Short weekend

We were supposed to be preparing the downstairs walls for painting; but the sun was shining outside, the skies were blue and since rainless weekend summer days are rare in England we decided to spend the day outside. (there seems to be plenty of sunny spring & autumn workdays) After looking through my big bag of travel brochures and changing my mind few times I settled on going to the Hall Place & Gardens.

It was lovely to look around the House and to walk in the Gardens. Of course as always I took too many photos of the flowers.

In the evening we did prep the walls and will probably attempt to paint them over the next few evenings as my poor husband has to work tomorrow. And painting the walls with no one else around to distract a toddler is just asking for trouble.

Easter in Photos

Unlike Driftwood I was very disorganized this Easter, so we didn't have an Easter Egg hunt or new crocheted chicks to play with. However I baked two lots of hot cross buns and strangely enough the one made out of mixture of plain, rye and self-raising wholemeal flour turned out much better than the traditional one (I wasn't experimenting - just run out of plain flour). The four days ended up being packed with activities:


We saw newborn lambs at the Woodlands Farm


We went to a fair where the Little Girl got to ride the little trains, while persistently asking to go on the biggest, scariest, fastest and craziest rides.


We drew on the train to Royal Tunbridge Wells. (I just love the look of total concentration on her face when she draws - I suspect I look very similar when I draw.) We didn't get to see much of the town, except the main shopping street that took us to the Spa Valley Railway, where we spent a lot of time looking at and riding the trains - everyone in our tiny family seem to be a train nut - Railway Series is the current reading favourite and The Little Girl wants to change her name to Thomas, James or Percy (train characters from the above book).

Somehow we also managed to walk, run, play and feed birds & squirrels in the local park. The last one thanks to a stranger, who kindly gave a small bag of left-over peanuts to the Little Girl when his older children lost interest in the tiny overfed fury creatures.