2014

First day at a new school

Tuesday 4th November 2014Wednesday 5th November 2014Baggie

I’m afraid you are going to have to wait a little longer for the annual Badger Moot write up as Tuesday 4th November saw a huge change in the lives of both of our girls and I’m afraid that takes precedence.

When we had to apply for schools for Éowyn we lived in Stanwell Moor and thus took into account journey times to school among educational and development promises the schools made. That sounds worse that it actually was, you can rest assured that we were dutiful parents and attended the open days and listened attentively to each of the presentations. After much deliberation we chose Town Farm. Town Farm is based in Stanwell and geographically is the closest to our old home (although still a car ride away). Town Farm had always had a poorer reputation than some of the other schools but on our visit we were impressed with the attitude of the staff and the obvious improvements that had been made to the school, with the cash injection that it had seemingly received. We do not regret for one moment sending Éowyn to Town Farm, she had progressed well, made good friends (one very good friend) and got on extremely well with the staff, especially her reception teacher Miss Finbow. Nevertheless, since moving into Staines (upon Thames) and more importantly, the other side of the A30, (and Crooked Billet roundabout) the journey had made us begin to question whether we should keep her there and that question was becoming more important as it would obviously influence our decision of where to apply to send Amélie and consequently Ezra.

In addition to these logistical challenges of keeping the kids at Town Farm there were also the positives in the local school: Riverbridge. Riverbridge is a five minute walk across the park at the end of the road, and a number of children in the road also attend. One negative thing about Town Farm, from our point of view was that we never felt fully part of the community, probably because we drove there, dropped the kids off and drove back. The alternative is sitting in the midst of our (albeit new) community. Therefore at the beginning of 2014 we put Éowyn on the waiting list to join Riverbridge. We were hoping that a place would become available over the summer and Éowyn could start year 1 at Riverbridge. That did not happen and we were only offered the place at the start of October. However, with the girls party and birthdays we asked if we could defer the start date until after the half term break, as it seemed like a more natural starting point and give us time to break the news to Éowyn, and her best friend Aaliyah.

Riverbridge, always had a very good reputation in the area but it has recently merged with 2 other schools, one of which has closed down. This transition has adversely affected its Ofsted rating but we think that this is just a temporary situation and the other positives will hopefully justify changing Éowyn at this stage in her education. That is what we are telling ourselves anyway!

Changing Éowyn’s place of education also meant that we needed to change Amélie’s place of education. Obviously Amélie is not in full time education so in some ways it is not as difficult to move her. However, Amélie has made friends at MiniTots and is very settled with the children there and the staff, so it is going to be a hard transition for her too. Again, we were very happy with MiniTots and with their flexible hours it was ideal to fit in with Éowyn, and placed on the same site as Éowyn’s school, we could not have asked for a better nursery.

Riverbridge has a nursery but you have to commit to either all mornings, or all afternoons there is no provision for children to stay there all day. This does not suit us as we prefer 3 full days rather than 5 half days. However, the second closest school, Our Lady of the Rosary has a nursery that has spaces and the option to send Amélie for three full days. We were very impressed when we went to look around but two factors swayed us. The first is that our neighbour Kathy works there, so Amélie would know one member of staff before going there and secondly one of her friends from MiniTots goes there on Wednesdays, so she would know at least one other girl. Unlike full time school, Amélie was able to go there for a taster session before half-term and thus was a little more prepared than Éowyn for her first day.

Although the schools are closer and there is no driving required, we still have to leave home at about the same time. This is because Amélie’s school starts at 08:30. Also, since Éowyn’s new school uniform includes a blouse and tie, it will take a little longer to get ready we woke up, on quite a cold morning, nice and early. The obligatory photos of the first day were taken (see below) sand we dropped them off. Amélie met a little girl on the way to school and immediately stuck up a conversation with her. There were no special measures for Amélie, she simply joined the rest of the children waiting outside and quite happily headed inside. It seemed a bit of an anticlimax.

At Riverbridge, we had to take Éowyn into school via reception. At least it was warm inside the school. We had to fill in a couple of forms and while we were doing so the head teacher introduced herself. Éowyn went into shy mode and lost her voice. She seemed more overwhelmed by it all but wasn’t upset more shell-shocked. We said goodbye and she headed off after the secretary down the corridors and towards her classroom.

The beauty of being a short walk away from school is that there is no need to get the car out and fight for a parking space outside school. The downside of being a short walk away from school is that you walk to school and although that is really something to enjoy when the sun is shining, it is a different matter when it is raining. At 14:45 today it decided to rain, not a drizzle but a serious downpour. Lucinda and I were soaked by the time we picked the girls up. Nevertheless, standing in the pouring rain we did manage to have a quick chat with Éowyn’s new teacher: Mrs Preston. She said that Éowyn seemed to settle quite well, made a few friends and joined in with class discussions.

After changing out of wet clothes and warming up we spoke to the girls about their first days. Amélie seemed to enjoy her day and had made a few new friends and was looking forward to going back the next day. There is another girl there called Amélie, so Amélie is known as Amélie B.

Éowyn was a little more reserved by said that she enjoyed her day. Blake, her friend and son of our friends Emma and Martin, sat with her and played with her: the consummate gentleman, looking after his friend. She made a new friend and had taken a tumble in the playground. Pretty standard stuff. She was given a new reading book (a story about a mermaid, so she was very pleased) and the work that the class had been given to complete over the half-term holiday.

Although both schools will be following similar curriculum they have concentrated on different things thus far. As a consequence it is going to take Éowyn a little time to play catch up with the rest of the class. Éowyn is very bright so we have no worries that she will catch up, but for Éowyn it is a novel experience being the only one not to understand something that the rest of the class does. She does not like this, so this evening she asked me if I could explain Hundreds, Tens and Units, so we sat down until she grasped the fundamentals.

Everything seemed good and we were mildly surprised how well it had gone, until Éowyn got out of the bath and burst into tears. I think potentially the realisation dawned on her that this was it, she was at the blue school and there was no going back. Up until today, it was just a notion, an idea an abstract concept. Today it became real and talking to Nanny and Granddad and then Nanny Fran and Auntie Liz coupled with explaining her day to Mommy and Daddy brought home the fact that she was not going to see her friends and teachers at Town Farm again. It is completely understandable, I know some adults that have the same difficulty with change and I suppose deep down we all do.

A cuddle and a chat with Mum, then Dad eased her tears but I have no doubt we will have more before the week is out but I also have no doubt that she will settle down and catch up with the work that the rest of the class are finding easy at the moment. As always I will keep you informed through the medium of this website.

I will leave you with photos of them in their new school uniforms.

Peace and Love

Baggie

PS This momentous day also happens to be the 200th post on this website – thank you all for reading

Éowyn’s first day

Éowyn and Amélie

Amélie’s first day

A year in our new home

Saturday 1st November 2014Tuesday 21st October 2014Baggie

Just a quickie of an update before the epic that will be the Badger Moot update sits proudly on the splash page. As you can probably guess we have owned our new home for one year. The actual completion date was the 1st November 2013 but due to being a Friday and the fact that I was working that weekend – sport never stops, even for house moves – we did not actually move in until the 5th November 2013.

As some of you may remember and if not, you can read all about it here, the purchase of our house, as can be in many cases, was a bit of a saga but that seems like a distant memory and we are settled into our new home as our tenants are in our old one.

The house felt homely when we moved in and rooms were allocated almost on our first viewing and they haven’t changed. Our furniture, however felt dwarfed in the bigger living space and although we didn’t want to clutter the space with furniture for the sake of it we have acquired a few new pieces including a very large extending table that will come in handy at Christmas.

I suppose to the house we have only made three major changes so far.

The installation of photovoltaic panels
Painting of the exterior
New French doors

The installation of the photovoltaic panels was never a definite plan but something I was interested in, especially when I realised how much bigger the fuel bills were for a larger, older house. When we investigated the various methods to acquire them and how much it would cost to buy an array we decided that there was no better time than the present and went for it. They seem to be paying for themselves and should pay for themselves (at the current rate) in 6-7 years, notwithstanding energy increases.

The first thing that we noticed about the house when we came for our initial viewing was the colour. The house is pebbledashed (something I am not too keen on) and the original mortar colour. Not very exciting, it was a good job that the rest of the house was so good. We decided as we stood in the driveway in those first minutes that if we purchase the house that we would like to paint it.

After moving in, it seemed that painting the house was an unnecessary extravagance and we should just live with the colour. Then the wettest winter in many a year hit and the one thing that we noticed (apart from the fact that we were not flooded and many roads around the area were) was that there were an awful amount of pebbles on the driveway. The mortar was absorbing the rain and crumbling. This then pushed us back to the idea of painting the house. It would serve two purposes, the first brighten the exterior of the house but secondly and more importantly it would bond the mortar and pebbles and add an extra layer of protection against the elements.

It was about this time that Lucinda was made redundant as Air Canada outsourced ground operations at Heathrow Airport to the handling agency ASIG. With a nice little bonus in the bank it seemed to be the right thing to do to invest some of it into looking after the house.

The third improvement has been the replacement of the old patio doors to some modern French doors. This gives us a bigger opening, bringing the outdoors in, as the architects are fond of saying but also additional security and additional insulation.

Not a bad haul for the first year in our new home. There is still plenty of things to be done, the most pressing in the heating system. Last year we had a power flush to try to make the system more efficient and allow the radiators to actually output the heat that they are rated for. The fact that last Winter was so mild (damp and windy but mild) it has sort of fallen to the back of our minds. However the first cold spell this Autumn and the heating failed to work completely. Therefore, it has become a level one priority. It has been patched up, hopefully to last us through this Winter but the system needs to be looked at. We will at the same time use the engineers to move some of the radiators to more sensible locations. This will most likely be in the Spring.

To help retain the heat in the house we will also be looking at underfloor insulation but that is going to be a big job and probably involve new carpets (or floor covering of some sort). That can possibly wait another year.

So, now I have bored you with boiler talk, I will take my leave of you and end this unusual of posts. I deem it unusual because it is not centred on Éowyn, Amélie or Ezra, the primary reasons for the existence of this website and neither is it about a person, whether they are part of our family or not. Despite this and despite the fact that none of the children were born while we lived in this house, without doubt all of them will regard this as home.

Peace and Love

Baggie

Before the painting began

Partway through the job

The finished house

Éowyn’s Sixth Birthday

Monday 20th October 2014Baggie

So a busy few weeks continues with our oldest child’s sixth birthday. Yes, Éowyn came into this world six years ago. Although six years, in the grand scheme of things, is not that long it is amazing to think how much our lives have changed in those years. It is also difficult to remember that we once had a life sans kids.

Éowyn’s birthday, this year, fell on a Friday. The Friday the week after 54 European Qualifying games. Hence my ‘weekend’ this week was Wednesday and Thursday so it seemed a good opportunity to claw back some of the days owed me to turn it into a three day ‘weekend’ and tag Éowyn’s birthday onto the break. With Lucinda unable to take the day off work it meant that I could take Éowyn and Amélie to school and look after Ezra, and then to be there to pick the girls up at the end of the day.

Despite it being her birthday, Éowyn did not wake any earlier than usual Friday morning. However, she did declare that it was her birthday and she felt different now that she was 6. She did not elucidate as to what this difference was exactly but good to know that there is a difference between being 5 and 6, it is too long ago for me to remember (the 1970’s!).

The morning, as most parents of young children can probably relate to, followed its usual routine of cajoling them to get ready and ushering them out of the door, so there was no time for present opening, that would have to wait until after school. However, she had received her main present from Mum and Dad the night before, her first bicycle. Yes, both Amélie and Éowyn received bikes for their birthday, I will keep you up to date with their progress and when the stabilisers come off. That is a little way off yet.

We had asked Éowyn what she would like to do for her birthday and whether she wanted to invite anyone around. It will not surprise anyone that knows our daughter that she wanted her best friend Aaliyah to come round and to go to the pizza restaurant (Pizza Express in Staines). Éowyn rushed out of school doubly excited firstly because Aaliyah was coming home, and secondly it was her turn to take Marmaduke home. Marmaduke is a teddy bear that is given to a member of the class to take home each weekend. The chosen child then has to write a little diary entry of what they did with Marmaduke and attach a photo of them with Marmaduke. So Éowyn insisted that Marmaduke came along to the restaurant.

Since Friday night, is usually movie night alternating between our house and Emma and Martin’s house we invited Emma and her kids Blake and Natalie along too. So a table was booked for three adults, 6 kids and a bear.

We only live a short walk into Staines town centre so we decided to walk the kids to the restaurant. As we started, we questioned whether this was the wisest of decisions, however apart from an attempt at walking on water by Natalie and Aaliyah (the mistook an algae covered pond for grass) the journey was uneventful and all six were very well behaved and we got to the restaurant relatively unscathed, if a little soggy.

I am not sure that the restaurant staff were fully prepared for the rumbustiousness of a table of excited children; however in fairness to our brood, they may have been a little noisy but they were not unruly. They all ate well, although the prize for the best diner was Ezra. He ate every crumb of his three courses and helped the others finish their meals too. Not bad for an 18 month toddler, although he is a Bagnall and my son, so it is to be expected.

The one thing we had overlooked when we decided that we would walk to the restaurant was the fact that we have just passed the Autumnal equinox and so the nights are getting longer. So by the time we had finished our meals and left the restaurant it was dark. O.K., we live in a town on the edge of one of the largest conurbations in Europe so dark is a matter of perspective, nevertheless it was a lot darker than when we arrived, especially the walk through the park, that had Amélie holding on to her daddy very tightly

Éowyn still had a large pile of unopened presents when we arrived back home (safe and sound, I hasten to add). She was kind-hearted enough though to allow Amélie and Aaliyah to open some of them, although not the big ones! There were a few tears when I refused to extract some of the toys from their packaging but it had been a long day and it was the cue for Lucinda and Éowyn to take Aaliyah home and me to put Amélie and Ezra to bed.

There was a whole weekend ahead of them to play with their toys and another party to go on Saturday morning. Georgia’s princess party, so they needed their sleep and so did Mum and Dad.

All it is left to say is ‘Happy Birthday Éowyn, love Mum and Dad’

Peace and Love

Baggie