Half Term - part 1

Saturday wasn't a particularly nice day - grey and drizzly!  Tom went for his football practise in the morning.  We decided to head to Skipton for lunch and a shop.  Have I mentioned the new farm shop in Skipton - Keelham Farm Shop - it is fantastic, full of wonderful produce at wonderful prices, not your usual Farm Shop prices.  We had lunch first, and then went a bit mad at the meat counter - lets put it this way, we won't need to buy any more protein for a long long time.

Next stop was Aldi - the other end of the scale, mainly for cake ingredients (cheaper than Asda!).  We returned home with a sleepy Tom so he had a rest and then we watched a Thomas the Tank Engine film together. Not an exciting day, but a useful one.

Climbing Pen-y-Ghent.

On Sunday we went swimming in the morning.  Matt had his new prescription goggles and discovered a whole new world under the water, so there was a lot of underwater swimming to be had. Tom's swimming was good too, but he seems to refuse to use his arms at the moment, making swimming really hard work for himself.

We had tea at Hornby Tea Rooms.  We won't again.  Seemed to be a gaggle of old ladies 'playing' at running a tea room.  They were having a great time and gossip, but the service to us customers was very poor.  My soup came first, 5 mins later Matt got his panini, then 5 mins later (after a number of reminders) Tom got his tea cake (by which time my soup was cold!).  His tea cake was burnt as well!  I wouldn't have minded but we were the only customers?!!!!  A lesson on how not to run a business!

Nearly there.

The afternoon was spent at Charlie's party.  A Charlie and the Chocolate Factory themed affair, and with Alice running it - it was very well done with lots of imaginative games and food all themed around the book.  The guests were the boys from school and 1 girl.  They all got on really well.  In fact us parents just sat down and enjoyed a natter whilst the children played.  There were no raised voices, no disagreements, no silly behaviour.  The boys enjoyed playing and got on with it.  No intervention was needed at all - pure harmony.  Lovely.

Tom and Lottie

Monday we met up with the Ellershaws to walk up Pen-y-Ghent (the third of the three peaks).  They have Caitlin who is in Tom's class and Lottie who has just turned 4.  They all got to the top and down again.  It was a lovely day out - nice and clear, blue skies etc, although a little windy.  The children did really well.  They more or less ran up the top - playing hide and seek, running away from monsters, and scaling up rock walls like goats.  When we got almost to the top, the wind got really fierce.  Tom doesn't like wind and had done really well until this point, but here he sort of lost it (crying that it was too windy) but somehow he managed to pull himself together and carried on up - scaling rock walls in the wind to get to the top.  We were really proud of him for getting through it.  Only 6 months ago he wouldn't have made it  through the wind (having the Ellershaw's there helped I think).  We all got to the top under our own steam - even little Lottie who did very very well.  We had a picnic and then headed back down the longer, gentler track.  Lottie got a little whingy, so Rich carried her on his shoulders where she fell asleep - bless her!  Caitlin got a bit upset after eating a sweet she didn't like and getting an itchy rash, but they all cheered up once we were out of the wind and in the sunshine.  All were smiling when we got back to the cars.

We finished the day off in The Station Inn at Ribblehead to toast our mountain climbing success.