Thursday was hot. So hot that I decided it was probably just as well that we weren’t going to the cloth place as well as Small’s Beaver sausage sizzle, as it would probably be way too much for them.
So instead we had a quiet day at home, apart from the screaming 🙁 There were some arguments over DVDs as Small had started watching one while Big was at Brownies and she didn’t want to watch that one from halfway through, while I thought it was reasonable for him to finish it, and she didn’t want to be out of the room to let him watch it in peace. I did remind her that she’d said she wanted to spend some time working on her diary, but that led to much more loudness, and stress.
Eventually sorted with much dvd watching, mainly Spider-Man 1 and 2
. While they were doing this I got increasingly wound up trying to work out how to get to where we needed to go on public transport, and eventually gave up and decided we would just leave really early, so got us organised, and we left just after 4.
Found the right bus stop and sat at it for over half an hour, as a bus just didn’t come 🙁 There were lots of other ppl waiting too, but most of them got on the bus about 15 minutes before we could – that one was going to the wrong side of the other town. That left us sitting with a lovely older lady, who started conversation with me by complaining that the other woman who had been sitting next to her was a less than cheery soul who could do nothing but talk about the war. “I lived through the war too,” she said “but I don’t need to go on about it all the time!”
Good opening gambit. We chatted some more and it turned out that the scout camp we were aiming for is very near her house, and she said if we got off with her she’d show us where to go.
Children already looking bedraggled by now after 30 minutes of waiting in the hot sun (whose idea was it to design bus stops that are first cousins to greenhouses anyway?) she took further pity on us and decided she would walk us most of the way along, as she’s a rambler, she likes walking, and she didn’t have anything else to do that evening anyway.
Turned out it’s probably about a mile and a half from the bus stop to the scout camp, mainly as the scout camp is over a mile off the road 🙁 Small walked uncomplainingly along as all these cars carrying beavers passed us by – Big was pretty uncomplaining too, but she’s got much longer legs than he has! We finally said goodbye to our good samaritan as she struck off across the fields to her house, and I delivered a hot and bothered Small to his troop only a few minutes late. I suspect that I will now forever be the mad woman who walked from the bus while pregnant on a very hot evening!
Big and I struck back out towards the road, investigated the neighbouring campsite in hope of finding a bar (didn’t open for another 50 minutes) and finally wound up in the country park to wait for Tim to come and pick us all up.
This meant we could employ our new Usborne Spotter’s Guide – Trees
and investigate the trees around us – slightly ashamed to discover she couldn’t recognise an oak tree. Still we worked out how to use the book and identified a number of trees and she took pictures of ones we weren’t sure of so that we could do further research. And then we walked back to the scout camp and watched the comanche explorers guiding cars to park safely until Tim arrived.
Small had had a wonderful evening – “there were two bouncy castles!” and he was quite pleased to see Daddy home too. And then we came home and put hot tired children to bed.
Can’t remember for sure, but don’t think I was all that long behind them!
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