Weekending

This last week has been one of rain, so much of it at times I never thought it would stop, and wind.  One morning my youngest asked why the rain was going sideways!

We started the week with our usual trip into the local town for shopping and a visit to the library.  My eldest found two atlases and has spent most of the week looking at them, his geography of the world is probably better than mine now.

The next day we had a change of plan, we did not meet up at our usual Tuesday house, our friends no longer want to do that every week during the winter.  We are trying out some other options for some weeks and will meet with them as usual every other week.  So we met with one friend at their lovely yurt.  I made soup and rolls to share for lunch and some blackcurrent flapjack for snacking on with cups of tea.  We had a lovely relaxing afternoon together eating, talking and drinking tea.  A break in the rain saw us running outside for a quick wander and we managed to catch the starlings gathering for their evening roost an amazing spectacle and a wonderful end to the day.

On Wednesday we joined friends to press apples and make juice.  We using the apples that we had picked last week when we had the most wonderful day learning about apples.  The press,which we had borrowed off the lady who we spent time with last week, was hard work to use.  We had a crusher which we used over the press to crush the apples into smaller pieces and the we had to turn the press to squeeze the juice out of the sides of the press.  We were surprised at how little juice we got from so many apples but it tasted delicious, we kept half each.

The next day we were joined by friends for lunch.  We had intended to go out for a visit to a local castle for the afternoon but it was the wettest, windiest day of the week.  So we stayed in and watched the flooding in the field opposite the house get bigger and bigger, by the time they left the road was also under about two inches of water.  Luckily it did not get any higher as it stopped raining late in the afternoon and the water was soon gone from the road.

We spent the rest of the week at home.  We played games, built train tracks, played with cars, drew pictures, painted, danced round the table to music, knitted, sewed, weeded the garden and generally had lots of fun.