The Marvelous Month of May

Oh May, how I love thee! The month when husbands bring home flowers, month when the sun comes out and I get to spend time with sisters, month of bike riding, month when dad and mum get to party. It's been a good full month with a lot going on. I thought I'd share some of the highs. I took a long awaited day off to spend with Lucy and the kids in May. We meet for lunch on Wednesdays but it always seems so rushed when I have to pack up and return to work, so we thought we'd make a day of it. Mostly we spent time on the park with a picnic, but the sun was out and the sky was totally blue so we loved it! Jenna wouldn't eat anything much, it's a phase she's going through and Lucy is dealing with it using Supernanny tactics! Thank you Supernanny! But she would eat ice pops and strawberrys. I thought in the shots I took she looked like a little model in the making!

Pink tongue!

The weather has been uncommonly good - and Mike and I have tried to get out and about. The rape seed fields look so pretty - just to prove that we really did have sun :

I put a buttercup behind Mike's ear and he forgot it was there. We walked past a group of chavs who were staring a bit - and only afterwards did we realise that the flower might have been why. Isn't he pretty!

May also has two bank holidays! One at the beginning and one at the end. We decided to go for a ride around a fairly local hotspot- Rutland Water. Rutland is the smallest county in the UK right next to Leicestershire, and is home to a resevoir with a cycle track and a nature reserve. Emily came with us and we hired bikes. The track was a 17 mile round trip.

It started well - there were no other people around really because we arrived early. We loved cycling through the woods and mostly rode off into our own little worlds. There was the occassional stop at the village fair for chocolate cake as well.

Later there were alot more people to dodge which seemed to give Mike bike rage . . .

Poor Emily.

I think the picture says it all!

We enjoyed some pretty flat sanwiches by the time we stopped for lunch.


Don't we look completely jacked!!?

In the end we were tired and happy. When you work in front of a screen it's a great feeling to get out into the open air and go for it! We completed the ride in just over three hours. Thanks for coming with us Emily!

The sunshine also seems to bring out Mike's artistic tendencies. We've been out taking pictures and on this particular day Mike had a clever idea to try and help him with his painting. What if he could take a picture frame with just the glass and use a felt tip to trace what he could see? So we hauled it all up to Bradgate Park and he gave it a go.



He's a perfectionist and never happy with his own work. I thought it was pretty good - he thought is was pretty frustrating and disappointedly rubbed off every thing he tried.

I occupied myself with stalking the deer and trying to get pictures. This is about as close as I dared. For some reason they could always hear me coming!


Of course no May is complete without Emily's birthday! Happy Birthday Emily. We had a sleep over at our place with the Farleys, Killer bunnies, Guitar Hero and "Seven Pounds". Emily guessed the twist of the film about 15 minutes into it! But it was good and well worth watching. Cake and icecream around Mum and Dads on her actual birthday as well. I can't believe my little sister is now 17! She will soon be on the road - so look out!

Mike and I have discovered a new haunt. YumiYumi Crepes. For milkshakes and a light lunch it is the biz and is in the foyer of our local cinema. You can see Mike didn't want to be in this shot - but I got long arms!!

The blog this month would not be complete without a little something from Mum and Dad. The ward hosted a 60s/70s/80s night and as part of the activities committee Dad wanted to make an enterance. Watch the video and see whether you think he did!

Bye for now! x

M&M

Jenna turns 2

This week Jenna had her second birthday and all the family came round to celebrate!

We all just love it so much when we get to spend time with the little kids we love. As you can see Jack is getting quite big now.

Jenna got some sweet pressies. Lots of books to enjoy with mummy.

A baby doll off aunty Jane. She was quite affectionate with the baby doll at first, but soon she did what any mother would do . . .

"Just eat up baby!"

She can have a grown up conversation like mummy now on her cool new mobile phone - yeah it's just a toy!

Jack loves it when people talk to him.

Opening presents, she took quite a while on each one, and once it was open she would stop and play for a while whilst we waited for her to get interested in opening another one.

"Look mum - I got shades!"

Jen knows quite a few funny songs now, and we had fun singing and dancing with her for quite a while- this is heads, shoulders knees and toes! Happy Birthday Jenna!

Seconds anyone?

There is a moment in ones life when one has to attempt to build a trifle. In the Young house at least you can be sure that "If you build it, they will come."

Mike was completely unphased by the task of making a trifle on his own, from scratch, blissfully unaware of the various pitfalls that many of us fall foul of the first time we make this tasty dish.

There was nothing sloppy or runny about this little baby. In fact it probably was about the weight of a child, it doesn't look so big but he packed it full of stuff. Good stuff.

So congratulations to you Mikey baby. The trifle was gone only moments later, but the legend of the trifle will linger for many years to come.

Mikey - "Don't leave me trifle. I love you . . ."

My first video

The video is my first attempt at posting a video. I decided to experiment with a pretty funny one in my opinion. This is post dinner time at the Youngs. We have just seen a pretty chinny picture of a local MP smiling and the video is what it induced.

Enjoy.

Micklefield Inferno

Dear all

It doesn't happen all the time, but some weekends you might find yourself asking - "what the heck...?". Last weekend was one of those.

The whole family visited Claire and Leon's for James' blessing. We all stayed over. Mike and I were in our old attic room. At 6am on Sunday morning we were woken up by two loud BANGs, which Mike thought were gun shots. Being Mike he pulled on his clothes, just as Claire came running to the bottom of the stairs screaming "Michelle - your car's on fire!!"

We got outside to find it wasn't our car, it was my sister Alices- check it out!


A psycho from the village had borken in and then torched the sucka. We started taking pictures but the car started rumbling so we went inside to await the firebrigade.


Luckily the engine didn't go, because it was really close to the house! Seems like the bangs we heard were the backs tires exploding!

The girls checked it out - what was missing? What had been burned?


They found this one remaining monopoly card - "Pay your insurance premium!". You got that one right!

The police caught the guy later that morning whilst we were at church. He'd punched out a taxi driver and done a few other naughty things around the village. They suspected it might be this particular dude, and went knocking on him. They found him lounging around drunk in his living room in the clothes that he had been described in. Genius.
Poor Alice. She had a pretty good laugh about it!

So what did you all do with your Bank Holiday weekend?

The Beaumanor Hall experience

Although I never think it's blog worthy, it's what I do most of the time: work. Somedays I love it, others I hate it, but am I always very very grateful to have my job here at Connect Midlands. So today I thought I would share a work first - my first ever event - organised by ME!

The slightly blah blah bit of the story is that I was asked to set up an event that would introduce female business owners in the region to a new investment fund which they could potentially apply to. Ladies event, I thought. April afternoon. Hmmmm.

Most business events, for those who don't know are pretty predictable. Hired rooms in conference centres or hotels where attendees get a good dose of power point before networking over a buffet. But this was going to be a ladies event, organised by a lady. I thought it might be time to try somthing new.

The result was that we booked Beaumanor Hall, in Woodhouse Eaves, a lovely stately home in rural Leicestershire. It was an afternoon tea and cakes networking event, and as you can see the venue even broke out their best china. Everyone commented on how "Lovely" it was.

I also got over my nerves and presented for the company for the first time. Not that I was nervous before, I was just never asked to speak before. So there I am.

Work, perhaps not the most interesting topic to some. But it was inevitable seeing as I'm there 5 out of 7.

Toodles.

Has it really been 5 months?

Hello friends and family. I had a timely reminder to come and enter some news into our blog once in a while! I thought "Surely it's not been that long since we wrote something?" and was shocked to see it's been more or less 5 months since I last made an entry! That's no good!

Well, timing couldn't be better because we have a few pictures to share from a couple of recent trips away. The first was to the strange town of Blackpool. I had to go up there for a work conference and Mike came with me to use his camera. The town is up in the same county as the Preston Temple, Lancashire. It's one of Ballroom Dancing's world capitols. If I had to describe what it's like, I would call it tacky Vegas. We visited off-season, which was good because during the summer it is heaving with crazy partiers. We were put up in one of the nicer hotels and whilst I learned a lot about the issues facing female entrepreneurs, Mike wondered around trying to discover something cool to shoot. I think the pictures he came back with kind of say it all. There's not much cool there. We appreciated the trip though.

There was another reason to celebrate in March . . . OUR FIRST ANNIVERSARY!!! Can you believe we've been married a whole year?! It's astonishing how time flies. To celebrate the best year of our lives we hired a "caravan" down in North Devon in a little coastal town called Woolacoombe. We weren't really sure what to expect because we'd tried to be a bit frugal and collected tokens to get a discount. Our place looked a little bit like some of the places we'd tracted on our mission!
Yes, we know. This is nothing new in beach holidays for Michelle, but probably the first time Mike had relaxed in a premium holiday trailor! There was a beautiful sandy beach about a 10 minute walk down the hill from our camp site, so we played the first day.

Second day we took a coastal drive down to Cornwall to see the Eden Project, a resurrected clay pit that had been reclaimed and turned into an incredible growing project that combines horticulture, art, science, engineering and anthropology.


Michelle was pretty excited to walk into the first Biome and see tulips - my favourite flower, and our wedding flower!


The Biomes have different climates, one is meditaranian and the other is a tropical rain forest. As you wonder through there are all sorts of species of plant, insect, bird and lizard wondering around! The tropical Biome was the biggest and best. So humid though! But it made us both want to go trecking.


Those were probably the biggest lemons I'd ever seen.



Sorry, I don't know how to flip these around on the blog, I'll figure it out and flip it later, but for now, could you tilt your head please? The tropical Biome:



Michael was the one behind the camera, and believe me there are plenty of pictures of me doing goofy stuff.


This statue was massive. It was called "WEEE Man" and was a sculpture made of the average amount of electrical waste thrown away by one person in the West over a life time. We have about 50 pictures of this guy. Spooky isn't he?



There were sandy beaches and stoney beaches. I'm sure I didn't need to prove it but I couldn't think of anything else to do in the picture!



The Sunday was a beautiful sunny day, but the sea was still freezing. When I say freezing, it hurt to put my feet in it. I've swam in cold water, and in the North sea in autumn, but this was unbearable. Perhaps it's my age. Michael was determined that I would go in the water!



But I didn't stay long.


That's just a few of our pictures. We had an amazing holiday. Thanks for the anniversary cards and kind thoughts that were sent. We are so grateful to be married every single day. It has been the very best year, bar none.

Of course the next day was Mike's birthday. He is now a 28 year old! There were some pictures taken that I don't have yet but they will be posted soon hopefully. He loves getting older as much as the rest of us, so we tried to cheer him up with a chinese, a chocolate M&M cake (made by Alice and Emily) and a Killer Bunnies/Guitar hero tournament. I don't know what else anyone could want really. He sends his love and thanks for all the cards and gifts.

Sorry for the slightly long post, but there has been much to catch up on. I will try and get to the computer more often from now on!

Love - Blogmaster Shell x