Rowan birthday

Rowan had a wonderful birthday with parcels from the UK arrivng just in time on the day.

He was muy contento

Enjoyed his first cake and the next one

That is a volcano in case you were wondering

He was pleased to have help with the blowing out and some other cakes arrived too

 

It was a tad windy so I knocked up a windbreak and we hung a Panyata fom it, Coco is over just now it was great to see him again I haven't hardly seen him since I taught him in primary school.

It wasn't too windy for watersliding though

We also did parachute games 

this was a huddling game I think

And we did rolling toddlers in a blanket

here they are two babes in tartan. all in all it was a great day - Callum has a birthday next month and wants to go 10 pin bowling - he has just discovered the SImpsons...Doh!

paddling, hens and our beach

The boys can't keep out of the padling pool and are getting through far too many sets of clothes each day just now, a couple of days ago young Stanley was very keen to join them, Ruan and Bindle are inspecting one of the two new scarecrows in the background. Bindle was the main architect while Ruan and I spent a couple of days uprooting and moving a fence that used to separate the trees from the rest of the garden but now runs across the bottom of the garden to try and keep the jabali at bay. I am going to try and finish the fence at the top of the garden today but the ground is full of stones and progress is slower.

The boys discovered the new PhotoBooth effects and actually appeared to get on with each other for a few mins the other day. Rowan has been cutting his hair again.
Some hens are happy with ordinary eggs...

Snowbird is sitting on some special ones and is very proud of them although the other hens keep laying proper ones next to her and she takes them in too... not sure what she will do when a load of little Kinder figures hatch.

The boys now think of Pantin as 'our beach' it is only a few kilometers further than Vilarrube and is a rather wonderful place although also has a lot of dangerous water but it does not have the sinking quicksand that we keep finding at Vilarrube. There are some lovely sand dunes and pretty patches of hotentot fig.Great places for boys to jump off.

And for dads to rest.

Christmas song

The boys disappeared into their bedroom with a drum and emerged a few minutes later with three songs unfortunately by the time I got the camera ready I missed the first two but I did manage to catch the last one although Rowan was flagging by then. They are not exactly regular collaborators and if we had tried to get them to do a song I doubt they would have responded. Callum has been getting more interested in drumming and spent 5 mins learning last week but this was a totally unexpected turn of events and something we will foster carefully.

Snowy Sunday

It is quite exciting finding out what kind of weather Winter will offer out here, I have been thinking back to childhood days in chilly noseburningearnumbinglybeautiful Northumberland and dreaming of snow. Sunday started with a rainy haily morning round the house then we headed out to the mushroom picking place somewhere between As Pontes and the Fragas de Eume hoping high ground would pay off and it really did. The closer we got the more it got like Northumberland in October; oaks and silver birches with golden leaves and a scattering of snow on the ground until the last kilometer when it almost turned into a proper blanket - a really wonderful few hours was had by all.
Callum's first proper snowball

The higher we went the more snow there was


Callum was so impressed he even said "You can have a wonderful Christmas even without presents"....so if it snows a lot more we might get to save a bit of cash this year if we take him at his word.Another few weeks and a few degrees below and there will be ice on the streams and hard crunchy snow this was soft and soggy but great fun all the same.
There were still a lot of mushrooms about I managed to find 7 boletus sheltering under the pines. Callum stuck with eating snow...

And of course we had to make a snowman then Rowan got really freezing so we headed back. The boys worried about the snowman all the way home so we are going back next weekend to see if he is still there.

getting fit

Here are some pictures of us at the training park at Vilaboa, it is next to the football place.

Callum's Birthday

Callum had a quiet 7th birthday but enjoyed it well enough especially all the phone calls in the evening and a video skype with Kate and Luke. Liz and Graham came round in the afternoon for cake but our camera batteries went flat so we don't have a lot of pictures.

Present opening started the day and you can see our new 200 euro cast iron stove in the background what a bargain.

The cake was a shield with crossed swords although that may not be obvious from the picture :-)

knights and courgettes

The boys found scissors and boxes from the recycling pile. Rowan cut his hair again and they both make armour.....


Rowan likes wheelbarrow rides.


Our courgettes seem to turn into marrows overnight.

We keep hearing snippets about how the financial world is falling apart on a global scale but it seems a distant reality as we are not really following any news programs out here, there is something comforting about having enough land to grow a fair proportion of our food. At the moment we have far too much hay considering the only animals we have are our 5 hens. The general approach seems to be to burn the exess but although fires are appealing to the boys, that does not seem too environmentally friendly so we are letting a lot of it rot down for now. I keep planting mushroom spores in a mix of well rotted pig poo and hay.... no mushroms yet though. Hopefully next year we will have more of the garden cultivated and less grassland to deal with. The fig cuttings I took from a very productive tree down at Vilarrube seem to have taken, as has a hazel, some fuschias, bay, escalonia, and other bits and bobs. Lots of interresting looking seeds have arrived from http://www.jungleseeds.co.uk so we need to get planting and hopefully we will have a small forest of banana plants along with an arbour covered in passion fruit, lots of agaves, aloes and opuntias, massess of beans, chillis, aubergines and others to numerous to mention. It is time to move some trees around - an apple tree planted a few years ago in a very gravelly drive is really struggling and the young wallnut trees along the border of our land have to move too.

Waterboys and outdoor girls

The boys love being in the sea, the Faro end of Valdovino has had some perfect waves for playing in recently.

Kate and Poppy have moved into different temporary accomodation, this time they are outside and they are a lot happier, as you can see the garden is getting a little more organised but not a lot. The hens are named after the boys' big sisters who are all grown up and staying in the UK. It is three weeks today since we arrived and we are all begining to miss the folks back home. With school about to start the boys in particular are feeling a bit lost for friends and getting a tad naughty despite telling us that living here is just perfect. They are still telling us they are not going to school in Spain ..time will tell.