Family Fun

Hello! It feels like ages since I last sat down to write a blog post! As the title suggests, we have been busy having lots of 'family fun'...

First, on Saturday, our town's actual "family fun day". I wrote about this last year too, it is an afternoon of craft, cake and fun that is funded by one of the local churches. Izzy looks forward to it each year - she loves it!

This year Izzy managed to do every single craft activity they had going...

Aquariam paper plate

Self-portrait

Biscuit decorating (not surprisingly, her favourite from last year!)

Paper fan

plus there were also a couple of origami projects - a frog and a heart - that escaped the camera. As if that wasn't enough, she was also sent home with the kit to make her own braided bracelet, as she ran out of time to do it there!

The moment she happily realised how to do it herself! It was quite a clever template involving counting 3 threads along, tucking under, repeated many many times!!

Toby was happy that there was lots of food - lots and lots of cake...

Ice cream (that my friend bought for her child who then decided he didn't want it - this was the one thing you had to pay for and I'm clearly a mean Mummy!!)...

Bacon rolls...Liam ended up eating 2.5/3 of these so he was very glad he hadn't been cheeky and got one "for" me too!!

And he also decorated a biscuit too - as you can see he was very eagar to eat it!!

Finally, before we went home we visited the balloon man. A dog for Toby...

and a 3-balloon flower for Izzy...

Izzy also got a little flower painted on her arm. Another example of my "mean-ness" is that, when there were so many other things to do and she'd just had her face painted a week or two before, I didn't let her stand in the really long queue for (admittedly free) face painting. Luckily for Izzy, one of the ladies who was running it recognised Izzy from toddler group years back, and insisted she jump the queue for a quick paint. Slightly embarrassing but very sweet, and Izzy's arm went perfectly with the flowers we passed on the way home...

Such a great day again this year! We were really lucky with the weather too - the rain held off until about an hour after the event finished, phew!

Sunday was more fun with family (and more sunshine!) at Liam's Auntie's house - she held a BBQ to celebrate one of Liam's cousin's birthdays. Weirdly, when I was looking back at last year's post above, this same weekend last year was also the family fun day on the Saturday and then Ben's birthday BBQ on the Sunday! Anyway, the thing Izzy was most looking forward to was the trampoline, so she made a beeline for it as soon as we arrived...

Izzy soon convinced Liam's other cousin, Mat, to join in - he is always so great with the children :)

Toby surprised us by absolutely hating the trampoline, but luckily he was kept entertained and fascinated by the little pond...

So Liam and I had time to eat, win! Liam had the usual meaty BBQ food, whilst I stuck to the salads - two plates of salad (potato, coleslaw, waldorf and rice...I somehow skipped the green, whoops!), plus a cheese roll with the first plate...

and then birthday cake and many unpictured chocolate fingers, ha, Liam's Auntie kept refilling my glass of Pimms so by this time I was super snacky!

Final bit of "family fun" (I promise!) has been this evening, as my baby sister is currently at her end of GCSEs prom! We went round to Mum's house for a few photos before heading down to the seafront where the entire year group met up to check out each other's outfits/have a huge official group photo taken. After Livs went off to the prom, Liam joined us after work and the four of us plus my Mum, Dad and other sister went to a local cafe for hot chocolates and cheesy chips, yum! I'd had enough of taking photos by that stage though - I snapped so many of Livs and her friends on the seafront, plus quite a few group photos at the house. I haven't had time to sort through them yet, and I'm going to leave most of that to Livs anyway, so I will just share a few photos - one of the prom girl in her lovely custom-made dress...

one of the 3 sisters...

and an actual nice photo of me and the children, with us all looking at the camera and smiling, yey - this never happens!! ;)

Right, that is us all caught up on the family photos I think. I have obviously also been doing lots of eating this week and, for me, a fair bit of exercise but I will leave all that for another post as this one is already super long!

Did your school have a prom when you were younger? My school didn't have a prom at 16, but when I went to a boarding school for my A-levels we had 3 balls a year. I tended to just buy my dresses from high street shops (and then *gasp* wear them to more than one ball!) - I was never much into fashion, whereas Livvy knew exactly what she wanted her dress to look like and luckily the local dressmaker was able to make it happen. Hopefully she'll be off having a fantastic time as I write this :)