Getting Ready

....to go away for a few days. Why is it that everyone else seems to swan off on holiday at the drop of a hat, but with us it takes a full 3-4 days to get work up to date, last minute orders packed, accounts ready to go (VAT due again soon), find the stuff we need to take, work out how to get there...blah blah. We need a holiday to get over preparing for a holiday, lol. That's the trouble with being self-employed. It has soooooo many good points, but the stress and loss of income that results from a short holiday has to be seen to be believed!

Yesterday, while Jon and I rushed around like headless self employed people, Emily yet again amazed us with her ability to amuse herself. She did several 250 piece jigsaws completely unaided, enjoyed a long and involved made up game of Tudors-meet-Egyptians, tidied up (!), drew, read and was generally a superstar. During a breather all three of us enjoyed doing this Usborne Map of the World jigsaw (why doesn't usborne.co.uk mention its jigsaws???) which was extremely big and pretty hard!!

Nana & Gramps also came back from their latest stay in the caravan yesterday, laden with goodies for Emily, so we had a good old chat about the area and what to see/do when we get there.

Off to ballet in a bit. I thought there was a witchy potion making activity on at 20/21 today, but I got the dates completely fuddled - for some reason, that's not until mid November. So, um, we'd better not go to that today, then. Halloween this year is going to be a bit of a non-event, as we're going to be driving up to Cumbria on the day. We would have done a spooky dinner for family tomorrow, like we did last year, and done the whole pumpkin carving/dressing up/games/spooky stories malarky, but we're just not going to have time. Really wanted to do some background work about the pagan origins of Halloween and how pagans celebrate Samhain (could do with some help from Kris there!)....but again, just ran out of time. Maybe next year. We'll try to do some background work about Yule, though, definitely.

This morning, though, Emily's been doing some Halloween 3-D pictures, which are very impressive. I had bought lots of itty bitty sissix ghost/witchy/bat/pumpkin/haunted house/spooky tree type shapes from Ebay (before I realised Halloween was going to cease to be) - she found them earlier on, and has been using double sided sticky tabs to build up 3-D scenes with them on black card with chalk and gel pens too. Verrry nice!

Meanwhile, a piccie of Friends & Allies - Merlin and Romeo have finally stopped hitting each other, and look like they're ready to co-operate on being the Boy Cats of the household. (Can't say the same about Juliet and Cassie-cat, though....)