In a nutshell...

I haven't blogged for a while because our phone line went up the creek and Talk Talk didn't listen listen. The fault took ten days to fix, resulting in the necessity to get all stampy footed and generally throw toys out of the pram and sulk. To cut a long story short, we've been fixed, placated and compensated.

In a nutshell, this is what happened in the meantime:

A big, yellow shiny thing appeared in the sky. It's still there! Bliss.

We went to the National Botanic Gardens of Wales. It was glorious.

We finally made our haylage (well, the contractors did, we just played in between the rows of grass and enjoyed the lovely smell of drying grass.)

The garden filled with butterflies, mostly freshly hatched tortoiseshells, peacocks and a speckled wood or two.

It was too hot for black dogs.

The first tooth fell out. (R5's first anyway. Technically it's the third she's lost, but the other two were under general anaesthetic.)

The garden produced some lovely Romanesco cauliflower/broccoli (can't decide which it is!). I've never grown it before and it's delicious.

Today we've lost another tooth. I hope the tooth fairy's got plenty of shiny one pound coins!

And we: Went back to school (H7 and R5), back to working three days a week (me); ran 41.7 miles (me again, but not all at once!); picked 3.5lbs of sloes; decanted the rhubarb vodka; tasted the rhubarb vodka (blimey); hoovered books (autumn cleaning); cleaned out the kitchen cupboards (no broadband. I was bored.); moved things around in the kitchen (can't find anything now!); made bread (many times, from Dan Stevens' fabulous River Cottage Bread handbook); lazed about in the sun.

I LOVE September!