Summer Holiday Part 2

PHEW! A week's worth of holiday photos have been edited & prepared for blogdom at last! Our family holiday was much anticipated as we hadn't had a holiday in over 2 years! Actually leaving Liverpool proved something of a long drawn out affair due to car trouble but eventually we were all squished in the car & on our way to the Royal Forest of Dean!

We were very blessed that some family friends offered to pay for our holiday for us. My mum found the wonderful Rosedean Cottage on the internet & booked it up for us. The cottage was fabulous & we can highly recommend it. The owner has thought of everything! It was great to have stair gates, high chair, laundry room, toys & books for the children, DVDs & CDs & so much more available to us throughout the week. Thanks Mum for finding it for us & thankyou Alison & Bob for paying for us to go! It was such a blessing!

The Forest of Dean is a place close to our hearts as it is where Lee & I got married 12 years ago. It seemed an ideal place for us to holiday in as we knew the area well, had lots of friends & family close by & it isn't too far to drive there. We stopped off at my parents on the way for a quick loo & tea break & then heading on a little trip down memory lane towards Ludlow where Lee & I were engaged at the top of the parish church tower. We had a car picnic in Ludlow too which was great fun!
The first weekend we were away we had a barbeque at the cottage with my sister Helen, Ian, my Uncle Ben & my parents. It was lots of fun making vegetable & fruit kebabs although not so easy to get them to cook! I'm still unsure why Luke decided to pretend to be asleep when he saw me about to photograph him eating his hot dog but that is what he did! On the Sunday we took the boys to the church were we got married. The service was inpsiring & fun. I still think of the older lady (whose name escapes me for the moment) who baked a victoria sponge cake with the children during the service as an object lesson illustrating the fact that we are all different but each of us has a purpose & is needed in God's body in order for us all to make something beautiful! The boys loved eating some of the cake after the service too! It was so great to take our family there & to see old friends & familiar faces again.
On Bank holiday Monday Uncle Ben treated us, my sister Helen, Ian & his dad to a pub lunch. It was a lovely afternoon & great to spend time with everyone. Actually the last time we ate in The Butcher's Arms (which is the pub next to our holiday cottage) Ben paid for our meal & Jordan was about 9 months old! So thanks for treating us to a yummy meal once again Ben! The rest of the week was full of lots of exploring & walking in the forests. Knockly Patch was our first port of call where I used to walk Ippy, Helen's dog in the weeks just before Lee & I married. It was strange thinking that way back then we never would have dreamed that one day we would bring our 4 children to walk along the very same paths. We enjoyed a stroll around the arboretum too which has lots of wooden sculptures made by visually impaired people. The boys loved the huge Millennium tree seat.
We visited Puzzle Wood & spent several hours wandering through the pathways & up & down the stone steps & over the sometimes rickety wooden bridges! The woods used to be Roman iron mines & are said to be the place that inspired JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You can certainly see that when you visit Puzzle Wood! It was rather muddy through the woods & poor Timmy slipped & fell giving his ear a terrible bruise & the rest of him a nasty shock! As he was crying Lee noticed his shoes were all covered in mud & said 'Look Timmy! Your shoes are all mooshy!' (Mooshy is one of Timmy's made up words for when things are squishy & mushy). Timmy was very proud of his mooshy shoes & face! The boys loved the giant wooden maze with stairs & little secret doorways & corridors that you had to crouch down to go through & it was lovely to see the donkeys & Shetland ponies too. By the way, if you do want to visit Puzzle Wood & you have a baby you'll need a kind Auntie Helen to look after her while you go exploring or the use of a baby carrier as prams can't be used in the woods! (Thankyou Helen for looking after Annie Joy for us!)
With all the rainfall we have had over the summer the Forest was blooming with ferns & cow parsley & mushrooms of all kinds! I did enjoy photographing the mushrooms as you might guess from the picture above!
Another high light for us was our day out with the Walsh family at Beechenhurst Sculpture Trail. We walked for miles that day! The 5 children that were walking got a little tired after 2 hours!!! But with a short rest on a bench & a game of I Spy with teacher Christian & some rousing songs to get us up the last hill we made it back to the car park in one piece.... Although Timmy had another fall right at the start of the trail & gave himself a bloody nose! Our 3 boys loved wearing their new rabbit wellies & looking for all the Giant's possessions (the first sculpture is the Giant's chair so after that every other sculpture was then re-named 'the giant's _____'. The play area at the sculpture trail is fantastic too! We could have spent all day just playing there really!
We went to Symonds Yat twice while we were away as there is crazy golf at the Butterfly Farm & Maze place. Jordan LOVES crazy golf so he was over the moon to be able to play twice in one week! We also went for a lovely walk along the River Wye & over the suspension bridge & back along the banks on the other side where we got the hand ferry back across the river again. It was great fun but not really a suitable walk for a pram! Annie Joy got very jolted about on the way back to the car & Lee did a sterling job pushing her on such bumpy terrain! (I think I did very well crossing the river on the bridge! I don't like heights especially not when accompanied by deep water! I got rather hot but wasn't as panicky as I was the last time I crossed the same bridge!).

We didn't get to do a lot of the things we had planned to do on holiday but we are hoping to go back to the cottage again next year & do some more of the same & some new things too! I have one last event from our holiday to tell you about but it deserves a blog post all to itself! So, thanks for reading & look out for Summer Holiday Part 3 the final installment! Hope all who read are very well. TTFN! :D
PS Do click on the postcard photos- they really will get bigger this time so you can see them more clearly! It took me a LOOOOOONNNNG time to upload them so I know it will work this time! LOL!!