just another morning here

Pick and Mix tea is what we have when we empty the contents of the fridge (and larder) onto the table and everyone takes what they want. Okay, not the entire contents, but you get the picture. Rules are that as long as we eat a sandwich/wrap/ricecakes and a piece of fruit then we can add pretty much what we want. The children think that this is a huge treat, so when I announced at the beginning of the week that it was going to be Pick and Mix for dinner every night it was met with huge excitement.

However, the reason for this is that we simply don’t have time this week to cook and sit down together, so I wasn’t quite so enamoured with the concept – not for a whole week! So if you want to be very bored hearing about the various reasons, read on …

Monday
Steve was out for tea anyway – Water Lane’s fortnightly ‘directors’ dinner’. Had to laugh as I pulled up in the car on the way home from Sainsbury’s at 5.30pm as Steve was going out again having dropped Anna home – we wound down the windows and had a minute-long conversation, which may be the most we manage today!

Josiah was meant to be doing a recording session with choir at school; in the end it got cancelled because the recording engineer was stuck in Europe somewhere unable to get back due to volcanic ash. But they still had a practice instead, so he had to eat and be back out by 6.10pm. Abbie has a drum lesson on a Monday too, so she needed to be ready on time. Of course by the time we’d all got home it was 8.30pm, and everyone was a bit tired.

Tuesday
This should have been another recording day for Josiah – but that was cancelled again. Usually when things are cancelled I breathe a sigh of relief but actually today it was just more hassle to have to make arrangements for him to come home (I’d booked him in to school for tea!). We changed plans, anyway; he got picked up by our friends round the corner and went home with them to do homework before walking home.

Steve came home a bit early to start the Pick and Mix scrum during the tail end of piano/cello lessons, and I got home from my staff meeting as soon as I could. Lessons finish at 6.15pm and we had to leave immediately to get Anna back to school. The evening’s entertainment was then provided by St. Margaret’s and their summer concert. Anna plays in about a hundred ensembles (okay, only 5 but it seems like a lot!) so she was on and off at various points. This was the first outing of the black performance dress which we struggled to buy – the one we found looked lovely in the end though. And she played well – apart from losing her music to one piece so photocopied the score at the last minute, meaning lots of unnecessary page turns, oh and apart from pretending to be a bass flute which doesn’t actually work that well on a bassoon, but never mind. So pleased that we made the school move, it’s such a relief to actually have that many groups/ensembles going on for her to join in with. Wind Band was the best but I didn’t get any photos of that – couldn’t see Anna in it anyway as she was hiding at the back.

Got home around 9ish and then I dashed out for a late night geocache – Operation Boardwalk – which saw us climbing down the side of the riverbank and then along a rickety old pier on the Teign Estuary, in the dark. Night caches are always good fun though – actually I was glad that it was pitch black as at least I couldn’t really see down from the boardwalk otherwise I might have chickened out. I found the vital clues after a long search so I was very pleased with myself.
Bit of a late night after that though …

Wednesday
Day at work/school for all of us. Did I mention it’s SATS week for Abbie this week, just to add to the stress? I was in with the very youngest nursery class, lovely but very hard work. Early start for Steve and the posh school two since over the past two days Josiah has managed to leave a shoulder rest and an entire set of school clothes at school, so Steve went in to try and retrieve all of that!
After school we came home in dribs and drabs. Josiah and I ate first, in order to get to violin on time. From there I took him back to the cathedral for his recording, then went on to a concert by a visiting German Choir, here for ECO’s 40th Anniversary Celebrations. I have the dubious honour of being chair of ECO’s committee so therefore felt obliged to attend as many of the festivities as possible, despite the fact that I don’t really do socialising! Anyway, tonight we were in charge of refreshments so nothing too onerous.
Meanwhile the girls had tea and then went out with Laura for Wind Group, while Steve was on pickup duty for the boys. I ended up finishing at the concert at the same time that Steve was waiting for the boys so we landed in the Cathedral at the same time and brought home one boy each – no tired arguments that night!
Late-ish night all round as a result – so all getting a bit tired now!

Thursday
Oooh excitement on Thursday as we might all be home in time to have tea together – but no, Steve and I were going out to a party with food – so pick and mix for the children again. Then again we thought it might be an idea to eat something before we went, just in case, so we picked a bit too
Changes to the programme (no evensong because of the 3 nights of recording previously, which of course didn’t all happen but evensong remained cancelled for the boys anyway) mean changes to transport arrangements; fortunately we managed to share taxi runs with our friends around the corner. This was almost scuppered by a cricket match that I didn’t know about but thank goodness all turned out ok. Amazingly in the end we were all home by 5.30pm, and the nice thing was that it meant Josiah had time for a much-needed bath!

Parties: Steve and I really aren’t good with parties. Even less good when we really don’t want to be there and are only going by virtue of the fact that I’m chair of the orchestra committee. However, I did buy a dress for the occasion …
Thankfully there was no dancing, instead just a lengthy performance from the choir. When asked ‘do you want an encore’ we didn’t have the heart to shout ‘no!’. Hmm. Got home around 11.15 and fell into bed. Now *really* tired.

Friday
Woke at 4am stressing about tonight’s concert. Got ready this morning and wrote myself a list of stuff we needed to remember tonight, as it’s another day when only some of us will make it home at all before 10pm! First though, a day at school for all of us. In my favourite class today at least – being exhausted before you start isn’t ever a good plan but hey ho.

After school Abbie and I dashed about getting ready, packing teas, gathering up clothes, instruments, and folders, Caitlin & Riona turned up and we went into town for the concert. Picked up Grecians clobber from some friends en route for the Exeter City March that Richard has re-worked, which is going to be used as a bit of a theme tune for Exeter City FC, so we had a Grecians themed piece with football rattles, whistles etc.

Class moment in the piece when Joe’s friend whirled his rattle around and hit Josiah in the head with it! Joe had lost it by the end of the concert which was a bit of a shame as he missed the beats badly on the last piece, but never mind – it was 10pm by then, he’d been at school/choir/orchestra since 8am and he is still not quite 9!

Anyway, the concert went well, I think I managed to do a decent job of looking after my recording engineers as well as the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress, and the Germans seemed fairly happy too. We over-ran by half an hour, oops. Our family managed to win a squash racket, perfume set, paddling pool, and £25 BSO vouchers in the raffle – and Grandma won a plant too! Home after a lengthy clear-up job at around 11.15pm again. Fell into bed but watched Outnumbered on replay before falling asleep.

Today we had to be up early anyway as Steve has gone off racing for the day (weekend) while Josiah went off to choir as usual. Anna got up and opened a letter to find she has an audition for SWMS in a couple of weeks – she’s pleased about that. So, anyway I am going to clean the house, cook dinner for our first family meal in a week, and then sleep.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 15th, 2010 at 9:07 and is filed under cookery, music, while at work .... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.