First Week of Summer

My kitchen currently looks like this...

Icing sugar gets everywhere!!

...so obviously the sensible thing to do is write a blog post, haha, sorry Liam!! ;-)

I can't believe we are already coming to the end of the first week of the summer holidays, and what a gloriously sunny week it has been. We've settled into a nice routine of doing something in the mornings (park, picnic, beach etc) and then coming home in the afternoon. Toby then has a nap, Izzy either has a nap or does some colouring inside, and I sunbathe in the garden. It is way too hot for the little ones to be outside 12-3, but the same rules clearly don't apply to me...I love the sun so am making the most of it while it's still here!

Today as slightly different as we met up with friends at 11.30am and went to the local woodland/river area for a picnic. I took too much food, as usual...

The box contains the best thing - egg mayo sandwiches, my favourite! I was only planning to eat the sandwiches, strawberries and water, but Izzy, Toby and Izzy's friend polished off most of the strawberries between them - I think I got 2! - so I ended up eating a few coconut biscuits instead! I never used to take things like crisps, biscuits etc to picnics but I found that everyone who we met would have these things so then Izzy would spend the whole time looking longingly at them. Today however my friend had just brought sandwiches and crisps with her, but we were happy to share the rest of our stuff! Those My-5 fruit shoot things are a new-to-me find and seem to just be fruit juice and water (?) which I'm ok with as an occasional treat. Toby used to have a fruit shoot whenever we went to Costa (whoops, not great ingredients!) but then they changed the recipe and he seems to be allergic to something - got the full on shakes and head jitters :( - so these were a good alternative that made him think he was having his old favourites!

Anyway, parental self-guilt over, we had a fantastic time today. We met up with my friend, her 13 year old daughter and her 5 year old son (who goes to school with Izzy). It was great having a teenager with us as she took the two 5 year olds (making the most of being able to call Izzy that until her birthday next Wednesday!!!) into the river...something Liam and I would never have done! At first they just dipped their feet in, but then they ended up stripping off to their pants (the 13 year old had a bikini on anyway) and getting soaking wet, such fun!! Toby does not like swimming/the sea/rivers so he just stood a bit away from the edge watching them, which suited me to be honest as whilst I trusted the 13 year old to watch Izzy, if Toby had been in the river too I would also have had to get in, and I much preferred chatting with my friend!

Yesterday, we went to the sea front for ice cream with Mum...

And then I took the children onto the beach. Izzy absolutely loved the sea and spent the whole time up to her knees in it (I wouldn't let her go in any deeper without me!), whereas this was the one and only time that Toby voluntarily got his feet wet - the rest of the time he & I sat close to the water's edge "chucking" stones in!

We have also been to the play park several times, as well as quite a bit of time spent in the garden. This weather makes it so much easier to avoid hearing the children (well, Izzy) saying "I'm bored...!" as there are so many places we can walk to when it's not raining!

I have also been eating more salads...

and bowls of yoghurt...

I made the most of Julian Grave's closing down 50% sale to stock up on a few goodies...

but when I opened the pack of chocolate covered pretzels yesterday, I then ended up eating the whole bag in one go rather than the few sprinkled on yoghurt that I'd planned, whoops! Liam and I are going to the cinema tomorrow night so I'm going to take a bag of chocolate popcorn with me to save some money - cinema snacks are such rip-offs!

Tonight I am off to the Body Pump class I first went to last week - looking forward to it! And then we have a busy day planned tomorrow (*hint* that first picture was a result of early birthday cake making!) so I'll be back after the weekend to tell you all about it.

Have a great weekend everyone! I've now got 20 minutes to clean up the kitchen before my Mum arrives to look after the kids, eek!! ;-)

Sunny Weekend - Picnics and Parks

We have sunshine! :-D About time too!

We have made the most of the sun this weekend with lots of time spent in the garden, as well as a trip to the local woodland area (which was under water just 2 weeks ago!)

for a picnic...

Egg mayo sandwiches, pineapple and leftover cookies

and Izzy (trying to!) learn to to ride her bike...

They yesterday one of my teacher friends came to visit and we went into town for ice cream...

and a trip to the play park...

Hi Sarah! :)

Notice there are no children in this photo...Liam = big kid!! ;)

He likes to use Izzy as his excuse when possible though!

I have also been eating lots of summery foods. A delicious chocolate peanut smoothie in the garden one morning (just almond milk, peanut flour, cocoa powder, stevia and ice - we were out of bananas!)

and also lots of omelettes. I finally got round to buying a pan small enough to make omelettes in. The first day I was a bit overenthusiastic with my fillings - lots of stinky cheese and strawberries - it still tasted delicious but looked a bit of a mess!

The next time I just filled the omelette with some grated cheddar, then served it with strawberries and cucumber on the side...much neater!

Yum, looking at these photos, I think I'm going to go and make myself an omelette for lunch now! I also have an almost 6 year old nagging me that she's hungry, haha, I am loving the summer holidays so far (I didn't properly wake up until 9am this morning...bliss!!) but I will have to adjust to a slightly different routine with Izzy home. With Toby, he is very much a grazer so I don't need to worry about when we eat "lunch" as he has been snacking on fruit, yoghurt, toast etc all morning anyway. Whereas Izzy is used to having lunch at a set time at school each day so wants to stick to that!

Do you have your meals at the same time each day or do you just eat whenever you feel like it? Have you all spent lots of lovely time in the sunshine this weekend? Liam and I discovered that, whilst we have 3 (!!) new bottles of factor 50 suncream, we don't have any slightly lower ones for the adults - after all the rain we've had recently we haven't really needed it, but after this weekend we both have slightly pink shoulders, whoops, so need to get down to Boots today I think. I'm so careful with slathering the children in suncream regularly, but I need to take more care of myself too!

Woodlands Theme Park {Day Out}

With moving house this weekend, and the near-constant rain, it might have been easy to forget that this week is supposed to be a break from school for Izzy. I wanted her to have at least one fun day though so yesterday we went to Woodlands for the day. Our friends are camping there all week (rather them than me in this weather!!) so we went to spend the day with them - good motivation to keep driving even when the rain was pouring down in the morning!

We were actually really lucky with the weather - it was raining when we first arrived, so we spent a bit of time in an indoor play centre to keep dry. There were 3 teenage boys in our group so they and Liam went in playing with the littlies, whilst me and the other 3 women sat drinking coffee...bliss! Once the sun came out we headed outside. First stop - pirate ship. Izzy loves this at Crealy but this one was just a little bit higher! She still enjoyed it, but spent most of the time clung to my arm!!

After we'd got our stomachs back (Izzy always says that her stomach flies away during the swing of the ship!!), we walked down a little path to the past (!) to see some dinosaurs...

Izzy and Toby loved being able to ride in the front of the tractor themselves, with me & Liam sat behind them...

After we'd all been round the dinosaur ride (5 adults, 3 teenagers and 6 little children = 4 tractors and took a while!) it was about 2pm so we headed back to the campsite for some lunch. We'd brought packed lunch with us, but the campers got busy cooking packets of pasta n sauce and hot dogs on the stoves while the children ran around playing with the outdoor toys...

Food time!

We had brie & grape sandwiches/rolls, dried apricots, vegetable crisps, apples, biscuits and, of course, lots of grape juice...yum! We've had a lot of picnic lunches recently, easy to make and the children actually seem to eat more food that way too - either that or they just need the energy after all the running around they do first!

After lunch we headed back into the park (it was less than a 5 minute walk from the camp site) and headed to the toboggan ride. Toby was, just, tall enough to go on it, but there was such a long queue that we decided not to take him on - he'd have probably tried to climb off mid-ride anyway! Liam took Izzy on the ride and I took Toby to an outdoor under 5s play area...

Love this photo I took from one end of the "panda" tunnel as Toby was coming through it!

I also loved that every time he saw one of the panda pictures he started making his snorting "pig noise", so cute! He's pretty good at his animal noises but I wouldn't know what noise to tell him pandas make...anyone??

We managed to catch Liam and Izzy coming to the end of their ride from our vantage point at the top of the slide...

Next we all headed to the peddle boats...

The peddles were too far away for the children to be able to reach, but we didn't trust Izzy and Toby (well, Toby!) to sit in the back on their own. So Liam sat in the back with Toby, and Izzy and I sat up front, with my poor legs doing all the work to get us round the pond a couple of times!

Ice cream was needed afterwards! ;) Thorntons toffee ice creams for the adults...

and smartie ice creams for the children. At least half the smarties ended up on the floor though - is it just us that finds them difficult to get out of the stick at the end??

Messy Toby!!

Most of the rides at the park closed at 5.30pm, but as we (well, my friends) were staying at the campsite, we could stay playing at the outside areas until dusk. We managed to fit one last water slide in before the 5.30pm mark. The main water rides had super long queues so the others were going to go on those first thing this morning, but this one kept Izzy happy enough!

We then spent about an hour playing on the outdoor slides, monkey bars etc...

At about 6.30pm all the children suddenly became really tired and accident prone. Izzy fell down the above slide (which she had loved and perhaps been a bit too confident with) awkwardly and cut her lip :( and Toby twisted on a slide and ended up going down head first on his back (!!) but was fine otherwise. The other children fell over, banged heads etc too - I think we ended up with only one child not injured! We took this as a good sign that it was time for dinner, and headed to the takeaway pizza place (our friends had been eating at the campsite in the evenings, but luckily had already decided that tonight was pizza night which tied in well with us not having brought food for dinner!)

I had a large share of 4 cheese pizza (with huge wedges of goats cheese + sundried tomatoes) and potato wedges, sat on picnic benches in the sunshine, 'twas lovely!

The sky started to get grey again just as we were finishing eating, so we headed to the games room to have a quick bit of chill-out time. Izzy and Toby happily "played" the demos on the games machines without realising you were meant to put money in them!!

We then headed home around about bed time in the hope that the children, now fed, semi-changed etc, would go to sleep and be easy to transfer to bed once we got home. We'd considered going home before dinner, but by the time we thought about it it was way past Toby's nap time and, having not had a nap all day, we knew he'd sleep in the car and then not want to go to bed at night...not what we wanted after a long day out! This plan worked really well with Toby - he slept all the way home, went straight to bed when we got in, and slept til 8am. Izzy on the other hand, despite the photo below, didn't sleep at all on the journey (in the photo she is trying to get to sleep, but she couldn't get comfy in any position and we weren't happy about her lying like that anyway...much easier when you're still in a proper car seat!!), did go to bed when we finally got home about 9.30pm, but then was still awake at 7am this morning despite the super late bedtime. Needless to say, she has been very tired and grumpy today, and couldn't even have a nap this afternoon as she had a friend round to play! Ah well, at least she was happy to go to bed this evening!!

If only they were this peaceful all the time!! ;-)

All in all, a really great day. I'm so glad we made the effort to go - when it was pouring with rain in the morning I nearly cancelled, but I didn't want to let my friends down so kept going, luckily - I'd have been kicking myself if we hadn't gone and then it had dried up from mid-morning onwards!

Have you had time off this week? Any fun day trips? What is your favourite thing to pack in a picnic? I've always been a fan of traditional sandwiches - I was the child at parties who would sit by the plate of mini sandwiches while everyone else was more focused on the hula hoops and party ring biscuits - and fresh fruit is also a good one - we've just been taking whole packs of grapes, blueberries etc to save on mess. We've had 3 picnics this week but I always take way too much food - note to self: a whole pack of custard creams is not a good idea as they wont all get eaten and will then get crushed at the bottom of the bag! Liam went back to work today so the children and I are having a couple of relaxed days - getting the rest of the house unpacked, meeting up with a couple of friends and catching up on coffee/sleep! I find it difficult to get a balance during half terms as it goes so quickly - I want to do some fun things that Izzy can talk about when she goes back to school (after February half term the teacher asked what she'd done, and when Izzy replied Crealy and another local attraction the teacher replied "oh, just normal things then"!!) but also want a chance to relax - Izzy was so exhausted by the end of last week that she needs to catch up on her rest!

How I Spent My 25th Birthday...

As I may have already mentioned once or twice (!!), yesterday was my 25th birthday, and I had a great day :)

It started with Liam bringing me breakfast in bed...

A latte, Innocent Mango & Orange smoothie, some cute flowers from the garden and french toast...mmmmm...

topped with sliced banana, sliced strawberries, agave nectar and pumpkin seeds...

so good!

After breakfast, presents! :-D

Love the wrapping paper, and in case you can't guess, I got a lot of books! Fiction books...

and cookery books...

Yey! There are so many great looking recipes in the above books, and I'm looking forward to reading the fiction ones once I've finished the book I'm currently reading. I also got given the table I've taken the photos on (just a small fold up table - good for taking photos in better light as a lot of our house is quite dark)

and my daughter chose a necklace for me...

Cute, but I might take her down to the shop to choose a different necklace, as the only necklace I currently wear is a silver & black heart design!

Very lucky me! Love that the gifts are thought out to suit me - admittedly I did give a few hints for some of the pressies, but Liam came up with others himself & I love them! :)

After baby's morning nap, we went to the local park for a picnic. Luckily the weather stayed pretty sunny! We had lots of yummy food...

egg mayonnaise sandwiches...

cheese and onion sausage rolls (the others had meat ones)...

strawberries...

pineapple...

vegetable crisps...

and finally, Pimms!

with strawberries and cucumber as well as lemonade...

perfect! :)

After eating, the kids had a run around before we went home. It obviously wore them out as they both then slept for 2 hours!!

During their nap time, I made Apricot Almond "Cookies", they were so easy to make, and really tasty! We took them up to my Mum's house to enjoy with a cup of tea. My Mum also gave me this candle as a birthday gift...

isn't it cute! She didn't want to buy me chocolates or anything, so this was a good alternative! :)

By the time we got home from my Mum's, and visited my Grandparents quickly, it was already way past dinner time! We decided to get takeaway instead - Chinese. I had black bean tofu with onions and green peppers, with egg-fried rice...

this was really good :) I've never ordered tofu from the Chinese takeaway before. We don't have takeaway very often, but I am glad to know there are good alternatives to meat that I can order whenever we do next have one.

After dinner, Liam and I watched The Social Network on DVD. I had been hoping for an easy to watch chick-flick as I was quite tired, but this film was good, and much more suited for us both watching it - just required me to pay a bit more attention!!

We did enjoy some of Liam's leftover chocolate birthday cake during the film...

Yum! I'm not always a fan of chocolate cake as I often find it too dry, but this was great. It was split into 3 layers too - so extra chocolate filling, yey! :)

And with that, my 25th birthday was over! What with Liam's Birthday on Thursday and going away Friday-Saturday, I had a really great weekend! Hope everyone else did too! :)

Off to get ready to go to circuits now. If I'm not too worn out from the exercise, I might possibly post again later - I still haven't got my laptop back but Liam's new iPhone arrived today, so hopefully he'll be distracted by that and let me use his laptop!! :)