runningin3time

Hello Blog!  Long time no write.  It’s been the summer holidays but I’ve been working a lot, trying to amuse the children, and singing a lot.  Oh, and socialising a lot.  It all takes up time.

However I did manage to take the children out on a day to Northumberland which was a huge success.  Kerry (who also has three children) and I were in Capernaum one evening and somehow the conversation got around to ‘let’s take all 6 of our children to Northumberland for the day – some time on the beach, a picnic lunch, and then a castle’.  The beach and the castle were places Kerry had been before, so they came recommended.

We had a fantastic day with children not wanting to leave the beach or the castle, and I’ve promised them a return visit sometime – though it may need to wait until next year.  We were just north of Morpeth at Cresswell, a huge swathe of sandy beach reaching far away, hidden behind sand dunes.  And the fact that it was the cold north sea didn’t stop Bella running in to the sea several times and getting soaked…

As I had worked for an outside catering company over the weekend, helping with a wedding buffet, we had a superb picnic comprising some of the leftovers – potato salad; ham hock terrine; bagels – and anything suitable I had in the house.  We could have stuffed ourselves stupid but the children were more interested in playing than in food.  The car was, of course, full of sand afterwards – and when I took Bella’s leggings out of the washing machine the following day I had to turn them in the other way and wash them again, there was still so much sand in them.

After a couple of hours on the beach we headed to Warkworth Castle.  The ruins are really impressive and again the children were able to run around without really causing too many problems to anyone else.  The weather also improved, the sun coming out and warming us all up.   Definitely somewhere else to go again – and thank you to Mum and Dad for my English Heritage membership, which meant we all got in for nothing and the only thing I paid for was some ice creams!