A pre-holiday-season beach clean up obviously has to happen before its warm enough to bring the hoards to the beach, but that doesn’t make for a warm day out really.  However, the rain held off until we were on our way home and I can vouch for the wind cheating properties of my waterproofs.  The bits not covered up got seriously chilly though :-O

I’ve never been to West Kirby before, it’s not the “seaside” as such, it’s on an estuary and when the tide goes out, it goes a very l o n g way out.  That’s not the sea you can see in the pictures, it’s just very large, shallow puddles….. It’s just under an hour away from us and when we got there it looked mainly like this.  If the wind had just dropped it would have been a glorious day for it really.

Although by the time we were leaving the sky looked a lot more like this

The day was organised by the Marine Conservation Society in collaboration with M&S.  The former providing the knowlege  and the latter providing the incentive to get us all there with vouchers for £5 off M&S food shopping which everyone got (so this really isn’t a sponsored blog post as such, just one I’ve been asked to write, about something I would have blogged anyway….)  I say organised, well, I use that in a fairly generous way in the same way that many home ed events are organised…… there was a lot of hanging around beforehand when really they could have been doing the “register”, dishing out gloves etc as people arrived and then about 20 mins of chaos whilst everyone grabbed stuff they needed from 3 poor women who were desperately trying to herd cats, sorry, I mean organise a gaggle of mainly “women of a certain age” into groups of 3-5 people with a bin bag, litter picker and clipboard per group (half the groups were recording what was picked up over a set area for the national survey.)  We were initially in a group of 5 but in the melee of trying to get grabbers and bags we got split up so we struck off on our own.

There were a few younger environmentalists there, this one was particularly cute.

And the local Bobbies came down to play too, although I think it was more a case of they had come onto the beach to play with their new quads and thought they would join in anyway.

Some folks went off into the dunes and they hauled in some seriously big bits of junk (crates, plastic drums etc) but we stayed round the beach area, where we were supposed to be and grubbed up lots of much smaller bits of tat that didn’t look nearly so impressive.  Unlike many beaches I’ve visited, it was actually remarkably clean to start with at a casual glance anyway but once you started looking, a lot of the “pebbles” were glass shards, building rubble and plastic.

This is fairly typical of what you can pick up in just one small area along the high tide mark, not the sort of thing you want where little ones will be playing barefoot!

There was supposed to be a BBQ afterwards with food provided by M&S. However, the caterers were having “one of those days” and by the time we were finished, there was still going to be something like a 40 minute wait before they started serving, and the children from the local schools who had come to help were to be fed first.   We were cold.  There was nowhere to shelter from the biting wind and the cloud was getting blacker by the minute so we decided that free food be damned, we were going to go and meet Duke where he works (20 minutes away, and on our route home) and have lunch in the hospital canteen.  It was a very pleasant way to spend an hour.

So, would I do it again?  Probably, but I’d turn up a bit late to save having to stand around for so long, or at least park where I could see the gathering place and sit in the shelter of the car until I had to brave the elements.

Would Aprilia?  Possibly, although she’s very sore just now so I suspect that if I asked her the answer wouldn’t be polite!

Would I recommend anyone else do it?  Absolutely, even if you just do 10 minutes or even take a bin bag with you next time you go to the beach and pick up anything you see just near where you are sitting.  Every little helps.

I do know, on an academic level rather than really by experience, that good running shoes make a huge difference to how well you can run and also how well you can avoid injury.  I’ve done enough sports massage on people who have pounded the pavements in their very fashionable but very unsuitable trainers to know that getting the right shoes for the individual is really important.

So, when I was asked to post a running shoe give away on my blog over which I had rather a lot of control over who gets the goodies, I thought that I could definitely make use of it to “reward” those of you who are going to run for charity this year (or next for that matter) with a pair of shoes that will help you perform at your best.

The shoes will come from SportShoes.com who have an impressive range of shoes for all types of feet and terrain.  They also have a nifty video tutorial explaining how to pick the right shoes for you.  This is actually a really important point as good shoes for one person may be totally useless to someone whose feet are a different shape or who runs differently or has flat feet or whatever else.  Even if you don’t win, go and watch the vid before you think about going to your local sports shop to get your next pair of shoes – asking for exactly the right kind of shoe is essential in a lot of high street stores as most of them assume that if you aren’t already super-fit then really all you are after buying is something to slouch around in.

Here’s what I want you to do……

If you are planning on running for a charity some time soon-ish, tell me about it.  Ideally I’d love you to do a really passionate blog about your chosen charity and why it means so much to you and then drop the link into a comment here…. but I know that you don’t all have time, so I’ll accept a short and sweet comment about your charity and why it means a lot to you in the comments.  People who send more readers this way via their own blog may well get extra entries (because I am, after all, trying to drum up lots of interest here and I’m not above a bit of bribery to get it)  I do need some way to verify that you are a real person though, not a cleverly worded spambot.  So please, if I don’t already know you personally, link through to your blog or some other on-line presence so I can verify who you are.  I don’t want a genuine person to miss out because a spambot won and by the time we discover, it’s too late for a real person to benefit

Because many of my friends support many different and very worthy charities I’m not going to set myself up for anguish and say I’ll pick the most deserving though.  Oh no, not going there!  At the end of the time period set for the competition I’m just going to print off the comments, cut them up, drop them all in a hat and pick one.   If you are the lucky one, you get to pick a pair of shoes from SportShoes.com running shoe collection up to the value of £90.  You can get a decent pair of shoes for that!

These are the rules, terms, conditions and so on as laid down by the company running the give away.  I’m quite sorry that they exclude younger runners, I think that young runners need proper shoes even more than adults so that their developing bodies are protected but there you go.

1. Competition is only available to individuals aged 18 and over.
2. The prize will be sent out within 28 days.
3. The prize must be redeemed within 6 months.
4. The prize will be a pair of running shoes selected from www.sportsshoes.com/running up to the value of £90.
5. Sportsshoes.com reserves the right to provide a substitute prize of a similar value should the specified prize become unavailable for reasons beyond its control. Cash or credit alternatives will not be offered.
6. Sportsshoes reserves the right to amend, suspend or cancel the competition without notice and/or review and revise these terms and conditions at any time without giving prior notice.
7. The publisher’s decision is final.

Now, I’m always a bit wary of “edutainment” type websites, I’m not convinced that doing some random game is going to really teach a child much other than maybe a bit of hand-mouse-eye coordination but there does seem to be some stuff there that is a cut above that including some video clips etc on the family side of the site and a huge array of resources on the Teachers side which cover a fair bit of the much hallowed National Curriculum with a fishy theme.  Some of the schooly bits would probably do well for a fishy themed home ed group day for those who are lucky enough to have a good home ed group nearby.  I’m wondering about a fishy theme to the next term of Rainbows that I plan and having a nice easy time of it whilst the website takes the strain

The Big Beach Clean Up runs over the weekend from the 11th to the 13th of May this year and is an event organised to tidy up the beachs round our coastline so that, come summer, we can all enjoy them but also in the hopes that it will reduce the amount of rubbish that ends up in our waters, poisoning or choking our aquatic life.

As an incentive, anyone taking part will get to enjoy a BBQ laid on by Marks and Spencers and will get a further bribe of an M&S voucher worth £5 off a £25 food shop in M&S which could be a rather indulgent way to repenish all those calories you will burn off picking up other people’s tat.

Aprilia and I will be at the West Kirby event which I know is not somewhere most of my readers are close enough to come to but it would be fab to know that you are joining us “in spirit” somewhere closer to yourselves.  As an additional bonus, for badge-obsessed types like my little miss…… bear in mind that events like this are probably worthy of a green Blue Peter badge!

In the interests of being clear here, I’ve been invited to go along as a “mummy blogger ambassador” which means I’ve been asked to blog before and after the event in return for my M&S voucher (I’m not sure if that’s the same voucher as everyone gets for taking part, I’m assuming it is) so I shall be reporting back after our day trip on Friday.  Well, okay, so I shall be reporting back some time soon after Friday….. why break the habit of a lifetime and blog right away?

The journeys were a little more moist that I had hoped for, I did wonder at one point if maybe when I was having the car mended this week I should have asked them to fit a snorkel as well….. but we got there and parked and then a lovely man in a minibus loaded us up and delivered us to the hall.  Very nice man.   The same very nice man delivered us back to the car at the end of the day and helped us load the car too.  We gave him a sweetie

I’d been warned that it was COLD at the show so went prepared.  I have to say that I really wasn’t cold at all but then, having survived several Guide/Brownie camps and outings as well as plenty of Home Ed camps I’m fairly good at wrapping up for the weather.  I did buy a headscarf-ish thing from the Ravelry Interactive Area as I’d forgotten to put my wooly hood in the bag and that probably made a lot of difference as it kept my ears lovely and warm (my hair does a fairly good job of keeping the rest of my head and neck warm!)

Anyway, I’ve been to loads of different types of shows and expos etc over the years and I think this one was definitely one of the more enjoyable ones.  It’s not huge but it was big enough that I felt we had got our money’s worth out of the entry price and had plenty of variety to look at.  Aprilia really enjoyed it too which did surprise me as I had expected her to be a bit bored and want to keep just going to the cute animal stands.  I tend to forget that she’s a craft fiend!

One of the first stands we visited had alpaca on it.  They are very cute.  No, seriously, VERY cute (especially the brown one, I did wonder if I was going to have to prize her away from him)

I bought a bag of fleece from this stall without even thinking about shopping arround first to see what other alpaca was available – anyone who is willing to decorate their shop with two walking rugs gets my vote.

We didn’t find the angora bunnies on the fist lap round due to the crowd of cooing women round that particular stall.  We did manage it later in the day though.  Angora bunnies are a little bigger than my two gorgeous rabs but really, you know what?  Mine are every bit as cute as they are (and Fudge could rival them for fluffiness in winter too so there…..) But anyway,they were gorgeous and here they are (click on images for bigger ones on Flickr.)

And there were some sheep too!  This is a Gottland one and actually looked so much better in the flesh (or in the fluff as you may say) The fleece looks like it’s been in rags all night it’s so curly.  I was going to go back and get a bag of fleece from this stand too but somehow didn’t manage to.

Other good bits were the Woolsack stand where we went twice to help stuff lots of hand made cushions.  They are all made with British wool, either woven, knitted, crocheted or felted and have been made all over the country and are stuffed with British wool.  Aprilia ended up stuffing and sewing up 5 and was definitely a bit of a hit with the ladies there.

The eagle eyed amongst you will notice the bribe being offered to all volenteers….. sweeties!  Somehow we ended up coming home with half a box of them, did I mention that she was a bit of a hit with the ladies??

And the felting stand where Aprilia blew her budget and then some (she’s going to be ironing shirts for a good long time to pay for that one!) on wet felting supplies.

Oh, and the man selling really pretty spindles which we partook of (and inkle looms which I resisted but only just)

Then there were the proper dark willow baskets that I so wish I’d bought because they were proper round ones and they were lovely but they were £30 so I didn’t.  Maybe next year.

And we would have spent more time in the Interactive area but it was ruddy cold up that end of the hall but I did get my apron (so now my kitchen apron can go back in there and I have something much better for keeping me clean when i play with my fluff) and my Ravelry Hello badge.  Aprilia enjoyed finding out how a drum carder works there too (and then went pale when she found out how much they cost!)

The final stash doesn’t look too bad really….

Breakfasts – usually chocolate porridge (don’t knock it til you’ve tried it!)

Today – (L)Carrot and parsnip soup
(T) Cottage Pie with veg

Friday
Lunch out with Slimming World Ladies (yum)
(T) Spanish omlette with salad and home made crisps (plus garlic bread for Duke cos he won’t eat salad)

Saturday
Bacon, eggs, beans, grilled tomato and mushrooms (we have a visitor and Aprilia wants to make sure we feed her!!!!)
(L) Pasta with quark and passata
(T) Eggy Bread for A and me, Sausages for Duke

Sunday
(L)Roast chicken, carrots, onions, roast parsnips, spuds and peas
(T) crumpets (4 syns each, plus whatever syns are in toppings!)

Monday
(L)Meat sandwiches and fruit for A, meat + salad for me
(T)Cold chichen and “Slimming world chips” plus veg/salad and fruit

Tuesday
(L) Beans on toast (need to remember to count syns for me)
(T) Fish casserole from SW recipe book

Wednesday
(L) “speed soup” for me, sandwiches for A
(T) Turkey burger for Duke, Turkey meatballs in pasata sauce for us

Anyway.  We had a leisurely drive down to the Fishes, pootling along at an uncharacteristically sedate rate to make the petrol go further, and arrived at round about the right time.  There was tea, cake and chat for the bigger people and aparently there was charging arround on the field, coke and Mentos volcanoes, non-Newtonian fluids (Strawberry blancmange flavoured) and girlie gossiping for the smaller people.  I say smaller people, obviously I’m on shaky ground here these days as many of these allegedly smaller people are now unreasonably tall.  It’s not on you know.

The afternoon slid gently towards evening with a very lovely spread of food for everyone followed by a film for some, DS-ing/chatting for others and erm, well, more tea and chatting for the grown ups!

Next morning was a very gentle start for Aprilia and I as we were in the “guest wing” which is well insulated from the main house and thus we had no idea that anyone else was awake  I did some very decadent web surfing on my phone (you know, sometimes it actually rings but mostly it’s not a phone at all, it’s a lovely toy…..) with the tiniest possible amount of me poking out of the sleeping bag (hey, it was comfy in there!) and eventually surfaced to find pancakes being cooked.  Pancakes appear to be a standard breakfast food for home ed gathering, I aproove of this absolutely

We slowly got everything back into the car and headed off to the second part of our visiting weekend.  I do think it was very considerate of the Fishes to organise their party to coincide with History Etc at the Beans which is very close by.  Aprilia did various crafty bits relating to Middle Ages things, took part in a reenactment of a crusade and then lept forward in time just a little to join in the Tudor singing and cooking of lunch.  It was mentioned to me that she knew an awful lot about the Crusades and I, falsely, said that it was all down to her watching lots of Horrible Histories.  Turns out I was wrong.  In fact, she knows so much about the Crusades because a couple of years ago I read that bit of A Child’s History of the World to her.  That was humbling in a funny sort of way.  I forget sometimes that certain parts of her brain over-achieve as a sort of compensation for the bits that work differently.

Meanwhile I did some Tigerboy adoration, off loaded a fair portion of my nappy stash on him, well, okay on Jax for her to put on him… and also passed on Aprilia’s baby sleeping bags which I have been irrationally attached to for way too long.  I also admired HH’s very expert sewing and briefly broke out in a cold sweat at having to create similar costumes without the aid of a local safety net.  I think I’m just going to have to buy a book or two….

The homeward journey was uneventful apart from a brief panic over the fuel levels and a lot of signs saying No Petrol on the motorway.  Thankfully there was some petrol to be had although it cost more than I’m used to paying.  There was also tasty but expensive food because I am not organised enough to bring food for the communal table and to remember to reserve something for the journey home (and, as I always seem to head home on Sundays, I can’t just nip to the shop to grab something cheap on the way home either)

My overall impression of the weekend was of having a very different daughter to the normal one that comes to these events with me.  I had one that slept comfortably without flailing and moaning and waking me up.  I had one that played for hours and hours and only briefly needed attention to clunk something back where it belonged (which seemed to gross the assembled gathering out disproportionately to the volume of clunking!)  I had one that chatted happily to me all the way home.  I do like this new amitriptyline infused daughter.

Moving on.

Monday we mainly loafed about but Tuesday we were busy.  First we had physio at Alder Hey where her lovely physio was amazed at how much taller, and slimmer, and happier and well, just how much more life there was really.  Aprilia specifically asked for arm exercises so that she can master cartwheels.  It’s funny to see my nearly teen suddenly wanting to do all the little girl things she’s never been able to do.  Then we had Slimming World where we both bore the evidence of a lovely but indulgent weekend in the form of a couple of lb on rather than off.  Ah well.  Then the headache that I’d been trying to ignore hit me really hard and I somehow managed to sleep through the timer I’d set and thus didn’t get to the dentist

So yesterday we went to the dentist and I was Very Very Brave.  I had fillings without needles.  Well, I say I was brave…. actually it’s the needles bit I hate more than anything and seeing as she was doing all the little holes yesterday and that non of those looked to go down into the nerve area it seemed silly really to numb something that probably wasn’t going to feel much of what was being done to it anyway.  One of them was a bit uncomfortable but only for a few seconds and certainly less so than the last injection I’d had.  Still, I think I should have got a sticker for being Brave.

I could see his point. We were covering a half marathon/ “fun run” which normally is a bit busy but nothing overly taxing. I wombled off in an ambulance with Harley who found us a good spot, pretty much where we were supposed to be but closer to the loos than the actual location we were supposed to be at. Aprilia stayed with Duke near the finish line where she usually stays, she’s out of harms way there and usually she can sit in the social club, plug the laptop in and watch videos all day.

It’s not normally this warm this early in the year though and the heat seemed to be catching a lot of the mid field runners out fairly dramatically. The ones at the front are serious runners and it’s unusual to have any problems with them. The ones at the back are sponsored walkers who shouldn’t be on a running race at all but it’s fairly high profile so it makes a really good fund raising opportunity for a lot of good causes and they don’t cause us too many problems either apart from making it a longer day for us than it should be as we wait for them to stroll over the finish line. The ones in the middle though are the ones who think they are fit enough to run 13 and a bit miles but many of them really aren’t. At one point the social club, whose car park we use, cleared their lounge so we could line up the casualties in the cool darkness of their establishment. Nice people. Gave out free bottles of water and salted crisps to all the expired wanna be runners to help perk them up too!

Duke was supposed to be there as part of the communications team. He was not being a first aider, just answering radios and sending the apropriate help to the right place. It’s a job that he is far better suited to than me as he can keep a civil tongue in his head regardless of provocation. And boy can you get provoked on duties like today. In the middle of all the bedlam, he had to leave his post and go in search of a reported casualty collapsed somewhere near his location. He didn’t make it back to the radios for quite some time. Meanwhile, the second in command of radios also parted company with the cool, air conditioned interior of the comms unit to help treat people. Whilst, in the circumstances, this was necessary, it meant that Aprilia then had to leave the vehicle as it left her alone in a vehicle with a non-familial adult which for obvious reasons is not allowed in the Red Cross. So there she was, trying to find some shade on a rather warm day when she gets grabbed by someone and asked to come and help yet another collapse…. she explained that she isn’t a first aider but alas she has been identified as one of the Red Cross people due to her being in and out of the comms unit all day (brewing up for the blokes!) and the person was insistent. So, off she toddles, rolls the collapsee into the recovery position, explains very bluntly why they need to be kept in this position until an ambulance can come and get them and goes back in search of shade Later she also stepped on on the radios when Person 3 had to leave them unattended for a second, I was out of radio range then so I didn’t hear her debut broadcast but aparently it was up to the normal standard expected of this family Start ‘em young is all I can say!

We were asked to go and find a casualty at a fairly non specific location and Harley leapt into action, little blue lights flashing, engine brum bruming noisily away…. and was totally ignored by most of the runners. So he put the noise on…. I never realised how high you can make a runner leap when duely startled out of their reverie  We did have an uncomfortably close encounter with one runner who, as everyone else moved to the edge of the road to let us through, decided that he would make use of all this suddenly clear space, swerve into the middle of the road and right into our door mirror.  I bet he has a sore shoulder in the morning

The local ambulance car paramedic, who called in to see us as a social call and quickly realised that his hopes of a cuppa and a biscuit were misplaced, was running a triage station in the car park – quick peep in the ambulance and say either inside to cool down, stay there and we’ll transfer you to the next county ambulance that pulls up or tell the driver to turn around and take them to hospital. We got sent off with our runner (who turned out to not be the one we had been sent to pick up but hey, we aren’t fussy, we picked up the first pale floppy person we found!) He wasn’t very well. He wasn’t truely poorly as such but he did need lots of fluids and well, we can’t put drips in and he was rough enough that he didn’t really want to drink so off he went. His mate who came with us wanted to know where Harley had qualified in the grand prix….. I didn’t think he was going that fast until he hit an unmarked speed bump and we had to play catch with all the equipment that shot several feet in the air Poorly Runner’s wife wanted us to take him to the hospital nearest to their house….. we declined to drive an extra 20 minutes further than we needed and took him to the one nearest to where we were, turned round and headed back in case there were any more waiting!

By the time we got home we were all a bit frazzled, so we went out for tea  then I curled up on Aprilia’s bed with her whilst she told me all about her day second by second…. I think i stayed awake for most of it but it was cool and dark and comfortable but thankfully she’s fairly forgiving of me not paying full attention to her.  She is such a lovely girl.

Last week I got a spinning wheel It was, on the surface, a 15th wedding aniversary plus various other missed events gift but really it was a “if I buy her something like this then she can’t complain about me buying stuff for the bike” present and was a bargain to boot. It’s taken a lot of work to get it working properly as it’s been an ornament (some people have Way Too Much Space if they can have spinning wheels as ornaments!!!) so had never been oiled etc in its life but it’s all sorted now and turns with a lovely thrum. I have 2 fleeces that need cleaning and prepping ready to spin but have had a quick go with some ready prepared wool left over from when we went on the course. Gosh, it’s faster going than with a drop spindle!

On Friday we were back at Alder Hey. We saw a different specialist who pulled and pushed Aprilia’s joints a bit and agreed that paracetamol and ibuprofen were unlikely to be effective pain management for her. There was a bit of disussion about sleep etc and then she decided that the best way forwards was amitriptyline in order to give her sustained pain relief so that she can be good and active during the day (to build stability round the joints and hopefully reduce long term damage) and then sleep properly at night. It’s working. She’s still adjusting to it so is sleeping LOTS but that’s all to the good as she’s healing whilst she sleeps and is so much more active and happy during the day.

I’ve nearly finished the first of my UFO projects, in fact, I thought I had finished it when I ran out of the red yarn but then decided that it needed a bit more length adding so I’ve switched to another different yarn and from knit to crochet and it WILL be finished very soon (I do love how fast crochet grows!)

Aprilia has decided that everyone is getting slippers or mittens from her for Christmas this year and is demanding that I spin faster so she can make them in the lovely Jacob fleece that I have aquired.

Educationally things are going slowly and steadily. Nothing much to report at all really. We are having a bit of an autonomy stint just now as before Friday she was just too wooly headed to think for long and since being on the new meds we just haven’t had much clear time to get back properly to it. So there’s been lots of me reading to her, some very random discussions, a rather unexpected chat about family planning, some logic in the form of some DS games (also reading etc which is good) and some maths in the form of working out how much money she needs to save up to buy things she wants and how much weight she needs to lose to get her first sticker and certificate. All very random!

In January there was a big shake up and all the patrols were mixed about.  Aprilia is now in a group with girls who she really has geled with, who seem to “get” her and who make her rather happy.  She’s coming home from Guides bouncy, happy and enthused.  The patrol is working as it should, with the PL leading but making use of the individual talents of the girls, listening to the patrol and agreeing on things based on what the team as a whole want, not what she thinks is right.  This is what Guiding is supposed to look like.

She’s come home this week with the Patrol Box…. a huge wooden chest that they keep all their stuff in.  As the only arty member of the patrol, she’s been asked to re-decorate it.  As they were a whole new patrol, they were allowed to pick a new patrol name (within the parameters of what badges were available for the leaders to buy for them) and they chose to be Bumble Bees.  So now the box is to be painted black and yellow and have a bee on it.  Well that will keep her out of mischief for a bit then!