A few more pics from Italy

A few pics from Rome

Happy Christmas!

Fabulous wedding ... very little sleep for the under-8s

So here are Fia and Will in their glad rags all ready for the wedding on Saturday. By a stroke of pure luck, they matched the bride perfectly and snatched a last-minute role in the wedding ceremony, as flower scatterers.

From Sofia's point of view, this was a dream come true. Here she is with her flower basket.

Then there was the actual scattering, some of which involved sprinting to keep in front of the bride and groom!

And here are 3 generations of Heath men. 

And finally all of us enjoying the company and the brilliant Irish sunshine.

The Victoria plum tree delivers

Sports Day

So we had Sports Day - triumph and disaster in one day and let me just say we did not treat them just the same as per Rudyard Kipling's well-meaning advice.

To start the day, here is Will winning the 50m sprint. There are some other competitors but as you can see it didn't exactly come down to the wire. 

Then we had Fia in her sprint, where she finished a close 3rd as evidenced by this picture. Somehow the organisers neglected to give her her shiny '3rd' sticker, which I would have been in there complaining about vociferously if I'd realised at the time, as it was her only placing all day. I thought better of showing the teachers the photographic evidence, in the end...

Will went on to win his egg and spoon race, sack race and the team event bean bag shuffle - in fact, he was in four events and came away with 4 1sts, which was starting to look a bit like showing off. To Fia's credit, she was just pleased and proud of her brother - no sign of jealousy at all.

Unfortunately, Fia had a nasty fall in the sack race and the day went from bad to worse for her. There were tears and lots of them and we'd just recovered from that when she dropped her egg in the egg and spoon and it all began again. 

In other news, we are trying without success to catch the rat we saw on the patio last week. It has fancy imported American peanut butter in its trap but it doesn't seem to be tempted by it. As yet. 

Most decorated boy at Sports Day...

Full report to follow. 

Happy 18 months birthday Dotto

Three visits from the tooth fairy this week

And sometimes like this...

An ordinary Sunday at our house looks like this

Sofia's exhibition

Today we all convened at the Royal College of Art so we could see (and buy - all for a good cause!) Sofia's painting of the Great Barrier Reef in the Cancer Research Young Art Exhibition. 

700 pictures were selected for the exhibition from about 7500 entries and you got your name in the programme so she was rightly very proud. 

Then we caught a Routemaster bus in the rain and then the tube back to Mr Fish for dinner. 

In other excitement, Dotto escaped onWednesday  night and was rounded up by Sofia as he tried to scale her shoe basket! Safely back in the cage now, probably plotting his next mission...

Happy 7th birthday Sofia

Our darling girl turned 7 this Wednesday and was showered liberally with gifts - thank you family!

 Here we have a rerun of Willy's football cake, which seems to be flavour of the month. (Really they just like the players - which are sour patch kids.)