The Snuffalufagus is alive.....

Today was an Outdoors day! Big Boy and I were celebrating the weekend between our birthdays by having a family outing.

Last year we took them to Knowsley Safari Park. As we came to the baboon enclosure we noticed the new 'car friendly' route!

'No ' I cry, definitely not, 'lets take them the full-on baboon up-close-and-very-personal route, after all we always did it as kids!'

I was driving, Big Boy was manning the camera, with a definite Blair witch effect.

It was like a car graveyard, I was torn between not slowing down and perhaps wearing a cute baboon baby as a hub cap cover... or slowing and letting them on to do unmentionables to our car.

Note: it is funny when you can see the Merc in front getting it!

We lost a windscreen wiper trim and were lucky!

The kids screamed hysterically and tried to get in the front simultaneously.

As we left, profoundly shaken by the event, we remembered that as kids we had been similarly traumatized!

So how to top it this year!

Nothing so ambitious...

We were going to become a family who walk...in the outdoors! ( Weather dependent mumbled Big Boy) as I skipped to bed , full of the joys of being a brill 'outdoors Mummy (tomorrow)!

6am and the kids are up as usual.. so I whistle a happy tune...

( honest , after a cup of tea anyway) a...nd set to work making a mountain of sandwiches and boiling eggs. A picnic isn't a picnic without eggs..even if it is only Big Boy and I that will entertain them!

Lie to Big Boy about the weather ( it is starting to rain) .. get him out of bed and off we go...to the Great Outdoors

...very rainy on the way up, but blue skies during our 'hour beginners trek', flat and easy,

though it took 2hours because of all the collecting,twigs, sticks, small trees, pine cones, more pine cones and of course photos to prove we had done it!

See photo of tree and the famous Dam Busters dam!

But..


Picnic in the boot of the car because the rain had started, an exact parallel with last year, but there weren't any elephants watching us..just ducks which meant that most of my lovingly prepared sandwiches went their way, courtesy of Small Boy and Girl.

'Ducks don't like tuna...'

'Yes they do!'

All in all a successful day.


But we come back to a garden that looks like World War One has been recreated, earth every where, scrapes in the soil and a huge freaking hole in the bank!

The badgers have moved in! I needn't have bothered leaving home to see the Great Outdoors , it's right outside my doorstep . . . literally!

...later...

I have just come in from a run, ( no comment .. but small seismic wobbles have been reported in the Stockport vicinity) and there is crashing and crunching in the bushes like the special effects of an old Horror movie..the one where the lone female jogger gets it....

It sounds huge and I wont be going into the Great Outdoors that is the bottom of our garden in a hurry..even if Big Boy holds my hand and wears his sexy head torch!