A lovely day today, with home edding friends doing lots of planting things. Fell out of bed blearily about 10 ish (although vaguely recollect a phone conversation prior to that about woodcraft folk) and chatted with friend re plans on the phone. Chucked the kids in the car and belted off up to the garden centre, determined to do planty things. Well, i bought strawberry plants the other day, and we need compost, and really wanted to do the potato thing.
So we wandered around the garden centre (who knew there were so many types of compost?? Aargh…ended up with an organic one) and got our seed potatoes (three types, went for Foremost, Home guard and Duke of York, as fairly sure Grandfather said not to go for Epicure and that was the other first early available). Still haven’t managed to get suitable tubs, but dp has to go down to see family next week, so if all else fails, will commission Grandfather to get us some tubs like his and go with that.
Got back and friends had arrived before us – togged the elder kiddies up and kicked them out in the garden while I prepared lunch (that had been brought for us, nice one!) After we’d eventually all eaten, we planted sunflower seeds and strawberry plants. The elder children played together pretty well – dd is very bossy, but R pretty much takes it in his stride, so it wasn’t too bad.
After mid afternoon snacks we suspended hyacinth bulbs above water in peculiar bulb growing things and the offspring played some more, before friends departed just before tea time.
Does seem we’d pushed it a tiny bit too far though – dd went into complete meltdown while finishing her tea, and ended up being frogmarched upstairs to her bath to chill out, and then pretty much straight to bed. A shame – we’d had a much better day, with very little direct confrontation, so a pity that I let it get out of hand in the evening, but I just didn’t spot the signs at all.
Now hopefully ds is getting tired, so I’m about to see if I can persuade him it’s bedtime. Night night all.
