Everything as it should be

Sometimes, everything just works. Like this weekend. Everyone was cheerful, no-one whined (much), and there was lots of fun!

It helped that Saturday morning dawned frosty and sunny. So Ian and I took turns in going for runs across the crunchy moor while the children ate breakfast, and then I dug the front garden some more while Nathaniel taught Thea how to climb up the rockery and over the wall and generally ran around having fun in the sun.

Then we took a pleasant stroll into town via a convoluted route which took in some areas that we'd not walked for ages and met Mikey and Jim and Vicki for brunch in Meltons Too. The children behaved like angels and joined in our conversations or sat contendedly which enabled us all to tuck into full english breakfasts followed by pudding, including a vat of jelly beans which Nathaniel charmed out of the waitress.

Thea and Ian went guitar browsing with Jim and Mikey while I took Nathaniel to music (via a lovely 15 minutes chatting to the banks of crocuses covering the Dean's gardens), followed by a screening of Cars which Nathaniel much enjoyed.

Today we headed out to Skipwith Common with a crowd to make the most of a mild, albeit overcast, Sunday. Here you can't see parents strolling and three five year old boys careering around on bikes.

But here you can see Thea, all kitted up for a chilly wind and plenty of mud:

We found puddles to fly over, gorse to fall into and trees to climb up.

We pretended we had been for a proper walk and headed to the pub to entirely blow our eating out budget for the month (yes, it's only the 2nd!), but the feast was greatly enjoyed.

Particularly the ice cream sundaes:

We met some guys who had been catching rabbits with ferrets, and having convinced them that the kids didn't need the evidence hiding from them, they let us stroke the ferrets and showed us their tracking devices to help them find them and their prey underground. The kids were predictably fascinated and unbothered by the dead rabbits, and had to come back to chat to their new friends to report that they'd found a rabbit burrow (I suspect that they dug it themselves), and ask advice on what to do next. (They were advised to bait the entrance with lettuce and then sit very quietly near by all afternoon while their parents had a pint!)

We took a different route back through some more convincing rain, and failed to see deer (can't think why not!!!), but felt that we had been outside and suitably exercised. And then home to chat and drink tea and make marble runs and play complicated games with baricades over doors (?).

And then bath and bed and great satisfaction over a weekend well spent.

London (and some trains)

Its difficult to decide what the most important aspect of this last few days has been - seeing Auntie Nimmy and Uncle James, visiting London, or transport. I suspect that it is the latter.

The excitement began early (Thea asked hopefully "Grandpa Beard downstairs?" as she got up. It seems that London and Grandpa Beard now belong together), as we set off from York in bright sunshine and Nathaniel agreed to walk all the way to the station. No, its not that far, but he'd always rather go on a bike or scooter.

The train was just as exciting as they hoped and at least an hour of the journey was used looking out of the window and being generally excited and happy!

And then we were in the wonderful place that is the new, improved Kings Cross in the sun, and then Nimmy and James were there. Lots of happiness!

And onto train 2 - a national rail train starting from an underground platform at St Pancras.

We explored Nim and James' house, and wandered the local streets, played in a park and ate ice creams, and generally made ourselves at home.

James cooked the most amazing roast pork, butchered by his own hands, and almost burnt to within an inch of its life! Fortunately it was saved just in the nick of time, and was mighty tasty!

James set off for work at the crack of dawn, but we had a more leisurely start before a wander to West Hampstead tube station (station 5 for those who are counting), and a trip on the Jubilee Line. The first tube train!

Green Park station was sucessfully navigated, and everyone enjoyed the long, wide tunnels.

Our destination was the Natural History Museum, and we had carefully ordered tickets (free) for the dinosaur gallery, as we were aware that it was going to be busy, it being half-term. But we hadn't really appreciated just how busy. When we arrived at about 11, the queue just to get into the museum was about 1hr30m long, and that was with them letting in 30 people every minute! The queue snaked away from the door through tight doglegged barriers all the way through the front courtyard on to the road and then several minutes walk down the road. It didn't look fun. So we bailed out and joined the smaller, faster moving queue to the Science Museum, moved down it faster than Thea could walk and had a good morning looking at steam engines, examining titan landers and exploring an antarctic expedition tank. It was pretty busy, but bearable, and when we when up to the first floor to find a spot to eat our lunch, it almost entirely emptied out. Both kids had museum fatigue by then, and were keen for some more underground trains, but we still got waylaid by the agriculture gallery, and Thea (and Ivy) had fun in the material science section.

We headed to Covent Garden for buskers and afternoon tea, and Thea was so exhausted that she wimpered until I picked her up (the carrier was all wrong!) and then promptly fell asleep on me.

Our journey home was slightly lengthened by a rather long walk along West Hampstead tube platform (do you know that you can see four distinct styles of train from there within 5 minutes?), and a brief detour back to Finchley Road and back just to up the number of trains travelled on (9 by now. And 9 different stations visited).

There was much umming and ahing about what to do on day 2. Having done the science muesum already, it made sense to try the natural history museum again, but there were no tickets left for the dinosaur gallery and we were rather put off by the queues. But Nathaniel was keen to try, so we braved the late rush hour trains, and were waiting at the museum, ~150 down the line, when it opened. It all payed off. We marched straight to the dinosaurs and walked straight in with no queue!

It was interesting, but would be a million times better without the swarms of people. Nathaniel almost missed his chance to see half of it after stopping to look carefully at a dinosaur and getting overtaken by the world! Thea was non-plussed. She enjoyed the animatronic dinosaurs, epecially the giant T-Rex, but she was keen to get back to the Earth Zone, where she had espied a long escalator disappearing into a giant glowing globe!

We progressed to mammals and found a cheetah and the great blue whale;

and then Thea led us back through the winding corridors (her sense of direction is scary!) to the Earth Zone. Nathaniel thought it was too scary, but me and Thea went up the escalator and back down the stairs three times!

Lunch beckoned, and we found a fine french-style cafe and sat outside under a canopy (it was really rather warm) and munched while the rain pelted down. It was fun!

And we were having so much fun that we had to have pudding - tarte au citron and a pavlova to share!

More trains (they were still excited by this prospect), and then did a little switching around so that we could try a new station (Baker Street), a new tube line (Metropolitan), and a new type of train. Did you know that each line has a different style of train? The metropolitan ones are amazing - they are totally open between carriages so it is just like a long moving corridor hurtling down a tunnel. I was surprisingly excited about watching down the train as it wound round corners!

Higlary came for supper and then we all went to bed - exhausted!

So, if you are keeping count, during this trip we visited 10 different stations and travelled on 17 trains and 4 buses! Not bad!

Normality

Its not that we haven't been up to much, its more that we seem to spend a lot of time getting to places at the minute - getting ready to go to school, going to school, going to the next place, getting back, going back to school, coming home again - and so photos don't get taken, and the blog doesn't get updated.

But here are a few things that we got up to this weekend:

A double scooty bike ride to Acomb.

We were valiently waiting for Thea to grow enough so that she could reach the ground and ride Nathaniel's old scooty bike, when a friend lent us a smaller model! So now they can both ride at the same time, which is great, because no matter how much Nathaniel enjoys his pedal bike and his scooter, he still loves a good scooty bike! This was Thea's first outing, and although she wasn't truly gliding, she was doing much more than just walking her feet along. It'll only be a couple more outings before she is totally balanced.

Gardening.

Which suffered from the afore-mentioned lack of photos. Nathaniel has declared that we must sort out the front garden, which isn't a bad idea, because it is a small space and therefore a bit less daunting than the jungle that is the back garden. We've always intended to put some veg beds out here, so the first stage is slash and burning, or in this case, removing several tonnes of weeds, gravel and rockery stones. We are on our way......

Thea has started to enjoy a bit of cooking and so she and I made a fish pie,

While Nathaniel and Ian watched a short video about galaxies and then drew their own.

And other stuff:

Sharing yoghurt out of an unfeasibly tiny tub:

Making, and then endlessly taking, two registers that closely resemble the registers (attendance and lunch preference) at school:

Making sticky-back-plastic-flower-things:

Playing in the woods:

Advent

It was a busy advent. Far to busy to write the blog! So here are some photos:

Our advent ring plans were affected by the shapes of oasis available and the dishes we own. So we present the advent tray!

I declined to purchase a chocolate advent calendar (because I am mean and nasty and don't think that a five year old and a two year old need to eat chocolate every day), so instead we had two! One with windows to open to reveal a picture, and one consisting of little evelopes to open in which there was an adventy activity to do (which sometimes was some chocolate!). Here is the second one:

One of the activities, as you would expect, was going to collect the christmas tree. We had left it later than most people, so it was a bit of a round trip around several shops, but we did find one that we liked the look of, and the kids got to wade through piles of trees and do good impressions of escaped caged animals as they ran round the garden centre! And then we got to prepare it:

Another activity was making snow dough. This would have been more fun if I'd tried it myself first! We had fun mucking around with the ingredients, but it would have been better if I'd known what we were aiming for! Once it coalesced properly it was much better!

I had decided that I wasn't going to be buying and writing 25 christmas cards for everyone in Nathaniel's class (though as I never actually managed to send any adult cards in the end, this seems a bit mean!), and had intended to help create a giant card for the whole class in which Nathaniel could write all the names if he wished. But he got so much pleasure from opening all his cards as they drifted in through the last weeks of term, that I relented, and helped him make a batch. We did cork-print christmas trees, biscuit-cutter stars, and tacky foil Father Christmas stickers when we got bored! And Nathaniel wrote each and every one! (Their name and his name)

Making presents was fun this year because both children understood what we were up to. If you think you may have received something that they made, you may prefer to look away now (or get your jabs up to date!!).

And at last we got to buying all the food for the masses. Here, Nathaniel has set up a French market stall from which to sell us our veg. There are scales (out of shot), which tell him how much our purchases weigh (20cm more often than not!) and how much we owe him (in multiples of 2ps).

And then there was Nathaniel's school Christmas performance. What can I say! It was a 70's show called Rock-around-a-Christmas, and every class had a dance. Nathaniel's class were animals with headresses made by themselves and sung the songs along with the rest of the school and did a dance of their own to "Crazy Horses".
video to follow
They all managed to stay awake for the 90 minutes and were able to remember all the words and dances to the encore songs when they got up on stage at the end (at 7pm!). It was highly entertaining!

How they are now

Dorothea at 2 years

Nathaniel at 5 years and 2 months

I'll attempt to do some more updating very soon.......