Ok, Party's Over

Both parties, actually. Poor Sid has been feeling dreadfully left out - after all, if both boys get parties, why shouldn't she?

Kit required his guests to bring water pistols and a change of clothes, and in spite of the gloomy evening, and the fine rain already forming, the eight children spent a very noisy half hour getting drenched before forming a very cold and bedraggled queue for the shower. Suddenly having three shower rooms in the house was barely adequate. The girls beat the boys in the quiz, but were rubbish at pass-the-orange, and Jeremy's twist on the spoon-and-string game was that the spoon had spent the afternoon in the freezer. Hee hee hee.

Beri's party also involved quantities of water - in his case, a water slide with a paddling pool at the end of it. More wet children, these ones muddy as well. Lunch was pizza, hula hoops, slices of apple, and chocolate cake *hangs head in shame*. One girl ate the hula hoops and a slice of cake, and one ate only the hula hoops. I learned later that her mother had given her a sausage roll before the party, on the grounds that she never ate her lunch.

We are in our last week before term starts, and before Jeremy starts his new job. I don't know that any of us are much looking forward to either of those things.

Blog? What blog??

. . . .ah yes - this one.

Well, it's summer, and the children play, and Jeremy does DIY, and I feel guilty about not doing the washing-up. That's about it, really.

Well, I guess there were the Perseids - Jeremy and I lying on the trampoline at eleven o'clock at night, not nearly well wrapped up enough, staring into the light-polluted sky and marvelling at the unparalleled beauty of the aeroplane lights - a major benefit of living so close to a flight path. Our viewing was totally undistracted by random shooting stars, thank goodness. They get so in the way of a decent bout of plane-spotting, dontcha find?

Sid painted her fingers and toes - when I say 'painted her fingers and toes', I do mean 'painted her fingers and toes'. On each digit, she started at her middle knuckle and plastered purple sparkly goo all the way to the end. What slightly scares me is that I don't know where she did this. Am I going to find a crusty lump of ugh on a Turkish rug? On the wooden floorboards? Smeared over a sofa or the curtains? In the library, heaven forbid?

Did I mention that Kit had a trial Karate lesson at the end of last term? Did I further mention that Beri, a couple of days after this, wanted to know if he could join in? So last Thursday, off we went to watch the brothers HA! and UG! and HAI! their way through a class together. Kit, bless him, took very good care of Beri, (drawing on his VASTLY greater experience of karate lessons, obviously) positioning him so he could see, repeating the sensei's instructions, and being fantastically big-brotherly.

Oh and yes yes yes! - Sid decided, in no uncertain terms, that she had had ENOUGH of an overnight nappy, and could she not, please? Based on the fact that in the morning her nappy was never less than VERY soggy with pee, I had my misgivings, oh yes. I gave in on the understanding that Jeremy dealt with the one-in-the-morning soggy bedding roust-out. To my amazement, it's been ten days now, and not one accident. (The same cannot be said for the daytime, however . . .) So it's only Beri now. Gulp.

You win some, you lose some

Having persuaded Jeremy's parents to join us for the day, and Jane having offered to look after the children while Jeremy and I saw the house, we missed Audley End. Extremely irritatingly, it was shut. Ha - I knew we were right to join the National Trust. Those English Heritage dossers are an idle bunch.

To Jeremy's and Ian's delight, the next possibility was Duxford Air Museum (the children didn't care, as long as it involved lunch). Being as how the major exhibits are all aircraft, the place is huge. We got to see inside a prototype Concorde, and ride on an electric train from one end of the museum to the other.

I found myself profoundly disturbed by the Land Warfare exhibition, which concentrated on WWII and the Normandy Landings. (I know. At my great age.) I know we weren't in there for that long, and certainly didn't see absolutely everything, but nowhere in all the diagrams and pictures and video footage that I saw was there any mention of the lives that were lost. No idea at all of the scale of human destruction. Yes, I understand that small children would be quite unjustifiably frightened by graphic representations, but no mention of the dead at all? It seems such a blatant omission, and such a cynical one. I don't understand why veterans' groups don't make a bigger deal of this.

Anyway.

All the Valentine grandkids were there for Sunday lunch, so the children had a ball, and on Tuesday the five of us went for a swim. Sid was so reluctant to get out that she yelled and stamped her feet and refused to get dressed. Luckily she had changed her mind by the time we got back, so she dressed before getting out of the car. (Hadn't changed her mind about yelling and stamping her feet, though.)

And for the first time ever chez ValentineSr., the little ones were independent enough to amuse themselves and eachother, which meant Jeremy and I could spend some time just sitting. (I vividly recall the Christmas Beri was just two years old. The call to lunch came, and I found him sitting in the middle of a great pile of games. He had found the boxes of Ludo and Scrabble and Halma and Monopoly and and and and, had opened them all and tipped their contents out onto the sitting room rug. Oh how I laughed. Ha ha ha ha ha.)

And the big news - Jeremy has a job!

Not just any old I'd-better-take-it-because-I-have-a-family-to-feed job, but a real, proper, senior senior JOB. A general managership at E-on Ruhrgas. Thank goodness. Now we won't have to sell the children for experiments.

Argh

My Aralia Elegantissima.

My mother-in-law's Aralia Elegantissima.

Is it the lunch, or is the conversation . . .

It's hard keeping up with her sometimes.

We've done hardly anything since we arrived home, and feel all the better for it. The house, which was extremely tidy when we came home, is pretty much back to its usual shambles. Sid and Beri have ALL the sofa cushions from ALL the sofas piled in the middle of the floor, are dressed in their sunsuits and are playing some arcane game, while Kit is off at a friend's party, racing Go-karts.

Tomorrow morning we go to Jeremy's parents in Essex for a couple of days. I'm hoping to visit Audley End, where there is a wonderful vegetable garden managed by the HDRA. In Trevarno we saw a similar garden at a MUCH earlier stage of restoration, again with the HDRA's involvement - if we get to make the visit, I'll tell you about the Vine House. Maybe we'll even have the courage to see the inside of the House this time.

Our friend Daisy, who is a couple of weeks shy of her fourth birthday, and a twin (developmentally, twins are supposed to lag behind singletons by about six months), has just mastered the art of riding a bike WITHOUT STABILISERS. (Beri, almost a year older, hasn't a clue.) She was riding round the garden, where her parents were standing chatting, and crashed into her father's legs. She fell off, got up, and putting her hands on her hips said 'Daddy! You MUST learn to look where you are going!'

We're Back

Two whole days ago, and we've been having a well-earned rest after the rigours of the holiday. On the left, a picture taken on our first, and on the right, a picture taken on our last day. Ha flippin' ha, eh? Well, it was bound to happen.

We went to the Blue Reef aquarium in Newquay, which is the most charming aquarium I've ever visited - small, but perfectly formed. I found my favourites, the jellyfish, and Sid found Nemo and would NOT be dragged away.



And we saw the Green Flash! It was quite, quite perfect. (Jeremy didn't believe me, a) that it existed, and b) he banged on about latitude and atmospheric conditions and blah blah blah. Imagine my intense irritation when, on the first possible evening, I had my camera to my eye, and missed it, AND JEREMY SAW IT. Aaaarghh!) I learned my lesson the next night though, and was privileged to see, for a fraction of a second, the most beautiful green.


Our way home, on a very beautiful and warm day, took us through Lacock, where, to Kit's excitement, part of Harry Potter had been filmed. The Cloisters, and the rest of the Abbey, are indeed fascinating, but the item that caught my eye was the Monastic Drain.

What?