A visit from the Iveys

It's been half term here this week so we've had a bit on. Richard and Kath came to visit mid week, we had our neighbours Janice and Roger  in for a curry on Friday night, with Cathy and Dom dropping in for a drink, and on Saturday the Iveys drove down from Wimbledon for the night.  After a trip to the re-opened funfair for dodgems, carousel and mini rollercoaster, it was time to run home, through the rain to a warm fire, the Saturday papers and some games. Children in bed, we had a wonderful grown ups dinner, cooking our signature pork fillet dish, before falling like felled trunks into bed. This morning, Giles ventured out into a stunning sunny, spring morning, returning with piles of newspapers. After 36 rounds of tea, croissants and hot cross buns, Rob returned from work and we hit Pett Level for a lovely walk, stone and shell finding expedition. The kids were also invited aboard the lifesaving boat by the boys in the wetsuits, much pant wetting all round. Back home, the grown ups fell on the papers while the kids watched  films, played games and dressed up before a roast chicken lunch. The weekend ended with Scarlett and I curled up in the armchair, in front of the fire, watching Dancing On Ice.  Spring has sprung, daffs are in vases, our bulbs are up, so not sure how much longer we'll have that fire going. 

Och aye the noo

Lucky me -  I got to have a last minute long weekend in Scotland with Moira and Fraser leaving Rob and the girls behind. The main purpose of the trip - apart from to allow Moira to feed my undernourished frame with her regularly delivered meal service, was to see Sarah who had also flown over for the weekend from the US, with her twins Ruby and Jacob. Sarah and Moira were my bridesmaids and Sarah and I were Moira's and they both spent part of their honeymoons staying with us in Sydney, so we all go way back. Despite all seeing each other regularly over the years, in the US, Britain and Australia, we worked out the 3 of us hadn't all been in the same room together for 13 years. There was much to catch up on, aided and abetted by Fraser's beard which poured the wine and attempted rudimentary childcare so us girls could catch up unencumbered by children. Visits to Stirling Castle and Balmaha punctuated the trip which mainly involved long chats on the couch and around the dinner table. Great stuff. 

Laughed. A lot.

The weekend began with a trip to the Saturday morning movies to see Megamind - hilarious. One of the funniest kids-films-that-parents-like-more than we've seen since Toy Story. Voiced by Will Ferrell, Megamind is a giant blue-headed superhero who uses his powers for evil. There were so many jokes only grown ups would get, that it was sometimes hard to hear the dialogue over Rob's hoots of laughter.  After lunch I got the girls ready to drive Scarlett over the hill to nearby Fairlight for the birthday party of one of her classmates. Only a few hundred metres along the road I felt we had a flat tyre so turned around and drove home, parking the car on the pavement to make it easier to change the tyre, and by that I mean for Rob to change the tyre. Even though I have, bizarrely, written a column on how to change a tyre I have never actually done it. After much rummaging in the boot, producing a sucession of metal objects and tools we were totally unfamiliar with, we worked out the jack and the thing for undoing the bolts on the wheel. A third oddly shaped object drew expressions of bemusement from us both so we used it to hold the pages of the car manual open. Moments later a bloke appeared from across the road offering help. He was what I think my grandmother would have referrred to as a 'rum sort', with a broken boxer's nose, a cropped hair do and large 'diamond' earrings. The cynic in me imagined that after effectively finishing the job for us that he would ask for money. While we waited for him to tighten the bolts on the wheel, during which he pointed out our bookmark was actually a tow bar, I casually mentioned I had been on my way to a kid's party when I spotted the flat tyre. "Was the party in Fairlight?" he asked. "Yes," I replied. "We've just dropped our daughter off there," he said. It turned out our good samaritan was the dad of one of Scarlett's classmates. Handshakes all round soon put me back in my box as did the realisation that he had been driving in the opposite direction when he saw us and had done a u-turn to come back and help us. As we waved him off I noticed his wife had been sitting in the car all along, just happy to wait while her husband did a good deed for someone else. Hastings 1, Duthies 0. On Saturday night our giggly babysitter Debbie arrived and Rob and I walked to Maria and Lol's for a dinner party with Maggie and Popi and neighburs Wendy and Mike. It was a very entertaining night with lots of laughs and storytelling. On Sunday morning while Rob was at work, the girls and I watched the DVD of Ring of Bright Water, I found in a charity shop last week. It was the first viewing for them and the first for me in about 30 years. Once you get  used to the beyond annoying flute and other irritating woodwind instruments that mimic the movements of the otter Mitch, it's very enjoyable and made me want to move immediately to a remote croft by the sea in Scotland. That was until Mitch got his head bashed in by Angus the local ditch digger. Tears dried, we had a really lovely Sunday lunch with our neighbours Janice and Roger and  two of their friends before collapsing into bed at 8.30pm exhausted.

Now I really must draw your attention to another extraordinary British TV series called Embarassing Bodies. Each week members of the public, who have some sort of unplesant and therefore, as the title suggests, embarassing problem with their body, comes into the mobile surgery manned by three TV doctors to get a diagnosis. They then show the Dr, and the rest of Britain let's not forget, their embarassing condition. In close up, on camera. Now I'm not sure whether they give the people who come on the show drugs, booze or money to get them there, because for the life of me I have no idea why the young and otherwise attractive young woman on this week's episode would want the rest of her nation to see the rash on her vagina. Anyone?

Likewise the woman whose anus we saw or the man whose leg sore was really more of a fizzing open wound (see above). Are these people unaware they could simply pop to their own GP, A&E unit or psychiatric hopsital for treatment? When I finally managed to drag my eyeballs back in from their stalks and back into my head long enough to roll them in Rob's direction to check his reaction, I found him similarly engaged, his gob agape like the doors to a cross channel ferry. Needless to say we will not be missing this week's instalment.

Busy bees

We managed to pack lots in this week. On Thursday after school, we took the kids to see Tangled, the brilliant new Disney film about Rapunzel (just as good for grown ups as for kids). On Friday, our car, the interior of which resembled a mixture of a child's playroom, a student house and a nuclear waste dump, was in need of a good clean. Not since I discovered a plate with a pizza on it in Sarah Robertson's bed in Kew, have I seen such a mess. Rob was sent out into the cold to do the job but within moments a pyjama-clad Flo was hot on his heels. Once I had wrestled her into a jacket she was off, working her way through a series of vacuum cleaner attachments until the car sparkled. We can't seem to get rid of that smell though.  On Friday night, keen to catch up on our pre-Oscar film viewing, Rob and I watched and enjoyed The Social Network, the nerd-tastic story of the creation of Facebook.

On Saturday we drove across Romney Marsh and on into Kent to Canterbury, where we planned to show the girls the cathedral. I hadn't been since I was 18 when we watched a performance of Murder in the Cathderal in the crypt.  This plan was aborted when we discovered it was 8 quid each for adults and 4 each for the kids to go in. To a cathedral.  Instead we had lunch in the city and then drove on to Whitstable to see Liz and Charlie in the run up to Charlie's birthday party. A bottle of prosecco was opened, cupcakes for the party were decorated and then Charlie and Flo, who are now strangely inseparable (strange because in Sydney last year they fought all day long), disappeared upstair to mix toothpaste and shampoo in a bucket and make a big goo perfect for rubbing into carpets. Downstairs the parents sipped wine in blissful ignorance because they were quiet. The evening continued it would seem in a similar vein of wine dirnking. At some point a curry and pizza were produced ad consumed. I'm guessing the last bit as I have no memory of actually eating it, but the tell-tale curry stains on my dress on Sunday morning gave that away. Oh and the fact that my head felt as if it had actually been split open with an axe. I have never, ever had a hangover like it - the closest being the one the morning after my 30th birthday when I cried, I felt so bad, and Rob had to drive me to and from work, I felt so ill. Now I've mentioned we drank a bit but on surveying the empties there were only 3 and there were 3 of us and this didn't seem to be the sort of hangover  you get from drinking a bottle of wine, more like 4 or 5. I spent 5 days last week on a protein only diet and I'm pretty sure this may have had something to do with it - no carbs, fruit or veg, just protein and fat-free dairy. Needless to say, after being helped into the car, I started to feel better on the drive home but didn't touch a drop of wine at Maria and Lol's where we had a lovely Sunday lunch with Dad and Alexandra, where stories of drunken nights were shared around the table...

...and the other one

Scarlett's second big tooth leapt to freedom last night, apparently missing its partner. She now resembles a young Dracula and has developed a pleasant lisp. Looking at this photo, I realise how long it's been since any of us have seen some serious sun. Scarlett looks positively anaemic. For myself, although I'm pleased my skin is getting a break from 13 years of sun, I'm finding that not having a tan shows up all the lines, wrinkles and other consequences of sun damage.  Pass the fake tan.

Big teeth

Scarlett looks quite demented in this photo which shows the departure, yesterday, of the first of her two big front baby teeth. After a night and a morning of fiddling and twisting, it evidently fell out during lunch at school. She now looks like a young Nanny McPhee.
Also new this week, the dance exercise class Maggie and I attended on Monday night at the local high school. After some anxious minutes in the car trying to guess the age group of the other exercisers we would encounter - Maggie thought 16, I thought 65 - we were beyond elated to discover a gym full of middle-aged ladies who'd had too much pie. Just like us. An hour of marching, agonising leg lifts, cha chaing and, bizarrely, grapevining, later we were two sweaty but happy individuals and will be back for more next week.