We came to the conclusion that when one’s birthday is so close to Christmas that there’s hardly any time to do any treat-type thing at the time, it doesn’t really matter if you have your birthday present a bit early. Abbie’s just done 3 days on a riding/stable management course (ie riding and about the same amount of mucking out!) as her birthday present this year. She’s had a wonderful time 
Or: I found some photos on the camera so thought I’d better add a blog post about them!
Last week Abbie went on a kayaking course down at Haven Banks, along with her friend Riona. They really enjoyed themselves, and finished up by achieving the vast majority of level 5 of the Paddle Power Passport. I imagine they may well go on and do the higher levels another year.
Joe and I went down for a walk along the river on their last day and watched them paddling back then finishing off a few bits of their award.
Just tucking into a piece of Abigail’s friendship cake, apparently called Herman. Why it’s called Herman I really don’t know …
Anyway. This wretched cake mix has been sitting on the kitchen side for ten days since a friend gave it to her and she had to watch it, stir it, add ingredients to it, etc. My apologies if you are the parent of one of her friends, since she split it up and distributed it to some of her friends too, so now they have to have cake mixture sitting around in their kitchens too… better than some other chain things I suppose.
And he tastes delicious
A new ring of geocaches was published yesterday, only 1.5 miles from home, so even though it was raining, I felt the urge to go out after them – we don’t usually have the luxury of a free evening to do that sort of thing with so it was nice to be able to give in to temptation!
Abbie came with me and we had a lovely couple of hours trudging through fields and country lanes chasing after plastic boxes hidden in strange places 
We were first to find most of them, though some cheating people had driven along the lane finding some of those that they could reach from the road!
The bonus was based on an anagram from letters we collected on the way round. We managed to miss one, but luckily for us the one that we missed ended up being the first letter and so we could work the number out by making an educated guess. Also luckily for us I could access a word games website because I’m rubbish at anagrams, especially with a letter missing. Is that cheating too?
Anyway, we soon had the bonus cache in hand as well, at which point Abbie decided that *she* wanted to register the prize of a new geocoin, so she came home and created her own geocaching account, ratbag!