I Spy..... A Tree.

Yesterday was Mother's Day, and as Mother's Days go, I did fairly well out of it. From my two children I collectively received 5 cards, three presents, one picture, breakfast in bed and tea in a pub. Not bad.

Due to a laundry malfunction during the week (I forgot to do any), much of the day was spent stuffing assorted piles of clothes into the washing machine, taking them out again and then stuffing them into the tumble drier, so my husband's instructions as he shot out of the door for a three hour run to do lots of nothing didn't exactly get obeyed. But thanks to the wonders of modern machinery, I at least didn't spend the day crouched in the river with a rock and a bar of soap.

And to be fair, I did spend much of the day happily sat on the sofa with my cross stitch, trying really hard to watch some recorded episodes of The Event on my digi box while the kids played outside in the rain. My digi box seems to have something against The Event. It doesn't seem able to play it back without randomly switching from full colour, to black and white, to strobing flashes of colour and back again. It does this to no other program that it records. I've concluded it must be the aliens doing it as I can find no other explanation. Unfortunately this is not enough to stop from darting back and forth across the room to wiggle leads and hit things on the off chance that it might fix the problem.



At tea time, we all piled in the car and drove to the other side of the valley to a pub with a power cut. As we gathered round our candle stuffed wine bottles and prayed the kitchen ran on gas, we gazed out the window and tried to play I-Spy. We started off simple - grass, flower, daffodil, tree. But it all fell apart when Daddy tried to be clever and declared he spied something beginning with 'R'. Rain, red flower, red car, roof, railing, rocket and even rolling pin were among the suggestions loudly made by the kids, but none of them were right so defeat was declared. "What was it?" they demanded, to which Daddy replied...... "Rainbow!" All eyes looked to the plain, uninterrupted grey sky where the rainbow had been when he had made his 'spy', but where it no longer was. I'm still not entirely sure how they managed to miss it....

Having stuffed ourselves silly, we went for a small dinner settling walk, and stopped in front of a tree to watch a chaffinch have a fight with another chaffinch. Elder child demanded to know why we had stopped, to which we gave the above explanation. A silence ensued during which you could be forgiven for thinking that Elder child was quietly watching the little avian drama with the rest of us. But alas, his mind was otherwise engaged; "What tree?" he eventually asked as a light breeze shook the branches he was standing under.

We groaned, sighed and laughed as, unlike the trees and all other inanimate objects that live in our house and garden, the trees around Chew Valley Lake are not known for jumping up and down and making themselves known to anyone who ought to be looking at them.

I was reminded of this very fact this morning as Elder child stood in the middle of his bedroom trying to find his P.E t-shirt. His searching method consisted of standing still and staring vacantly at his closed drawers and cupboard, apparently expecting the missing item of clothing to appear via osmosis through the wood.

Strangely enough, it didn't.

After Younger child got involved and found two other missing items that were also needed for school, it became obvious that the offending P.E t-shirt was not in fact in the house at all and must therefore be in the magic place that is 'lost'. Elder child was therefore told to simply find 'another' t-shirt to take for P.E until the correct one could be found and we all returned to our various getting up engagements.

When, after 10 minutes Elder child had still not appeared for breakfast, I gathered myself and all the patience I could ever possibly muster and went upstairs to see what could possibly be keeping him. I found him, unmoved, in the middle of his bed room, staring vacantly at his closed drawers and cupboard waiting for the replacement t-shirt to appear via osmosis through the wood.

And this time it did just that. By the magic of Mummy and her amazing drawer opening abilities.