Second week of the holidays

Monday we met up with Eli and Adam at RSPB Leighton Moss.  I had arranged this on purpose as Eli is so knowledgeable in nature, so thought I would pick her brains and learn something.  I did learn a bit, not so much with birds (although I now know that a 'squeaky bike' like tweet is a Moorhen) but more to do with bugs.  She had bought two bug collecting jars and 2 nets and the boys spent most of the day hunting bugs.  We didn't find a woodlouse (Tom's current favourite) but we did find lots and then we went pond dipping and found my old favourites - water boatman, pond skater, leeches etc.  It was good fun.

Can I do it...

yes I can!

They also had an inventive play area, including a place where you could 'walk the plank' and stack pieces of wood.  Tom and Adam stacked them up and invented a jumping game.  Tom was surprisingly good and managed to jump pretty high to avoid the tower of logs.  Fun was had by all, but at 3pm, once again the shutters went down on Tom.  We went to the cafe to try to revive him via food, but his behaviour deteriorated and in the end we had to leave.  Tom fell asleep within minutes of leaving in the car and slept all the way back.  Phew - at least his bad behaviour was tiredness not naughtiness!

Tuesday - sorry can't remember what we did!

Driver Tom

Wednesday was Matt's birthday so we celebrated with a trip on the Eskdale and Ravenglass Railway a cute little ex mining railway over to the west of the Lake District.  We had to go through some truly stunning scenery via some quite twisty and steep passes to get there, it was worth it, even in the grey and mist.  We got our day rover tickets (free via Tesco) and settled down to our ride.  It is a really lovely ride and the trains were very cute.  We went all the way down to the end of the railway and had a lunch in a pub and then set out again doing some half trips before ending up back at the start again.

The weather was pretty good to us with only a couple of spots of rain.  As predicted Tom fell asleep on the way home, so we waited for him to wake up before stopping for tea.  He slept a while as we got to Kirkby Lonsdale!  We were intrepid and tried a new venue - the Royal Hotel who do pizzas - very nice they were too, although we think on the whole Avanti's are better.

Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway

Anyway a good day was had by all and everyone went to bed happy.


Thursday, Tom and I spent the day with Kate and Finn.  We were going to go out for a walk but Kate had had a nasty accident on her mountain bike (ripped her elbow off!) and had a very fat arm and hand and really wasn't looking too great.  We stayed at theirs.  Tom distracted Finn for the day playing with him whilst I sat and chatted to Kate, she wasn't looking well and was in pain - yuck.  (Turned out she had an infection and ended up in hospital for a number of days undergoing more surgery - tough luck to happen at the start of the holidays!)

Skinny Herdy

Friday Tom had his swimming lesson at Ingleton Pool (he did quite well) and then spent the afternoon at Matthew's playing.  The day went in a whizz - before we knew it, it was tea time so we headed back so we could have our dinner out with Matt.