Busily Beeing

I started 2013 with the intention of blogging a little more often than twice a month.  I may have to downgrade that to "at least" twice a month.

I started a new novella on Jan 31 and broke 17,000 words yesterday.  Got my cover for the piece accepted for publication last month and am tentatively scheduled to go to the London Book Fair courtesy of the publisher for a bit of promotion.  I'm hoping to finish my current piece in the next few days (projected 20k word count), let it sit for a week, then edit and submit.

In the meantime, the kids have been growing and developing, funny things have been said, sibling rivalry waxes and wanes, and a lot of train sets have been built and dismantled.  Today we put a dress on C (she is not convinced by such things) and E immediately said "Oh, you look very stylish!  You look like.... a cooker!"  He meant a chef, but C was very pleased.  (It also helped that the dress had huge pockets.)

Yesterday B and I got a (relatively) fantastic night's sleep and woke up energetic.  So we took the kids to Morden Hall Park which is surprisingly easy to get to via public transport.  The most difficult part was the walk down and up the hill to our local train station.  We took scooters plus a lightweight stroller as a fallback for C/holdall for random stuff.

The most exciting bit for E was the fact that we got to ride on A TRAM!!!!!! as part of our journey there.  BOY was he excited when he realized we not only rode on a tram, but also got to go over level crossings.

And the park?  That was good too.

Here's some pics.

Riding back into the park proper after a spot of lunch at the nearby cafe.

Tire swinging in the "natural play area" which had some interesting things to do.

C having a turn on the zip wire.

Floating sticks in the fast-moving river while watching a dog retrieve his ball.

Decommissioned mill wheel.  We floated LOTS of sticks under this bridge.  The water was very fast-moving here.

The very exciting crossing.  Yes, we looked both ways.

Waiting for the tram on the platform.

Chillaxing after one's bath.


Anyhow, that's all for now.  I'm now mostly caught up on photos - there's a few from last month I'll try and slip onto the blog at some point.  E is off school this coming week due to half-term break so I'll be even more busy this coming week.  Going to be drinking lots of tea and practicing being zen in between planning days out/adventures on busses etc.