Jethou

In an attempt to catch up with family blogging, here's a few images of our "recent" trip to Jethou. Grandma bought us a trip to the island when the National Trust were granted permission to go there with a group of visitors.

Much as you'd expect, it's a small island which takes an hour or so to walk around (even with small children). But it is relatively untouched and it's quite something to sit on top of an island that no one usually gets access to. Needless to say, it's beautiful there.

Accesorize and pamper

Ankle bracelets and hair straightening. What have we let ourselves in for?

Beads from Gran and Pampa.

Nice beads.

Happy 8th Jonah

Jonah was 8 last weekend. He had two mates around to play and got a skateboard and a chocolate fudge cake amongst other things - lucky boy:

On the road

And not too soon after learning we all go for an ice cream down the road:

If you look closely, you can still see the chocolate covering most of her face.

Cara's 5th Birthday

Cara is 5. Were it not a period of time that is rigorously defined as 365 days, we would say that it has taken an age for her to get here.

She got a scooter and a DS, for which she has been angling for a long time.

Happy? She's very happy.

And what kind of cake did she ask for? A chocolate cake with pink icing. Why not?

Bread and cakes

It's open season on wheat.

We've been struck by an addiction to flour-based cooking and the results, which have been consistently awesome, are now all gone. In fact, they tend to disappear within five to ten minutes.

Oh well, at least we're brimming with Omega-6.

Cyanotypes

Meriel' been making gorgeous cyanotype prints as a result of an inspirational visit from Helen

Many more to see here.

The evolution of a bike rider

So now it's Cara's turn to learn how to ride a bike. It's been a while since we posted anything here, so here's the sequence of her learning.

First we start with the "Parents run alongside the bike bending over to hold the rider upright" routine. Thankfully this doesn't last long, but my my, isn't it killer on the back:

Then we move on to the individual starting, which looks a bit wobbly and works without the benefit of good breaking, but at least the back doesn't ache any more:

Once that phase is over, it's pretty much plain sailing and she's off and running:

Bye Cara, don't forget to write when you get where you're going:

Lazy Saturday

No orchestra for Jonah on Saturday, so we all had a nice lazy day:

Although Cara does look a little worried about it. Don't worry , Cara.

Foraging again

We went on the hunt for sea spinach and rock samphire and found loads of each at Petit Port.

Meriel pickled the samphire and made the spinach into filo parcels with feta cheese - yum.

Here's the parcels:

And here's the samphire prior to pickling:

Now we've just got to wait 4 months before eating it. How long!?

Finally Meriel and Jonah went on the hunt for Alexanders, which were peeled and steamed. Nice:

Meriel's Birthday

Meriel's 39.

So we made her some cakes:

Perhaps we got a little carried away, but hey.

She got some PMC (precious metal clay) stuff for making jewelry along with some really nice books.

Oh, and we went to Petit Port for lunch - beautiful weather. We just had a packed lunch and watched the tide coming in. Here's the spot:

Happy Birthday, Meriel

Ben's Christening

We went to Ben's Christening last Sunday and, without being able to find anything in a shop which would convey a deep enough feeling of love and money, we all went home and made the nearest thing to it ...

... fairy cakes!

We each made one and put them in this really snazzy box we found in town.

Now, surely that was better than shop-bought tat, wasn't it?

And it was fun.

London after the holiday

We stayed with Meriel folks for a few days after we returned from the ski trip. No guessing which restaurant we went to when we hit Soho:

Skiing! Eeeeek!

So we went on this skiing holiday and knock me down if it wasn't completely perfect.

We went to La Plagne in the Alps and got good snow every day. Neither Meriel or myself are wildly experienced, but it was far and away the best conditions we'd ever seen.

The kids had a lovely time, going to ski school in the morning and bum-boarding and eating cake in the afternoon - what's not to like?

I was waiting to stitch together some images from the holiday which is why this post is so late, but I just haven't got round to it, so here's some of the other images from the trip:

Here's Chalet Ingrid, where George, our fantastic chalet host, lookaed after us with sublime food and daily cakes (yum):

I'll post some videos and some other images when I get round to uploading them.

Snow!

Lots of snow!

Like we've never seen here before.

My arms ached the next day from throwing around 200 snowballs (at Meriel).

Jonah & Cara had the day off school and the next day too - but by then most of the good stuff had gone. Good practice for the upcomming ski holiday (two days to go - eek!)

Walking in the woods ...

... we found this cool playground. With trees.

And a swing (which you can see if you look really, really hard):

It's clearly somewhere we'll be going back to.

Christmas catchup

A broken computer over the Christmas period meant no blog postings, so here's a quick round up of the events in image form (not that there were many):

The children made cards with Meriel, although they'd already done some through the school (facilitated by Lenny amongst other PTA people). Meriel got them to do a picture of a basic Christmas tree each, then she scanned them both in and printed out a pile of them to be given decorations by the kids. Lenny was in London attending James' birthday party. Here's a shot of a snowman's backside from Carnaby Street:

And the street where he worked for years when he was living there (just a visit for old time's sake):

After a very relaxed Christmas at home entertaining Grandma (Catherine), we all spent the rest of the holidays just messing about and having fun. CAra made patterns on the windows (not all of the time):

And Jonah used his new explosive chemistry set to make a volcano and its environs:

and here's the result:

Almost hit the ceiling.

There was the usual "lots of walking" on cold beaches:

And there was tree planting at Ed and Vanessa's place where there was a film crew from the mainland who were doing some sort of "Grand Designs" for gardening. Lovely day and lots of nice grub sitting on their veranda looking over Saint's Bay (they have a phenomenal view).

Finally (because my memory is only as good as our images on Flickr) there were the crocodiles:

But we all escaped unharmed.

The end.

PMC

Meriel went to a class to be taught about PMC or precious metal clay. You form this putty into any shape you want and then fire it in a kiln or even use a blow torch. You can mold it, cut it, do allsorts and at the end of the firing you get pretty much pure silver (or gold if you want to pay loads for it). It looks like awesome stuff.

Then of course, we had to photograph it.