Tilly is on a Guides camp this week, so Mummy and I call it a Mummy-and-Lavinia Week! We’re going to do lots of fun stuff. Here are all the outings and innings!
Monday
We dropped Tilly off at her Guides camp, and then sped off to a brilliant park. There we met Grace, Eve, Anne and Lillian, and their mums. We had a tasty packed lunch and then we played a game in the woody part. Have you ever stamped on a non-fully-developed conker? You know, when they’re all green and spiky? Well, do, and then pick it up and crack it open. If you weren’t too vigorous with the stamping part, you should find some little white ovals. If you stamped too hard, they’ll be all mashed up, and you’ll have to try again. Sometimes, though, you can rarely be unlucky and your conker won’t contain any silvery ovals. Find another one, and it should.
We played our conker game underneath a conker tree. All the fallen conkers we trod on, and then we split them open and I invented the fact to call the ovals little ‘Pearls’. These Pearls were our money in the game. We sold them for all sorts of things, but eventually the game went a little out of hand and we all tried to find each other’s Pearl stashes and steal them like burglars. Then we’d creep into each other’s shops, and steal all their conquers..then Eve and Lillian and I found a bush filled with little white berries, which looked almost exactly like Pearls. We would pretend they were, and use them like fake money. It was a real fantasy!
Tuesday
Today, we were sitting in our pyjamas eating breakfast when Guess Who came round? Beci and Sebby and Nanny! Sebby is getting to be a really clever boy, and he knows all his words and colours and sentences and he’s only two! We played some games and read some stories, and Sebby would say, “Nanngy? Nanngy, Mummgy, want go outsh!” and we would open the door and he would run outside and say, “Cansh we dig the veshtebbles?” with all those ‘sh’s because he had his fingers in his little mouth all the while! He is adorable! I would say, “Yes, Sebby, let’s go and dig some vegetables!” and we would go to the vegetable patch and Sebby would say again, “Which veshtebbles?” It was hilarious!
After lunch, when Beci and Sebby and Nanny had gone home, we went to Woburn! They have a safari park and a public footpath to go for a walk on. It was the school holidays, so we decided to stick with the walk (!) or else everything would be pretty much packed – but the walk was fun, too.
There were, indeed, lots of real-life deer, some of them with huge antlers and some with little brown bodies and white spots, just like Bambi! In the woods there were some logs, too, all piled up on the top of each other. Some were about two thirds the size of Mummy, and she helped me up to walk on them – I felt like a giant, with only a visible view of the top of Mummy’s head, and her sandals that seemed to emerge from her hair!
When we got home, we even had a little tea-party with my painted teaset, and real sugar and tea and milk, and Mummy, Andy, and my bears were invited!
Wednesday
Today, as yet another Mummy-and-Lavinia Day, we went out to Wrest Park after lunch, where they had some Victorian games going on. There was a little stall with some map-making businesses on it, where they had cut up some maps and given them out as jigsaws, and had tiny compasses and big compasses, and tiny globes and big globes, and those little globes that have a picture of the Earth on its axis, and where the Sun would be then and so on. It was all very fun. At three o’clock, however, Mummy was drawn away from it because of the story-telling, where a nice lady dressed as a Victorian one gave us a little story all about Mary Kingsley, an explorer who explored Africa. She was told lots of sensible things, but she ignored every one of them and was not very lady-like. She finished her father’s book and wrote her own, and I daresay they must be very interesting!
Thursday
On Thursday, we stayed in and made cakes and watched quite a bit of Roman Mysteries! But it was nice to have a day in before we zoomed back out again. The cakes I made were Key Lime ones, but nobody (apart from me) liked the icing, so I’m going to try again with a different set 😉 It was a fun day though.
Friday-Sunday
On these days, I’ve already written a post, so here’s a link: Sleepover with Sebby and again with Nanny