Another Weekend Away

As you can read here and here the Brownlee family are now well and truly in the habit of going on our Church's weekend away.  We are now just back from our third one and thought we'd share some of our goings on and a few fun photos we took along the way.

This year the weekend away was in a new venue.  Not far from Loughborough we were staying in the Whitemoor Lakes Activity Centre, it's a newish place and everything was under one roof and it was even catered.

Unlike previous years, Naomi was now sleeping in a bed! I was slightly concerned when we walked in to see that there was a bunk bed (and therefore ladder) but Naomi was incredible and didn't try (too hard) to climb up it and did a very good job at bed and nap times for not getting out of bed.

Trying out the bed

Naomi really enjoyed the food that was on offer, especially all the puddings she had on offer as we don't eat pudding all that often at home.  Here you can see her complete joy at being allowed a donut!

In previous years there has been a walk organised and Naomi and Sandy have gone both years (although I didn't go the first year as I had just had a baby!!).  Unfortunately this year there wasn't really a good place to go out that wasn't unsafe (we were right next to a very big lake) but Sandy and I took the girls out for a little fresh air.

Naomi having a look at some climbing equipment belonging to the centre

This was the view from our room, it lets you see the edge of the lake and also some climbing towers and canoes

Feeling slightly childish I found myself being quite concerned by this notice next to the toilet, where should we put our wee, or indeed anything else for that matter...

We were there, of course, for the teaching and the worship time and although we had to miss quite a lot because of various childcare requirements we both managed to hear some teaching on "coming of age" (our church is 20 years old this year) and we each managed to get some time to worship God without Naomi as she was having an absolute blast in the creche, playing and exploring how God can heal and help us feel better.  She loved the creche a lot and spent much of the time asking to go to "creshhhhhh".

We all came home tired but very happy and glad to have spent time with our friends and with God.

Finally we have some pictures of Miriam for you.  She seems to have decided that after a weekend of being held a lot and sat on people's knees a lot she should be able to sit up all the time.  This means that after sitting her in the bouncy chair for as little as a couple of minutes she started doing this...

This isn't a massively safe situation so we decided it was time to break out the bumbo (the timing of this is incredible as we had loaned it to someone and had only got it back yesterday!)

It was quite tiring for her but she seemed to like it a lot.