Poolside Theatre!

Another scorching day.

Emily's spent virtually the whole day in the pool again - no surprises there then! She spent hours this afternoon playing Shakespeare.... she made up a play, and then pretended to be Anne Boleyn secretly acting in it (come on grown ups, surely you remember that only men were allowed to act in those days??). Jonathan alternated between playing an unsuspecting Henry VIII, playing Shakespeare, or playing the general heckling rabble in the audience, whilst Emily played all the rest of the parts and "directed" as only she can. Fantastic stuff, couldn't have wished for a nicer afternoon.

She did manage to get bird poo in her hair, but well, these are the hazards one faces when performing open air theatre....

Utterly entranced by the person our daughter is, and the person she's becoming :-)

Any spare moment not in the pool has been filled with doing Tudor shrinkles, which Emily's coloured astoundingly well, of her own accord seeking out reference books and portraits to get the colours just right. She's also been practicing swimming a lot in the pool with two of those noodle things - it's just about deep enough for her to actually float and swim without her tummy on the ground, much to her delight. Off to the swimming pool tomorrow afternoon to capitalise on this progress, quick!

We'll probably go off to Burghley House next week if we can fit it in - it's about the only place within remote distance of here that seems to have any flippin' Tudor heritage. Apologies to anyone who loves this part of the world.....but, well, it's at times like this that I really, really, really miss living in Berkshire. Didn't think much of it during the first 20 odd years of my life, but its appeal to anyone with children is pretty obvious. There we would have been within half an hour of Windsor Castle, an hour from Hampton Court, half an hour on the Waterloo line to central London...easy day out distance from the stately homes of Gloucestershire, easy reach of Longleat, Stonehenge, zoos, safari parks, caves, not that far down the M4 from South Wales....I could go on. Maybe I just don't know the hidden secrets of Lincolnshire, but I really struggle with finding interesting days out!

(can we have the rain back now, please?)