Two blogs in one day – aren’t you all lucky?!  Am desperately trying to get back on top of my blog as it’s been getting away from me over the past few weeks.  But nearly there – just have to cull the hundreds of photos I took at a big family weekend back in October, and then I’ll be up to date 🙂

Just a quick blog this evening about the past weekend – what a busy one we’ve had!  We started off with Halloween on Friday.  I’ve never really marked Halloween – we never trick-or-treated when I was growing up, but it’s becoming such a big thing that I agreed to take Alex with his friend Sam on Friday evening.  So, we really got into the spirit, trying our hand at pumpkin carving for the first time.  The kids loved getting their hands all messy, but very quickly they decided the pumpkin was too smelly, so I ended up carving it myself!

We had so much pumpkin, we ended up baking a pumpkin cake as well!  The house smelled very spicy!  Alex chose a skeleton costume, and loved it so much that he wore it to Jacqui’s on Friday for a day of Halloween themed activities – including some scary artwork:

We rushed home to get ready for trick-or-treating.  Wizard Sam came over with his mummy, and we headed off into Frankfurt Road.  I’d intended leaving Sophie with Matt to answer our door, but she wasn’t having any of it, so she grabbed a bag and came along with us!  I’d been a bit nervous about trick-or-treating – I always felt it was a bit frowned upon when I was younger – but I needn’t have worried.

Loads of the houses on my road had made it very clear they welcomed scary visitors, having decked out their houses with lights, pumpkins, spider’s webs etc – so the children found it easy to spot the houses they could visit.  Everyone was so friendly – I felt such a sense of community, it was fantastic!  Alex, Sam and Sophie were super polite, wishing everyone “Happy Halloween!” and gathering vast amounts of sweets and chocolate.

Matt was kept super busy back home with a constant stream of little ones – he ran out of sweets in about 30 minutes! I’m already looking forward to next year!

Our Halloween themed weekend carried on into Saturday when we went to a spooky party with some Herne Hill friends, Ben and Nici.  We spent a wonderful few hours drinking pumpkin soup, enjoying a BBQ, watching a huge number of children running wild around the garden and even watching a great little fireworks display in the garden!  Alex loved his sparkler, although neither Alex or Sophie enjoyed the loud fireworks.  Quite glad I didn’t fork out on a big public display this year!  Hopefully they’ll be braver in 2015.

In contrast to the Autumn themed Halloween activities, with Saturday dawning unseasonably sunny and warm, we decided to cling to Summer and make an impromptu trip to the beach!  So we packed up the car with a picnic and the scooters and headed to Brighton.  It was probably a little bit too far for a short day trip, but it was such a pleasure spending a few hours on the coast.  The beach was really quiet, so we had it almost to ourselves in the sun.

We played around in the pebbles, looking for seaweed, shells and driftwood.

And, of course, spent most of the time throwing and attempting to skim stones – I love this picture of Matt attempting to teach Alex to skim stones!  Even Sophie had a go.

When we’d exhausted the beach, we wandered along the pier where we found a good spot for our picnic and wasted a few pennies in the arcades.  And just before we headed back up to London, we found space in our tummies for huge ice creams from a fab ice cream parlour, Boho Gelato.

Here we are by Brighton Pier.  Happy day.