Cor, I'm ace today!

That might have just been my most productive day, ever!  It was good, and now I am quite tired, but good tired.

Let me just quickly brag about all the things I've achieved today:

1. Getting up early enough to let the boys cycle to school (them cycling means me walking and pushing Matthew in the pram of course, as Matthew can't do the distance quickly enough - we think it's about a mile from our house to the school gate).
2. Walking all the way back home, without getting sweaty!
3. Cleaning our hellishly messy living room, which took four hours (the mess was a year's worth of Thomas's doodlings and writings - there were great piles of papers lying around - he's creative and that's wonderful, but I think it's about time I taught him to tidy up after himself).  Very hard work, I am great.
4. Cooking a healthy and nutritious hardly-any-fat-at-all toasted sandwich for me and Matthew, which we ate with salad, whilst sitting outside in the healthy fresh air.
5. Having much fun talking and talking with Matthew, as he pottered about and helped with the tidying or played with some freshly found lost toys that I had just rooted out of a mountainous pile of stuff.
6. Walking back to school to collect the big boys.  The sun had come out now, and it was too hot for walking to school in jeans - had I known the sun would come out, I would have put my shorts on.
7. Sitting down to do homework with Thomas (only bad thing today: lost patience with poor Thomas, because he's stubborn about maths homework; must remember that losing patience does not help Thomas to learn maths, and also that Thomas gets half of his stubbornness from me!) and did manage to teach him one or two useful things.  Thomas left the table smiling :)
8. Cooking very healthy and nutritious meal of tuna steaks, with very special olive oil and dill/chervil/parsley dressing with prawns, and jacket potatoes with sour cream, and crunchy mange tout.  Now that was very special.  Kev missed it because he had to go out with work people - poor Kev.  
9. Dancing with the boys, when some very funky sixties jazz tune came on the radio.  We danced like loonies, which is one of our favourite things to do.  We always like to leave the blinds open in the living room when we dance, just to make sure that the neighbours can see us and know that we are loonies.
10. Putting the boys to bed, and although starting to get rather tired, still persevering and doing the washing up!  How's about that for motivation?!  I usually leave it until the morning when I'm this tired :)
11. Being a very clever girl, and doing my second, very difficult, proofreading assignment from start to finish.  (I have just finished it now, and although it's very difficult to say, I think I have done quite well.  I'm sure I haven't spotted every mistake, and there will probably be things that I've marked up incorrectly, but I can't expect to get full marks.  But I do have a feeling that I've done quite well.  I seemed to spot a bit of everything that I've been asked to learn so far, and I believe that I have made sure that I have not made the same mistakes as in the first assignment.  But I've got a couple or three weeks to wait until I find out my marks.)
12. Oh, and another little achievement - writing a blog entry about my day :)

Here is a low quality picture of the high quality tuna that I cooked for tea this evening (which the boys loved, and devoured!):

Mmmm :)

Back to a nice routine.

I'm not usually all that keen on sending the kiddie-winkles back to school after the holidays because I miss them.  But this time, I was very happy to have the house to myself again.  We didn't have a bad half-term, but I did shout more than usual: my babes were tired all week, and all they wanted to do was to stay at home and play with their toys, and in the garden.  I indulged them, because I had no money to take them anywhere anyway!  Well, we could have gone to the beach for free, but the weather, as you all know of course, was not great for the beach for most of the week.  I offered to take them to the park, but they were just content to stay at home.  I did drag them out to Holly Farm one afternoon, and we did have a lovely time, as we always do.  And there were a couple of parties.  So all three of our outings involved soft play areas.  Not my usual preferred school holiday activity, but there we are.  To be honest, I was quite bored, and boring, throughout the week.  One Easter holiday, a couple of years ago, I wrote out a list of activities and we ticked them off as we'd done them, and that worked perfectly - we had the best school holiday, like, ever!  But since then I've not bothered with the list, and I should've done.  I will do the list in the Summer holiday (I'd better start saving up now though, as not much on the list was completely free).

I think I also found this half-term to be quite boring because the boys were sometimes at their friend Oliver's house.  He lives in the house behind us, and we've removed a fence panel so that they can come and go as they please.  Usually they're at Oliver's in nice weather, because Oliver has a trampoline!  And even when they're at our house, they're up in the bedroom, and I'm left out!  I want to play!  I've been discarded, for a younger friend.  Hmph!  Wish we'd never removed that fence panel!  I'm jealous of a child!

That's enough exclamation marks!

I've come up with a plan though: I've bought some inspiration - yes, you can buy inspiration now; actually you can buy just about anything if you have a computer and a paypal account - I have bought a pack of Usborne 'Games to Play on Holiday' cards.  And I'm going to lure my children back into our garden with promises of fun and hilarity.  Who needs a trampoline??  Not we.

These activity cards are brill.  Lots of the games only need you and your body, and the rest only require household items that most of us have in the junk drawer.  We're not waiting until the holidays come around again though, no, no, no; we're going to try out some games at the weekend.  It'll probably rain, but that's alright - we can do some puddle jumping instead.  Or, we have a fairly big space in our dining room, we can play some games inside.

Now, I am going to have a lie down, because I think I am coming down with a chest infection!  Hopefully, if I'm nice to it, it will go away very quickly (can't see my mum when any of us have germs - she ends up in hospital when we give her bugs, poor mummy).

I'll just sort of tail off at the end of this post then...  dum de dum...  bye then...

Sunshine. That's nice. Now go away.

I'm not good with hot weather (yeah, yeah, I know, this isn't even really hot - but much hotter than 20ºc (68ºf) and I start to melt, become very grumpy and headachey, and am generally pathetic).  I hate being outside in unshady sun.  Thank goodness we don't get very much up here.  That makes me happy, the thought that the scorchiness never lasts :)  I'm supposed to be outside and playing with my kids, but I just end up lying in the shade somewhere and asking to be allowed back in the house.

This is what I think of when it's above 20ºc:

That is all I have the energy for today.

I am supposed to get on with the next unit of my proofreading course this evening.  I will do that, as long as it's not still scorching hot.  My brain is sweating.

Incidentally, in my car is said that it's 27ºc, which is considerably more than 20ºc, so I'm not being soooooo totally pathetic.