Some more summer highlights

Another few pictures from our summer goings on to try and keep you up to date...

Wherever possible we have been outside

But sometimes we have had to play inside

trains

happy land with friends

doll's house

Sometimes we have done craft

We have been out on our bikes

Top go to the bike

We've even lots of picnics

I'm sure there will be more another day...

Veg

Another hotly-anticipated update on our vegetables and other plant life. Having been away for a couple of weeks, which were mostly quite warm, our garden has been doing a lot of growing. While Jay was in Loughborough our neighbours were able to water everything, so we've got quite a crop coming on now.

Last weekend we harvested most of our peas, which managed to feed two grandparents, two parents and two hungry little girls as part of a decent meal. The girls have also been enjoying the occasional raw peas fresh from the garden, and there are still a few left to grow yet. Here's the crop just before picking...

Sorry about the blurriness of some pictures:
I neglected to clean my phone's camera lens

 The onions have a little more growing to do yet, but are definitely getting there. Naomi decided that one looked ready today, so we'll be trying one of them soon.

 It's a similar story with the carrots. I deemed this one to be ready, so Naomi picked it and we all had a piece raw - very nice!

 This afternoon's big story was the harvesting of the potatoes. You can see that they were ready to pick (having died back a bit), so Naomi and I took to pulling them up. One big advantage of using grow bags is that this is pretty easy, and you can sieve out the compost to be sure you get them all. Naomi was quite excited to find so many potatoes hiding in there!

 The courgettes have just started flowering, so there's some wait left there yet.

The younger sunflowers are getting close to flowering...

My parents have ended up with hundreds of Livingstone daisies after a highly successful seed packet. We received some of them and they are really brightening up the garden

Naomi's old enough to remember planting the seeds for the different plants and more or less understands that they've grown up and we can eat most of the results. It's proving quite fun to see her engaging with the whole thing. It's definitely worth a go if you have the space to do it too!

(for those wondering - possibly as many as one or two individuals! - I will post something about my recent various travels soon)

Beach

We have just been up staying in New Deer for a week allowing the girls to hang out with Grandma and Grandad and allowing Sandy and I to rest up a little bit while there are more adults to share the load of childcare in housework!

We may well do a post with some pictures from the rest of our trip soon as we had lots of fun and got some amazing photos of the girls, but in the mean time here are a few from a brilliant day we had at the beach.

The weather had been great so we decided to head to Banff Links for a picnic lunch and we managed to pick an unusually sunny and brilliant day for a lovely day of fun, splashing, paddling, sandcastles and hole digging!

First things first, let us eat some food!

And next let's build some sandcastles

But it was very exciting to get to walk along the beach and to paddle too!

"sea"

Mummy sat down for a minute and then joined in too

What a fun day we all had and all the better for not having had to travel far!