All Sorts

All sorts of stuff has been going on but none of them eventful enough to warrant an entire post so I thought I'd bung them all together to make this one.

On Friday night Beth (with a little help from daddy) made dinner for us all. Chicken quesadillas from the Annabel Karmel cookbook she got Steve for his birthday. They were pretty good and we enjoyed them even though neither of the kids were overly keen and only picked. I think we'll have to try them again but limit the filling to cheese and ham!

After dinner Steve took them both outside to have a play with the new soakers we got from Costco.** Beth got the hang of them pretty quickly and was more than happy causing havoc watering the windows and Steve; she wasn't so happy being got (must take after her mum), I stayed inside clearing up and watched from a distance.

**The "can't get out of Costco without parting with $100" has made it over here too (but in £s) and Steve sits and wonders how on earth we can spend that much on the 'essentials' . . . ;)

We seem to have had a bit of time to spend with Toby on his own

recently - Beth stayed with grandma and grandpa at the weekend. On Sunday morning

we went to Clumber Park to attempt to fly a kite since

his favourite song (that he sings ALL the time) is "Lets Go Fly a Kite" from Mary Poppins. It was semi successful as the wind was not very steady but Toby enjoyed it.

Toby is also very much into bubble blowing and takes a bottle of bubbles (empty and closed) to bed with him. He must have spent an hour chasing them around the garden last week; I'll have to go out and buy a couple of gallons to keep us in stock!

Village Fête

Today was the village May Day fête. As expected on these days the weather was pretty awful - heavy rain followed by two minutes of blazing sun then hail (it's May, what's going on?!) and a bit more sun just to give you hope, but no, more rain.

It didn't deter people as many came out to see the floats, one from Beth's preschool - she did not want to go on it as she couldn't be a princess (the theme was books and that float was 101 Dalmatians). The other float was the church Sunday school one, they did the Mr. Men and there was also the May Queen/Princess float.

Grandma and grandad came down to spend the day and help with 'crowd control' as Steve is off doing the Trans Pennine Trail for charity. Due to the weather we didn't stay for too long but we did get to see the birds of prey rescue charity 'display' with an enormous owl (you can't really tell from the photo but it was about the same size as Toby!). We also had a go on the lucky dip, looked at the fire engine and had a poke around the stalls. One of the stalls was a specialty cheese company who made cheese wedding cakes - can't say that I would want one, brings a whole new meaning to nightmare weddings! It was a nice afternoon just a shame about the weather.