Sunday 4th December

Today was a quiet one. The kids woke at 5am and when asked what they wanted to do, Xavier said he wanted to stay at our London house and run around in the backyard. Fair call. Not an appealing option for Adam, he decided to head into the city to check out some boat that's there and that I had been pretty clear I had zero interest in seeing. The amusing bit (for me at least) is that he didn't end up seeing the boat as the walkway to get out onto it had collapsed. He did instead wander around the streets of London and saw some other cool stuff.

Despite the kids thinking it was a good idea to stay home, the reality was somewhat different. Because we had breakfast so early, but 9am I was starving again so made us all some toast with jam for morning tea. The fighting continued so I pulled the trusty 'just add water' card and put both kids in the bath for some time out. I made the mistake of heading downstairs for a second, believing they were safe in the bath only to return upstairs and discover the brand new bottle of shower gel sitting in the middle of the hallway EMPTY!

Yep, the kids had used an entire bottle of shower gel within about 3 minutes. They had cleaned not only themselves but also the walls and glass. There was so much soap that I couldn't even get them out of the shower as they were, so decided that draining the bath and hosing them down with the hand held shower was the best option. Except that is that to get the shower to turn on I had to pull the very stiff bit on the tap *sigh* I pulled and I pulled and got nowhere, so instead decided to run them a fresh bath to rinse off a bit. Naturally, I'm stubborn and decided that I would keep trying the pulley bit, as the owner had said that despite being stiff it was a bit easier if you had the water running. Well, in the middle of running the fresh bath I managed to get the shower working, while I had most of me under it trying to pull the bloody bit up. Then just as the icing on the cake, as I reached up to grab the nozzle, it slipped and sprayed in my face and drenched the front of me. If only the video camera was running I would have been a contender for Funniest Home Video's no doubt.

Adam got home not long after and we got ready to walk into Kingston again to organise pants and a shirt for Xavier to wear to the wedding. Just as we were about to leave, it started raining. We waited it out for a bit then decided that it has stopped enough and we would brave it. While we survived the rain, we almost didn't survive the shocking behaviour of 2 tired children. It was enough to make us investigate the bus route into town that goes from the end of our street.

The evening wasn't much better with tired children, but once they were finally asleep we hit the Internet and booked a hire car and accommodation for the next few days. We are off the Stonehenge and staying the night in Bath, then heading the the birthplace of Shakespeare in Stratford-Upon-Avon for another night before heading back here for Adam to attend Bryan Adams concert on Thursday night.

I'm also hoping to be able to book flights and accommodation for Italy for next week, but still not 100% on that one.

So all in all a fairly standard day for this mumma.