Some time off

Work has been hellishly busy recently, what with trying to organise for the Library to move next year and also trying to prepare for the new staff member who will be starting next week (to cover my maternity leave). Because of this and because I have an impressive chunk of annual leave to use before I go on maternity I took a couple of days of this week to try and get a bit of rest.

Thea is also off at the moment (lucky teacher that she is!) and invited me round for lunch and a chance to chat today. Katie was as sweet as ever and was good enough to share her play picnic food with me for half an hour while lunch got prepared. It was great to get out of the house and catch up with Thea and Katie - hopefully when I have bump I'll be able to do this sort of thing a little more.

Em, Stu and Aubs come visiting

It has been a good while since I got to see Em and Aubs, the last time was at the wedding and then I didn't get as much of a chance to talk to them as I wanted. As for Stu, well I haven't seen him for years... oops! So today all three of them braved some truely awful traffic to come round and admire our new home.

For our late lunch I did the cooking for a change - and as it all got eaten I guess it was good :-) We had one of my favourites - Jamie Oliver's spatchcocked chicken with new potatoes, asparagus and herby/lemony yoghert. For dessert we raided the freezer and ate all the hagendas ice cream that I had been hiding in there - don't worry though I'm sure to buy some more soon.

Aubs has managed to damage himself somehow and turned up with a crutch and a bandaged ankle - daft man. Em and Stu seemed really happy and also brought us a lovely pot plant for our window sill. Hopefully I'll get round to visiting their home too at some point, but that probably won't be until after bump is born as the next few months are pretty fully booked. Cheers for coming all!

House warming party/park fun

TWo years have past since our last summer house/park party and as the house is finally starting to look how we want it we thought it was a good time to have a load of friends round. We decided to follow the same format as we did two years ago and have all the guests meet up at our house and have a quick look round and then once everyone had arrived get them out the door and off to the local park.

This all worked well apart from where I suddenly remembered half of the way to the park that I had fogotten a few of the essential picnic items and had to dash back home to get them. Even so everyone seemed to be in high spirits and we soon arrived at the park ready for some tasty food. Marcus had even brought along his own gas burner so that he could cook burgers for himself and Thea - however they did take almost half an hour to cook!

After everyone had eaten all they could manage (they even ate our home baked chocolate fairy cakes, the ravenous horde!) two teams were gathered together to battle it out at rounders. I even got a chance to bat briefly (Rich didn't want me doing any of the running - he was a little worried about bump) with Mike being good enough to do my running for me. However, my team did lose quite badly only scoring about 5 runs with the opposing team running about 50... After this sad defeat the people who still had some energy left decided to play a bit of football, which seemed much more successful and luckily no injuries were caused (though there was a good deal of tackling going on).

Tired, but happy the guests started heading off to their own homes with a few of them coming back to the house for a few final drinks and a chat. Thanks for coming out everyone!

Lord of the Rings - Birthday treat

Due to there not being much space to spare in our new home I felt a little bad about asking for new things to fill it up with for my Birthday but luckily Thea had a perfect idea of how to give me a non-space using present - to give me a trip out instead. We decided on a trip out to the theatre in London and Thea found some well priced tickets to go and see the Lord of the Rings musical. We were very lucky to be able to get these tickets as this was the last week of this first production of the show and when we arrived were impressed to see that it had pretty much sold out even though it was a week day matinee showing.

The show was great - lovely music, great dance sequences, good costumes, scenary and a well paced story line that managed to cover the main parts of the books within the short time for the performance. My favourite performance in the show came from the actor who played Gandolf, he was perfect, larger than life and full of character. The hobbits were just right too, always thinking of their next meal and great fun to watch.

I'm thinking that after this successful trip I should start asking for more of my presents to be experiences in the future. Thanks for such a lovely present Thea!

James' BBQ

You can really tell that summer has arrived when the invitations to BBQ's start coming in thick and fast. James once again invited the usual suspects out to his home in Horley so that he could feed them up with BBQued food and we could all enjoy a bit of good weather. Rain did threaten the intrepid guests but luckily held off and we all stayed mostly dry.

Once the weather started to get a little cooler those of us that were still there headed up into James' little flat to admire the changes he had made (he now has a bat cave in his loft!) and sit with cups of tea eating pavolia, lovely!

Birthday girl

Yup it's that time of year again, July, when all the best people have their Birthdays. Today I woke up happy and yet again started my 27th Birthday. Unfortunately I had to go to work today, but after work was over my Birthday began properly. Rich and I went out to the cinema to see the new 'Hancock' film which we both really enjoyed. After this we went off in search of tasty Thai food from one of our favourite restaurants - 'Mai Ping' in South Croydon.

The food was very delicious and we both munched our way through a lovely starter and main course, but decided to skip dessert as there was something hiding back home for me. Rich had spent the previous evening baking up a batch of fairy cakes which he then painstakingly iced to say "Happy Birthday Jessica!" What with some tasty cakes and lots of lovely presents to unwrap I was as happy as anything, especially as one of my presents was a tasty cream tea!

Rich off at the Grand Prix

This weekend Rich joined his dad and some mates up in Silverstone to help marshal at the Grand Prix. This time I was supposed to be joining them for my first time, but now I have the bump I'm not too keen to spend a few nights camping. So I stayed down south and instead gatecrashed my sister's brother-in-law BBQ with Thea, Marcus and Katie.

I had a great time eating lots of party BBQ food and plenty of cake as well as playing with the kids who were there and even sitting on the trampoline for a while (seems that pregnant ladies are not supposed to have any fun - like have a little bounce on a trampoline). Thea and Marcus provided me with 5 star accomodation and Marcus even collected me and dropped me back home after my visit.

Rich came home quite tired on the Sunday - but very happy as Lewis Hamilton had just won the race at Silverstone and everyone there was really supporting him so the atmosphere was great.