Stripping the Willow

This evening after work, Rhodri and I met up with some other villagers in Canary Wharf to celebrate our friend Julian Wild's art exhibit opening night. His exhibition is called "Stripping the willow" and is a sculpture exhibition in the lobby of some big office building. It was a really fun Tuesday evening, although it felt quite strange to see the familiar faces of our neighbors in the context of Big City London.

Birthday pizza party

Tryfs went to Jake's birthday party today which was held at Pizza Express. Look how cute they all are in their little hats!

Communal worship

Every week at school, one of the classes hosts the "Communal Worship" session which parents of that class are invited to. This is a fairly new way of doing things as it replaces the Friday morning assembly where the former headteacher used to recognise a few pupils each week who had done something special or notable. Parents were pretty reluctant to be excited about this change, but actually it has been so wonderful. Each week there is a theme for the school, such as humility, enjoyment, generosity, friendship, etc... Nice themes which the school then explores throughout the week to really understand what the word or concept is.

This week was Foxes class who were presenting something about the theme(s) of "Enjoyment and love learning". They sang 3 different songs and also explained the 5 ways to pray to God: praising, saying thank you, saying sorry, asking for help for someone else, and asking for help for yourself. After each way of praying was presented, some of the kids played soothing inspiring background music on the xylophones while the audience was invited to pray. One might expect that such a scene populated by about 25 6-7 year old boys and a meager handful of 6-7 year old girls would create a rowdy din of gong banging and giggles, but actually these kids were so earnest in their attempts to create soothing music it brought tears to my eyes.  Their grand finale was a song called E-N-J-O-Y which I wish I had videoed but my phone's memory was full by then. What made it great was that everyone was invited to stand and sing along and/or dance. It was such a joyous song. The song was accompanied by a slideshow of nice things, so the song went something like this: "Birthday cake! Birthday cake! It looks good. [repeat] E-N-J-O-Y! God is good, God is good. God is great!" and then repeating with another something that sounds good, tastes good, feels good, and all done to a samba beat.

Anyway, the video I did take was pretty cute too. It is just so sweet to see all these gorgeous kids singing and dancing so earnestly.

Sports Day 2015

Today was Sports Day and it was a truly gorgeous day. Tryfan had been gearing up for the annual running race where he would try to beat Harrison while Rhiannon was hoping to not come in last for her running race. Both of their ambitions were not realised today, but they both ran really well in this race and also in the other 5 events. Tryfan came in 2nd and showed great sportsmanship, and while Rhiannon was technically last in her race, all 5 of the girls were pretty close together so she wasn't last by much.

Rhiannon doing standing jump

The events were: standing jump, throwing distance, throwing accuracy, sack race, obstacle course, and then running.

The Year 2 Fox class - Tryfan is in the back row, middle

 It was actually probably the hottest day of the year so far - around 28 deg C/ 85 deg F - and so we all clustered in the shade for a picnic lunch at the end. This was the first time the school has done it this way and it was so lovely to just gather together in the soft grass and picnic!

Village Day in the Gate

...Chelwood Gate, that is.
A few years ago the parish council bought the piece of land adjacent to the Chelwood Gate village hall and established a village celebration day sometime in mid-June. This year it was held on Sat 20 June, which was also Solstice, also the day of a sponsored walk with the school (along the same route as the one a few days ago with Beavers), and also the day of a party for our friend Roland. So it was quite a busy day.

Tryfan dressed up in party accessories

Kids tug-of-war which morphed into general tug-of-war

Girls side pulling their way to victory

It was a fairly overcast, mild day which eventually turned to drizzle. Not too glorious weather-wise, but we had a fun and full day anyway. 

Friends in the Gate

Our long lost friend Sarah came over this afternoon with most of her kids and also her new husband. Sarah used to live around the corner from us here in "the Gate" but moved to another village a couple of years ago. It was really nice to see her again, and the kids fell right back into familiar playing as if no time had passed.

Tryfan, Joe, Rhiannon with Maisy and Hattie with Poppy

 Later this afternoon we had some other friends around for dinner - the Denslows, who have really looked after us as we've been undergoing the house renovations. We had a lovely afternoon although the sun wasn't shining quite as brightly as we expected it to. The kids played "Grandma's Footsteps" while we adults sat around chatting.

Rhiannon as the Grandma in Grandma's Footsteps - boys trying to sneak up on her

Our little monkey

Today Tryfan went on a sponsored walk with his Beavers troop. Bentley and I came along too, since they needed an extra adult and the walk was in "our" part of the forest anyway. The whole troop dressed up like monkeys and just ran around the forest like real monkeys.

Monkey Beavers in the rhododendren

BBQ at Little Bridge

Our friends Rob and Macha invited us around for a BBQ today and it was all rather spontaneous and wonderful. There were a herd of kids there from our 3 families and soon they were riding on wheeled vehicles down the lush, grassy slope.

Flossie, Leonie, Rhiannon, Tryfan, Carter, Ellis and Teddy

Tryfan on a wagon coming down the slope

Many kids coming down the slope!

Elderflower champagne triple batch

This year we decided to go big with our elderflower champagne and we invited Ms. Wain and her daughter Brooke over to make it with us. As always, we followed this recipe. We started on Friday eve after work and then Sunday morning we reunited to strain the precious liquid into sterilised bottles.

We ran out of bottles though, so we did have to make a quick trip down to the recycling bins at the village hall. Fortunately we didn't have to dig too deep before we found some perfect bottles to use for our champagne.