Autumn

This morning, the weather was so perfectly autumnal that Nathaniel and I just threw coats and wellies over sleepsuits (him, not me), and took the daschund for a walk on the moor.

Invasion

Seemingly overnight we have been overun by mysterious intruders.....





Can any one tell me how to get rid of them?

Birthday

Nathaniel had a great birthday week. Despite us all being very busy, me having the most ridiculously hellish week at work, all of us (except Nathaniel) having a stomach bug that made us extremely bad company for 24 hours, and manic preparations for a birthday party, we all had lots of fun.






Thank you everyone for your lovely cards and presents!

Nathaniel moved up into the big children's room at nursery with great enthusiasm and is generally enjoying romping about with new and complicated toys and reading endless books. He shows limited interest in coming home with us at the end of the day!

The birthday party was a roaring sucess (sorry no pictures, as they all have other children in), and the piece de resistance was Nimmy! Her baking was much admired and commented on, and I'm still getting texts of congratulations for her!

Preparations

Bikes

This weekend was the annual Festival of Cycling, and having had so much fun last year, we planned carefully to make sure that we got loads of silly bike fun.


We arrived as they were opening, and got to play on all the bikes with children's seats before there was a great crush.




Mikey and Nimmy demonstrated rather impressive cycling skills on the side-by-side tandem.


I was not so confident!


Nathaniel didn't let the rain get in the way of him trying out the toddler "trac-da-da". We're not sure what makes it a tractor, but he was insistant that it was.


Even the Evening Press agreed that we were having fun, and Nimmy, Ian and Nathaniel appeared in the journalistic triumph which is their coverage of the Festival. (Click on the slide show of images to see them).

Harvest

I have mentioned before that Nathaniel has taken rather a liking to blackberries. He knows where all the good bushes are, which branches he can reach without being "prick-ulled", and exactly how ripe a blackberry needs to be before he will eat it ("little bit of red okay").

He has therefore been overjoyed to find that "Aun Nin" shares his interest in blackberries and will actually go out with the sole purpose of picking them. Aunt Nimmy's obsession with jam-making has meant that we have spend many, many afternoons ransacking the blackberry bushes near our house.


One of the best things about blackberrying is that you have to carry a basket, and Nathaniel is happy to undertake this responsibility. He has done lots of skipping through meadows with his basket of blackberries, pausing only to stuff another handful into his mouth! The basket has now been designated the "eating" pile, and Nim and I have taken to taking another recepticle for berries that we want to make it back to the house.


These adventures also mean that we have spent a lot of time in the woods and fields behind the house. They make me feel so happy that we actually managed to move! I still can't quite get over the fact that we managed to move to a house with enough space that was not far out of town but still have fields and meadows and hedgerows so close. These pictures were all taken within three minutes walk of the house!

Finding sticks (with no autofocus)

After jam (delicious), Nim decided to make chutneys, so we borrowed an apple picker and started to ransack the apple trees on the moor as well. Last weekend, as it was the sailing club regatta at Yorkshire Ouse, we hitched a ride on the rescue boat to Naburn, and as the first race was taking place, walked out to a fine apple tree that we had spotted on our bike ride and filled great bags full of apples.


This resulted in much eating of apples!


Nim is now busy preserving everything that doesn't move, and tonight the house is full of the christmassy smell of spicy apple chutney. It doesn't get much better than that!

All the horrors of nursery

Nathaniel often comes back from nursery these days repeating things that have been said during the day. Today, he came back saying, "Chay[nge] mappy, chay mappy. Ohhh mye!"

I dread to think what they found in there....

Nathaniel likes food

It is well recorded that Nathaniel likes food, and he has always been fond of things with distinctive (some may say, extreme) tastes. He was the only 8 month old I knew who would happily tuck into a plate of olives, and I've never met another child who will lick mustard off bread (bread only dilutes it!).

He is a big fan of both red wine and real ale (and he'll happily drink lager given the chance). He is unbothered by not-quite-ripe sharp blackberies and gooseberries will be eaten with great gusto. Last week he drank a good few spoons of vinegar (see previous post).

So I don't know why we were surprised at this:


Maybe he doesn't have any taste buds.....

Susie and Charlie's Wedding

Despite a journey during which we had to visit an unexpected number of bizarre little Nottinghamshire villages (we decided that sitting in a 60 min tail-back on the M1 sounded very litle like fun), we had a lovely time at Susie and Charlie's wedding. They got married in a little hamlet south of Warwick where Charlie grew up, and it was exactly what English countryside should be like. Pretty little stone-built villages nestling in the folds of rolling hills covered in pasture, chocolately brown ploughed fields and elegant copses where you expected to meet a Jane Austen character on a horse. (Yes I know it's the wrong bit of the country - but it just felt quintesentially English!).

The church in Chesterton was perched on the top of a hill overlooking a pond and was surrounded by sheep (as all good churches are). You could even see "Warwickshire's most famous landmark" (really?): the Chesterton Windmill.


We had a lovely time catching up with Jenni and Susie and Anne and Kate and everyone and eating delicious food. Nathaniel managed to behave his way all through supper, and as reward got to watch Ian being given the task of carving the lamb for our table! He was even supplied with a special apron!


We spent the rest of the weekend in Abingdon generally enjoying ourselves and sailing and picking blackberries (did I mention that a certain little boy is rather fond of them?!!!) and making merry. The high point of the weekend for Nathaniel was the hire-car that FF got - a VW transporter, or "Gra Beer Van-car". It has been requested many times since!!

Even more holiday

Some how, Nimmy has managed to cope for a couple of months in York without a bike. With both her serious bikes in the States, it was hard to come to terms with the fact that you simply cannot live in York without a bike, and there is no point in having something flashy. So we took a trip to the bike rescue and came away one pre-loved orange trashy mountain bike!

Then we had to go on a bike ride!


As Nimmy had never been there, we decided to cycle down the solar system - a scale model of all the planets at the right distances from each other along a disused railway. We stopped at each planet to admire it.


All the way along are helpful signposts so you can see how far you have got. At this point we had traveled 91 millon miles. Nimmy's bike was doing a good job!


Some planets are pretty exciting!


We were just starting to think about a little smackerell of something, and Nathaniel was insisting that we stopped at every blackberry bush;


when we saw exciting things - a combine harvester and a tractor pulling a trailer in which to gather the grain and a tractor with a hay baler! We had to stop for a muffin!


I think we were as entranced as Nathaniel! We learnt all sorts of interesting things such as that the combine harvester has to harvest for a bit and then sends the grain ("woosh!") into the trailer and there is plenty of time for the tractor to nip home and empty the trailer. The hay baler made hay bales really quite quickly and we all shouted when another rolled out. It was really fun.


We also did a bit of scouting for apples and things. Nimmy is preparing for a great preserving marathon and so we were on the look out for all things yummy and hedgerow-ish for her to boil and put in bottles. More of that another day......

More holiday

In today's edition of holiday, we decided to make the most of weather that wasn't quite arctic yet and venture to the seaside. It looks like the summer is over and we aren't likely to have any more properly hot days, so it was a stereotypical british seaside visit - to the East coast (rubbish!), with many warm layers, and a full set of waterproofs!

But to be honest, when you are a little boy, the beach is so exciting that it could be snowing and you'd still have fun! The tide was quite a long way out so we went for a big walk to see the sea and found exciting things like rock pools, sea weed and shells on the way.


We found that you didn't need paper on the beach - it's just one great canvas for drawing tractors!






When an actual tractor came past, Nathaniel wasn't so sure!


We experimented with sandcastles, and Nathaniel found that they were just as much fun to destroy!




Here are Nathaniel's sand ruins:


We like the seaside!