What is Going On Down There?

Ah, Dad is spooning out the ice cream.

The Girls

Birthday Breakfast

Happy Birthday to me! Look at my delicious cinnamon buns and strawberries (thank you John and girls), all temptingly stacked on my beautiful handmade tiered cake tray (thank you Jennifer). Perhaps I'll just go have another one now, and another coffee.

Faire le jardin!

!With this heatwave we're having in Aberdeen this year the girls are just itching to get their green fingers going! And.........we have a new camera! So we're back in bloggerdom - it's been refreshing to be unshackled of it for a while - and you've been spared some shennanigans that have gone on - had to show you the painted garage come faux croft.Ailsa thinks she will be paid for weeding until 10 pm - get to bed girl! - bedtime 7.30. Big J

Granda, take our picture here!

And here!

And here!

Lots of fun dressing up in Grandma's finest and fanciest and orchestrating the photo shoot. John's brother David, after seeing the pictures in an email, says it looks like a Sally and Sharon show.

I. Love. Weeding.

I am well on my way to becoming a gardening bore. Jennifer seems to lend a romance to the activity of planting and blossoming and harvesting, which I don't think I can do. Instead I could easily start blogging about how many carrot shoots are up, and the merits of different supports for string beans. I mean, I have already done a post about snails. Somebody stop me. But, briefly....I have discovered weeding. What a great, therapeutic, relaxing thing to do. Sit on the grass, or kneel in the dirt and just pull out the bad little plants, or root out a great nasty dandelion. Stop now, enough words.

So instead, I could tell you about the lovely Saturday we had, without any fighting, lots of sun, playing, eating lunch outdoors, going to a local summer fair and playing lots of games to win lots of sweeties and prizes. Then, Ailsa had a birthday party to go to down at "the amusements" at the beach, right over suppertime, so I took the other 3 to Pizza Hut (John was working), and we just had such a fun time together. Laura was pulling goofy faces with her spoon in her mouth to make her sisters laugh, Heather loved not having any competition for conversation or filling in the crosswords and puzzles in the kids' menu and at one point Claire threw both hands up in the air and said, "jzeshtalunn, jzeshtalunn, jzeshtalunn!" ( jzeshtalunn = restaurant)

Lilacs

When we bought this house last summer, there was a big blossoming white lilac tree in the back. At the start of this spring we hacked it all back to keep it under control and to stop it shading over our new grass. And now, the young shoots at the back are blossoming. Not white, but purple. Is this possible? Normal? Is it a second lilac tree that never got to show off because the white one was so gregarious? The photo above is not of our tree, still google imaging.