28/08/2022
The week started out wet, safe to say summer is starting to wave goodbye. The kids were as happy as ever though as this meant the puddles were back. Eloise has recently traded Emma’s pink wellies for Emma’s yellow wellies. This girl does not understand how good she has it right now. Lachlan was trying to convince us that Eloise’s old wellies were a good fit now.
Super Mum was getting creative thinking of inside activities for the day.
Eloise took the midday walk as another great opportunity for a drink, zero chance of nap o’clock today. After a wet walk it was back to work.
On Tuesday, the weather had slightly improved and we spent the day at David Lloyd swimming and soft playing about. The kids had a blast with Juju and were worn out by the end.
Surprisingly Eloise still had energy to walk home from afternoon dance.
Wednesday morning jet setter Jennine was back, the kids had lots to catch up with her. The sun came out in the afternoon. Lachlan set to work, checking out the damage from the previous two days of storms. His favourite past time is sitting on the basketball hoop base. We often think where is Lachlan to find him sitting in the corner of the backyard searching for squirrels.
Eloise was very excited when Dad got home to show him the hospital she had been looking after all afternoon. All of her babies were wrapped up on the hospital couch as she played the role of nurse Becca all afternoon.
Out of the blue, Eloise requested to bring back post-dinner walks before bedtime, a great idea. The only issue was it was too sunny for her torch. She happily suggested taking an ice rocket instead. The top-up sugar and sunlight just before bedtime worked about as well as you could imagine.
You heard it hear first! Liam’s prayers had been answered! I sort of got it right, Rangers qualified for the Champions League the hard way in the end, anyways the headline is LIVERPOOL ARE COMING TO GLASGOW! “Celtic will face holders Real Madrid in the Champions League group stage as Rangers take on runners up Liverpool”.
Thursday, the rain was managing to hold off, back to Lachie’s loch.
Thursday night it was back into the big apple for an overdue secondees dinner. The kids were excited about playing their usual tricks on Bill. Prezzo Italian Restaurant was a nice choice. Liam was impressed by the size of the pizza oven and received the longest pizza he has ever had.
Friday morning the kids were in a good mood, especially Lachlan. Super Mum’s latest creation had hit the mark!
Once Super Mum had convinced them to get changed, it was straight up on the window sill to lookout for Emma.
Emma had came with all her princess dresses to play with. Lachlan was the real winner with his very own Spider-Man suit.
Saturday morning was Football Buzz, it was shaping up to be a fantastic day. Eloise had the great suggestion of riding to football this week. We had to do some quick checks to make sure everything was in order and off we went. Poor Lachlan was not happy that he was being left behind. We made it in good time, but Liam had underestimated the climb. Eloise was funny screaming at me to pedal faster and even pushed me in the back to help me up the hills.
On the way home, Eloise suddenly started yelling. I was worried she was falling out, turns out we had set off and forgotten her post-Football Buzz snack. She was not having any of that.
We both got home exhausted, Lachlan was flapping up and down for a go though, it was back around the block.
After a two-second sit down we were back out and about. It was too sunny to be inside. We headed around the corner to the Milngavie Healthy Habits event to rendezvous with Eloise’s partner in crime.
The whole event was free, the kids were ready for maximum fun. Eloise and Emma darted up the bouncy slide. Eloise was loving it until she turned around, uh oh, that was a lot higher than she was comfortable with. The bouncy slide lady had to go up to rescue Eloise.
With everyone’s feet firmly on the ground, it was to the football game where the kids were bizarrely given a free rocket for having a crack.
The flashy bike caught the girl’s attention. Emma knew just what to do.
It was then through the long inflatable and most importantly ground level assault course. It was almost as if Lachlan was made for these, he flew through bouncing off all the walls while giggling his head off.
Emma was a bit unsure about the assault course because it looked like a “monster” but then she saw the Peppa Pig bouncy castle, we were not sure if she would ever come out. Funnily enough, Eloise was not convinced by the Peppa Pig one. Perhaps it brought back the traumatic experience of bumping into Peppa herself.
Both the girls were desperate to join the long line for the Bungee Trampolines. After the three of them had love-hate relationships with all the different activities we hesitantly waited and waited and waited, at least we got our week’s worth of sunshine. Luckily it was worth it in the end, the girls had a great time. We were amazed by Eloise’s confidence. Liam has a faint memory of being terrified on one of these as a kid and Grandpa DAVE forcing him to do flips. Perhaps Eloise is much braver than I was.
The whole day was paid for by the local Milngavie businesses, we felt obliged to grab lunch somewhere, not that we ever need additional encouragement. After all the fun, the kids were slowing down and finding everything hilarious.
We rushed home for Eloise to have a nap and Lachlan to do this thang.
This morning we were up bright and early. Thankfully Eloise and Lachlan had made Dad breakfast in bed, although I think Eloise took the role-playing a bit too far.
With bellies full, we made our way to one of the UK’s top 10 favourite parks, we could not have picked a better day for it. As soon as we entered the kids’ radars were going off “LOOOOOOK PLAYYYYGROUNDDDD”.
We found Strathaven Miniature Railway, Scotland’s oldest miniature railway. For £1 it was a no-brainer.
Strathaven Model Society Ltd operates the miniature railway in Strathaven Park in South Lanarkshire. This is now the oldest continuously running miniature railway in Scotland, with our passenger hauling trains running from 14th May 1949 (72 years ago at time of writing)… Our original steam locomotive (Margaret), which was running on the first operating day all those years ago, is still running well and can be seen in steam on special occaisions throughout the year. She has been lovingly rebuilt and maintained over the years by our dedicated team at SMS Ltd. From the start until now the miniature railway has used different modes of locomotive power (Steam, Petrol & Electric) with steam still being the most popular with young and old alike.
Eloise and Lachlan then spotted their second assault course in as many days. Here we go again. This one was tricky, well for Dad at least. The kids made quick work of it.
We then made our way around to the main attraction and the reason why we had found this amazing park. We were on our way to the worst organised and communicated event we had ever attended. We were not too sure what we would see but knew at least we would all have fun at the beautiful park. We luckily snagged a close park and didn’t have to deal with the dysfunctional park and ride which seemed to be the cause of most complaints.
The Strathaven Balloon Festival had a large setup with lots of activities. It was lucky there were lots of activities because there were no balloons. Well, not as many as we were hoping for at least. Hot air balloons do not tend to ‘fly’ during the day due to the wind levels and thermal layers going haywire, it does not take much. Surely the organisers knew this when arranging a hot air balloon festival in Scotland? Supposedly a lot of balloons had got away at sunrise with plans for more to liftoff around sunset, we did not have time for this, Super Mum was bouncing back again. We were hoping that there would be a dozen or so tethered for the kids and the large crowd to enjoy.
We did see a couple inflate and deflate, bit of a stretch calling it a ‘balloon festival’ though. It had been a ‘lovely-day-in a-wonderful-park-with-lots-of-activities-nice-music-and-a-minor-side-of-balloons’ festival.
The swatch balloon was a big hit with the crowd. Not that there was an awful lot else to cheer on. It was ginormous, much larger than the first purple one. Look at the people and car for scale.
There are places in the world optimum for hot air ballooning, safe to say Scotland and hot air ballooning are not usually mentioned in the same sentence. In Albuquerque the “Hot-Air Ballooning Capital of the World” they have much larger flight windows. Below is a nice video of what our day did not look like.
It had been a week or so since our last outside dinner.
Meanwhile, on the other side, there was an emergency meeting called to devise Plan B and smuggle the Fensom grandchildren back to the land down under. Plan A had collapsed, Tom and Hazel had returned home this week after an incredible year and a half but had failed their mission to kidnap Eloise and Lachlan.
There were five matches this week between Liverpool, Celtic and Rangers, safe to stay football is back! With the world’s eyes turning to Qatar in three months’ time. Finally Liverpool woke up hitting 9 past Bournemouth.
[…] Returning to Prezzo’s for long pizzas was the easy decision. […]