Messy Play Date

Madeleine really enjoyed getting ready for the messy playdate - making the jelly, cooking the pasta, making the cloud dough, getting out the paint, and she really, really enjoyed it.  However I make no bones about this - having a messy play date in your house is a really, really BAD idea.   Someone please remind me to NEVER do this again!

The Fringe

Yes - of course we did the Fringe!   

Malta

We went to Malta and Gozo.   It was searingly hot, the beaches were horrible, some of the food was okay, there were zillions of churches and Valetta was nice.  It's a 2 day per island sort of place, but we were there for a week.  Madeleine didn't care.  She'd only recently become brave after dropping her "everything frightens me stance", and spent her holiday jumping in the pool, taunting the suits of armour and sticking her hand in the lion's mouth.  

Camping in Scotland

Madeleine's first camping trip up to Glencoe, onto the Ardnachmurchan penisular and back down to the Red Squirrel site in the valley.  It could safely be said that she loved it with almost equal measure to her father's loathing.   However, it had to done - 

Scotland was actually having a summer, with temperatures soaring into the high 20s, it would have been practically criminal not to have gone. Even if we did get eaten alive by the midges, at least we were warm.

Lazy Summer Afternoon with grandparents

Just an ordinary sunny summer's day with (most of) my grandparents and my uncle... not something that happens very often..

Madeleine turns 3!

 An impressive castle cake was required to mark such an important ocassion.  All Madeleine's friends came to play, and the fairies even hid bubbles and lollypops in the garden.   

At the end of the party, the grown ups were happy to sit down with a nice of cup of tea, and leave the little ones alone upstairs with jelly and icecream, as 3 year olds are always very sensible and always behave.

  

They looked so trust -worthy, when I'd left them to mash jelly into the carpet.      

  "Who did this?" we asked.

   "We all did" they chorused, clearly delighted with themselves.  

"What do you say to Susan?" chided Olivia's Mum, obviously horrified.  Completely deadpan, because obviously she was, she responded "Thank you very much".

The moral of this story: never work with children or animals.  4 hours to ice that castle cake, and it was completely upstaged by a packet of Hartleys. It will always be the party where the kids mashed the jelly into the carpet - and no, the carpet has never been the same again - but hey ho - it's only a carpet :-) 

Midsummer's Eve

As the seasons come and go, here’s something you might like to know.  
There are fairies everywhere:  under bushes, in the air, 
playing games just like you play, singing through their busy day.  
So listen, touch, and look around – in the air and on the ground.  
And if you watch all nature’s things, you might just see a fairy’s wing.

On Midsummer's eve, we went on a fairy walk to collect gifts for the fairies.  Little flower heads, herbs and stones... and then we lit our pretty fairy attracting lanterns and crept away.  In the morning, we were delighted to find they had been, and left little gifts for us...  a gold and silver crayon to draw fairy wings, some pretty heart jellies and a little daisy fairy doll.