Birthday outing

Celebration part the third! This is getting to be one long celebration, and Big is loving every little bit of it.

Having her oldest friend stay overnight, as he has done rather a lot of times in the past, ought to be straightforward and it did used to be. However, we didn’t used to have another little boy sharing the room and Small just can’t help but try to get in on the act. So it was a while before the yelling stopped last night, and then they were up quite considerably before the crack of dawn this morning. Lovely 🙁 Consequently I contrived to sleep through the alarm clock that I had set for 8.30 this morning, and continue snoozing until well gone 9.

I needed the sleep, that much was obvious, but it did slightly derail my day. Just as well we’d had a replan of my driving, as Jonathan was joining us with C, otherwise I’d have struggled to get there in time. As it was, despite the standard tension of driving into Leeds, we arrived pretty much the same minute as the others, and met up outside the playhouse.

Alice was wonderful. The children were rapt throughout it, which has to be a good recommendation. Tim asked how much of the book was shown, and I have to say that it was a pretty good coverage. You certainly got an idea of Alice and who she was, the type of thing she would say and think, although I could have done with a marginally younger actress playing her in some respects. I’ve always thought of Alice as being quite young – can’t remember if it specifies her age in the book, anyone? Jan? But that was only a very minor quibble and overall it was a pretty good birthday treat. Also got to say that while the west yorkshire playhouse is a fair hike from us, it’s well worth the drive, especially on a Sunday. The seating really *is* well tiered, so even though we were on the very back row, the children could still see. Suspect Jonathan had the worst of our seats, and that he may have lost a small amount of the action due to his angle, but other than that, I couldn’t really complain.

Reasonable run home, despite the extremely slow moving lorry taking up two lanes of the M1 and causing a rolling traffic jam of approx two junctions. I suppose I should be grateful they were moving it today when the traffic is light…have I mentioned recently how much I hate that road?

Got home and made tea, while Big explored her present from the Rainedrops. She is absolutely over the moon with it, so thanks Barbara, it’s the hit of the year so far. In fact, I’ve got homework to do tonight, as she wants to write about Butterflies tomorrow, so I need to do some research and leave her some notes to copy! Wonder if I should leave her some more maths as well, she’s requested several more sets of questions today, and today I was allowed to make the totals go up to 11 😉 (Tim got his questions marked wrong when he made them total more than 10 yesterday!)

Tired children into bed, and even though Small refused a story (Big settled for just the one Story of Thumbelina (Read Along with Me S.)) he was asleep within moments once Tim got him to lie down. And now I have stuff to do, so that’s your lot for this weekend. 🙂 Apologies if any of it is incoherent, I’m watching the new episodes of NCIS that we missed the other night 🙂