We’re loving these few days at Lynda and Stuart’s, it’s like we never left home to do anything mad and crazy!
This morning we rang my Mum as it’s her birthday and then we all hung around chatting / playing / drinking tea. The kids and I walked to the bakers to get some rolls (and some cakes) for lunch and then we watched the rain falling which cooled everything down beautifully and made all the pavements and garden flowers smell lovely (I do love light summer rain 🙂 ).
Davies wanted to watch a Pirates of the Caribbean film with Stuart who had only seen 1 & 2 and I wanted to wander down into the town to get some bio-oil as someone had suggested it would be good to put on my hogweed scars and I know from using it on previous wounds it does aid the healing. So I took Tarly and we left the rest of them here. We had a lovely couple of hours, walking into town via the park which has a small duck pond with ducks, coots, moorhens, a pair of swans and a heron on it. We stopped to stroke cats along the way and chattered about everything and nothing. She’s lovely company is Scarlett :).
In town we got the bio oil from Boots, did a quick tour of the charity shops and picked up a couple of cassette tapes for the tape player in Willow and the 3 pound shops where I picked up some hair accessories for me as I’m bored of my hair and passed the Thorntons which has a cafe in it – the only Thortons cafe I’ve ever known, where I regularly used to go and have hot chocolates when the kids were really tiny and we lived up here. They used to do a dark hot chocolate made with part cocoa and served with cream which was divine and I was telling Tarly about it so she asked if we could go and have a hot chocolate in there. It is stupidly expensive at £3 a cup and normally I’d say no but as it was just two of us instead of 4 I thought we’d splash out :). So we had hot chocolate (Thornton’s chocolate melted into hot milk with whipped cream, marshmallows and more grated chocolate, plus all drinks are served with one Thorntons chocolate on the side) – Scarlett had a large and I had a regular. She learnt a valuable lesson about hot chocolates, that less is more 😉
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very lovely but we both felt slightly sick afterwards 😆
We walked back via the park again.
More sitting around chatting before dinner, washed down with some of the mead from our last hosts. Scarlett and I made some plasticine dragons and I found the words to Puff the Magic Dragon and read them out to her, which made her cry 🙁 She’s so sentimental under her tough exterior, no idea where she gets that from 😉 We rang my Mum again for an other-end-of-her-birthday chat and then I read the kids some stories before bed. Lynda and I looked at wedding pictures from their younger son’s wedding a few weeks ago which was very pink, princessy and expensive and we told a few more anecdotes about our year. Sharing our stories with friends is a real highlight of this experience so far :). Looking forward to more of that later this week.
Tomorrow is our last full day here and Lynda and Stuart are both out for much of the day working so we have the house to ourselves and are cooking dinner. we’ll probably wander into town again and then have plans to cook lasagne – I’m really looking forward to being in the kitchen 🙂