Day Nine of Chicklet Holiday

Watching the Royal Wedding ... Noyce ... Unusual ... Different

Glad I'm watching it in the comfort of my own home because everybody there looks uncomfortable and bored out of their brains!

Chicklet and I started our day with breakfast in bed from Poppy Bluebarry and we played some Sim Dragon before we experienced our first big meltdown of epic proportions.

The worst of it lasted for about thirty minutes followed by mini waves of misery.

In the end I called her a "Drama Dragon" and we got on with our day.

We sat outside in the sunshine and watched Poppy Bluebarry chop down the mulberry tree, the roots of which have destroyed our water bore and have crept under the neighbour's fence and threaten to undermine the foundations of their house.

We did some washing and then sat in the outdoor area to do some work on both the dragon cave and the dinosaur skeleton that we've been painting in sessions.

We also painted our clay dragons ...

We enjoyed a late lunch and then some quiet time, a bit of football on TV, followed by a light dinner of boiled egg and a whole carrot with a smoothie made from kale, zucchini, broccoli, celery leaf, apple, banana, dragon fruit (to make it pink), raspberries, coconut milk and coconut water.

Her favourite dessert with fruit whip ice cream, banana and chopped up strawberries filled her belly to the brim.

We played Sim Dragon for half an hour before bed and then had cuddle and chat time together.

Vegan Chickie called early this morning because she was going on a cruise along the Rhine and didn't  know if she would have phone reception this evening (our time).

It's almost 11pm so I'd best get some sleep.

Nite all.    

Day Eight of Chicklet Holiday

Chicklet and I were snuggled up in bed together this morning, in our pyjamas, playing Dragon Sim, when I received a phone call from The Motivator asking if I could come into work for a couple of hours. I needed to be there in thirty minutes.

That was at 9.45am.

We walked through the door of the shop at 10.15am.

An achievement worth bragging about!

Chicklet wanted to be at the shop with me, so the achievement was all hers. This is the girl who is so easily distracted in every moment of time - before I've even finished uttering a sentence, her brain is focussing on something entirely unrelated.

She dressed herself, found her shoes, located her water bottle and was waiting at the door for me before I was even ready! I've never seen her do that before.

What was supposed to be a couple of hours, turned into four hours and Chicklet was sooooo good.

I expected that she would get bored out of her brain and start doing all the things that I asked her not to do while we were there ... like run around the shop, touch the stock, talk incessantly or interrupt me while I was with customers.

She was wonderful and kept herself occupied watching kids Netflix in the back room, helping me with the snap buttons and being very quiet while I served.

Once, when a customer walked in the door, Chicklet whispered to me "Can I talk to her?" I told her "No, because she is here to have a look at the shop, so we won't disturb her." Chicklet responded with "But I will talk to her about the shop."

"What will you say?" I asked.

"I'll talk about shop stuff." she replied.

After that, the customer began talking to me and barely took a breath herself inside twenty minutes, so Chicklet didn't get a chance to do any talking at all.

Chicklet was just beginning to get fidgety at about the three and a half hour mark, but brightened up when The Motivator walked through the door and she got to have a chat with her for a while.

We came home and finished painting the dinosaur skeleton.

I cooked another early dinner and we were done and in the bath by 5pm. Vegan Chickie phoned at about 6pm for her daily catch up and I walked out of the bedroom with Chicklet sound asleep at 7pm.

I'm feeling a bit weary tonight, so it will be an early night for me ... as soon as the football is finished. I guess 10pm is early enough.

No photos again from us.

Nite all.

Day Seven of Chicklet Holiday

At about 1.30am, a little person came running into my bedroom, made a flying leap onto the bed, curled up in a ball on top of me and didn't move. I asked her what was wrong, but she was sound asleep and didn't respond.

I somehow manoeuvred my way out from under her and took her back to bed. I turned on her sleep meditation ap and lay beside her for twenty minutes. It only took two minutes for her to appear to be sleeping but I waited, to be sure, and then returned to my own bed.

She didn't remember anything this morning and we laughed about it.

Between Adoring Husband snoring like a freight train (a recent phenomenon), the psychotic dogs needing to pee during the night and Chicklet making special and unexpected appearances some nights (not every night), my sleep habits are copping a beating.

This makes me cranky and moody and poor Adoring Husband is copping the brunt of it. He has big shoulders and will be my punching bag for the remaining three weeks ... especially since he is contributing to my sleeplessness.

Having said that, he has been very helpful by keeping Chicklet occupied in the mornings, making her breakfast of fruit and toast and spending time with her while I catch an extra hour of Zzzzs.

This morning Chicklet and I spent an hour in bed playing the dragon ap. We got up, got dressed, did some washing, made her bed and went into the outdoor area to paint some pieces of dinosaur which will be put together as a standing dinosaur skeleton tomorrow.

It was time for me to get ready for work, so I gave her some strawberries to eat for lunch while I got dressed.

She decided that she wanted to come to the shop with me, so I packaged up some apple, grapes, carrot sticks and smoothie to take with us. The smoothie has baby spinach, cucumber, celery, broccoli, apple, pineapple, banana, coconut milk, water and a drizzle of maple syrup. Vegetables that she doesn't even know she's getting.

While we were at the shop, she did a very large drawing on a sheet of purple cardboard of a scene from the dragon ap that we've been playing. I set her up at a little table in the training room and she ate her food while she worked on her art.

After that, she came into the shop area to help me unpack some snap jewellery and put some snap buttons into a display sheet. She used her little fingers to open up some tiny snap lock bags so that I could display some new buttons.

She waited very patiently while I answered a phone call that took forever to finish.

Adoring Husband arrived right on time to take us home and brought all of our paraphernalia inside so that I could close the shop.

The phone call really set me back with where I was up to, so I didn't finish my work time very satisfactorily.

AH was supposed to go to SES training tonight, so I went straight into the kitchen to make an early dinner for him before he left. A pointless exercise, because he didn't end up going anyway. That wasn't very annoying at all *insert sarcastic tone here*.

Chicklet and I played another hour of the dragon ap before, bath time, cuddle time and sleep time.

We had a problem with her iPad not charging and I think her charger might be faulty, because it charges on all the other cords in the house. Her iPad was flat and she needs her guided meditation to fall asleep, so I ended up having to buy the ap and put it onto my iPad so that she could fall asleep tonight.

I'll be trying for an early night and will hopefully get some solid sleep tonight.

I'll also be working for the last 90 minutes of our opening hours at the shop tomorrow.

I didn't take any photos today but I thought this was pretty funny ...

Nite all.

Day Six of Chicklet Holiday

The day has been filled with dragons ... how unusual!

We found an ap where we become dragons. Wind dragons. Fire dragons. Earth dragons. Ice dragons.

We have to fight Knights, Wizards and creatures to go through levels and build families of dragons. There are castles and volcanos and glaciers and oceans and floating islands in the sky. There are different dinosaurs of varying strengths to either conquer or avoid.

This ap is pretty much Chicklet's dream come true.

She climbed into bed with me this morning and told me that she was going to get the Sims Cats and Dogs ap so that she could created Jack, Ruby and Colli and play with them all the time. So I did a search for that ap and it didn't exist. Instead, I found a different dog ap, so I downloaded that to my iPad.

As we began to play with that one, an advertisement appeared for the Sims Dragon ap, so I searched for that and found it.

The excitement level was profound.

We played that in between meals and creating our own clay dragons with the moulding clay that Poppy Bluebarry got for us in The Bay. Adult dragons with unhatched eggs, partly hatched eggs and baby dragons already hatched.

Every so often Chicklet runs outside to our cross trainer which is stored under the awning of the shed in the back yard and she spends a couple of minutes exercising before running back inside. It's more action than that machine has seen in some time!

It was much later than usual by the time Chicklet climbed into bed. She wanted psychotic dog Colli to lie on her bed for a little while tonight, so I put the dog on top of the doona, only to discover that she had a dirty butt. This required changing the darned doona cover (while Adoring Husband bathed the dog) and it was after 8.30pm by the time Chicklet fell asleep and I could leave the room.

Ugh! Sometimes 'things' don't go as smoothly as you plan. It's annoying.

I'll be working for a couple of hours at the shop tomorrow afternoon. I'd best get some sleep.

Nite all.



 

Day Five of Chicklet Holiday

I opened the shop and had the morning at work.

Morning coffee with the girls was an added bonus! Love my girls.

The original plan was to work til 11am but I wanted to help The Motivator as much as possible so I spent the time to check off some newly arrived stock, price it, display some of it and find homes to store the overflow.

This took me an hour over the plan.

The funny thing is that while I was stressing that I had pushed both Adoring Husband and Chicklet to their limits, (coping without me), AH thought that I was working until 1pm. So I arrived home to an empty house and they turned up to the shop after I had left!

They had spent quite some time walking along the beach collecting more shells for our next project and then sitting in the shade chatting while Chicklet played in the sand.

I'm pretty sure that Poppy Bluebarry was relieved that I was now home to relieve him of the responsibility.

The remainder of the day wasn't filled with much else.

Chicklet was starving hungry and by the time she stopped asking for (and eating) all the lunch I could muster, almost two hours had passed and it was time for some quiet time.

She spent her quiet time in the bedroom and then she liked the idea of sitting up in our big bed watching Youtube videos about Minecraft. I should have taken a photo because she looks so tiny with all the pillows behind her and the doona covering her body.

Before we knew it, it was time to start preparing dinner.

After all the food she ate at lunch time, there was barely any room left in her tummy for dinner, so she ate a boiled egg, a piece of carrot and the last of the smoothie that I made at lunch time.

Fun in the bathtub followed by cuddles and chats before falling asleep in this position ...

I have no idea how she does that!

Just wanted to make a special mention of the petrified gecko that she found in one of the drawers under her craft box that was stored after her last visit.

She was pretty excited about this find!

Vegan Chickie made a quick call from Florence just before bed, which was a nice finish to the day.

We have big plans tomorrow for the dragon cave, so I'd best get some sleep.

Nite all.  

 

Day Four of Chicklet Holiday

Poppy Bluebarry and Strawberry Shortcake (that's what they call each other) are a combination that require constant monitoring and reigning in.

I'm sure that I am currently caring for two children instead of one!

Once the clock ticked on to 7.30am Chicklet and I spent an hour in my bed bringing dragons to life on that ap that I told you about ...

... after we changed out of our pyjamas and into play clothes, we created a cardboard dragon and read lots of interesting information about the different dragons from countries all around the world. So many legendary tales to learn about.

I went to work at 1pm and the two trouble makers went to the park and then collected some shells from the beach so that we can create a new Sea Serpent Cave next week - after the current cave is complete.

They picked me up from work at 3pm and while at the supermarket, we discovered a fossilised dinosaur egg that requires Paleontological skills to unearth.

It was an amazing discovery because it kept her almost completely silent for more than an hour! In that time, she found two skeletal bones and is excited at the prospect of finding the remaining bones tomorrow. Also in that time, I was able to focus on cooking dinner for Adoring Husband who had to leave early for a SES meeting, and at the same time prepare Chicklet's dinner.

Tonight, after her bath, while we were having cuddle and chat time on the bed, psychotic dog 'Jack' decided to jump on her bed - this is the first time that he has shown an interest in Chicklet and over a period of time, he moved closer and closer until he was right beside her pillow.

Chicklet was both apprehensive and excited about this change in their relationship and just before she fell asleep, stated that the best part about her day was having Jack jump on her bed. She now loves Jack and he has become her favourite.

I was grateful to have a peaceful couple of hours to myself until AH arrive home from his meeting.

I'll be working for a couple of hours in the morning, so I'd best get some beauty sleep.

Nite all.

Day 3 of Chicklet Holiday

We all had a relaxing start to the morning.

Adoring Husband didn't wake up until almost 8am and Chicklet was quietly keeping herself occupied in her room.

Less than an hour later, in walked Chicklet and AH with some breakfast for me and Chicklet climbed under the covers to snuggle while I ate.

AH went for a drive to get me some coffee and when he returned, he called Chicklet out to help him do something. A few minutes later they came into the bedroom with two plants and two Mother's Day cards. She had written her name inside the Grandma one.

After our lazy morning, it was time to get up and continue working on our dragon cave. It seems that the hard work was pretty one sided as I hung fifty bats and spiders from the ceiling of the foam cave. This required poking 50 holes in the foam, removing the paper from 50 wire ties, threading the wires through the bats and spiders, poking the wire through the holes and then bending the wire to keep them in place.

While any one of those tasks could have been completed by Chicklet, and although she desperately wants this dragon cave to be amazing, she is not the slightest bit interested in forming a team with me to complete the contract!

We covered the floor of the cave with red glitter glue and then sprinkled silver and gold glitter over the top of that.

Chicklet created one tree by wrapping glittering green pipe cleaners around a stick that she found in the back yard.

Then she was bored with the dragon cave and made a couple of dinosaur sticker pictures.

We had a colouring book of Mythical Creatures and she explained that there was an Ap with it that made the creatures come to life. Who knew?! So we coloured in our creatures and wallah!!!

Amazing.

She has an hour of quiet time every afternoon which is followed by feeding the chooks with Poppy Bluebarry and a bit more play time with me before dinner.

I've stumbled across a winner with Banana Split for dessert. My usual fruit whip ice cream with a banana, chopped up strawberry and raw chocolate grated over the top. This is her face to show how much she loves it ...

We have cuddle and chat time on her bed for about twenty minutes every night before we turn on the kids guided meditation that she falls asleep to almost immediately.

Day three a success.

Nite all.