NotSheep

It’s been one of those very strange days when all sorts of unexpected things happened. I’ll tell you about Monday and yesterday first, because - well, because they happened first, and that’s what I’m like.

I realised over the weekend that my driving licence had expired. In November. How did this happen? Don’t they send reminders? Well, yes they do…but somehow my address change never got processed after we moved, and I was a bit busy having a baby (Toby) etc, so it never occurred to me that the new bit hadn’t arrived. I never use my licence - a bank teller asked me for photo ID once and I started to look for it in my bag, but the next teller over said “oh, it’s all right, I know her” so I never took it out and looked at it. If I had, I might have realised that the address was wrong, and then I might have told them again, and the reminder they sent out might have been sent to where I actually live.

I phoned the licensing people on Monday and a helpful man there told me what I needed to do and pointed out that until I did it, my insurance wouldn’t pay any claims. Oops. So getting it sorted out moved rather rapidly up the to-do list. One of the things I had to do was get photos taken and have them signed by someone who has known me for at least two years and is a “respectable” person - which made me think hard, because we don’t have a minister and the doctor I’m registered with has never actually met me and the only teacher living in the street has only known me since last summer. Eventually I remembered a friend who doesn’t live too far away and is a teacher (though whether he’s respectable is definitely up for debate, as he and his wife were the first to agree).

George cut out lots of circles in the afternoon, so that I could use them with Beavers for Pancake Puppets. Meanwhile I browsed for other pancake-related activities we could do, and phoned my co-leader to check that the cooker in the hall was working. And got frustrated with Twitter’s recent flakiness.

Barney went to Air Cadets on Monday evening - proudly wearing the t-shirt they gave him last week - and Freddy went to ju-jitsu. George announced he was too tired, then took great offence when I told him to go to bed right after Freddy left. But y’know, if you’re too tired to go out, it doesn’t make any sense to stay up until the time you’d have come home if you’d gone out in the first place. In the meantime, Jack and Toby played in my bedroom with a VTech phone thingy. Jack was ordering in: “Can I order two ice-creams? Cold, with a stick in one of them and a stick not in one of them.”

On Tuesday morning, Scratchy arranged to work from home for a while so I could run out and get photos taken for the driving licence application. Somehow he thought he’d be at work by 10. Given that the chemist (nearest place to get them done) doesn’t open until 10, I’m not sure how he thought that would happen. He also thought that he’d be here with five children and still get some work done…heh. I got home and did some work with the boys and got more frustrated with Twitter’s recent flakiness.

Tuesday evening: Beavers. I took all the cut-out circles and various other bits of equipment with me, including the ingredients for making pancakes. We split the Beavers into three groups to make their pancake batter. Then we took them into the kitchen and…discovered the cooker was not working.

We talked about pancakes, played games, made Pancake Puppets and sent each Beaver home with a cupful of pancake batter. We told the parents to look at it as an easy breakfast the following morning. Not sure how that fits in with using up all the eggs and butter etc before Lent, but there you go.

Afterwards I went to visit my maybe-respectable-maybe-not friend and he signed all the things I needed him to sign. By the time I got home, it was nearly time to collect George and Barney from SJA Cadets, so I dropped Jack at home and the neighbour’s son at his house. My neighbour told me that I’m “an idol in this house” - I’m not sure how much of that is because I have five children and how much is because we home-educate. We were talking about getting them all up and out in the mornings. I’m in two minds about this: both he and his wife work full-time, and I really don’t know how anybody manages to do that and also manage children and their schedules, but also - well, they’ve only got a six-year-old and a teenaged daughter, so it does look from my perspective as though it must be fairly straightforward. I suppose we’ve all got our own ideas about what’s difficult. Anyway, I went to get Barney and George and finally got everyone home and to bed, having warned them that we needed to be up and out early today.

We had to be up and out early because Cassie was booked in at the vet’s to be spayed. They only do one spay a day, and they do it first thing in the morning so that they can keep an eye on the dog all day, so you have to be there by 9 o’clock. I reckoned that leaving at 8.30 would be okay - and I’m sure it would have been. Unfortunately I was woken by Toby jumping on me at 8.29. I haven’t leaped out of bed as quickly as that in a long time. Much shouting at everyone to get dressed etc - poor Jack was rudely awoken and almost dragged out of bed. Older children dressing and chivvying along younger children, many orders being given. We were pulling out of the driveway exactly eleven minutes after I opened my eyes. So it turns out I could do it if I had to - but I really don’t want to!

We got lost on the way to the vet’s (it’s a very rural practice), but got there with just a minute to spare. The four parking spaces across the road were taken, so I parked across the back of one car and told Barney to come and get me if I needed to move the car. I talked to the vet, filled in all the forms etc - and then two police officers came in and said, “Is that your Chrysler Voyager out there?” It turned out that someone had parked on the other side of the road - probably marginally more legally than the way I was parked, if there are such things as gradiations in the legality of parking - and between us, we were blocking the way of a large truck. And a police-car. Actually I don’t know if the police-car just happened to come along or if the truck-driver called them, but either way, I abandoned Cassie and ran out to move the car - and give Barney an earful for not coming to get me. Oh, he’d seen the truck. Oh, he’d even told the police officer where I was. But did he come and get me? No. And just as I was turning the car back onto the road, the text-message that Barney had sent me arrived: Car needs moved.

I provided all the children with a drive-through breakfast and took Toby to get new shoes. He has reached the dizzying heights of a size 5. No longer will it be true that his shoes are almost as wide as they are long Next stop: play resource centre, where the pickings were slim but at least my membership card hadn’t (quite) expired. Conversation with Barney en route about the ethics of animal-spaying: “Isn’t it sort of like genocide?” Well, I can see the reasoning, but I definitely think the pros outweigh the cons. I realised I didn’t have the vet’s telephone number with me (result of earlier speedy exits) and that I was supposed to ring at 1 p.m. to find out when Cassie should be collected, so I phoned Scratchy and asked him to google for it. A few minutes later he rang Barney (on top of everything else, my phone battery was dying) and told him he’d phoned the vet. Uh…beginning to see where Barney gets his (in)ability to follow simple instructions! (Not shouting at all now. Oh no. Of course not.) Oh well, one more reason for the vet to think I’m a moron.

And then off to the driver licensing office with my forms and my passport and my photos and my cash. The licence will take about two weeks to arrive, but will be dated from today, so at least I’m now driving with insurance.

Hm, what did we do next? Home for lunch, I think. A game of 20 Questions in the car. Barney: “Hey, guys! I have a really good one! It’ll only take one question!” Jack: “Is it a frog?” Barney: “No! It has to be the question we usually ask first!” Freddy: “Is it alive?” Barney: “Yes! You figured it out! It’s a live. Get it? It’s A Live.” Uh, right. Me: “So what exactly is A Live?” Barney: “Isn’t that really a philosophical question?”

Home and found the vet’s phone number myself and phoned at 1 p.m. Cassie was doing well and would be ready to leave at about 3. Good stuff. Checked the post and discovered a letter from the Education Board - oh, had they finally noticed us after only nearly seven years of home-educating? But no…it wasn’t addressed to me. Or even my address. It was, however, addressed to the Scout Group where I take Beavers, with the actual postal address of the Scout Hall on it. Not that we get post delivered there…but how on earth did it make it to my mailbox, in the next town, when it didn’t have my name, house number, street name or postcode on it? The mystery was solved when I remembered one of the other leaders I’d met at the Cubs Quiz a couple of weeks ago - he works for the post office and apparently they get confused because they can’t deliver to some of the Scout Halls - so they just give anything Scout-related to him and he figures out what to do with it. He must have remembered where I lived and decided that was the quickest way to deal with post for our Group

Also in the mailbox: a card about a parcel delivery. What could that be? I haven’t ordered anything recently. It said to collect it tomorrow, but I don’t plan on having the car tomorrow, so I took the chance and went to the post office anyway - and noted with optimism that there was a ParcelForce van right outside it. And yup, there was my parcel. Remember way back in November when I bought something from Ebay Canada for George for Christmas? It was posted to me on November 13th, and the Canada Post tracking system had it on their website as leaving the country on November 22nd. But it didn’t arrive in December; George was very understanding when I explained to him just before Christmas and said that he’d get it when it got here - but by the end of January, I’d given up hope of ever seeing it. Well, we saw it today. George is now the ecstatic (his choice of words) owner of a pair of Vector Prime and Wing Saber transformers.

(Oh, and can anyone explain to me why in the UK, where we call it “the post”, it’s “Royal Mail”, but in Canada, where they call it “the mail”, it’s “Canada Post”?)

We brought Cassie home too, all shaven underneath and acting subdued. The vet brought her out to the reception area from the back of the surgery and said “She’s just lovely!” Yeah, she is

And now…George and Freddy are at Cubs, Barney is leaving soon for Scouts, and I’ve got a website to work on. It’s a simple website, but the person who wrote it did so using Microsoft Publisher, so the code is 95% rubbish. I volunteered for this - it was a plea for help on Freecycle - but the bloke whose site it is has said he’ll service my oil boiler for nothing in exchange, which I think works rather well all round