Wee fun

I think you all know the story....

When our friends John and Alison had kids, they decided that one of the things that they missed the most was sitting in a smoking pub drinking jar after jar listening to and playing folk music. And so Wee Folk was born - a monthly Sunday afternoon in a no-longer-smoky pub where we drank jar after jar and listened to and played folk music while our offspring ate chips, played loud percussion, invented words to songs and generally made merry.

And after a while, the natural question occured - why spend a fortune taking offspring to expensive child-friendly festivals, when we could make our own. And so Wee Camp was born - a weekend camping at a friend's smallholding (complete with compost toilets, outdoor kitchen, giant campfire and rustic stage), with the entertainment provided by us all.

And it was brilliant. So we did it again this year, and to everyone's amazement, it was even better!

It all started in earnest last Monday when we spent the afternoon clearing the site and pacing it out trying to work out exactly we were going to put an extra 5 tents. Nathaniel wheeled his wheel barrow around and snipped and hauled and collected and delivered to the wood pile.

And then he relaxed.

Then on Friday, it was all systems go. Firstly we unloaded and set up the tent. As chief tent-placers we may have grabbed a rather fine location for ourselves and our nearest and dearest.

Then we got some extra porta-loos in and set up PA equipment.

Thea spent a good hour walking round and round the campfire, balancing on the benches with increasing agility. She enjoys a good beam!

And then the fun proper began. Everyone arrived, and we managed to fit all their tents in with space to spare, the kids scattered and started to swing and play with sticks and make dens and run and climb and other important things and we all sat down with a beer until the bring-and-share feast with the first band.

Sorry about the shaky out of focus video!

Then the campfire was lit and the music continued to the light of our amazing lighting rig created from anglepoise lamps and tesco cheapy fairy lights.....

After a good nights sleep, we were all ready for day 2. Yes, Nathaniel wore his dragon costume 24 hours a day, just changing from pjamas to day clothes underneath.

And Ian and Katherine cooked the most splendiferous fry up for 22 people on three stoves in the most elaborate camp kitchen I've every seen at a festival.

And frivolity ensued. How many children can play in the bell tent? At this point, 6 four year old and 3 two year olds.

There were more bands, yoga sessions, the Barbarellas sang a set (almost from memory!), karate, storytelling etc. Beer was drunk and our keg of home brew red ale was the first to be finished.

Cake was consumed, down to the last slither of icing.

More tasty food, more music, another campfire, a good quantity of various whiskeys. Doesn't sound half bad!

The next day, we played, and made balloon-powered boats care of Tim's workshop.

Bunting was made for next year:

And we had more fun until everyone got tired and it was late and it was time to go home.

Until next year...........

[Here's last year's highlights in case you are intersted. Spot a very small girl wearing a duster-yellow babygrow crawling around, and lots of a stripy, dungareed curly boy romping.
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Here be dragons

As some of you may know, Nathaniel has mostly been intersted in castles and knights for the last few months. And then the arrival of The Reluctant Dragon heralded a new obsession - dragons.

We have been playing scary/friendly dragons ad infinitum.

So when I stumbled across, in the most evil of multinationals, a costume, it had to be had.

I don't think he's taken it off since it arrived!

The rest of the summer

In brief..... We made friends in pub gardens

And by rivers.

Nathaniel practised writing in order to be able to write his name by the time he started school (he succeeded!).

We climbed and swung and slid and relaxed.

We read,

And played instruments,

And baked

We had fun!

Summer holidays

It's been busy so far, and we're all a bit tired:

But here are some highlights: Going for walks in various outfits with various wheeled vehicles:

Swinging:

Looking at motorbikes in great detail at the steam fair:

Playing dressing up (though I don't think that shops generally encourage it!):

Painting:

(I have tried to be a good Steiner parent and provide open-ended art activities, but even with me modeling interesting projects, they are only interested in some paint and blank paper for a maximum of two and a half minutes. But when they found the magic painting books they were suddenly enthralled and spent hours at it! I might give up trying to nurture their creative side and admit that we have created two scientists!)

Counting our vast fortune:

Cooking:

Pegging:

Also (not pictured), making "machines" in the living room (all called Bertha), hosepiping, sandpitting, more swinging, balloons, drawing. And there have been some stupendous camping trips, a little foray into France and one rather big wedding. More to come when we have another minute.........

La Belle France (Part 1 of many)

I've just uploaded a few pictures from France - just enough to show the highlights, and discovered that there are 91. That's a lot of photos. So I imagine that this will be a post in several parts. And I guess that I better delete some of them.

But lets face it, half the reason for posting all of this is that we enjoy looking back on it all. So even if you are bored, we won't be! But feel free to scroll past.....

Despite not being a morning person, I quite like getting up early when you are going on holiday, especially when it is sunny and warm (and when someone has brought you a cup of tea and spoken to you gently like you are an ill child that needs to be encouraged to try). So getting to the ferry for 9am wasn't too arduous, though it didn't make the A34 any more interesting.

But look how excited we all were:

The least said about the ferry trip (SeaCat from Portsmouth to Cherbourg - 4 hours too long!), the better. It was rough. Nathaniel and I were sea sick. With an emphasis on the sick bit. We survived by watching Scooby Doo in French on a big screen, and I could tell when he was starting to feel better because he started asking questions about the plot and became slightly uneasy as to how much peril was involved.

But then we arrived, and after half an hour, everyone felt much better and Thea had a nap. And we started the long journey south of Cherbourg along not very interesting roads through not terribly fascinating scenery. Once we hit the autoroute everything improved becuase you zoom over map pages so quickly when you are traveling at 130kph. We stopped at a service station ("aire") outside Argentan, which is interesting to no-one apart from me as Abingdon is twinned with Argentan, so I have been faintly interested in it ever since I could read the big town sign on the Nags Head bridge.

Eventually, just as we thought that we were going to have to take evasive action and get the kids out of the car, we arrived in Saumur. Twice. Because it appeared a bit more quickly than we were expecting, and we were suddenly hurtling accros a river that we didn't need to cross. Of course, trying to navigate around a French town for the first time with an inadequate map and two unimpressed children is not the easiest exercise, but it worked and we found ourselves in a perfectly reasonable supermarket to stock up on food and shortly after at the campsite.

The campsite wasn't anything special - just in a handy position in an interesting looking town in the right direction, but it was on a island on the Loire, had a great view of the chateau (of which we took no photos), and a swimming pool. We set up camp, had supper (marvellous french bread, cheese, yoghurt and beer - to start the habit) and coaxed the children into bed.

Aware we had a long drive ahead of us, we were up relatively early, and got breakfast inside us.

Nathaniel, Thea and I went to explore the swimming pool while Ian struck the tent. The pool was deserted, so Nathaniel splashed around in his armbands in the paddling pool and I admired the amazing view across the river to the chateau. Thea could not be persuaded into the water and walked around the pools looking at things suspiciously.

Then it was time to get in the car........