Cooler days, quality time...

A real treat for me, my lovely husband decided to take me away for the weekend as a belated birthday present. We so rarely get any time without the children these days that he had secretly arranged for my parents to have them overnight and we went to a lovely little country house hotel for the night. It was bliss, not just to spend time together but also to just explore, go for lovely walks together and to get a little bit of time to do as we liked and not to have to constantly be watching out for one or other of my little monkeys! This plant was on one of our walks, I think it is water hemlock and was enormous at around 10 ft tall, with great umbrella heads that were beautiful as I glanced up... beautiful but deadly as it's witchy folklore as a very poisonous plant is well known. I did like the way it looked though! The other thing I loved about our stay was that the room R chose for us had lovely lovely paintings and samplers in. As I lay reading my book in the stunning afternoon light (precious in itself as I hardly ever get to read undisturbed these days) it felt very peaceful, and very very special! How lovely the food was in the evening, it was beautifully presented and absolutely delicious, my taste buds were tingling!We really laughed, relaxed and had fun, all of which was great, but it was still brilliant to return the next day to my little ones. I suppose the rare quality time together is only possible if you have the mad wonderful normal day to day time to compare it with!

As a little ps, and completely on another note, today I took Jack to have his pre-school injections... something I had been nervous about for weeks, and thank you Char for your advice on how to deal with it - I did tell him about the little pinch on each arm that the nurse would give him, and gave him his walkman to play with a few minutes before we went in (he hadn't seen/played with it for a month or so, so it was sufficiently exciting.. and to him humming 'row row row your boat' he actually watched her give him both injections and didn't even squeak! I was so shocked and proud of him! Nurse Liz was impressed too, he really was a brave little lion as the sticker he got said!

Tam, UK