After such a promising April, I find myself very behind with my blog – and a massive backlog of photographs to get through! I blame the most crazy couple of weeks, involving a trip down to Brighton for a couple of nights, the Imperial Festival weekend, a myriad of deadlines and two choir performances. More on all that in a later post…

But now, I find myself with the perfect opportunity to catch up as life slows down for a bit. We’re down in Cornwall starting a week’s holiday at beautiful Coombe Mill. I’m curled up next to a wood burning stove with a glass of bubbly and two exhausted children sleeping upstairs after a couple of hours exploring the farm we’ll call home for the next few days.

So before I fill the blog with tales of our adventures in Cornwall, here’s what we were getting up to a couple of weeks ago…

We spent a wonderful Sunday down in the New Forest with one of my oldest and best friends, Katharine.  We ordinarily wouldn’t travel so far for a single day, but this was for an occasion we just couldn’t miss – the christening of little Emilia.  With a 10am service, it made for an early start – but a chocolate chip brioche breakfast in the car and some movies on the tablets made the journey fly by.  At least the roads were quiet!

We arrived at the church early enough to let the children have a run around in the neighbouring woods and churchyard before the service.

The fresh air helped burn off some energy, and armed with colouring books and stickers, they behaved brilliantly during the lovely christening service – although Sophie was getting bored towards the end, announcing after every hymn – “is it time to go now?”

Their good behaviour was rewarded with a longer play in the gorgeous bluebell woods next to the church after the christening and we had a fun time exploring the trails and clambering over logs.  The bluebells were stunning.

They didn’t really stop running for about 30 minutes!

With the bluebells in full bloom, I was keen to get some snaps of the children surrounded by the flowers – but Sophie wasn’t really in the mood for a photoshoot!

But she finally stopped fooling around and I got this super snap which I love.  Can’t get enough of that grin!

We headed over to Katharine’s house for a post ceremony party.  Emilia was looking particular gorgeous in her lovely christening dress – look at those blue eyes!

She didn’t let her pristine white dress hold her back – enjoying a lively game of football with the boys before lunch!

The children’s favourite part of the day was the cake (of course) – Emilia looked pretty pleased about it too!

Sophie clearly enjoyed playing up to the camera as much as she enjoyed her enormous slab of cake – she’s getting more expressive by the day, becoming as dramatic as her big brother!

After lunch, we hit the garden again for more running around – and lots and lots of family photographs.  Just love these shots of Katharine and Emilia:

Here we are having such a lovely day:

And my top photo of the day – old friends nearly 20 years since we all met, with the next generation perhaps forming lifelong friendship too