living and learning: A lovely week away

We got home today from a really lovely week away, which we spent visiting and meeting up with family and friends and having some great days out with just our 'little family'.

We started off in North Wales, just over the border from Chester, where Nana and Little Grandad (that's A's parents) live. It was lovely to see them, although very sad to realise that Little Grandad is becoming less and less aware of who we are as Alzheimer's continues to affect him more and more. He still knows who A is, but not really who the girls and I are, although since he has always called us Your Majesty, Your Highness or Your pretty Highness (as he does for most people anyway and has done for some time, as his mechanism for coping with not remembering names) and he's happy to talk to us anyway, it doesn't show as much as it otherwise might. K in particular got quite upset about the idea of him not knowing us, but day to day it doesn't really show, although I'm expecting her to need to talk about this when she's processed it some more.

We arrived on Sunday, on Monday, given the weather forecast wasn't good, we got the bus into Chester and went swimming in a pool with a particularly good flume. On Tuesday all six of us went out for lunch and met up with two of A's cousins. Then at the girls' request the little family (i.e. the four of us) went to our original 'Nature's playground', a phrase that is now used for anywhere natural that's got water that can be paddled in and preferably trees and/or rocks that can be climbed on. While there, as well as having fun, we also did two more of the 50 Things. We built a (not particularly effective, I must admit) dam in the stream (deconstructing it afterwards) and had a go at skimming stones. We have done the latter before, but this is the first time that either K or M has managed to get the stone to bounce at all and they both managed it twice with two or three bounces, although some refining of technique is needed to more consistency.

50 Things to Do - Dam Building

Having fun in 'Nature's Playground'

Quite deep in places!

Exploring further.

Choosing good stones to skim - another of the 50 Things.

Our original plan had been to go to Chester Zoo on Monday, but we had decided to postpone given the weather forecast and instead went on Wednesday, which was definitely wise. The idea was that we would then move on to our next port of call for the night straight from there, but in the end we had to go back to Nana and Little Grandad's to collect the coats that we'd forgotten!

We had a great day at Chester Zoo, where Little Grandad worked as a gardener about 35 years ago. There are so many animals to see and plenty to read and talk about and most of the animals really do seem to have plenty of space and an environment that they can interact with. I took far too many photos to put them all on here, so here are some of our highlights.