Golden Week round-up

Everyone's been back at work for a week or more now, so I think that I have to accept that Golden Week is over :-)

We mainly stayed close to home, avoiding the crowds and enjoying the good weather with friends and family. Along with our day at the beach, one of the main events was a barbecue here with friends old and new.


Meiko and David were visiting from New Zealand, Jason and Junko live here in Yonago and Marvin and Ikuno have just moved here from Australia. Between the 8 of us, we have 6 little children so it was quite a lively afternoon...

We also met up with H's uncle, visiting from Hiroshima, one evening and spent another evening at home with Heidi and Lisa playing board games, drinking wine and eating lots of yummy things (including locusts. Not really sure if they should be categorised as 'yummy' though...).

H's mum looked after K one afternoon, so H and I went out for lunch and a movie. We've failed dismally to do that every month, as I resolved back in January, but that just made this day all the more enjoyable.

H did some work in the garden and I got some more fabric for the shop, and we also had a morning at the park...

It was a lovely sunny day and K was finally able to wear the outfit I'd made for his birthday!

He loves going through the big undulating wire-tunnely thing (above), but always wants to hold my hand on the slopes. This time he did all by himself, and he went through a little tunnel that turns into a slide for the first time too.

After that there was no stopping him and he even climbed up to the top of this net by himself, with me hovering worriedly in the background...

That was the last day of Golden Week for us, but in the holiday spirit we took H's mum out for dinner on Sunday night for Mothers' Day. Then on Monday it was H's birthday and we went out for dinner again, plus presents and cheesecake at home too...

Parklife

Lately we have been having real autumn weather - sunny, warm days with cold nights alternating with wet and windy days when it never seems to get completely light. On the good days we've been making the most of it by spending a lot of time at our nearby park.



K is big enough to actually do a lot of things there now, and this park has lots of things to entertain even the littlest ones. The other day he went down this slide all by himself for the first time, which led to many, many repeat performances.

The maze is one of my favourites...

These pictures were taken last Friday in the mid-afternoon, when we went to the park after realising that K was not going to have a nap. We've had a lot of those days in the last couple of weeks... It did mean that we had the park pretty much all to ourselves though, since everyone else was either still at school or having a nap (grrr...).

This yellow hill is great. The surface is very dense foam, making it a bit spongey and bouncy. K needs help to walk up it (hey, so do I sometimes...) but he goes down the slide alone. There are four tunnels leading into the centre of the hill and after going through them with me a few times he now does that on his own too.

One of the tunnels connects to this:

K needs to hold onto something, usually my hand, to make it up and down the slopes but he's getting more and more confident all the time.

There are also some spring-mounted-animals (?) that K loves to rock back and forth on, especially the dolphin. We have a rocking horse at home too and he's very into that sort of thing at the moment. The jury's still out on the swings though; he usually looks a bit worried while swinging, but then wants to do it again as soon as he gets down...

It looked pretty grey when I got up this morning but now, at just after 8, the sun is peeping through the clouds and I see blue sky. Another park day?