Meerkats United

The Observer magazine is generally free of adverts for tat; you know the ones I mean - the Franklin Mint's Celebration of 20 years of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a specially commissioned plate with a portrait of Jean Luc Picard on it etc.

However, in Sunday's edition I spotted these:-


Made from real genuine poly resin, they are designed to sway in the breeze in your garden, apparently.

I think I might have to have some. I especially like the authentic feel of the one with the red scarf around its neck.

Speech Therapy

Just after Sam's second birthday in February I took him to see the Health Visitor; he still wasn't speaking, he wasn't even babbling. And on Monday, five months after his birthday, we finally got to see a Speech Therapist. The wheels do grind exceedingly slow in the NHS sometimes.

Anyway, the therapist spent some time with Sam testing his play skills and comprehension and concluded that he's perfectly normal in all other aspects of development; he is just being slow with his talking.

Obviously this has come as a great relief to us; for the time being our fears of speech apraxia, years of therapy and special schools have been allayed. While there may yet come a time when (if he still isn't talking) he may have to be referred to a paediatrician, for the present the therapist is confident that we can get him talking after some sessions with her.

So, now we're in the system, it won't be another 5 months to our next appointment; we will be going back next month. In the meantime, we have to continue with our efforts to get him to talk - he says Dadada quite a lot now and even managed Mama yesterday, so maybe we are already making progress. Still, at 2 1/2 years he should have 250 words by now, so we have a long way to go.

What We Did On Our Holidays (Part 2)

I turned 40 on 9th July, and by way of celebration, Doug and I treated ourselves to two days of child-free relaxation in London. We had originally planned for it to be four days of sight-seeing and catching up with old friends, but my mother-in-law didn't feel up to looking after the boys for that length of time; her rheumatoid arthritis is particularly bad at the moment. So we left it at two days of "us" time.

We took afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason (lovely; so elegant - and Chris and Poy from CBeebies were at the next table!) and went to see Spamalot at the theatre (extremely stupid and silly and the funniest thing I've seen for ages).

On my actual birthday, we went to the King Tut exhibition at the O2 (to spend the morning with exhibits even older than me) and to the Globe Theatre in the afternoon. It was also the wettest day I've experienced since the day of the E Yorks floods last June; apparently London got a month's worth of rain in a single day. Needless to say, we got very wet feet and as Doug didn't have a brolly (until much later), he got extremely wet; he finally succumbed and bought a rain cape from the Globe:-


We ended up doing a bit of shopping in Hamleys and in the Haberdashery department of Libertys, which is possibly my favourite bit of shop in London; all that wool, all those different colours and textures, and still the same woman running the shop from when I used to go there over my years in London. There was even a chair for Doug :)

The rain eventually stopped and we managed a couple of cocktails and then dinner at the Boulevard in Covent Garden; we'd originally aimed for dinner at J Sheekey, but its proving impossible to get a table there now. But the Boulevard was where we went on our first date, so it was lovely to go back.

Anyway, a rather wet but very enjoyable break from the kids. Am I bothered about being 40? Actually, not really. I didn't like 30 as I didn't feel I had anything to show for it, but at 40 I'm a wife and mother, and while I might not have anything resembling a career, I feel content. That said, from September Sam will be starting Playgroup with a couple of sessions a week and it won't be long before he'll be there most mornings a week; if life begins at 40, its time to start thinking what to do with the rest of my life....

What We Did On Our Holidays (Part 1)

We're just back from two weeks of sun and fun, lego and London, donkeys and Domes, and pythons and Play Areas. At some point during this period, I hit the big 4-0 (more of which later), but in this post I shall mostly blather on about the majority of the holiday, the bit spent with our kids.

First up was Brighton for the christening of Julian and Cass's twins, Eben and Eloise. I would like to say that I have loads of photos of this event, but as in the case of most weddings I attend, I failed to take the camera out of my handbag. However, we did have two very nice days in Brighton and Hove in a particularly nice holiday let that was only a stone's throw from the beach and this playground:-




We then headed up to our campsite at Pagham, via a very nice RSPB nature reserve in Pulborough. As you can see, the sunny weather and a two mile walk was a bit too much for the doughty Winter males:-



I was a bit unsure about what to expect from our campsite and caravan; a Toddler Group mum had been filling me with horror stories of her trip to a Haven campsite in Dorset, all about skanky caravans and stag/hen dos keeping them awake to the early hours every night. However, I needn't have worried; our caravan was absolutely fine and the campsite was stag/hen-free. Not rabbit-free, however, as this chap came by our caravan most nights for a small snack of the uber-tasty grass we were parked on.



There wasn't a vast number of things to do at the campsite (it wasn't CentreParcs, after all, it was about £700 cheaper), but it did have an indoor and outdoor pool, a play area for the kids, was situated next to a nature reserve and was only a 5 min drive from the beach. We weren't far from Bracklesham Bay either, which is supposedly fantastic for fossil hunting; except that when we got there, Jacob refused to get out of the car on the grounds that it was too cold - Not too cold for him to have an orange lolly, however. Sam was a bit more game and came down onto the beach with me, but I think it was a bit chilly even for him. Absolutely beautiful, though.



We headed down (up?) the coast to Portsmouth and wandered round the Old Town, looking at the old fortifications:-


And had a great time at Arundel Castle where Jacob insisted on telling all the staff that Mummy and Daddy had told him about the time that the Daleks had attacked the castle. Obviously, the worthy Dukes of Norfolk repelled the invading hordes with the aid of Doctor Who and his ye olde sonic screwdriver.


Here I am with the invading hordes:-


We had a good walk round the Pagham Nature Reserve, equipped with a very useful pamphlet titled "Know Your Vole", and I allowed Doug to attempt to take some arty shots of the flora:-


while I carried on taking less arty shots of the fauna:-


We were blessed with the weather for most of this part of the holiday; only on the last day was it really wet. And even then, it stopped raining for the afternoon allowing to go for a little walk around a place called Bosham, near Chichester. Although the tide was a bit too high for us to go walking on the mud flats:-


we were able to admire what is truly a most beautiful village.




After a week of caravanning, we headed off for Reading and a visit to the In-Laws. As Doug and I headed off for some more grown-up holidaying (stop sniggering at the back), we left the kids to the tender mercies of their grandparents and a trip to Legoland. I'm sighing slightly that despite our best attempts to keep the kids amused with castles and cannons and beaches and the like, all that Jacob can say about his holiday is that Granny and Granddad took him to Legoland....

We did have one more day out with them before we came back to York, a trip to Bucklebury Farm in Berkshire. Excellent play areas (Jacob spent hours going down one of the slides), but we did get them outside to feed a few of the animals:-


All in all, an excellent holiday, but after spending today mowing away two weeks' of lawn growth and ironing just about every item of clothing in the house, I feel like I need another break!!