Fantastic Fun at The Gun Powder Mills

Last year, we visited the Royal Gun Powder Mills at Waltham Abbey. It featured briefly in our 40 Days of Summer posts in 2014, but I have always wanted to give it its own post. So here it is, a gun powder post for Guy Fawkes night! We had no idea what to expect at the Gun Powder Mills, but there was a surprising amount to see and do. We learned all about the fascinating history of the Mills in the interactive museum and there was an opportunity to view and handle various guns and weaponry in the Armoury. L was fascinated to see what our soldiers had to carry during past battles. Some of the guns were nearly as big as him!

Autumn Garden Tips

It's fair to say, I am not the most organised of people. I try, honest I do, but I always seem to be five steps behind. This year, though, I have been determined to get the garden sorted and keep it that way. It took me six weeks this summer to plant a border to match the one on the other side and that just left my nemisis; the back of our garden. It resembles marshland for most of the year, as it collects a lot of rain water and gets barely any sun, so it is hard to get anything to grow. Except bindweed. That stuff grows like, well, a weed.

Children Fuel with Cheestrings and Yollies

I don't know if it's a boy thing, but my son always seems to have his head in the fridge these days. He can be quite a fussy eater, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want to be eating something most of the time. I try to keep sweets and chocolate to a minimum, so its always handy to have snacks around that will have a nutritious benefit to him instead. I also understand that busy boys need a lot of refuelling in order to be the best at football, exploring, climbing, den building or other important occupations synonymous with a well-spent childhood!

Which School Mum Are You?

The first term of the school year is already half over and it has given us all six long weeks of making small talk at the school gates. During this time, it is likely we will have established who's who in this year's line up of mums. Who do we envy, who has us rolling our eyes and, most importantly, who is the one who makes us all look a little bit more together than we feel? If you are new to drop off and pick up time, you may already have come to recognise some of the stereotypes that crop up year after year. Here's a few to jog your memory.

My Sunday Photo: Years of Horsing Around!

 Not one photo today, but several. I've been sorting through photos and trying to organise them on  my laptop. As technology has become a bigger part of our lives, taking photos has become almost too easy, and I've ended up with thousands. So I thought the time had come to organise them into files, one for each year, since I got my first camera phone in 2006! It makes it so much quicker for blogging purposes, as I often recall photos I took at some stage in the past that would be just perfect to illustrate a particular post. It has actually been a lot of fun and really interesting to bring together photos from previous years in one place.