Fresh start.

Had a lovely birthday on Monday down in Worthing (thanks to everyone who helped make it a great day!). Great time catching up with friends too - here are a couple of pics from our trip to the beach with some friends ... The first one is the classic 'sun in the background over the crashing waves' shot. And believe it or not, this is not very long after Joshua's had his haircut. That's as short as it's been for ages!



The second is a wonderful picture of my brave little boy (!) running away from the waves. I know it's a fun game to play, but he's clearly a little less hardy than his mate, who's still ten foot closer to the sea than he is and hasn't even started running yet. Having said that, if you look closer at the photo, you'll see that Joshua's already failed dismally in a previous attempt - absolutely drenched trousers! His mate's mummy wasn't overly impressed with me either ... I was taking photos of them (as you can tell!) and saw a wave coming in. I legged it up the beach, staying perfectly dry, but leaving them to get wet. Oops.

Great to catch up with people at Worthing High too! Lots of new faces though ... weird. I now don't recognise half the school!

Then we got back home and I discovered this:


Yes, a tree fell over in our garden while we were away. Well, there's a bit of a 'did it fall or was it pushed?' debate, but the less said about that the better. It's funny, I was stood there thinking, 'oh no, that's our best cropping plum' (ok, call me sad if you like). And then I looked up at the sky, saw what a great spot the tree had been planted in and immediately started thinking, 'I wonder what else we could plant here instead'. If only all loss was so easily dealt with! And of course, there's the other advantage that we've now got more wood to burn!

I'm also now trying to work out what things need to be planted in the next couple of weeks. Our new fruit trees are on the way, so they'll go in. But I've got serious amounts of seed to go in, with what is currently quite limited planting space. I think more stuff may have to come out... Oh dear. Joshua and I planted some more tulip bulbs (WAY too late!) and some dogwood cuttings today too, so hopefully they'll make it... If not, it doesn't really matter, they'll just compost down over time!

And last but not least, we had a lovely lunch today with friends here. They introduced us to a game called 'chairs'. There are 24 little (like, two inches tall) plastic chairs that have to be stacked in a tower, with only one touching the ground. It's more fun than it probably sounds (think Jenga, but building from scratch, with plastic chairs...) and I spent some time crafting the amazing tower below ...

Little things please little minds ... as they say.