Calke Abbey - National Trust Free Weekend

I've always been a massive fan of the National Trust. I love nothing more than pottering around some Country Estate or Stately home and wondering how fabulous it would be to live in such a place. Most of the sites are really child friendly and as well as loads of room to run around have a play park too. We're lucky that as we live in Leicestershire we have a massive amount of properties to choose to visit within a reasonable drive.

Early this week I was rooting around in a charity shop looking for some wedding things when I came across the most awesome picnic basket for £4.99 that I just had to have:

Obviously this then meant that we had to try it out this weekend and as an added bonus the National Trust sites today and tomorrow are free at certain properties. We decided to take full advantage of this and today headed off to Calke Abbey. There is a house, church, extensive gardens and a nature reserve. Luckily the weather was absolutely beautiful so we made the most of it:

There may also have been some dressing up involved:

If you get a chance then check out the National Trust website to see where is free near you....it's well worth it!

p.s. This is not a sponsored post I'm just a big fan :-)

I babysat a Jelly Baby.....

I'm not sure if I mentioned before just how fabulous Chick's Teacher is but she's just awesome. It's really hard to get information from Chick about how her day at school has been no matter how much I question her. Normally I ask her 'what was cool at school?' and she has to tell me about at least one thing that was cool.....even if sometimes it's just whatever she had for pudding!

From the little that she does mention I can honestly say that I wouldn't want to be stuck teaching her class for the day. They seem to have struggled with the move up to Year 5 and the difference in responsibility that comes with being towards the top of the school. This week the Teacher decided that she'd had enough and said that they needed to learn a lesson about responsibility - towards each other, towards their things and homework etc

She decided that for the whole week they each needed to take care of a jelly baby and they got points out of 100 at the end of the week depending on how well they'd taken care of it! If they were unable to look after it then they needed to get someone to babysit....hence the reason I babysat a jelly bean this week! Chick earned  90 points but more than that learned a really valuable lesson about responsibility. I personally feel that it was an inspired idea of the teacher because the kids found it fun, were really competitive about who looked after theirs the best but also took it really seriously along with learning a good life lesson.

I'm really not looking forward to the jump next year when we move up to Senior school and seeing what life lesson Chick needs to learn there!!!

Nineteen Years