Sunday

Today it was the Alex Smith race at the sailing club. This entails sailing halfway to York and then racing near the salubrious A64 bridge with a picnic. But on a day when it was forecast to rain on and off and gust 40mph, it didn't seem like a great child-friendly activity.

So instead we took advantage of the sun (winter has returned to York), and went for a paramble at Askham Bog. Its nicer than it sounds.

We were never likely to see the deer with our resident foghorn in tow, and I saw a total of one robin, but we saw lots of interesting plants. We examined reeds and marvelled at the fractal-nature of ferns. No-one got stuck in the bog, but both children tried. Thea had a good go at balancing on the raised edge of the board walks, and used the passing spaces for spinning around and around. Nathaniel was mainly a mouse who was scared of the rustling reeds and did more scampering than I've seen for some time.

The afternoon brought the rain that we were promised and Ian and I mainly wanted to snooze - not an easy thing to do with two children with verbal diarrehoea. So instead we broke open the box of Lidl cornflakes and some cake cases and they were busy for about an hour. The activity was improved by the cake decorations and a modest amount of crispie mix, but nevertheless, lidl cornflakes (nutritional value=0), are my new favourite toy!