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

Our new home

Although it's old news now, we think it's still worth reporting that we have moved and Michelle has a new job! hahaha! Finally after all that waiting, she got a Marketing Executive position with Connect Midlands and has been there a couple of weeks now. She is really enjoying it so far - but the most exciting news is still to come -

WE HAVE A PLACE!!! Yes people - for the first time in our married lives we have a place to live and call our own. Michelle's sister has family who own a resteraunt which had an apartment up above it, which wasn't being used. They offered us the chance to stay there for free if we would put the work in to doing it up, and then a greatly reduced rental price when it's done which would include bills! Amazing. So we thought we'd post some pictures so you can follow the progress as it happens. Mike is working so hard on it and Michelle feels so grateful that he is just so darn handy. Is there anything he can't do. So far, nothing.






The grand entrance - imagine Kate Winslet, decending the stair case in a ball gown . . . it is seriously going to be that grand!











The view onto the landing at the top of the stairs







Wait a minute - before we could even blink, Mike had built a stud wall - you go Mikey!










The living room - it looks much nicer when all our junk isn't piled up in there!





The spare bedroom - I tried to add a little feminine touch even amongst the debre!













In our bedroom - Mike just HAD to see what was behind the wall - he has dreams of a fireplace in our room - wait - did he say in EVERY room? Ambitious.








Still in our room - I really didn't think he was taking this one, but revenge will be sweet!






The soon to be kitchen.









How can you glamorise this shot - it is what it is! (Yes we do spell that with an s!)


So there you have it - a work in progress, but it is progressing so quickly now, and we will soon be posting finished shots of our new palace! Yippeeee!



Revenge :-)