just another morning here

Have just enjoyed a lovely little trip up country seeing various people. It felt great to get away even just for a weekend and really good to catch up with so many friends and family

First we landed at the Puddles’ very late on Friday night, it was great to have their hospitality for the weekend – special mention to Max who looked after children at various points as well as cooking! On Saturday Merry gave me a guided tour of her unit and I shopped for various birthday presents that I needed (must remember to run the order through the website today!).

We went on to Helen & Kirsty’s 70th birthday party, which was very enjoyable – I loved seeing old friends and the children did too; Josiah in particular had a ball running around with his mates. Photos are in the usual place but these are some of my favourites.

On Sunday, after earning myself lots of Mummy points for letting Anna buy Rocket Dogs for summer school shoes, we headed off to see our friends Stuart & Liz, who long time blog readers may remember. They’ve moved house recently so it was nice to catch up with them too. The kids had fun playing with fire in their garden!

From there we carried on down to my parents’ in Oxfordshire where we stayed for a couple more nights. Lovely time with them, playing games, sitting around chatting, eating delicious food, and I even got to introduce most of them to geocaching too

We also had much hilarity remembering this funny story that my Dad always used to tell at church Christmas parties, probably the memory of it was more amusing than it actually is, but it made us all laugh, a lot! One of those where the telling of it is far funnier than the punchline itself!

Unfortunately Anna wasn’t well yesterday and Josiah has been asleep for most of the day today – something worse than just overtiredness I think. Still, it gives us a good excuse to sit around not doing very much today and perhaps tomorrow as well. Not much else planned this week apart from catching up on the inevitable washing and cleaning that needs doing at the end of term.

Two hours of extreme noise; one in the swimming pool and one in the activity room

Josiah didn’t make it, he was up and well enough to go over to Grandma’s, which was definitely a better option for him, he wasn’t alive enough for swimming and partying. His invited friend still came though, and Anna had a friend there too.

We’ve come home with an extra two of Abbie’s friends who are sleeping over … after sorting their room out and opening party presents (Abbie did really well! some lovely craft sets, music related things, and some money too) they’ve dipped in and out of the X Factor and the Girls Aloud party on the big screen, but they’re being fairly quiet so far! Anna’s out at Soul Exeter and Joe headed back to bed after Merlin. Steve’s popped down to the pub at the bottom of the road with some garage related mates. I have eaten party leftovers and found a bottle of wine to drink

Our party went really well, everybody ate well, and the children played nicely together upstairs and downstairs, inside and out! We did a pass the parcel, the children all dressed up (you would have thought it was too hot for a tigger suit and a furry rabbit outfit, but no!), and we also had great fun with the Pinata!

Here’s Joe hitting the pinata. It was Megan and Tina between them who did the most damage and finally broke it – we really enjoyed it and will definitely do one again, much more fun than party bags, I think!!

Three whole days after creating this weblog it finally goes live! Thank you blogger. I’d been wondering what on earth I’d done wrong, had friends looking at it for me, and all sorts … but here we are, finally.

We’re full of the joys of spring this week. Despite the impending war, the sun is shining and the kids and I have been doing our best to enjoy as much of it as possible. We bought a season ticket to Pennywell Farm, which is a lovely place to go to with the children. Every half an hour they ring a bell with a different activity, from feeding lambs and milking goats, to puppet shows and weaving with willow branches and sheep’s wool. I think you’re supposed to do one or two activities in the day, but my lovely girls wanted to join in with everything so by the end of the day we were exhausted! If I were ticking boxes for subjects covered I would have been able to tick loads … but I’m not, so there we go.

Steve’s had a good week at work so far, too, wahey.

Today we met up with another home educating family for a trip to the park and our local scrapstore. Personally, I didn’t need any more scrap, I have plenty in the house already, but our friends picked out a bag of useful sparkly and shiny things. In fact, my whole house seems to me to be one gigantic scrapstore, sometimes! The weather has just been fantastic, so we had a lovely time. We came home for a shared lunch, then went off to another park to meet some more friends.

This evening’s achievement was managing to surprise a friend of ours with a birthday celebration – he’s a very difficult person to plan a secret party for, so we were pretty chuffed to have been able to pull it off!

Better not go on for too much longer, it’s not good blog etiquette, is it?