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.