A walk down the river

A couple of Sundays ago, we went to the playground by the river with animals; sadly most of  the animals (chickens, goats and rabbits) had gone away for the winter, but we still enjoyed the pigs. You may recognize it from last year - we haven't been there for a while. As you can see it is beginning to get cold, and as it was 9AM, we had the whole place to ourselves for a while

Compare and contrast, the same swing (at the flag playground) today and September last year

halloween 2015

Obvs this weekend it was halloween. I bought the biggest pumpkin I could find in Zurich, and carved it Saturday afternoon (pictured above). Emily had found some other parents and kids to trick or treat with, so she took Bluet and Ilona while I waited for other parties of kids and parents to come calling for sweets. I think we had 5 groups visiting our house, I hope some were genuinely scared by our giant pumpkin. Bluet decided she wanted to dress as a princess. Sadly the only photo I took is the one above, but Bluet did draw a picture of herself trick or treating, which is more or less as good. Also, a witch and a skellington.

Ilona got to dress as a zebra because we already had a zebra costume (see halloweens passim). Anyway, as she was the cutest zebra anyone had ever seen, she got plenty of treats.

Leaving York

So it was a pretty action packed weekend in York - you can see more here and here. Looking through my photos, here are a few I missed in previous posts. I think that we all had an excellent time. Bluet and Ilona have continued to spend most of their spare time drawing at the kitchen table, as in York. And of course it was great to spend time with cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents. Now Ilona recognises everyone she saw (Gran Helen, Uncle Nick, Simon, Angela, Gus and Della) from our extensive collection of photographs really for the first time, so this was probably an important formative trip.

Here we all are on Sunday, enjoying the York Marathon

And then while Ilona and Gus napped, the big girls went on a walk where they ended up climbing York Castle

(NB this is still Ben writing this - for some reason the computer won't let me log Emily out)

What we did next in York

What we did next in York, was to go the seaside (Bridlington) which has not only a beach , but also some carnival rides and even a pirate ship that will take you for a 10 minute round trip out into the bay. We were joined by Gran Helen, who had arrived the evening before, and we ate some fish and chips (a first for Ilona, and possibly also for Bluet), and ice cream, which of course you have to do at the British seaside. Also it was sunny, not windy which is a bit inappropriate for a British seaside resort.




All aboard the pirate ship





Bluet loved the rocket ride. Ilona also went on the dodgems, but perhaps she is still a little small for that kind of excitement.

Canoe trips

Yesterday Bluet was playing with Lego, with her lego people having a picnic on the beach. A little later on I saw she had cleared them away and asked what had happened to her picnic, and she told me that they had finished and packed everything up into the canoe, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. This is because on the float trip in the summer when we were camping on the river, all the food was packed into Nana and Wayne's canoes at the end of each meal. Here is the lego picnic packed into the canoe.

Also we went and practised bike and scooter riding, and later Bluet took a photo of Ilona and printed it out.