Down on the farm.

A has done an awful lot of driving over the past few weeks.  We shared the driving back from Dorset last Sunday (unusual because I generally fall asleep in the car), but after a couple of hours rest A then drove up to north Wales to his parents'.  His mum (aka Nana) was having a week's respite holiday from caring for his dad (aka Little Grandad), who suffers from Alzheimers, for the first time.  He stayed overnight and brought her back here on the Monday morning.  We had a couple of days here and then A drove Nana and the girls down to Kent, while I went by train.

Nana was staying with her brother (Uncle P) and sister-in-law (Aunty M) on their farm very close to where they grew up and we stayed in a self-catering place nearby, although we didn't spend much time there.

It was compact and bijou!

The village sign.

We had a couple of days out, but first went out 'lookering', a new word to me, which means counting the sheep and making sure they're all okay.  On Thursday, we went with Nana and Uncle P to Dungeness and K & M paddled in the sea in the third place in the September.

K in the sea.

On the very shingly beach.

Dungeness.

Nana & A outside it.

We just about managed to dash to to the top.  That's the station of the Romney Hythe & Dimchurch miniature railway with the train in the station that the girls and I took.

The view from the top.

K & M on the train.

On Friday (after lookering) we all went to Sissinghurst Castle.  We went up the tower, and looked at the gardens for a while, then A, K, M & I went for a walk around the lake while the others spent more time looking at the plants.

The tower...

....with K, Nana and P at the top of it!

M & K with a fairy door we found on our walk.

We also had the opportunity to see plenty of wildlife.  There were lots of blue tits, great tits and chaffinches in the garden, and we also spotted a woodpecker.  There were also plenty of rabbits around and we saw some bats too.

The bird-feeder.

On Friday night A & I went out just before dusk, taking P's new gadget  with us, a night vision monocular.  We went badger watching.  We had already seen the sett during the day and it was clearly an active one.  P had told us where to watch from and we did indeed see a couple of badgers, which was fantastic.  Unfortunately though, we hadn't got it quite right where to watch from, so were much further away than we could have been, so on the limit of the gadget's range once it got properly dark. 

The sett.

K & M liked just spending time on the farm mostly and particularly playing with the dogs.

K & Meg.

And M & Meg.

On Saturday morning we went to a Macmillan Coffee morning, where Nana met a couple of old friends, including an old boyfriend!  A and I each had a go (along with lots of other people) at guessing how many hundreds and thousands on a picture of a cake, the prize being a big cake which Aunty M had baked and A won!  On Saturday afternoon it was time to head back home after a lovely few days.

Delightful Dorset.

We've been away for a few days to a part of the country that none of knew at all, but I have a feeling that we will be returning.  One of my closest friends from school, known in our family as Big K (having the same name as our K, and indeed one of the reasons I like the name so much), was getting married 'after a whirlwind romance of 20 years' as it said on the invitation.  It's rather a long way to the south coast, so we decided to make a mini break of the occasion and on Wednesday went as far as Oxford, where we stayed overnight with my brother and sister-in-law, before going the rest of the way on Thursday morning.

We arrived in Corfe Castle in time for lunch.  We parked in the National Trust car park and had our first view of the castle, which is rather impressive and also exciting as it was the inspiration for Kirren Castle in Enid Blyton's Famous Five books.

View from the car park.

The walk around the bottom of the hill to the village is a lovely one, particular the detour through the 'Play Trail', which has an obstacle course and the option to cross the stream using stepping stones.

Obstacle course.

Sticking to the stepping stones is no fun!

Before going into the castle, we had lunch and had some company.

The girls decided he was called Rob.

The lure of the model village was greater than that of the castle too, so we went there next.  It was rather good and had some games (quoits and croquet among others) that we had a go at too.

The castle as it would have looked.

Not sure if The Doctor ever visited though!

 We then went up to the actual castle, although it's rather battered compared to the depiction in the model village.

M on the way in.

K, M & A admiring the view.

Exploring.

K & M sitting on The Wishing Chair outside the Enid Blyton shop.

Next stop was the very nice B&B we were staying in a mile or so down the road and after a break for a cuppa, we headed for the beach where the wedding celebration was taking place on the Saturday at Studland.  Having learned from our last trip to a beach (up north) when they went paddling and ended up really rather soggy, we were more prepared this time.

They kept their top halves on to start with.

It didn't last long.

They really like the beach!

A little breather.

We had to tear K & M away to go and find something to eat.  We had planned to go straight out to eat, but needed a quick pitstop at the B&B for the girls to shower the beach off first.

Friday we had decided we'd go look for fossils.  K's not particularly bothered but M was very keen.  On the suggestion of the B&B lady, which tied in with the helpful information given by Facebook friends we went to Kimmeridge first.  There were loads of things to spot and M brought quite a few stones home to go at with her hammer too.  We found lots of things that were clearly something although quite what we often didn't know and although we didn't find any ammonites, which is what M was very much hoping for we found plenty of imprints where there had been one.

M hunting for fossils.

A couple of ammonite imprints.

And another one (with M's finger).

We also visited the marine centre and discovered that I was correct and that the colourful thing that M had found was indeed part of a lobster's tail.

Hermit crab at the marine centre.

 We then moved on to Lullworth Cove, where we went into the visitor centre and found out a bit about the geology of the place.

Amazing seeing so clearly how the layers of rock have been pushed to such an angle.

We walked from the pebbly beach all the way up to the top of the hill for the view.

We finished off with a brief return trip to Studland's Knoll beach, where K discovered that wasps are exceeding ungrateful, when one that she was trying to rescue from drowning in the sea stung her on the finger, before going back to the B&B to shower off and for a bit of a rest before heading out for a curry.

On Saturday morning we returned to Corfe Castle village for more croquet at the model village.  K & M

really wanted to go back to Knoll beach considerably earlier than we needed to be there for wedding celebration.  They had chosen some appropriate things to give the bride and groom as presents from among their possessions and wanted to make them something else.

A sand wedding cake!

With a playmobil bride & groom and pollypocket wedding set.

The bride and groom and their sand wedding cake.

The ceremony had been family only at the town hall in Swanage, so the couple redid their vows on the beach for everyone to witness, before a glass of bubbly at the café and then to the village hall for the rest of the reception. 

The vows.

It was an absolutely wonderful celebration and so lovely to see so many old friends too.

In other news I have finished my first attempt at a crocheted garment (not counting a hat) and indeed wore it to the wedding.  I'm really rather proud of myself!

Ta dah!

A mystery and a musical.

M had just about finished preparing her mystery for A to solve with Detective Fox (a puppet with many different professions that is something that is very much a Daddy & girls thing) by the middle of the week.  Unfortunately Wednesday is swimming night and A was late home anyway and he was off to Amsterdam from Thursday until very late Friday.  This meant that it wasn't until Saturday after lunch (M needed some time to plant various clues and alter one of the notes and A had various things to do in the morning) that we set things in motion.  K & I had been drafted in to help point A & Detective Fox in the direction of some clues, so after helping M set things up, I told A that I was a bit concerned because I'd heard some strange noises one evening while he was away out by the shed and please could he check it out (he didn't realise to start with that it was to do with the mystery and thought I was serious).  This lead to the discovery of the first of three notes (written on paper stained with a used tea bag and torn to look old), which were written in runes and needed decoding.  There were also a couple of other clues, one to indicate where the baddies were meeting (the shed) and one with a D and two patterned rectangular shapes, which were meant to be rugs to indicate that Drugs were involved.

The notes, the dimetrodon baddies and the rescued lion.

The drugs!

 Rather fortuitously, the final note revealed that the baddies, who had stolen a lion from a zoo using drugs to sedate it and who were going to paint it and then sell it to a circus, were meeting in the shed at 2.30pm that very day!  It was just gone 2.30 when A decoded the final message and he manage to catch the baddies in the act, solve the mystery and save the lion.  Hurray!

On Saturday evening we had K's birthday treat.  It's a bit early, as her birthday isn't until next month, that wasn't a problem.  This is the third year in a row that K has chosen a trip to the theatre instead of a party, which I must admit is so much easier!  For her 9th birthday it was just the two of us (M opting out) to see A Comedy of Errors at the RSC in Stratford (nice and easy as Granny and Big Grandad live nearby, so we all stayed with them), last year she asked if we could see Matilda the Musical again (we had been to see it when it first opened in Stratford for a Christmas treat a couple of years previously), so we went down to London.  This year was closer to home, as Shrek the Musical is touring and in Nottingham this month.  We had said she could take a friend or two and she wanted to take A & J, but since it is A's birthday in a couple of weeks S and C their parents came too and we all had tea in Pizza Express first.  K & M both love Shrek the film and can recite various parts of it, the musical follows the film very closely and it's really well done.  Lord Farquaad is particularly hilarious, running across the stage on his knees with fake legs attached to his thighs, absolutely brilliant.  All in all a fantastic evening and now M's contemplating a theatre trip for her birthday next June (current first choice would be Matilda *again* or Cats if possible).

Waiting for the show to start!

In other news, both girls have been doing more coding on Khan Academy, we're continuing with The Dragonfly Pool and working on a big tidy up of the playroom with a view to possibly getting rats for Christmas (the rats would live in there and in order for the girls to be able to get them out, the room would need to be kept tidy, considerably tidier than is usually currently the case, so we'll see).

M's Codes

M has been coding and writing in code today in two different ways.  She has been on Khan Academy making picture using coding and she has been writing messages in runes because she's decided that as, unlike the Secret Seven or the children in Helen Moss's books, she never seems to stumble across a mystery to solve, she's going to come up with one herself.

She needed a bit of a reminder to get going with the coding, both from the videos and from me, about what the various numbers mean when writing code.  For example when drawing a rectangle: rect(50, 80, 20, 40); the first two numbers tell you how far across and down the field the top left hand corner of the rectangle is, the third number is how wide and the fourth how tall the rectangle is.  But with a triangle there are three pairs of number in the brackets, which tell you where each of the corners is, rather than telling you the size in the way that it does for rectangles.  It took a while for her to really get the hang of this, rather than trying out fairly random numbers and seeing what happened, but I think she got there in the end.  She didn't manage to finish what she wanted to do, because K had been waiting for a turn on the computer for quite some time, but we've saved where she got up to, so we can pick it up again at a later date.

Writing is one of those things that I used to get a bit stressed about, as neither K nor M is the sort to sit down and write a story, and I thought that writing was something that we 'should' be doing.  Occasionally they would voluntarily do a little bit and we have at times had phases when they've written a bit at least quite regularly, such as post Christmas and birthday thank yous, we had a month when all three of us sat down and wrote for 10 minutes every day and at other times we've written shared stories taking it in turns to add to the story.  On the whole though it's not something that either K or M is particularly keen on.  Lately though M in particular has been doing more of it.  For one thing she has recently acquired a penfriend, admittedly she's only written once so far, but she is keen, so that will be a fairly regular thing and now there is this mystery she's concocting.  So far she has written three or four letters which she has then translated into runes, using a sheet she got from Nottingham Uni's Mayfest earlier in the year.  She's occasionally asked me to spell a word, such as 'circus', but from what I've seen her spelling is pretty accurate. 

As for K, she's been doing some more of the maths worksheets that I've made for her based on Basher Maths, recently it's been Quadrilaterals and Polygons and she now has a 3D Shapes one waiting for her.

3D Shapes worksheet

In other news the girls had their first piano lesson of the new term today and went to korfball this evening.  M was not happy about not going, so decided to stay and 'help', which fortunately our friend K who coaches them was fine with.  I think M was a bit bored though, so it's fortunate that she's allowed to get back to doing all sports at the weekend.  I think it'll be a while before her wrist is back to full strength though.

Not Back to School and then off elsewhere

On Wednesday we went to the annual Not Back to School Picnic at the park at Lakeside.  I've just looked back at my blog post about it 2 years ago and I talked of a 'good turn out of a dozen or so families'.  Last year there were considerably more than that.  This was most (but not all - some like my girls don't like to be in photos) of the children who were there this year with a few of the parents.

K & M were very happy to see some old friends there, although M did have a bit of a meltdown about not being able to keep up with people because she couldn't climb as fast.  After a play in the playground, M finally got to take off her splint and we went for a lovely walk around the lake with A, N, L & T.

Getting close to the fauna...

...and flora!

Thursday K spent quite a lot of time doing what M had been doing over the previous few days, going through our photos on the computer and choosing some for her own photo album.  We also had to get most of our packing done for a weekend away.

Friday was a busy one.  We had to set off about 9 o'clock to get to Derby where K & M were doing a morning's 1st Aid course with St John's Ambulance, organised by our friend C.  I wasn't sure what the set up would be and discovered when we got there that the children went off and the parents and younger siblings had to entertain themselves for three hours.  Fortunately I had taken my crochet with me, and so made good progress with that while chatting to the other parents.  After the course, during which sounded as though they'd covered quite a lot, we went back to C's for lunch and a brief play before we had to come home.

Our weekend away was due to a christening in Durham of the daughter of a friend of A's from college on Sunday, but we'd decided to make a weekend of it and drove up on Friday.  We spent the day at Alnwick Castle (aka Hogwarts) on Saturday. 

Hogwarts!

M really liked the diggers too.

A & M in the middle of a sculpture.

A, K & M and another water sculpture.

After visiting the garden and the castle we went for a walk around the town and visited the rather enormous second hand bookshop in the former railway station.  Then we headed for the beach, where K & M had a paddle and jumped waves, before we went back to the hotel for food and sleep.

Wave jumping.

Sunday we went straight to the cathedral for the christening, before going back to the friends' house for the do afterwards.  I had tried to persuade K & M to wear something reasonably smart for the day, and in K's case managed by buying her an outfit in Alnick, admittedly it was jeans and a shirt (from the adult petite section - she's only 10!!) but she looked reasonably smart.  M on the other hand, was not persuadable and the best we managed was clean.  She wore patched jeans, a nice purple spotty t-shirt and odd socks with sandals.  Nobody minded in the slightest though, so all was well.  A caught up with some old friends from college who he hadn't seen for years and K & M enjoyed playing on the bouncy castle among other things.  We got home rather later than we'd hoped as the traffic was pretty bad, as it had been on the way up on Friday. 

Today M has been getting geological.  She started before the weekend trying to crack open various stones with A's hammer and collected more stones on the beach to continue with this endeavour.  With a more appropriate hammer found in the shed and some safety goggles from a science kit she successfully split open a few stones and while she has yet to find any fossils, she has found some interesting looking minerals inside.

M splitting rocks.

One of the interesting ones.

She found a book about the geology of Britain in the library in the adult reference section (there wasn't anything in the children's) to have a look at and see if we can have a go at identifying anything.  Nana is coming to stay in a couple of weeks time and she studied geology (admittedly about 60 years ago, but I'm sure it hasn't changed that much!), so M's looking forward to picking her brains.  While M was busy on the backdoor step with her rocks, K spent quite a while playing the piano.  M had a go this evening, but found it hurt her wrist still, so gave up after a short time.  This afternoon L from over the road came to play for a while before the three of them went back there to continue playing while I did some housework.  Then it was time for tea and the first Brownies back after the summer for M.

In other news, M has been reading (or I should say re-reading) the Maths Quest books with A.  He thinks that she knows the books well enough that she doesn't actually need to do the problems any more, which would suggest that her memory is pretty good even though it doesn't tell us much about her maths!  Finally, we have started The Dragonfly Pool, which, although we're only a few chapters into it, is looking very promising.