Summer Holiday

Lies I Have Told Ben Today

* That Grandma and Grandpops are lost in Wales. They may have been eaten by a whale. We need to find them.

* That when we cross the big river into Wales we'll get eaten up by the whale and he'll spit us up on the beach we're going to.

* That the river is the River Seven, not Eight or Six.

* That it's an estuary (that bit was not a fib) - and crocodiles live in estuaries.

* That the whale will eat us up car and all so we won't get all covered in whale gloop.


Lies I Have Regretted Telling Ben Today, As Funny As It Was Pulling His Leg...

* Anything to do with being eaten by a whale.

Unbeknown to me, he had watched Octonauts the other day with Steve and one of them got eaten by a whale shark. She was rescued by one of the other octonauts tickling its gills and making it laugh. And she came out all covered in gloop. (I had to restrain myself from talking about tickling girls to make whales laugh... Ben's pronunciation of "girl" does sound more like "gill"!) He was a bit worried about being swallowed by a whale. Like, really worried, to the point of getting upset. I've had to do a LOT of back-tracking....

I don't think I have heard the last of this :-/

Thankfully not such a big deal was made of the crocodiles and the slightly wrong river name...


I have been teaching him other (non-fib-based) stuff though, we've been doing lots of map reading! AND we went past Stonehenge - I never realised quite how.... well, small it was. I feel such a philistine. Ah well.



Ben has just asked me if we are in Wales. We are. He said, "where are the whales mummy? But I want to see the big fish!"


Thank goodness Charley stayed out of that conversation. He has been so wonderfully easy this car journey, even though I did end up squished in the back fairly early on. Once I've got comfy it's actually really nice being here in the back with them :)

Total journey time, including stopping for diesel at the start, 9 hours. But. Once we'd stopped trying to get here for dinner, we stopped stressing about it and the journey wasn't that bad at all! A couple of lovely stops for food and a breather, and arrived at the chalet around 9.30pm. Unpacked, let Ben run off his car-fever, got everything sorted just in time for Charley to wake up and scream the place down while I had my insulin!

Looking forward to a relaxing couple of weeks. By the time we set off this morning we were so stressed from all the packing that we needed a holiday just from that - but the drive itself has been remarkably good, and for a change we have arrived at our destination stress-free already.

Wish we'd remembered to bring a bottle of wine or two.....!