Squeezing the last few days out of the Summer

It has been really, truly a rubbish summer. We've had hardly any days out because of the rain, and me working. Not much of the fruit around here has ripened, it's all tiny and hard, and the trees started dropping their leaves weeks ago, which is bizarre. I have felt bad not doing much with the family, so we went to Danbury Woods for a wander, another childhood haunt of mine that I've never taken my brood to before. Kit got to see his new obsession there on the ornamental pond, ducks. He really does loves them!

V Festival

We went to the V Festival on the Sunday in Chelmsford. It was Ryan's first festival, so that was fun. Our friend Bushy went with his 16 year old daughter Charlotte too, so her and Ryan wandered off being teenagers most of the day. I went to my first one at 16 too.








We had a tough decision to make as we loved both of the headline bands, Kasabian and The Prodigy. We saw the Prodigy at V in 2005 so were veering towards staying for Kasabian, but my god am I glad we didn't in the end! The Prodigy were amazing, probably one of the best live shows I've ever seen, and I've seen a few.

Fruit Picking

We went fruit picking last week, on one of the rare days where we actually got some sunshine!











We picked our own body weight in raspberries, and got a few leftover strawberries too. We are now overrun with raspberry jam but we've got into the very naughty habit of having cream teas. It only takes me about 20 minutes to knock out some scones, which is about the same amount of time that it takes Pete to drive to the shop for clotted cream.

Karting

An old school friend of mine who I chat to on Facebook owns his own karts, and takes his son to a track in Tilbury, so last weekend we had an invite to go over. We still had no car at that point so I had to walk to the train station, travel a few stops, then walk to the track - we were bloody knackered by the time we got there!


Taylor had a great time though and got to have a go in the big kart as he was too tall for the junior one.

Hmmm...

Can you see his lovely chicken pox scar on his head? It is really deep and awful. I'm very sad about it. :(

We are not having much fun at all here. My job is basically finished, so once August pay day comes around we are totally out of money. I've applied for a few other bits and had no replies, so I had an interview for a local part time job today out of desperation. I should hear back in a few days. If I don't get it we won't be eating next month! I had to sell my moped as scrap on Ebay, then we had to scrap the car too as we couldn't afford to MOT that either as it had too many problems, and now Pete's TV has blown up. Not good. We had a power surge and it's totally busted.

It's not all doom and gloom though, we scrabbled together all the money we had in the world, and Pete's parents sent us some too, and we managed to buy a very lovely new car this week;


I also heard that I passed my course this year, somehow, so that cheered me up a little.

Taylor & Isobel finished school a few weeks ago now. Taylor goes up to senior school in September so he had lots of fun activities leading up to the holidays. They all went bowling;





And got to graffiti all over each other on the last day!