Brownie-base cheesecake

Olivia chose this as the dessert of choice to make from a new book - and it was nice. The cheesecake topping wasn't quite as good as my normal cheesecake, but the combination of the brownie base and the cheesecake topping was a nice idea.



And this one, I just couldn't resist - my nephew Dave has a good excuse for sitting down to play as he'd been awake for something like 28 out of the last 30 hours at this point in the day (having arrived this morning from Australia) - the others, well, it's just laziness! Except for Olivia, who has just finished all the sweeping up and is looking for something with which to scrub the pathway (I told her that her energy was better spent elsewhere!)

Photo Shoot

Recently I took the kids in to have some photos taken - we had won an hour's free studio time, plus a voucher which would pay part of the cost of the photos, so I thought it would be a nice thing to do. Some of the photos were great (she took hundreds - the wonders of digital photography!) - and in addition to some prints and a nice canvas, we got some digitally, so I'll be able to print them out for various relatives, and blog them, etc.




I've only chosen three of them for the blog entry, as I didn't want it to be too photo heavy, but I did upload them all to my flickr album, so do go have a look!



The kids even convinced me to be in a few, though mostly, it was just them - in various combinations and singly...

S'mores

Hard to believe now, with the raining tipping down outside, that we spent most of the evening lounging on the patio with the barbecue going (and then with the barbecue dying down and the sky growing slowly darker). Aah, "summer" evenings - bliss!

Haircuts

Zoo

Off today for a trip to the zoo - Sarah elected not to come, but Olivia (who requested the zoo) and Alex and I had a lovely day - sun was shining, birds were singing, zoo wasn't very crowded (especially considering it was a sunny day in the half-term holiday)... Here are the two kiddies at the start of the visit inside a giant termite mound model.




Billions of photos were taken (especially since Olivia kept grabbing the camera from me), but the beauty of digital photography is that it doesn't matter - your kids can take billions of photos of animals at the zoo and it doesn't really waste anything, except a little battery life. I've picked a small selection of photos to share - this penguin being a particularly cute example of the ones with sticky-up feathers on their heads. He stood like this for so long without moving, I was beginning to think he was a statue...




We watched one of their animal shows, and this parrot was doing tricks - here he is hanging upside down by one claw. He later hung by his beak alone, but I missed that photo.





The zoo is full of signs - informational, instructive, etc - this was one of my favourites. Not sure what you are doing, but stop it. Or else, maybe it means to stop doing nothing and start doing something?





Probably the best photo of the day here - the heron who wanted to be a pelican.





Alex the meercat...







versus an actual meerkat (if you are in the UK, you will appreciate I have resisted making a "compare the meerkat" joke here. If you are not in the UK, don't ask, it's an ad on telly...).





And here we are at the end of the day, getting ready to take our tired feet home - still sunny, birds still singing (actually, this is right by the big aviary, so many of them were actually squawking), kids still getting along, more or less. Sunny tomorrow too - hurrah!

New horse

Our walk to school passes between two fields where there are usually horses. Lately, there's been a new little horse. About two weeks old in this picture. Right before I took this, she was standing up and I wanted to show her all gangly-legged, the way foals are, but she decided to sit down, and we couldn't hang around...

To photograph or not to photograph...

Well, I somehow failed to take photos of either of the main things I did this weekend - school Spring Fair on Saturday (completely rubbish weather), where I do have the good excuse of spending most of the afternoon talking - on the PA, making announcements, etc - so no time to take pictures even if I HAD remembered my camera.  And today, the Girl Guiding Mother/Daughter picnic (completely rubbish weather), where even if I had taken my camera, and been willing to expose my hands (as opposed to keeping them under my legs for warmth) long enough to take photos, you wouldn't have wanted to see them - can you just imagine a handful of photos of cold people sitting around eating picnic food in the grey drizzle? Not really blogworthy, I fear.

So, you get supper. Dinner. Tea. Whatever you like to call it - an evening meal. In this instance, potato, cheese & onion pie. We also had salad. The pie was excellent. There are leftovers. Mmm, lunch tomorrow...

A walk in the bluebell woods

We had arranged to meet up today with friends, originally for a picnic and walk in our favourite woods (good for bluebells - normally it might be a little late for them by the May Bank Holiday, but everything is late this year due to the dire winter). As the weekend approached and the weather forecast got increasingly yuck, plans were changed from picnicking to a pub lunch, with the walk to follow unless there was a real deluge. Which, happily, there was not.




Here's the view from the pub window - nice view of the South Downs. So, we ate, and in due course, walked, with only a small drizzle of rain. The walking is fairly dry underfoot, despite the rain, due to the chalk hills, so at least it wasn't at all muddy.

Bluebells were indeed spotted, as can be seen in the top photo - they never look quite as magnificent in photos as they do in person in the woods, I think, but you get the general idea.




Here's one chap a bit closer up,



and another thing I love this time of year, ferns, bracken and other plants just unfurling.



And a snail - Helix pomatia, the Roman or edible snail. Apparently the Romans brought them over (a staple food) and now, they roam the South Downs. In as much as a snail roams.... One of our friends is a biologist with a PhD in snails (not this snail, as it happens, a different type) so we had fun searching for them in the undergrowth. There was a lot of turning rotting logs over to examine the bugs underneath, as well, which is good fun. It would have been nice if it had been nice enough to picnic, but after all, you can't have everything --where would you put it?

St George's Day Parade

Alex's scout district was due for a parade along Wimbledon Common and a short service today; this morning about 8, it looked like the parade was doomed - raining steadily. Luckily, it cleared up (then started, then cleared up again!) and the sun even came out for a while.

They assembled on the common, then went off to line up.

I didn't follow the whole parade, just watched them head off...

...then caught up with them a bit later to see them all come along. It was quite sweet actually -

despite Mr "I must make faces at the camera".

Once they passed, another mum and I went along to the village for a cup of coffee... Apparently, if the shop is posh enough, you don't get handles on your cups!

And here they are, waiting to be collected.

Jack Petchey Awards

Sarah and I attended the Jack Petchey Achievement Awards Ceremony (for Guides) tonight - she received the award for her dedication to Guiding - I think because she nearly always attends, including extra-curricular things, is enthusiastic, responsible, sensible (I know what you are thinking!) and happy to take on responsibility. Here she is receiving her award - it's a medallion, plus she gets £200 to spend on her unit (they bought some new tents - badly needed).

A birdy day

Today was the last day (boo hoo) of the Easter Holidays. And, astonishingly, it was just as gloriously gorgeous as it was yesterday, so we decided to have a trip out* - the Wetland Centre is a nice destination on a day like this and as we are members, it's, while not precisely free, at least pre-paid. It was great, actually - not at all crowded, despite expectations. We decided to take the official guided tour - despite having been members for a number of years we have never done this before - largely because we usually have small children in tow. It was great - nice to go around with someone who is an expert.



We saw a variety of birds - both exotic and common - the kids were, of course, the most delighted with the baby ducks. Although they did also like the cranes.



Here were are watching the sand martins fly back into their nests in the sand martin bank - it astonishes me the speeds at which they manage to fly straight at the bank and into their nest holes without crashing.



We saw a few other animals as well - still haven't managed to see the elusive water vole, but there was a rather nice marsh frog. And we saw a baby slo-worm, which is technically a type of lizard, though it looks like a little snake.



It was a lovely day out - gorgeous weather, and despite some initial reluctance on the part of the eldest child, the kids had a good time...

*when I saw "we decided", what I technically mean is that I decided we should be outside on a day like this, so I put my foot down and told the children that we were going out.

Waveboard

This is Olivia's new gadget - it's a kind of skateboard called a Ripstick, Waveboard or Street Surfer - the thing is, it only has two wheels, which makes balancing on it a bit challenging. The neat thing is, you don't push off the ground to make it move, like a traditional skateboard - it's all in the hip movement, which is a kind of twisty movement, like the dance. She's getting very good at it, as demonstrated by her ability to turn a circle!

Sign of spring...

It's not that we don't make ice-cream in the winter, but when the warmer weather comes, it's somehow that much more enticing. Today's is just vanilla (I say "just", but really, vanilla is the King of ice-cream, let's face it) but it's a harbinger of summer treats...

Nest in the shed

We had our (usually) annual Spring Clean of the shed today - we take everything out, give it a good clean (it's a brick building, fairly good sized, very popular with spiders, etc), decide what can go to the tip and what stays, and then put everything back. In one corner, near the roof, we found this lovely little nest - I should have put something in for scale, as it's very small - the eggs (which sadly, were unhatched, were very old - probably even last year's (we didn't clean the shed last spring, as it happens)) were about the size of Cadbury's mini eggs - the candy coated ones. About an inch long, for those who don't speak Cadbury's. We think it's probably a blue tit nest, as it's one of our smallest birds - wrens are smaller, but they have a different nest type.

Adventures

I took the kids to Chessington World of Adventures today (amusement park right down the road from us), as it was a lovely day and they were doing a special promotion for Nectar points (a loyalty card scheme for one of our supermarkets plus other various shops), so we got a very good deal. It was fairly crowded, though not as bad as Legoland usually is. Still, we did do a bit of waiting to go on the more popular rides, but it all worked out in the end. Alex is finally big enough to go on most of the rides, including some roller coasters - he enjoyed both the Vampyre (what we are queuing for above) and the Dragon's Fury, as well as other rides. As it happened, Sarah went with a friend today as well, but they were both too cool to want to spend to much time with us (or with Katharine's dad, who took them, I suspect).



Here's Olivia waiting for our turn on the swings in the new Wild Asia section (those of you who know Chessington may recognise the swings from when they were part of Beanoland - though they did completely move the dodgems and the bus!).

Anyway, the weather was gorgeous - sunny and warm - which no doubt contributed to the crowds - and we had a lovely day out.

Picnic in a park

Today the weather was so lovely that while we were out running our various errands in Wimbledon (orthodontist, passport photos, birthday present for the weekend, trousers for a boy who keeps growing, rechargeable batteries, parsnips, etc) we decided (or rather, I did, unilaterally - the advantage of being the person in charge of transport!) to grab some lunchy things and head to the park for a picnic lunch. Traffic in Wimbledon being awkward, we abandoned the first plan of going up to Wimbledon Common, and instead ended up at Morden Hall Park, where we had a nice stroll as well as our picnic.

We spotted this lady in the river with a fishing net - turns out it was a kids activity where they were racing plastic ducks - she was the person in charge of making sure no ducks made it into the wild...

I am sure that in my photo collection somewhere, I have a similar picture of the kids picnicking on this particular tree stump, but I think it might require some digging. However, I did find another photo, which was from that occasion (or a similar one), which shows them on the bridge above, playing pooh sticks...

Marbling!

Finally, the Easter Holiday is here. After sleeping in a bit to celebrate not having to get up at 7am, we basically spent the day lazing around. This was largely helped by the still disgusting weather - which hopefully will get a bit better over the next two weeks. Otherwise we are all going to go stir crazy!

Anyway, yesterday we decided to play around with some marbling inks I had knocking about - I had thought they might work nicely on eggshells, but that wasn't very successful - the ink didn't stick as well. However, paper and card did work well, and Olivia and Alex (Sarah being out with a friend) made lots of bits of lovely marbled paper to use in later craft activities...