Month: November 2005

A quieter day, Gwen went horse riding and showed great poise on Beauty, with which she has a good relationship.  She would have galloped more than she did, but for the fact that Bella was in front slowing down rather often.

Dear Diary,

No Monday morning blues this morning, beautiful sunrise and huge moon with a halo.

Today was Mia’s school party and her friend Mille’s birthday, let her tell you herself: “we had a limbo competition, and I was amongst the last 5 to be knocked out.  We had an eating competition where we had to eat “sweet string” (not sure what this is called in English!!) as fast possible.  I bought raffle tickets and won some sweets and I also bought a coke and there was also musical chairs, but I did not play.  We danced to music.  Tonight we made pancakes.”

This evening Mia was practicing her Christmas songs, so we were treated to a house full of music.  Now we are going to write Christmas cards (yes, we known, its only mid-November, but the post takes a long time to some places!).

Whilst the cat is away…

Little does Anne realise that we have access to her blog!  Gwen, Mia and T put Anne on the plane this morning and just to prove how perfect we are, we came straight home and did ALL our homework (well, Mia did, Gwen still has 2341 pages of Harry Potter to read…)

Gwen takes over the story:  “After that we made a packed lunch with tomato soup and went out to the pond. We ate our lunch and then Mia skated on the ice (I did too but without iceskates). When we got home we played Settlers (Dad won boo!), and now we are going to make the dinner (quiche).”

On Tuesday Mia’s class walked over to our house as part of their outdoor life lesson. They had their packed lunches in the loft and then picked our apples, bounced on our trampoline and played hide and seek.

Mia was allowed to avoid the long walk back to school and stay at home and I am sure that this breaks a hundred rules in the UK.

Yes, the moment you have all been waiting for has arrived. The CD is out and ready to mail. The world’s largest children choir singing 5 Christmassy songs with the help of Danish celebrities. It has been played innumerable times in our house already and Mia is always humming one of the tunes from it. And there’s more! There are computer games on the CD which we haven’t tried yet but they are probably all in Danish so even more challenging.

We received the first Christmas parcel from Santa yesterday, seems he was passing through Rotherham, gave up and stuck it in the post.

And finally, the photograph is a sunrise from yesterday just outside our house. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning they say and indeed the weather wasn’t brilliant.

I organised a conference this week but didn’t need to go anywhere as it was an online conference. However it did mean that I had to shut myself away with the computer for long stretches of the day four days on the trot.

Gwen and Mia cooked macaroni cheese, cheese on toast and pizzas to keep me going.

Tony has been and returned from his conference in Maryland. The autumnal colours were wonderful apparently but the pictures fail to convey them so this time you get a picture of the cat washing his face becuase he obviously didn’t wash properly while he was away.

They hired a car to get back to Washington Dulles airport because it was cheaper than talking a taxi and there was no public transport. Inevitably they took a wrong turning (following the hotel’s ‘excellent’ instructions) but happened across a gas station attendant who had no idea where they were when asked to point out their location on a map of Washington city.

Tony has been and returned from his Russian conference, lucky not to have hurtled to his death from the hotel balcony. There are no pictures of St Petersburg because they were stationed two hours drive away (too expensive in the city itself) and only ever visited it at night (to avoid the horrendous traffic).