A Matter of Choice

Due to living in Cyprus Leo has probably been to the beach more times so far than I did in my whole childhood, at least he can't be that far off it.  For me beach trips for on holiday or if you were really lucky then those rare English summer days that coincided with a day out! My Dad was always great fun on a beach, we used to spend a lot of time in the water usually on ' the hand' (the best inflatable I've seen!)  and we made some great boats, cars and of course sandcastles. Looking back I now suspect that I may have had minimal input into the design of these creations and have the feeling that my role in making them could have been limited to digging and 'patting down'.  It does kind of ruin my Dad's 'reason' for building them which was so he could get the sun on his back as they are much more impressive than strictly necessary! Not that I'm complaining of course, they were great fun to do and I'm sure he is lookin...

It' Flashback Friday time again and this week we are going back 30-something years to my 2nd birthday as next week is my son's 2nd birthday and I'm in full toddler party planning mode! The year was 1979, as you could possibly guess by the rather fetching orange flowers on the wallpaper. I don't remember anything about being 2, but I do remember spending a lot of time over the years in my Grandad 's garden He had a huge garden, and obviously I was a lot smaller so it seemed like an enormous place to be in. We used to visit every week so I would have spent many hours playing there. Granddad was very green fingered and grew many different things in his garden and greenhouse. He had so many things growing in seed trays that he needed to label them and came up with the genius plan of cutting up old fairy liquid bottles into strips and writing on them. These plastic strips ended up everywhere and I made it my job to go and find them and collect them up fo...