Burns Night

Very frustrating to keep reading about the Northern Lights visible not only at the very top of Scotland but in various places we spent time last year while we’re down here in the far south 🙁

I had a fairly easy day – I spent the morning editing a film with the kids. They’d taken video clip footage over the last few days as Jill wanted a kids’ eye view of Middlewick video for her youtube channel which was right up their street so they very happily took themselves off with the camera. Uploading the clips took a while and then the kids chose the order of each one and helped with the credits. It wasn’t anything they have not done before, particularly Davies but it was good to be doing something with them.

We’d already arranged to have haggis with Jill & Johnny for dinner so I went off to the supermarket with the kids to pick up tatties and neeps and another haggis. We had a quick poke around the charity shops in town while we were there – at the weekend we picked up some miswak branches in one of the shops to use as toothbrushes but Davies had managed to lose his so I wanted to replace it for him.

Back at the cottage I busied myself peeling and chopping potatoes and swede while the kids ran off some energy outside. It was a much better day for having spent some time with them. We did a blogpost for WW and talked about how we are all feeling at the moment – it’s a scary time with more questions than answers and the feeling of not being the ones in control is always hard, particularly for me, I do like to be the one in control 😉

That inspired some conversation which in turn inspired some ideas, which I’ll blog about next, it deserves a blog post all of it’s own 🙂

I had a shower and managed to catch my toe on the joint of the screen door as I stepped out. It *really* hurt (as toe injuries always seem to, utterly disproportionate to the actual injury) and then bled copiously. I spent some time looking at the Eye to Eye book with Scarlett who had gone through and marked all her favourite pictures, we talked about wildlife photography generally, she identified the animals (some obvious like lions and tigers and elephants, some slight trickier big cats, primates and birds – I’m always impressed with her animal knowledge) and we talked about which countries they were taken in too.

Ady did the mashing of the neeps and tatties and made a very lovely gravy, then we carried our pans over to J&J’s where they had cooked the haggis. Much eating, drinking and laughing ensued. We played a round of PIT a card game which was very good and most riotous and then Ady took Davies and Scarlett back to our cottage to bed and returned while Jill took Thomas off to bed. Further drinking and chatting continued and we were joined by Leyah when she dropped the swimming pool key off after she’d locked it up. It was a late and loud evening and a good way of celebrating what we hope will be an even bigger date in the calendar for us next year when we are resident in Scotland 🙂