Moving On

[heavily edited post]
This morning, our new bed finally arrived :-)) It needs putting together but it's here. The large chinese rug I had ordered isn't going to turn up and has been refunded, but at least the bed's here. On Friday and over the weekend, Jon worked incredibly hard in the bedroom and we now have beautiful warm, chocolate coloured painted and varnished floorboards. We've started putting the furniture back into the bedroom and I absolutely love it. With any luck, tonight or at latest tomorrow night, the bed will be together and we can "move in" :-)) Here's what is looks like so far, minus the bed and also minus the various bits and bobs of wall art that are still to go up. Jon still has to choose a chair and bits and bobs for his spiritual alcove too, which you can't see in the photos. Once the bed's in and the pictures and hangings are on the walls, it's going to be gorgeous; exactly what I wanted :-))


There's an amazing atmosphere in the bedroom now, too. And at least every other picture we've taken in there is covered in orbs, which is quite spooky, but in a good way. Maybe whoever used to walk these floorboards 150 years ago quite likes having them back ;-)

Last Friday we had a fantastic day; Emily and I took Mei Lin and Jasmine with us to Normanby Hall for the day. The girls had the most brilliant time playing, chatting, laughing and picnic-ing. We looked around the Hall itself and the walled garden, fussed over the resident cats, nature collected in the woods and then crafted some natural bits and bobs using twine, wire and so on that we'd brought with us. We also birdwatched, walked in the deer park, fed the ducks, had ice creams and went potty in the playground. Much fun was had by all, although the girls were exhausted by the time George came to pick them up on Friday evening! Here follows a photo fest to cheer me up :-)








It had been very warm on Friday but it was even warmer on Saturday, so......drumroll please.....yep, it was that time of year again, the first paddling pool day of 2008! Emily proceeded to spend ALL of Saturday and Sunday in the pool, apart from her karate lesson, lol. Even I braved it on Sunday afternoon, although to protect those of a nervous disposition I won't post those photos! Here's our bathing beauty.

Meanwhile, as well as working his socks off doing the bedroom, Jon's made an incredible difference to the garden over this last couple of weeks. He's cleaned, tidied and swept all the concrete area outside the back door that runs the length of the house, so it's now usable as a little patio area. He's planed tons of stuff, worked on the rock garden, weeded, painted and varnished our two old wooden benches, cleared away all the rubbish.....it's looking really nice out there now :-)) Pond is the next project!

Yesterday morning we decided to work out in the garden, so Emily lay on her trampoline to write letters to Nana and Gramps at the caravan and to a friend. She also got to do some maths in there too, and dubbed it "maths prison", lol. Here she is busy behind the bars....
We've decided with Emily that we'll go back to doing project work for a while. We're starting a "Gardens" project which Emily's really keen on. We're going to do a lot of work on our own garden - scale plans, photo and written journals, bug hunting, plant science/botany, science experiments with soils, butterflies etc - and we're also going to look at the history of gardening, including things like native american medicine gardens and renaissance magical herb gardens, plus we'll look at some famous gardens, possibly research the hanging gardens of Babylon, find out more about Sir Joseph Banks, famous botanist/naturalist from Lincolnshire, investigate and plan our dream versions of different types of garden such as wildflower, zen/meditation, formal and so on. Oooh, and all sorts of other things.

To begin with, today Emily found lots of these beautiful emerald colour bugs in the garden. As yet unidentified, because we haven't had time to look it up, but they look very much like smaller and green versions of the beautiful cardinal beetles we found last year.
So, lots to look forward to at the moment. Plus we'll be heading off to St Bees for a few weeks very soon :-))

[added 16th May] The sharp eyed and elephantine-memoried of you may notice that part of this post, and all of the preceding one have been removed, together with a post from March 2008. These posts dealt with a very unpleasant and stressful professional incident which has caused me no end of hassle and anguish, and they were posts from which various people/companies mentioned requested names removed and amendments made. With hindsight, the simplest thing seemed to be to remove all references to it. Please forget you ever read this ;-)