Half term is now well and truly upon us. In some ways it feels a bit daft being all “Yay, half term” when neither of us are working and so, in many ways, it is just another week – a week that should have been a much looked forward to break for J after his first few weeks of teaching, but that was not to be, yet, and so just another week – with the obvious exception that the boy isn’t at nursery. And we have visitors. Lots of visitors.
So far this week we’ve taken in the beautiful sights of Aira Force with friends from London, one of whom hadn’t been to the wondrous Lake District before. So we enjoyed showing off the, often almost magical, landscape and watching her drink it all in. They brought along their baby girl and it was fun to see the kids being the bigger ones for a change, usually they are the babies amongst friend’s children and referred to as such. This time it was us saying “Be careful around the baby”, “Don’t poke her in the face!”, “I don’t think she needs to see the Gruffalo quite THAT closely”. They were both very well behaved though, even when there was a near kicking baby in head incident, and the boy justified my, slightly overly oiled, rant about his behaviour by having his usual, fist flying, strop about having a wee before bed (why, oh why peeing has become such a contentious issue we don’t know).
We’ve also had our usual feet dragging / puddle diving walk around where we live, trying to show off the area to other friends and their boys; almost giving up when it took half an hour just to get out of sight of the house due to the wealth of acorns, which obviously ALL had to be collected. These visitors definitely curried favour well, by bring along some amazing bubble blowing presents that filled the crafty barn with bubbles whilst the adults looked on filled with childlike wonder.
We’ve been to Walby Farm Park where we had to peel the kids away from the ridiculously huge slides, which gave them equally ridiculously huge grins of ecstasy and screeches of excitement. They stroked guinea pigs, rabbits and goats (whilst I moaned “But I REALLY want a goat”, partly, I admit because in the sun they smell of goats cheese) and had their first gambling experience with ferret racing.
They rode toy tractors, ran around in a corn field choosing pumpkins for carving (whilst the adults muttered about memories of the 80’s horror film ‘Children of the Corn’) and generally completely exhausted themselves with excitement.
The plan for the remainder of the week centres around a Halloween party. We’ve purchased skull bunting, bat LED lights and cobwebs with plastic spiders (a bit daft as the crafty barn is full of plenty of the real thing), and we have ghosts and spiders to make to ensure the crafty barn feels spooky enough for proceedings.
We also need to create Halloween outfits which need to be innocuous enough not to cause nightmares, whilst still making the kids feel appropriately dressed for hallowweeeeeen, as we like to call it. In a moment of realisation, Daddy finally came to the conclusion that covering a two and three year old in, albeit pretend, blood, may be a little TOO much.
So, in many ways, it’s just another week. But in many others it is anything but, this has been the first time we’ve properly showed off our new life to friends, and, so far, we’ve enjoyed (almost) every moment of it and hopefully our visitors have too.
Escape to the Barn 
[…] overhaul. The trestle table was rescued from the crafty barn (where it’s been since our halloween party) and voila, a ready made potting […]
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