Ticket To Ride

I'm a bit behind on the old blogs as photo editing has taken priority for the last few nights, but here is a day out that we had on Tuesday.

I had planned to take them to The Wilson in Cheltenham but as ever Jenson had other plans. Now the school run is a thing of the past (hurrah!) Simon gets up pretty sharp, very often before me. You can often find me lazing in bed at 8am (hurrah!) This morning I could hear Jenson talking to Simon. He was telling him about some tickets he had just finished making. See below. When I eventually heaved myself out of bed I looked at all these wonderful tickets he had made and suggested we might like to go on a journey somewhere. It was quickly decided that a bus should be taken to somewhere with craft. I assumed this to mean a craft shop but no. I was told we had to take the bus to a place where we could actually do craft. This left me a bit stuck and resulted in a lot of Googling on my phone whilst eating my breakfast. I eventually came up with a plan. We would go to Cirencester to "Pick a Pot and Paint!" 

We've not been on the bikes much since the school run has ended (hurrah!) so it was good to get back in the saddle! The bus was at 10.15am leaving from outside Cheltenham Hospital. We left the house at 9.45am to leave time to pick up some lunch on route. We arrived at the bus stop at 10.10am and I was just giving myself a good pat on the back when I saw our bus come...and go. I had made that fatal school girl error of standing at the wrong bus stop. Buses to Cirencester go in the other direction, evidently!  It was another hour until the next bus. It was pretty cold. I wasn't feeling hardy. Luckily the kids were and I now know how many games of Eye Spy you can play in an hour: quite a few! 

We eventually got on our bus and miraculously made it to Cirencester. The rain was pretty keen to make a thus far miserable day even more trying. Not to be deterred we got our heads down and marched on. I had printed out a map of Cirencester for Jenson to try and follow but I gave up with that idea. The rain made light work of the paper and so I reverted to my trusty iphone to lead the way to the pottery studio. 

On route we stopped in at the bank to pay in the fundraising money Jenson had raised last week for Children In Need. The pictures paint a pretty picture but the reality was somewhat different. Wren screamed for the duration and Jenson needed the toilet quite desperately and repeatedly shared this information with me and the rest of the people in the bank. All throughout I was desperately trying to take some pictures to put in his Learning Journal. Aside from paying in the money, the only other real plus point to our bonky bank experience was how very keen Jenson was to write his name on the paying in slip. Very proud Mummy.

We eventually made it to the pottery studio. As with most three and five year olds, my two were like bulls in a china shop. I hadn't anticipated a teeny weeny room with shelves stacked to the ceiling with hundreds of very breakable objects. Whereas my vision for the trip had been some pretty Christmas decoration we could hang on the tree, Jenson was insistent on painting a vampire. We compromised on a trophy that apparently was for bunny when he beats bear at a race, (bunny is very confident!) Wren chose a Christmas star. 

We were led up the stairs to a very pretty and quaint pottery studio. The children chose their seats and were handed paper plates that would be their palettes. They actually both listened really well to the instructions given. I particularly liked the fact that a sample of each of the different colours they could chose from had been painted onto a plate and had been numbered. There was then a correlating number on the lid of every paint pot in a separate basket. The children had to choose the colour they wanted to use by reading the number on the plate then correctly match it up to the number on the lid of the actual paint pot. Make sense?! Jenson could do it pretty well until he reached number 19!

The actual task of painting their objects probably only took about 15 minutes, after which they lost interest. We were back on the bus 20 minutes later going back to Cheltenham! It had felt like an awful lot of effort for such a fleeting visit, and no, I was told we were not going to look around the shops! That is far too boring apparently!

When we finally got home we were all a bit soggy so we lit the fire. We are very into dens at the moment after acquiring several very large boxes. They spent the rest of the afternoon playing in it and I spent the rest of the afternoon dreaming about that big glass of wine I'd be having later that evening. I was off out with some Mum friends from school and boy was I looking forward to it!