Last weekend - pilgrimage to Bruges

Last Saturday, 1st October, Mum, Honor and I joined a group from our church and from the catholic churches of Canterbury and Herne Bay on a pilgrimage to the beautiful city of Bruges in Belgium. Honor and I had to get up very early, 5.30 am to be on time for the coach which took us on the ferry to Calais, France and on to Bruges. As I said, it was the 1st October and it was, well, very hot! Pushing 30 degrees in fact which made the coach journey a little unpleasant. I didn't think the air conditioning was up to much!
But once off the coach, we had a very relaxing time browsing the many chocolate shops and having a nice, leisurely lunch before gathering at a chapel for Mass.

I bought some nice handmade wooden toys to bring home for Hope and Henry, though everything was very expensive.

This weekend we are doing a lot of clearing out and moving the children's bedrooms around and Hope will soon be going into a room of her own. I'm looking forward to being able to decorate that! So far it has been hard work and the state of Henry's room has had Hubby rather displeased. I'm glad to say that the weather has got seasonally cooler, though a pleasant day has been forecast for tomorrow, so perhaps we'll do something nice then.

Le weekend

All week, the children have been coming home from school with armfuls of paper and card as the big end-of-term clear out got underway. In anticipation of our new arrival, Henry brought hom this enormous cardboard box. He said it was to be the bed for the new kitten. But then all three children got into it and went for a wild ride. One hour later and it wasn't much good for anything.

This was our lunch on Saturday. Just simple ol' nachos with guacamole and soured cream. The drink is a watermelon cooler. It's just watermelon whizzed up with a scoop of ice-cream in the top. When I was pregnant with Henry, I had one of these in a mexican cafe and was hooked on them. Lovely.


And here he is. Little, ginger, fluffy Hugo. He is seven weeks old and adorable.

Happy Birthday to Boo!

On Saturday it was little Hope's second birthday.

She had jelly babies for breakfast!
And we bought her this little tea set.

She enjoyed her party a lot more than she did last year. She revelled in all the attention and ate lots of cake!
Ah. What lovely girls!

The weather here has been quite nice too. I've been growing some seeds on my windowsill and today I planted out a few rows of peas. I start most things off indoors as I don't have much luck with sowing things straight into the ground. However, I have sown some spring onions and radishes straight into the veg patch as they were successful last year.

We have plans to make a simple outdoor kitchen this summer. I am inspired by the Nigel Slater 'Simple Suppers' programme where he is often cooking delicious recipes outdoors at somebody's allotment or veg patch. At the moment I have sown peas, broad beans, runner beans, swiss chard, perpetual spinach, beetroot, salad leaves, spring onions and radishes. Little Hope has helped with a lot of the planting. She has been learning to spoon compost into a container at her Waldorf Steiner toddler group.

We have plans to fix up our indoor kitchen too. I don't know if I mentioned it, but a pipe in the bathroom leaked recently causing damage to the ceiling. So that needs repairing and I think we shall be retiling and putting in new worktops and sink too.

Happy Birthday HM!

It is big sister's 9th birthday today. She got lots of books. I bought her the last Percy Jackson adventure, my Mum bought her a lovely box set of classics such as 'Treasure Island' and 'The Railway Children' and Hubby's Mum bought her another box set of all the Enid Blyton 'Adventure' series. As I've mentioned before, her party is on Sunday. Today we kept the celebrating quiet. After the younger two had one to bed, we cuddled up on the sofa together and watched a film with a choc-ice. I hope she won't be too tired at school tomorrow.

Here is Hope playing with her 'kitchen treasure basket'. It can be difficult getting on with things with a toddler hanging on to your leg, but this helps.

Gratitude Friday and Peter Rabbit.

This is what we had for dinner tonight. Salmon pasta bake. I made it up based upon what needed to be used up in the fridge/freezer and what is on offer at the supermarket. I rarely buy a newspaper now. (I can't see the point of paying 50p per day to read about people's sex lives, or lack of it. One week it was the woman who wrote about how she gave her husband, for his 40th, the gift of sex every day for a year and the following week another woman who wrote about not having sex for, oh, I don't know how long it was. But I decided then I was giving up the Dailys!) I did get one this week, though and read about a journalist who switched from shopping at Sainsbury's and M&S to Aldi and Lidl and worked out that if she did this properly she'd save herself about £3,000 a year. I've personally found Morrissons a bit of a star this week. A pack of 4 kiwi fruits cost 30p! The kids have chopped kiwi and peaches for their dessert. And tinned salmon was buy 1 get 2 free! So I did and mixed 2 of the cans with wholewheat pasta and a mix of frozen veg, cream and cheese. We had this with chips and garlic bread and a dish of celery and cucumber sticks to nibble at too. It was very nice. I even lit a candle!

These little cherubs are now waiting for me to come and read Peter Rabbit because it is Beatrix Potter night! Yay!!

Such a naughty rabbit!

I don't know if it is because I'm so very tired, but I've been feeling a bit sorry for myself for the last half hour so it'll do me good to list some things I am grateful for...

1.) HUBBY - cos to cheer me up he set out a cup of camomile tea and a couple of 'munchies', those little chocolate thingys, for when I came down from the bath. I asked for vodka but this is nice. Thanks. XXXX

2.) Friends. I recently found an old school friend on Facebook and tomorrow she is coming to visit. I haven't seen her in about 20 years! I'm grateful for my other friends, too. I only have a few, but they are good ones and they know who they are. Big kisses to you too! XXXX

3.) The comments left by the ladies from Faith and Family after my Small Successes post. It's the first time I've joined in and it was lovely to read their encouraging words.

4.) Moonlighting - It is being shown every night on CBS Drama channel (Freeview) and is on right now. How can I be miserable when bears bear and bees bee????

Not amused.

Well the kids survived their early night without tea! And Henry was bending over backwards to please this morning. (I went up to check on him half an hour later with a glass of milk but he was already asleep, so maybe a good night's sleep did him good). Honor still needs to work on her attitude though. I left today's Kumon by her bed last night with a note saying that if she got it done before school, we could have an evening off with a DVD and few treats. So when I came into her room, she had started but it took a lot of nagging again to get it finished. Henry, of course, did his in 5 minutes, ate his breakfast, got washed, dressed, made his bed, made Honor's bed!!!, without any nagging at all. Honor, on the other hand, expects everything to be done for her and was expecting me to provide tinsel for her hair at short notice as she had suddenly decided that she is in the choir and wanted to go to their carol concert this morning. So we had to get to school early so that I could speak to a teacher, get permission, sign a consent form and then run home and back again with a booster seat! I know! You have to be cruel to be kind. I'll have to stop all this and start letting the kids sort themselves out a bit more, after all, when I eventually go back to work, they're gonna need to be a bit more self-sufficient.