Finally back to normal

This week we were free to leave the house, no longer contagious - hooray!

Monday was just bliss. Freddie did an impression of someone who was doing nothing:

In fact he was totally occupied - listening to a story on a CD, and observing the birds to-ing and fro-ing at the bird feeder.

Once his CD was finished we popped into town to run a couple of errands. The kids played in the fountains.

After lunch we went for a walk down the tow path. It seems we saw everything we'd missed in the previous week, all in a couple of hours! Moorhen chicks (tiny, fluffy, black, the cutest things), ducklings, an orange/yellow ladybird with no spots, a red kite flying low, a pair of dragonflys with unusual markings on their wings, huge fish basking in the warm water, and we picked half a small white (empty) egg and some iridescent duck feathers.

Freddie chatted to the fishermen we passed. There were 3, each fishing differently from each other. One sat on the bank, waiting for a bite, one was fly fishing, and one was walking along pulling his line through the water.


We stopped at the playground, had a play and an ice cream.


Later, at home, we were going to use this abandoned traffic cone in a police game.

But when I picked it up, there was an ants nest underneath. It was incredible - we could see the tunnels and the eggs. The ants went crazy. There were regular ants and flying ants. The white things at the bottom of the photo are the eggs. There were small one and bigger ones. We guessed the bigger ones were the flying ants, but must look it up.

After a while I replaced the cone and left them in peace.


Later in the week we went to the Buckinghamshire Goat Centre. There are goats of course, rhea, sheep, ferrets, guinea pigs, rabbits, hens, pigs, ponies, a donkey, a llama, chipmonks.

They had all sorts of activities on. Freddie held a week old guniea pig[let]. We watched a ferret race. We all helped feed some lambs and kids their milk.


The kids bounced, slid, swung and played in the playground.




Meg spent a lot of her time power crawling, and the rest of the time here:


On the way out as walked round the last field, Freddie spotted a goat had got itself caught in the fence. He ran back to tell the manager. It took her a few minutes to free the goat, as it had got its head caught twice somehow.

Here is the goat, free and happy!