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Published: October 13th 2010
Back down south to celebrate Great Nanny's 90th birthday!
First a few days in Plymouth with Nanny & Grandad, time to catch up with aunties, uncles, cousins and neighbours. J is pretty quick on his feet now, and keen to explore everywhere and everything. No cupboard went unopened, and a particular favourite trick was opening the fridge, taking out two actimel yogurt drinks, then toddling over to Nanny with an imploring look on his face hoping that one would be opened for him!
We had to set some limits though, the china ornaments around the fireplace became 'Nanny's toys' and the two guitars 'Grandad's toys', as in 'No, you can't play with Nanny's toys, these are your toys', although as you can see from the picture, Grandad did share his toys now and then, which is another good lesson!
It was lovely to see Mummy's cousin and her two little girls, M is just a month older than J, and you can see the difference in her speech and walking, although maybe having a big sister to keep up with helps!
J's favourite family member though has to be Loulou the cat, who belongs to Uncle Kip
& Aunty Lau. As happy as he was to play with his aunty and uncle (and who needs toys when you have a wooden spoon and a tupperware tub?) he spent most of the time under the table, trying to appeal to poor Loulou who eventually escaped into the garden!
On the Friday, Daddy flew down and joined us for the big family knees-up at Butlins in Minehead in honour of Great Nanny. Didn't know what to expect from Butlins, but it was great!! There was a brilliant swimming pool, although 'pool' is a bit of an understatement, with flumes, a beach, wave machine, floats and toys. There was non-stop entertainment in half a dozen different locations, so there was constantly something to do or see, there was a funfair, adventure playground, a lake, Bob the builder, diggers, and all right beside the beach! Brilliant!! The accommodation is still fairly hi-de-hi, with paper thin walls which made getting J to sleep while next door watched Coronation St at full volume pretty hard! He got his own back at 6am the next morning though!
It was so nice to be around so many family and did make me more
than a little wistful to be living so far away from everyone. The abundance of aunties, uncles and cousins meant that J was never short of company, or ice cream, or toys and after a while Mummy & Daddy stopped asking where he was and just assumed that someone had him somewhere!!
The high point for Mummy & Daddy (literally!) was the high ropes course, teetering about on tiny planks and wires 100ft off the ground. Big Uncle G is a scaffolder in the Shetlands, so it probably didn't faze him as much as it did Mummy, but it was pretty scary up there looking down at the rest of the family miles below! Flying down the zip wire at the end was fun though!
On the Sunday night we had a party for Great Nanny in the restaurant with birthday cake and balloons before heading into the pavilion to watch the stars of X-factor, and, J's favourite Barney the purple dinsosaur!!
Happy Birthday Great Nanny!
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