Blood, Grass Stains & Bird Poo

Always the signs of a nice afternoon out. Those were the souvenirs, as the girls put it, of our visit to Normanby Hall with Emily's best friend Romy and her Mum, Hazel. The grass stains shared equally by both, the blood being from Emily's grazed ankle and the bird poo having mysteriously appeared on Romy's trousers. A thoroughly nice time was had, and the peacocks were in fine fettle, displaying regally for a totally unimpressed peahen.

Started this morning with a foul headache, mainly thanks to Merlin waking us up at an ungodly hour. I don't do mornings. We're normally very late to bed anyway, us grown ups, since we don't start the packing until after Emily's asleep at around 10pm, and most nights we have on average 70+ books, packs, CDs etc to send out. We don't get to eat our main meal until gone midnight, and then Jon usually stays up until past 4 in the morning finishing off work. So mornings are not a popular time in this household. Except with Emily. And the cats.

Somehow in the morning haze something productive did happen. Emily printed off her letter to Tutankhamun for the Great Young Historians Competition, and decorated the borders of it, whilst listening to her Egyptian myths CD. For a moment, I thought we'd gone back to the blissful days of an ancient Egypt obsession - at least I knew a bit about that time period so was able to cope with Emily's beloved 'you be.....and I'll be....' pretend sessions much better than now we're pretending Tudors all the time. My Tudor knowledge is fuzzy, to say the least. Getting better, though. But anyway, no, we hadn't experienced a time slip. We were still in Tudor mode because apparently Emily was "being Elizabeth I learning about Tutankhamun". In her best dressing up dress, naturellment.

There was some art work going on too, with Emily doing some very intricate gel pen drawings of various fairies and beasties. Must work out how to get pictures up...there's got to be an easier way than the faffing about I had to do to get yesterday's up.

Anyway, she and Daddy are now out in the garden on a bird hunt, so I'd better go and tend to the ebay sales whilst I've got a chance.