A nice week

The house warming already seems ages ago, so time for an update.

The Raine Drops stayed with us after the house warming and we tucked them away in the guest wing ;-). One advantage of the new house is enough space to have people to stay without it being a major hassle, particularly such lovely company who bring such yummy chocolate brownies. A week of extended playing happened, which was great for everyone.

We carted most of the RDs off to church with the promise of the band and Sunday School but neither happened (Sunday School is on school holiday). The children gathered at the back colouring, doing word searches etc, and no-one seemed to mind the extra noise or the smaller ones going to find Mum and coming back (lots of times!). During coffee after the service lots of v. smartly dressed people started to mill about, whom I hadn’t seen in the service. It turns out that the Anglican church just across the road has nowhere to chat over tea and biscuits, and so wander over and they had had a Sea Service, so lots of mayor-types and current and former service personnel with impressive uniforms and/or ironmongery on their chests.

On Monday the local Home Ed. group had organised a trip to Duxford for a workshop on flying which apparently was very good, followed by a mosey around the museum. The other day of doing stuff was a 3 museum trip (Arch and Anth, Earth Sciences, History of Science). The History of Science Museum has improved since the last time I went there, and B & J sent Morse Code to each other and tried to make their own Zoetrope. After all that they weren’t too tired, so we introduced the Raine Drops and our children to punting – no-one fell in and B, B & C were very good.

One evening they introduced us to Risk and our marriage has survived so far 🙂 We did the full grown-up evening and tried the local Chinese takeaway for the first time, which makes very tasty and interesting stuff indeed (tempura veg 🙂 )

It was C’s birthday while he was with us and so an unusual cake was baked for him (that still involved chocolate and so was consumed quickly), which was just about big enough for all the candles ;-).

Then of course there was the Beans’ Castle party. Cue a nice garden and sunny weather, fancy dress for the children, and many photo opportunities for the parents – so much so that I thought that a camera was a requirement for being let in. Much lovely food and drink, children having a whale of a time, and adults having a relax in nice company. Thank you very much Chris and Helen. A had a long and involved chat with Jax, and giggled over Karen (which I managed to capture a bit on my phone’s crummy video camera).

We still hadn’t managed to evict the Raine Drops this morning 😉 so it was off to church again, this time with the band (v. good) then back home for lunch and the Raine Drops headed off. Only a few hours later the Frabjous Days posse arrived and the two blokes went off to be manly hunter-gatherers (at the local chippy) followed by fantastic cake (you know you can come again without providing yummy calories – but it is always appreciated!). A tried out her Bumbo for the first time, which went OK, but she won’t be zooming around the house on it any time soon!