Family

The Badger Moot 2012 – Part Two: Halloween

Thursday 8th November 2012Monday 12th November 2012Baggie

So welcome to part two of my first two part update. If you have missed part one please click here.

For the first time in nine years the Badger Moot occured over Halloween. Every year we do a little something for the kids for Halloween, usually involving a piñata in a suitably Halloweeny form, this year, however, we went one step further and had our second fancy dress night of the week.

The Manor house is spooky enough and we quite often try to freak each other out with tales of unexplained noises or movements out of the corner of your eye. It definitely has a history and I am sure it could tell many a tale. Adam, Lucy, Steve and Zöe had volunteered to organise the party and food and dress the house with Halloween decorations. To allow them time to get everything ready we all headed out of the house and into the Dorset countryside.

We headed first to Bridport to collect a few minor items to add to our costumes and then we were going to head further down the coast. However the October weather had other ideas and the heavens opened. It wasn’t the fact that it was raining, it wasn’t the fact that it begun hailing, it was the fact that it was hitting you horizontally. So we took shelter in the car and since there appeared to be no break in the clouds we just took a drive down the coast road towards Abbotsbury to watch the power of the sea crashing into the shore from the safety and dry of the car. That killed a little bit of time but eventually we had to head back to the manor to dry off and get ready for the evening.

Banned from the kitchen and lounge we headed to our room to don our costumes. Éowyn and Amélie both had a choice of two costumes, a witch outfit and a ghost costume. Éowyn wanted to be a witch (well a witch princess to be precise) but Amélie refused to dress up. ‘No witchy thank-you.‘ So we asked her if she wanted to be a ghost. ‘No ghosty, thank-you.‘ So she was the only one who was not in costume for the evening, however she did take a shine to Finley’s axe and spend most of the evening dragging it around – which is slightly worrying.

Once suitably attired we headed to the television room to wait for the grand unveiling of the party. It did not disappoint. A lot of effort had gone into the decoration but the pièce de résistance was the skull and plastic limb bones surrounding a baking tray of ribs and sausages. Yes the main meal was presented to look like a corpse but it sure did taste good. The decorations and cannibalistic gastronomy was enhanced by the spooky Halloween sound effects playing on an iPod.

Once the meal was finished it was time for the annual piñata and the delights that it held inside. The children, as always, were very good in taking turns to bash hell out of the cardboard and papier-mâiché Frankenstein (‘s monster to be specific. Victor Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, Adam was the name of the monster – but you all knew that, right?). As always it took a while until it finally yielded the sweets inside which were then placed in a big pile to share evenly between them all.

It was a great night and fun was had by all and thus I decided to make this a two part update to do justice to the effort that everyone put into their costumes and the sterling work that Adam, Lucy, Steve and Zöe put in to spookify the Manor house and hopefully the photos below give you a little bit of the flavour of the evening.

Peace and Love

Baggie

Happy Halloween

Enter… If you dare

House rules

Welcome to dinner

I recommend the ribs

Scary kids

It’s a little unhygenic

Who’s for dinner?

I have something in my teeth

Are you OK Sis?

Feeling a little pale

Got a splitting headache

What a lovely couple

Haven’t had time to do my face today

It’s my natural colour

Hexenbiest

I’ll get you my pretty!

Behind you

Aarrgghhh!

Excuse me…

Someone’s hiding

And that is where the treasure is buried

Even undead have to put their feet up

The balloons are scary too

The Cousins

Behind you!

The Ghost of Finley

The Badger Moot 2012 – Part One

Thursday 8th November 2012Thursday 8th November 2012Baggie

As regular readers of this blog will know once a year the descendants of Granddad Badger hire the Puncknowle Manor Estate in the Bride Valley, West Dorset for a week’s holiday and a chance to catch up on all the family news. It might sound like hell to some families but I think to a man (and woman) the descendants (and partners) of Granddad Badger look forward to the annual pilgrimage to the country. This year there were even some Badgers there (despite the threat of a Badger cull), Uncle John and Auntie Margaret flew in from Sydney, Australia for the 2012 Badger Moot.

This is the ninth annual moot and I think it gets bigger very year (we, personally have added two new members) and this year there were 20 adults and 7 (and a half) children, which I believe was a record turnout. Unfortunately not everyone can make it for the the full week (work commitments can get in the way) and I was not exempt from this issue. Work, as regular readers know, is very busy at the moment and the weekend of the Badger Moot coincided with one of the busiest weekends of the season, and my presence was required in quite a fraught weekend. However with Lucinda still recovering from her appendectomy and our entire support team (i.e. the family) down in Dorset it was not an option for her to stay at home and for us to arrive as a family on the Monday. Therefore, I took the Friday off and drove the 125 miles or so to Puncknowle.

The holiday officially starts Friday afternoon as we can get into the house from around 3pm so the remainder of the afternoon and evening tends to get eaten up by arriving, unpacking and preparing the evening meal (Thanks Uncle Bill and Auntie Sally) rather than visiting any of the usual haunts and it is an opportunity to catch up on family news. It is also an opportunity for the cousins to explore the house and set up their dens for the week. Éowyn has always enjoyed playing with her older cousins and gets excited whenever she gets an opportunity to play with them and her little sister is no different. So a week of having them ‘on tap’ was a week of bliss for both of our daughters. And in fairness to the older cousins they are brilliant with both Éowyn and Amélie even if though there is quite a large age gap they involve them in their games and have a huge amount of patience with them.

So just as everyone arrived and begun to settle in I had to wake early on Saturday morning and drive the return 125 miles or so straight to work to put in a full shift. While I was having a difficult work weekend the remainder of the Badger Clan begun the week of fun. Saturday morning saw them disperse to various places in the vicinity including the traditional Saturday morning jaunt to Bridport Market to see what bargains lay to be discovered. Unfortunately for Lucinda Éowyn decided that she didn’t what to really be there and since there was no pushchair seat for her then she was going to play merry hell. So far from a pleasant mooch around a Dorset street market it became a battle of wills with a four-year old, which I think Éowyn won.

Saturday night saw the first of two fancy dress nights: an Hawaiian theme. Everyone dressed up a number with genuine Hawaiian shirts bought in Hawaii. Unfortunately I could not wear mine as I was busy working 125 miles away, well I suppose I could have but it wouldn’t have been the same. I also missed Uncle John and Auntie Margaret’s Thai Green curry and the traditional quiz night. This year saw the older generation versus the young generation with age and experience taking the honours. Due to my ability to absorb trivia I am usually banned from competing in the quiz night and thus have become the family quizmaster putting my general knowledge to good use, although this year may have been different.

Sunday morning saw a very traditional English pastime, indeed during the Middle Ages it was law that every man over the age of 14 should spend 2 hours a weekend supervised by the local clergy doing exactly what had been arranged by Lucy for the Badger Moot 2012. She had arranged for a morning of archery lessons for the family at the Manor and I was probably more disappointed to miss this than the Hawaiian and quiz evening. Everyone seemed to have enjoyed it with John and Lucy being the most adept with Lucinda admitting to being one of the worst. Maybe next time.

Monday afternoon I arrived back in Puncknowle for the rest of the week. We spent the afternoon round the house before heading to Weymouth for this year’s ghost walk. In 2009 we took a ghost walk around Dorchester with our guide Alistair dressed in full Victorian regalia. We enjoyed the way he told the stories, in fact he toned the stories down that night when he realised that he was scaring the kids a little too much, so we booked him again this year for a trip around Weymouth harbour (not Melcombe Regis – we don’t want any misunderstanding on that matter). He met us at the Boot pub dressed as 16th century pirate and took us for a hike around the sights of the old harbour. This year the kids were not as scared and Finley challenged him on many aspects of his stories. Indeed Éowyn joined in the banter, when began to tell us of a submarine shipwreck in the harbour and the ghostly noises heard by divers exploring the wreck. ‘I know what noises they heard,’ she said, ‘Woo-oo‘ she continued without waiting for an invitation to reply. We had been concerned that she may get a little scared by the stories and were prepared to leave if it came to it but Éowyn loves her stories and that is exactly how she saw the trip and the anecdote above just illustrates how much she enjoyed it.

Tuesday was my first full day there and so we headed to probably our favourite place in the area: Lyme Regis. It is a beautiful town on the edge of Dorest with a little sandy beach at the edge of the main pebbly beach. We bought the girls buckets and spades and after a couple of lessons off Granddad we happily making sandcastles. As you can see from the photos below it was not exactly pleasant, it was dry which was a bonus, but a little on the cold side so the coats and wellies stayed on. Tuesday was also our day to cook so we left mid-afternoon to head back to prepare the Mexican themed meal, O.K. Fajitas and Chilli, for the 20 adults and 7 children.

The next day was Halloween and our second fancy dress party of the week. Everyone put so much effort into the night and their costumes that I have decided that it deserves an update all of its own. So please click here to read about the day and more importantly look at the many photos of the night.

That left one day of our holiday. 2012 was the year that London hosted the Olympic and Paralympic games but London wasn’t the only venue to host events. Weymouth harbour hosted the off-shore sailing competitions and to take advantage of the expected influx of visitors Sealife built a tower and observation pod at Festival pier to carry up to 69 people 174 feet (53 metres) above Weymouth bay for fantastic views of the area. The great thing about this attraction for the Bagnall family is that the tower is operated by Sealife, which in turn is owned by the Merlin Entertainments Group which means that we could use our Merlin pass for free entry. The view from the top is spectacular and we were lucky that it was a bright and clear day and we could see miles of coastline and many of the landmarks of the area.

After lunch we headed to Weymouth’s sandy beach for more sandcastle building and splashing in the sea. Before we headed for the Manor house and packing up to leave we asked the girls if they wanted a ride on a donkey. Éowyn was initially up for it but when we got there it was Amélie that was the most excited and Éowyn changed her mind. So it was Amélie that took a trip down the beach on a donkey and indeed when the ride was over she got all upset thinking that daddy’s three pound meant that she could keep the donkey. ‘My donkey!‘ she screamed as we dragged her from the beach and back to the car. Cruel parents.

And so our annual trip to Dorset ended with a late night journey back home so that I could return to work on the Friday morning. It is quote often said that you need a holiday to get over a holiday, in many ways it didn’t feel like I got a holiday but nevertheless it was great to spend some time with Lucinda and girls, even if it was a bit of a rush.

Please feel free to click here for the Halloween write up and the photos.

Peace and Love

Baggie

Take me to your leader

An Hawaiian jigsaw

Hawaiian night

It’s a little big Mum

Monkey attack!

A typical Hawaiian scene

The power of the sea

Amélie

Éowyn

The Badgers strike back

Should I be aiming at my sister?

Don’t upset mommy

I’ll go this way

Enchanted garden

A natural…

Jump!

And turn

And Splash!

Throwing stones in the sea

Playing on the sand

Learning from the best

It’s a little cold

Dancing on the beach

Grooving on the beach

I crush your castle!

Nanny and Granddad at Lyme Regis

Weymouth’s latest attraction

Amélie’s Second Birthday

Thursday 4th October 2012Friday 5th October 2012Baggie

So a couple of weeks after we announced to the world that we are expecting our third child, our second child celebrated her second birthday. Yes can you believe that Amélie is 2 years old. This time in 2010 we were on the way to St. Peter’s hospital and thankfully the road conditions were not the same as they were this year as there were road closures and heavy traffic around the area and I can’t imagine trying to battle your way through heavy traffic with a wife in the latter stages of labour!

As a modern father I have (so far) managed to be off work on all of my children’s birthdays and Amélie’s second one was no exception, in fact I managed to organise myself the entire weekend off. Amélie’s birthday was last Friday and on Fridays Éowyn goes to pre-school and this Friday was no exception. However before we took Éowyn to pre-school she helped Amélie to open her birthday presents. Amélie obvious wasn’t entirely sure why she had presents but didn’t care too much as her big sister opened a Peppa Pig treehouse and nothing else then mattered. We did manage to wrestle it from her grasp so that we could take Éowyn to school before heading out for the day’s adventure.

With the impending third baguette due in March we have come to realise that Lucinda’s Nissan Micra is not going to cope with three car seats. In fact, most cars have difficulty fitting three car seats in, hence the proliferation of MPVs on the market. Unfortunately most MPVs simply replace the boot (trunk for my American readers) with two seats. This obviously is handy and does allow extra car seat space, unfortunately it usually means that there is no boot (or trunk) space, which when you have pushchairs and the general accoutrements that goes with children is a real disadvantage. Not all MPVs are made equal though and the balance is to find one large enough to accommodate the three car seats and the progeniture paraphernalia without feeling that you are driving a van (especially when you have been used to driving a Micra) and, possibly more importantly, without breaking the bank.

The model that seems to tick the majority of the boxes is the Ford S-Max (not only does it have seven seats and boot space but it is wide enough to get three car seats across the middle row meaning that as a family of five we could keep the back two seats down turning it into a very large estate car). So it was with this in mind that we took a trip to Car Giant in Shepherd’s Bush to look at their current crop. Unfortunately none of the ones that they had in seemed to be right and when you are spending that kind of money it needs to be right. There was one that had caught our eye when we looked at their internet site but unfortunately in real life this particular individual did not inspire love and affection from either of us so we decided that we would walk away and keep looking there are plenty more S-Maxes in the sea.

Returning back home, we picked Éowyn up from pre-school and then Amélie completed her birthday day at home playing with her new toys with her big sister. It is probably the first time that Amélie has things that Éowyn really wanted and I think that Amélie realised this and suddenly became very possessive of her presents. Time for a lesson in sharing, for both of our children.

A relaxed Friday afternoon melted into an equally relaxed Saturday morning. However there was a big family outing planned for the evening. Hollycombe Working Steam museum, near Liphook in Hampshire is, as the name suggests, a working steam museum with an Edwardian steam-driven fairground alongside the obligatory steam train and traction engines. It is open all summer long and although it closes for the winter in September and October it opens for evening admission which, with the autumnal dark nights, adds a magical element to the fairground. It is somewhere that Lucinda’s family try and visit each year but unfortunately we have not been able to make it for the last three years for one reason or another, in fact the last time we visited Éowyn was a baby.

We arrived at Hollycombe about an hour or so before it opened and Lucinda’s dad fired up the camping stove and cooked us all sausage and bacon sandwiches. We provided desert with Amélie’s birthday cake (a cake that she was unable to eat because it contained milk – so she had her own chocolate brownies that Lucinda made especially for her) before buying our tickets and heading into the museum. As we entered the museum we noticed that the steam train was running. This was the first time it had been running on an evening that the family had visited and therefore it was too good an opportunity to miss, so we paid our £2 and climbed onboard. This really whetted the girls’ appetites for the fair and so after disembarking we headed to the full size carousel. Again both girls thoroughly enjoyed it and Amélie didn’t want to get off. Fortunately there were plenty of children’s rides for them, a junior roundabout, juvenile dobbies, austin cars and the children’s chair-o-planes and they enjoyed all four. We were unsure how they would react to the chair-o-planes but we need not of feared, they loved it! In fact it was a bit of a struggle to get them off each ride and more than once they were the only children on the ride and made the operator send them round twice. I would thoroughly recommend a night trip to Hollycombe for kids, young and old and imagine what it must have been like for your great-grandparents visiting one of these at the turn of the 20th Century.

We ended the weekend in style at the Village Centre in Englefield Green at a joint 4th birthday party for Éowyn and the other children from our N.C.T. group. It was just coincidence that is was 2 days after Amélie’s birthday, it was planned to be somewhere in the middle of the span of the N.C.T.’s group’s birthdays. The Village Centre was a great venue for the party and was just the right size for the group that we had invited, it felt cozy without feeling too crowded and had plenty of room for games. Sharing a children’s party certainly takes the pressure (and the expense) off one family. We all had responsibilities for different aspects of the catering and we all organised one mass participant game each. As a consequence of sharing these responsibilities it meant that the stress was reduced (or at least shared across six sets of parents) and thus as a parent you could actually enjoy your child’s party. There were tears (it wouldn’t be a children’s party without them) but on the whole the children were very well behaved and we keep them entertained long enough to prevent any serious altercations. It was good to meet up with our N.C.T. group even though it was difficult to sit down and chat for any length of time,as a parent that is something that is now second nature.

Now work beckons and my mini break is over, the wide world of sport stops for no man, but before I leave you just an update on Éowyn’s quasi corporeal companions (imaginary friends to you and I). Dizzy, it seems, it a naughty boy but no bad deed goes unpunished. The other day Éowyn calmly informed us that Dizzy was in hospital. He had tiptoed out of the house and got squished by a car. Do not fear he is alright but it seems that his place in Éowyn’s affections has been relegated slightly and now there is a new brother called Connor. Connor it seems looks like an old man in a paper hat. When I suggested that Connor was an old man I was rebuked, ‘No Daddy, he just looks like an old man.‘ So now you know. He also will only wake up if you speak to him in Russian. Éowyn’s quasi corporeal companions are not limited to people, Russian or otherwise, she currently has a cat called Stephanie and a dog called Giggly. Either she has a fantastic imagination or she can see things that are hidden to us cynical adults.

Peace and Love

Baggie