We have been mainly.......

having fun with friends and family this week.

We started the week with our usual trip into the local town.  After the busyness of last week, we set off earlier and managed to avoid it.  We found a fantastic book about spiders, The Diary of a Spider a fun story about how spiders live.

On Tuesday we joined our friends for our regular play date.  The children all rescued a baby blue tit which had been caught by a cat and cared for it.  It was interesting to watch them working out what to do with it, what they needed to keep it safe it kept them busy for a long time until they could set it free.  They also decided to put on a show on the trampoline with jumps, songs, a short play and joke telling it was great.

We stayed at home the next day and kept ourselves busy reading books, playing with Lego, painting, knitting, baking bread and observing Lammas. We cooked a meal in the evening based on the few bits of produce that we have in the garden at the moment, it's a lean year this year.  After supper I headed off to a meeting with friends to plan a programme of activities for a local Explorer Scout group it was the first time my youngest had gone to sleep without me, she managed just fine with daddy for company.

We joined friends the next day at a local pick your own farm.  We managed to pick a pound of strawberries there were not many as it is the end of the season, and three pounds of raspberries, I have given up trying to grow strawberries they will not ripen in my garden and I really ought to get some raspberries canes for my garden.  Having picked our fruit we drove up the road to a play park where we had a picnic and a play.  It was really quite warm for a change, although you needed a jumper when the sun went in.  I made most of the fruit into jam when we got home, some of the raspberries got eaten with cream for supper.

On Friday we visited our friends to the south, it has been a long time since we were able to spend time together and it was great to catch up with them again.  We joined them for lunch after which we walked to a local park so that the children could all run off their energy.  I seemed to be doing a lot of that as they had me whizzing them around on a heavy roundabout!  We returned to their house for a drink with  scones and jam before heading home it was a lovely day.

Over the weekend we enjoyed an adventure with our canoe and sail on a local lake on Saturday.  It started off sunny with light winds and ended with wild weather heavy rain, wind, thunder and lightening.  We had the lake to ourselves at that point, not surprisingly.  Whilst cooking tea that evening my children decided to raid my utensil draw.  My youngest had a colander on her head and a funnel as a trumpet, my eldest had two measuring cups and a whisk as a drum set.  They were marching up and down, making music.  They soon had many items on the table which they were tapping with the whisk they realised that the size of the item had a bearing on the sound it made, it was lovely to listen to their conversation of discovey.

We stayed at home on Sunday drawing, reading books, playing Lego and watching DVDs a quiet end to the week.