Welcome Home Grandad!

It's been a busy week :-)

There was lots I wanted to blog, but as usual it's all vanished from my head now I'm actually looking at the screen. Oh well, brief recap here we go:

Tuesday was spent frantically trying to meet deadlines. Nuff said.

On Wednesday we went to Normanby Hall with Romy and Hazel for a play - and supposedly to collect nature stuff for making more fairy furniture, but the girls were having too much fun just playing so I think the collecting was a bit of an afterthought! Emily did find a great Nanny McPhee stick, though, and spent the rest of Wednesday evening and much of Thursday morning playing out scenes from the book and film with it.

Thursday was welcome home Grandad day as he arrived back from Canada with Uncle David and Aunty Barbara. Emily made chocolate shortbread in their honour and we all had a good old chat, spirits lightened by Jon discovering at a doctor's appointment that a health issue we'd been worrying about wasn't anything serious after all :-))More cooking on Friday - lemon cake this time, which was truly scrummy (and I should think so too, the amount of ingredients in it....five eggs and three lemons indeed). Having gone out for the day, David and Barbara came back to join us for a meal and a chinwag again, and Uncle David and Emily between them had fun doing a 200 piece glow in the dark skeleton jigsaw.

This morning Emily was enchanted to see such a heavy frost when she got up, so we piled out in the garden at an unfeasibly early time in the morning and spent a lovely hour wandering around taking in the beauty of it all. There were incredibly intricate little ice crystals covering our garden decorations, and the leaves of our red tree have finally started to fall, so the garden around the tree was covered in a carpet of leaves that looked as if they were wedding cake decorations frosted in sugar. Gorgeous. Whilst out there we remembered something we'd seen somewhere about making ice lanterns, so thought we'd have a go. Emily was in her element collecting lots of bits of nature to go in the bowls, then we taped smaller bowls inside the big ones, filled them water and popped them in the freezer. Here's the Frost Queen collecting her bits:

David and Barbara popped round to say goodbye just as we were giving the kittens a run in the frost, so Emily had lots of hugs since they've got to last until next year now!

Then it was off to ballet, and lots of arty crafty stuff this afternoon. The ice lanterns turned out quite well for a first attempt, although they could have done with an overnight freeze and a slightly bigger candle. They really do look magical in the dark with the candle shining through the ice and lighting up all the leaves and berries. I did take pictures of them in the dark but none came out well enough to use, so here's one taken with the flash:

Today we've had the dubious pleasure of discovering we need to pay nearly another grand to the VAT man by the end of the month, which given that our cashflow is a bit wonky at the moment should be interesting. Hmmm. Better get back to work, then! There are three article deadlines approaching on Monday, and I haven't started on any of them yet. Ahem. Bye bye for now!