the ropes are way broader than the old swing so the old ones won’t work and the new one didn’t come with any so I’ve got the delightful job of standing on the step ladder messing with wet nylon rope in the drizzle cos sure as anything the girls are going to want to play on it regardless of the weather!

I have next term’s Rainbow programme to plan and letters to all the parents to write and print off including a set of "Unit Guidelines" covering such things as what will happen if you don’t collect your daughter at the apointed time (half an hour late without a phone call seeming to be a common trick of one particular parent) and what will happen if your daughter turns up without uniform regularly or subs are more than 4 weeks late and most particularly what will happen if your daughter is a mean little brat and reduces another girl to tears.

Oh, and, until her cousin arrives, I also have a small child to entertain really don’t i! 

but no, the little one is currently pitched in the garden and "tent ed" has been in full swing for a few days.  Which of course, is due to the fact that I’d declared it Summer Holidays and no more education was going to be offered!  We’ve finished Follow My Leader which, after a grim start, she really enjoyed.  We have also plodded on with the History bit of Core 1, we’ve drifted off from the plan now and I’m just limping through it a bit at a time.  Some days she’s really interested in it, others she really, really isn’t and having been turned off history as a child I don’t want to do the same to her by pushing it, it’s taken me years to find out how interesting it all is and I can’t help but feel I’ve missed out all these years!

She has a cousin coming tomorrow for a sleep over, the pair of them get along so well, Em is 4 years older than Aprilia but she’s great with her, like the sort of Older Sister I would have loved (not like the Older Brother I got….. who I loved dearly but who was a bit of a monster at times!)  She has the whole thing planned out…… it had better not rain on her parade (or her bbq for that matter!)   and has even done some tidying up in honour of the visit!

Aprilia spotted my tatting shuttle this morning and so decided that, after having almost made a sock baby (it’s currently arm-less cos the need to cuddle it grew too strong before the poor thing was finished!) she *needed* to have a tatting lesson.  Now, you have to understand something here….. I love my daugter to bits but I also can see her foibles, mainly because she shares most of them with me….  and my shuttle isn’t a dainty little thing, and actually, until you get the hang of it, tatting is a fiddly business.  Her fingers were just too wretched small to manage the shuttle but she was in one of her doggedly determined moods which meant that I spent rather a long time today showing, and re-showing her how to do it, undoing bits she had got wrong, and finally finishing off a teeny tiny butterfly for her.  My patience was fast running away out of the building.

I finally managed to bribe her with extra, extra Harry if we could put the shuttle down and have a story time.  The final story haul came to 5 chapters of Half Blood Prince, 2 of Follow my Leader, 3 of Lemony Snicket’s Slippery Slope, 2 of The Dolphins of Laurentum ( Roman Mysterys) and 2 of Muddle Earth.  My brain feels like it has been pushed through a grinder, I know I will miss these marathon story fests when she is big and it’s no longer cool to have mum read but oh my! 

not promising anything like coherance with this, but then, what’s new there?

Bounce was the first Guide camp either of us had ever done, even though I was both a Brownie and a Guide.  I’d been informed that Guide camping is very different than "family camping" so wondered what it was going to be like.  Actually, I wonder if maybe I have a different concept of "family camping" than everyone else (my version including multiple families pitched together…) cos it wasn’t that different.  We had mud, rain, lots of noisey children enjoying themselves most of the time, activities laid on with varying degrees of success and a long walk to the nearest clean toilet.  See?  Just like Kessingland!

Aprilia was with the Brownies for the first half of the week which she had looked forward to for ages but which didn’t quite reach her expectations.  Being a "lone Brownie" tacked onto another pack who already all knew each other and were, for the most part, much older, is never going to be easy for anyone.  For Aprilia, who can suffer from serious bouts of the collywobbles when she’s not in her comfort zone, it was really very hard.  but she made it to the end, earned her Camper badge, tried lots of activities that she’s never done before and even ate foods that she really, really didn’t like the look of but declared to be "okay" once she had got beyond the "ew, it’s all mixed up together" reflex (this girl does not like mixed up foods, except for pot noodles that is……)  I was somewhat annoyed that all her kit came back to me on the Tuesday evening saturated, having been left out in the rain for a while followed by being left at the leaky end of the marquee, especially when they knew that a) I was on site so could have come and collected it earlier if I’d known (and they had seen me earlier so could have mentioned it!!!) and b) unlike the rest of them who were going home and thus didn’t need to worry if the rest of their kit was soaked, they knew full well that she still had the rest of the week to do.  But hey ho, we managed.  We cheered ourselves up on Tuesday evening by visiting the Glam tent which was open as a "one off treate" for the staff and their families.  Amazing what a manicure and glitzy nail varnish will do for your mood!

The rest of the week she split her time between helping me run activities in the "international tent" where 5 of the continents were represented with a craft activity, a few with challenges and all with food and pestering the ladies in the craft and glam tents with her new-found friend who was also a young Brownie whose mum was on the same bit of the site as me!  Between them they each earned their Communicator, (another) Craft and World Guiding badges and would have done more given half the chance but there is only so much you can do in the middle of a field you know!  It was really interesting to see that, after several days of not being able to break into existing friendships and being very obviously on the margins of things, within seconds of meeting up, she and A were inseperable and to see how that dynamic worked so much better.  That pair could have taken on the world, just not if they needed to do it with 12 other girls!!! 

I had a small crisis when my gas stove failed me (the regulator stopped working so I had a flame that was about as much use as a small candle) but that was quickly averted by me learning how to use the "trangia" (meths burning) stove that I had inadvertantly bought a while ago as part of a set of lightweight camping pans!  FAb little thing, bit scary until you get used to it but fab all the same, and aparently I got myself a mega bargain as it should have cost in the region of £40 and I bought it for £10!

The most lasting memory for me is the closing ceremony when then entire camp (400 girls plus about 100 support staff) sang "taps" together whilst the flags were lowered.  Seems such a little thing but it really did send a shiver down my spine.

The memory I’d like to dispose of rather rapidly would be the toilets.  I really, really don’t like chemical loos.  And I shall leave it at that shall I? 

Obviously the week was wonderfully rounded off by throwing everything into the car in random fashion and heading North to join the Off the Path Party.  Jan’s summer house made a lovely "home" for the night as it was really too windy to pitch the Hobbit Hole (it would have been fine once it was up I think, just the thought of acres of tent flapping in the wind whilst we tried to pitch really, really did not appeal!)  Once more I was treated to watching how Aprilia behaves so very differently in a crowd to in a smaller group as she wobbled her way round until finally bonding with 2 other girls to form a sewing club which they took out into the summer house cos the house was just too noisy for them.  I’m actually very proud that she can deal so very well with that sort of thing and find her own little niche where she’s comfortable rather than trying and failing to "fit in" with the crowd.