Cup of brown tea

This is completely hilarious and yet incredibly skilful use of words, have a gander. ...

Goings on...

One, two, three yep count them four boys!

This half term week has been exhausting. It kind of crept up on us, fooling us into thinking that as I had some leave booked, we could get some jobs done. Oh no, silly us! Fixing the garage door was a struggle, putting some coats hooks up painful and the shelves will have to wait! At the end of Naomi's tether yesterday I called super nanny (my Mum) and begged her to have the three older boys. Phew, some space to breath. What a great Gran! I got home to Naomi cleaning the toilet! Not quite what I had in mind for her relaxing day without the boys but she seemed to find it strangely cathartic.



I also worked today - had a meeting in Shoreham which meant a nice long bike ride down to the seaside and back. Even on a tiny, twenty year old, 125cc Honda, riding a motorbike is fantastic fun and makes any journey an adventure. I love it, I love it, I love it!
Everyone should have a motorbike, it's great!

You say garage, I say garage, let's call the whole thing...

A triumphal moment of DIY glory came today when I managed to fix my garage door! For some time now going to my garage has been quite an ordeal since the 50 year old mechanism which lifts the door as it is opens, gave up the ghost. Not having £150-£250 to blow on a new door I decided that bodging a fix was the only way and took the whole door down, screwed on some huge hinges and fix it to the frame. It looks pretty awful but works fine and was a great little character building journey of ups and downs, bruised knuckles and bloodied fingers, and a DIY-inferiority complex which gave way to an immense sense of satisfaction on the completion of said door project.

Obviously my escapades in the garage left Naomi with the four boys, one of which (Noah) had been up all night and most of the previous day. By lunch time Naomi was pulling her scalp off having torn her hair out and resorted to trying Rusks, toast, and SMA baby milk. He downed all of that and probably would have eaten a doner Kebab if we had one. So, a growth spurt or something I guess!

This and other stressful May-days including The Big Church Day Out, birthday parties and fun days, has brought home to us just what a difficult phase of life this is with four little ones hanging off our arms 24/7. It is incredibly difficult to do anything other than the minimum even when we're both around at half term. This is something which gets us both down at times but I'm sure we'll look back on these days with wistful grin. Do you think?

Phew!

So the party went well! There was one administrative hick up when we remembered that we'd invited the reli's over ‘mid-afternoon’ but that Ben had another party from 3-5pm! A few phone calls later and all was sorted.

So the day went like his…
9-11am party setup
11-1pm party!
1-2pm pack down
2-3pm Kev & Sandy visiting
3-5pm more clean up with Ben at another party
5-7pm Mum, Dad, other Mum, sis, bro et al!
7-8pm bath and bed
8-9pm clean up and make a curry to reward the hardest working parents ever!

Bens party guests were a mixed bag! From cute or shy to cheeky and even down right obnoxious! I found myself making allsorts of judgements about home life and poor parenting only to conclude that they’re all a ‘work in progress’.

Fresh Pasta

Tonight I made pasta as I often do. I made a tomato sauce to go with it. It had fresh herbs from the garden and was topped of with some feta and roasted pine nuts. What a great meal! It's not often you can eat like a King and feed the whole family for about 60p a head.

So we are still in the middle of a run of full, worthwhile but tiring weekends. There was the very successful Kaleidoscope fun day followed by the very emotional celebration of Naomi's Dads life. Last weekend was Erons birthday party and this weekend is Bens birthday party followed by the 'Big Church Day Out'. After that is Granny and Grandads diamond wedding anniversary.


Ben is having a Transformers birthday party. Not one where you just buy a load of cheap tat from a catalogue but one which involves Naomi making an Optimus Prime cake, a Megatron piñata, transformers party bags and cup cakes, the list goes on. It's been a lot of effort but I can see that she is so keen to make it special. The sort of special that usually involves spending lots of money only that's not an option right now so it's blood. sweat and tears instead! Hopefully it's an investment and whilst they may prefer a day at Lego Land or Chessington right now, in the future they may look back and have some how benefited from the way we try to live. Hmmm deep!

Finally... Eron seems to get more cute the further into his 3rd year he gets whilst Noah is learning some skills with the cup!

How do you eat an Elephant?

Reading,
originally uploaded by Squelchy Welchy.

...one piece at a time!

I've recently been reading 'Long Way Down' the story/journal of two famous guys riding through Africa. It's a pretty big book by my standards but I've almost finished it by reading it in tiny bits every time I visit our 'smallest room'. That's right, this has been my toilet book! In the chaos that is a family of six, this book and that room has been a great escape!

My reading over the last couple of years has been other people's adventures. From motorbikes around the world to rafts across the Pacific and Hobbits through middle earth. The reason for this is probably because I want my own adventure but right now I have a lot of people depending on me for a lot things so the idea of escaping for an adventure, even a tiny one, is not a reality. Reading about other people's will have to do for now.

So the search is on for the next source of escapism to be devoured in bite sized pieces!