Swampy pays up!

Our hard work earlier in the year has led to this:

Loads of carrots, thousands of chillies (not very strong, we will be trying a new variety next year), cauliflowers, several different sorts of squash, lots of apple cucumbers and more runner beans than a runner bean farm.

Also, lots of hazelnuts from the garden. We still have much much more to harvest and we hope we can get to the remainder of the food before the advancing line of slugs.

On Thursday it was Sunny. SUNNY! Emily and I went to the local park, to look for signs of autumn and generally play around. Autumn wasn't hiding, we found lots of conkers, acorns and the leaves on the Horse Chestnuts trees were brown and crisp.

All Change !

Everything is suddenly very different in this house. James and Kate both left home for uni this weekend. I am so pleased and proud they both got the places they wanted at uni and that they are moving on, that's the whole point after all. But I admit to more than a prang of sadness at this change...trying to keep busy...

Onto brighter news.
Emily has been working hard. She continues her love of history and this year we have begun work on the Galore Park books. Having covered a lot of the material in history already, we sailed through the first chapter and began work on dinosaurs yesterday. This lead to a wonderful conversation about evolution and creation, with Emily able to immediately see the holes in both theories!

Here we go again.

Emily and I have been busy planning the next few months ahead.

Emily requested to do more formal work this year, so that has been the basis of our plans. We had some problems finding suitable workbooks, as Emily would be going into year 2 at school but we found that most of the work had already been completed last year by expanding on the work we were already doing. Luckily a friend then recommended Galore Park, which starts at year 3 - so we're taking it slowly.

Back to school (aka: the dining table)

So I haven't blogged since, well, since the dawn of time. So just for the sake of completeness here's a catch up.

Our summer holiday was very wet. Again this year we opted for camping in the UK. We were going down to Cornwall, but the weather forecast was so pessimistic we went over to Norfolk instead.
I recommend Scratby Hall as a lovely campsite.

We spent most of the remainder of the summer at home. Our allotment has been mainly successful, lots of peas, beans and potatoes. The difficulty at the moment is keeping up with all the picking. We've made mead and runner bean wine, so far. Methinks that beetroot wine might be next on the menu.

Nanny was 70 in August so we went to her party.

Then Emily and Rich popped down to Kent to see the other Nanny. They took advantage of the abundance of Romans in Kent and went to visit a Roman villa to round off our studies on that time period.

Waiting on exam results and University places has played a large part in the last few months. Happily both James and Kate passed their courses and have been accepted into their first choice universities. A bit of a struggle to sort out accommodation, but now its all packing and waiting for them to go. Very mixed emotions about the whole thing, especially as they are both moving so far away. I never had twins, I never expected them both to leave in the same week!

Rich has now returned to work in that way that teachers do this time of year, and Emily and I are beginning a whole new year of work and play.