just another morning here

Fine names for guinea pigs, yes?

Best not to ask just why and how we have managed to end up with guinea pigs in addition to a hamster and a fish. Anna says I am working up in pet sizes and that one day I’ll manage to convince Steve to have another baby! (I think not.)

Not much else going on here other than the excitement of the guinea pigs. A couple of music lessons and a bit of music practice, but other than that we’re still on holiday so have been doing nice things like baking, seeing friends, etc. Although the other day Anna did get so bored that she picked up a spelling workbook and started doing it! She is the world’s worst person at finding herself something to do

The other two are very happy bimbling about together, lots of games of Scrabble (great for spelling practice and maths too!) and Mindbender going on, and drawing, and other bits and bobs.

Last night Joe’s violin teacher measured him up with some bigger sized violins and pronounced him ready for a 1/4 size so he’s excited about having a new violin. I’m jolly glad that from the 1/10 we were able to skip the 1/8 size and go straight to the 1/4, as it will last for a good 2 – 3 years and therefore make it worthwhile buying one.

Today we had one of Anna’s friends with us, and took her into town to do a drop-in craft workshop at the museum. We had to wait a while so spent the time doing one of the museum quizzes in the Egyptian Mummy section, so that was interesting. Back down to the activity room – Abbie’s choice of the workshops on offer this week was felting, and all three girls came away with great felted pictures. Joe opted out and sat doing jigsaws in the museum instead.

Followed that with sausage rolls from the bakery eaten on the Cathedral Green. I love our Cathedral Green, it is always packed out with people sitting around on a beautiful day like today, and such an eclectic mix of people – from those sitting outside the cafe of the poshest hotel in town, students, business-people on their lunch hours, mums and dads with buggies and small children, to the Big Issue sellers and today some drunk person singing very loudly entertaining (or not!) the rest of us. And there is something about the cathedral being right in the middle, accessible to everyone … I dunno, I just like it! You can almost always meet someone you know there as well. And for some reason the children love it too. Just another part of my ongoing love affair with this city …

So today we got up early again, feeling particularly dozy after a better night’s sleep (why is it that it works like that, you have an early night and feel worse the next day than if you’d carried on the habit of chatting until 1am!). We were at the bus stop by 9.45am which I thought was pretty good, and headed into town for this family fun day at the museum. Turns out that the Castle exhibit is particularly interactive and fabulous for kids anyway (just as well, as the actual activities on offer weren’t actually that thrilling although I’m sure it was very educational!) so we spent all morning there. Descriptions are on flickr if anyone’s actually interested.

Stopped for a quick drink in town and then came home for lunch. Pootled around in the afternoon, took a trip to the park, and then Emma came to pick Robyn up.

We had a short break while the children watched Monsters Inc, then we had tea, after which we waved goodbye to Ruth and the girls. It has been a wonderful week. And now we’re slumped in apathetic denial about all the stuff we *ought* to be doing! There’s always tomorrow

The girls have spent the day at Animation Allsorts, another Animated Exeter activity. They went with Caitlin and Riona, and seem to have enjoyed the first day immensely – as I picked them up I was shown an array of plasticine models plus backdrops to animate them against; they think that as well as finishing the animation they will get to add sounds tomorrow.

After dropping them there, Joe and I spent an hour at the Museum, playing with the stuff in one of their boxes. Josiah didn’t want to bother looking around at all but he’s been begging me to do a box every time we’ve been in the museum recently, so it was nice to indulge him (the rest of us have got a bit bored of them!) and he really enjoyed himself.

Then we pootled around doing various bits – had our photo taken for some newspaper editorial about the new garage, stopped and bought more hamster supplies, then eventually came home for lunch. Faffed around here for a bit packing stuff into boxes so that we can move stuff around more easily between our downstairs rooms. Josiah played with Mollie, Steve popped home to measure various things, and then it was time to go and pick the girls up again!

If anyone’s interested, this is the new sofa which we are waiting for with bated breath I’m still glad we got rid of the old ones early though, as it’s given us plenty of space to work in. Tonight’s job is to move everything around between the two living areas and work out what we want in each room, then Steve has the fun job of rewiring it all accordingly. I think it will work well, essentially the front room will become more of a film/music room and the back room will be more of a tv/games room. Front room his domain, back room mine … or so we’d both like to think

Forgot to blog this the other day when I took it – this is the finished Snakes and Ladders wall hanging at the museum. Can’t remember which of the snakes the girls made, now, but mine was that long rainbow one in the middle!