Norfolk Broads - day 1

My parents took us all on holiday to the Norfolk broads!
It took hours to drive there, the children were excellent in the car, better than I was, as I always get fidgety. But finally we arrived, loaded up the boat and set out for a week on the water.

The kids loved sitting on the front of the boat while we motored around.

Our first mooring. The kids got into the swing of things straight away by getting their books out to relax.

And of course fish
inside our boat.
we backed up the two boats so that the kids could hop from one to the other. Hubby was nervous about handling the boat but he did a great job reverse parking :)
The swans came to visit.
And the girls bought some new horses for the trip.
The first fish!!!!


Kiki pretending to drive

Kiki caught a fish too.
That night, most of us slept well. Kiki, however, fell out of her bunk a couple times :P

crayon recycling and nature

Chicken update: we have more males than we thought :( They are loved by the children but there is no way that we can keep all of these males!
Our apple tree only produced one apple because of the strong winds a few months ago! And we can't even eat it because the chickens got to it first :P
Brandon fed them the rest of the apple.
We went for a walk to the park with some friends


And later made some cupcakes.
We have a ton of broken crayons so decided to have a go at recycling them.
The kids cut them up
put them in a muffin tin
and put them in the oven until melted
peeling crayons

ta da! Don't they look great? The kids loved this activity but I really don't know when they would use these crayons.

Activity day!

Brandon and Kristin went on an activity afternoon with Brandon's football team.
Here they are waiting for their turn for the quad bikes.



then sledding



pretending to ride a Harley
before bowling

And exploring


Kristin had been for a sleepover the night before so was shattered when she got home :)

bread, blackberries and exploration

Making bread together. I know that we cheated using a packaged make your own but the process is still the same.

baked with cheese and rocket hmmmmmmmm
An abundance of blackberries
so we made poffertjies and placed a blackberry in each one.

they looked like mini volcanoes
and with the dusting of sugar, chewy texture of pancake and then burst of blackberry flavour, they were delicious.
Boo went off for a pony day and the for a sleepover at some friends. So they younger two played outside
and Brandon took old electronic equipment apart.
I hope that he learns how it all works and can be fixed, that would be a really useful skill to have :) as well as being able to put it back together again.
Kiki was telling me a story here.
I love capturing children engrossed with nature, OK, here they are watching a dying slug...but still nature :)