An Eventful Weekend

Thank you so much to everyone who sent me kind and supportive words and wishes after Fridays post, on the blog and in private. It meant a great deal to me that I wasn't collecting tumbleweed after sharing our news.

By Saturday morning I'd pulled myself together and we went off on an early train to the National Media Museum. We had booked to see The Snowman as part of the Bradford Animation Festival. We absolutely adore the film and were jumping with glee at the chance to see it on the big screen.
We got to the museum early so we wandered around some of the familiar exhibitions.

Before the film there were a lot of animation shorts shown. They were absolutely amazing!

After the film we went out for lunch, where Cameron announced that he doesn't want to go to school after all (he said he thought "it looked fun at first, but doing it everyday would be a nightmare").

We did a bit of shop browsing (Christmas decorations, I can never resist a look) before heading back on the train, feeling really proud of myself for doing a city centre visit on a Saturday.

On Sunday we woke to find the electricity had cut off at some point in the night. It turned out that half the street had also lost power and that the cause was a fault with underground cables. A large chunk of our street was dug up and the four men worked, without breaks, in the cold, wind and rain until the power was back on - around 6pm. I am very grateful for their efforts!

Power cuts are always so educational, I find, even for me. It's scary how much we rely on electricity and take it for granted. During the daytime we went out to a cafe for lunch and visited Grandad.

Cameron experimented with Grandad's guitar and we chatted, played Lego etc. As we were about to leave we saw a huge, unbroken rainbow - it was fantastic!

We had a lot of fun thinking up ways to entertain ourselves, in the minimal light of late afternoon, while we waited for the power to come back on. I taught Cameron to play hangman and we made up some other paper based games. Cameron read, and I cooked beef stew - both by candle light, an interesting experience.

I'm still catching my breath from all of that really! Today has been pretty much catching up on washing (that I was supposed to be catching up on at the weekend!) and emptying the ruined contents of the fridge and freezer - which is rather sad as it contained a lot of things I worked hard to preserve for the colder months when not much is growing. I had a huge stash of frozen berries, boxes of soup and other things - all wasted now :o(

Cameron is busy working on a design for this half-term competition.