After a ridiculously busy June, comparatively July has been fairly quiet. With the exception of three solid weeks of end-of-term fun I mean – but I pretty much covered that in this post.
The weather hasn’t been anywhere near as glorious as last month, but that’s OK. All together now… “The garden needed it“.
For the last week, I’ve been on antibiotics for a wisdom tooth infection which is nowhere near as fun as it sounds. They’ve knackered me out entirely – AND I can’t even drink even though it’s the summer holidays. Ridiculous if you ask me.
Anyway, I predict it’ll be a fairly short one this month. Onwards!
(If you want to read my other monthly updates stretching all the way back to January of 2024, you can find them all here).
My youngest turned ten
It’s officially one whole decade since I gave birth so I probably need to start thinking about an excuse other than ‘baby weight’.
As is tradition, the dog got hold of the birthday cake. She knew she’d done a bad thing so she immediately ran away and fell in the pond.
They say dogs are man’s best friend but my best friend has never eaten my kids’ birthday cake OR fallen in my pond. Yet.
I went to Dunelm and bought more birds
Really this is just an excuse to show off my new mirror. Nice, innit. Do you think there’s a point at which ‘lots of birds’ becomes too many birds? Actually, I don’t care.
I caught up with a very old friend
When I say very old, I had not seen this person for 26 years. But those are the benefits to being entirely too findable online, I guess!
After catching up via email for a few years, he happened to be passing the area. Coffee turned into lunch turned into cocktails and wine, and it turns out that unsurprisingly his memory is far superior to mine, so I got to re-live my teenage years.
Anyway it was a lovely catch up, and a less lovely hangover.
I found out that Dippy Eggs aren’t really a thing in America
Egg cups may be a staple of the British cupboard, but if you want to find some in the good old US of A, you have to order them in.
I am lead to believe that the main reason for this is that salmonella is still a threat in the US, where for some unfathomable reason they wash the protective coating off the egg prior to sale and consumption.
Anyway, people got really mad about it. If they had something warming and comforting – say, a soft boiled egg with soldiers, and a nice cup of tea – to consume, then maybe they wouldn’t be so mad. Just an idea.
Summer holiday fun
Well, not really. For the first few days of the week I had to work. I can pretty much fit my entire six-hour-day in before my kids are even dressed, which is useful. And if work overruns, they can just watch K-Pop Demon Hunters for the 263rd time.
I also took some annual leave so we could go out and about and do some fun things, like the Mystery Guide for Reading which I bought as a Christmas present for the kids and then completely forgot about.
It’s an outdoor treasure hunt/escape room; you solve clues based on statues and buildings etc in your specified city. My youngest got well into it and we solved all the clues in a few hours in time for lunch.
My oldest meanwhile gave absolutely no input whatsoever. Standard.
We went to Chessington
I was offered tickets to visit Chessington World of Adventures on a day of my choosing, and with Izzy already booked into the dog-sitters and annual leave booked, it seemed like the 31st July was a winner.
It was not a winner.
We left our home in Reading at 8.30am; significantly earlier than either of my children had woken up so far during the holidays. We got on the move, with a brief stop to get petrol, and were making good time until we hit the M3/M25 junction and everything came to a screeching halt. We didn’t move again for 90 minutes; much longer than the whole journey was supposed to take.
Eventually – after witnessing several fire engines, four ambulances and a number of emergency staff on motorbikes winding their way through the stationary traffic – we started to move. Our sliproad was closed entirely which added another 30 minutes and a lovely detour of Staines to the journey. We arrived at Chessington not just before opening at 10 as planned, but a little after 12.
At which point, it began to absolutely bucket it down – and it didn’t let up for several hours. There was even talk of thunderstorms and rides being shut.
Thankfully, it didn’t come to that and we managed to salvage the day and have a great time anyway, albeit a slightly shorter and wetter one than I’d had in mind when booking! The one plus side of the awful weather was that the queues were nothing like we’d seen last year – although we did have queue jumper wrist bands (which very much takes the edge off), it wasn’t as peoplely at all.
Other things I wrote this month:
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