A Matter of Choice

Who'd have thought it, that the rain would ever cause such excitement.  I've always hated the rain, traditionally the sure fire way to ruin a day for me in the UK  but once you approach the end of the summer and almost 6 months without a drop of the wet stuff and your outlook tends to change! There has been rain recently in Larnaca and surrounding villages but it had been yet to reach us. Today as the first few drops fell I remarked to Aaron that it would probably come to nothing as the first one usually does..... Leo who once said 'I don't like raining, we gonna need umbrellas'  (to be precise 3 years ago this week, thanks to the wonder of 'Timehop')   went a little bit crazy and ran around dancing and singing, oh and doing 'Power Ranger' moves - like you do. I was amused to see look over the balcony and see my Dad standing in the rain, with the garden hose aimed at the gazebo roof, after laughing at him though I did decide to get...

One of Leo's favourite books over the summer was 'a Winne the Pooh one  - Where does the rain puddle go'.  We read it every day for weeks and he kept asking to put his welly boots on and go jumping in the rain puddles.  He was quite disappointed that it wasn't going to rain for several months! We've had a few odd days of rain now so he was very excited to finally get to do it. We only went over to the bit of wasteland next to our apartment but he had a great time.  It was brilliant to see how much fun he was having as we'd never done it before!  He was a bit concerned by how deep it was in places, as when it rains here it rains a lot! We were out for almost an hour while he stomped up and down through them all,  he was quite interested by the snails everywhere but the highlight seemed to be finding an orange had fallen off the tree to kick through the water! Linking up to Country Kids

Cyprus - an island in the sun, with 340 days of sunshine a year, or so they told us!  So that means only 15 days of rain right?   I think that might be a little bit of exaggeration creeping into that sales pitch as it seems we've certainly had more than enough of this.... On Wednesday this was the view that greeted me as I opened the curtains,  I suddenly had the feeling this day was going to need a bit of effort to survive it. Leo has been suffering from a bad cough which had seemed to be on its way out but has now turned into a streaming cold.  I am amazed at the amount of snot that can be produced by one child! Because of this, Leo's not feeling his best and therefore is not he's usual happy self. A plan was needed to cheer him up....Let the activity day commence! First up...... Making biscuits, but not just any biscuits, oh no, a day like this calls for the most exciting biscuits you could imagine if you are 2..... train biscuits! Ther...

Last Sunday was an unusual day, I said  'see you later' to my friend Michelle  and then went straight to the airport to meet my friend Larisa which was great timing as it cheered me up! I saw Larisa once last August when I was in the UK but Aaron hadn't seen her since we left almost 2 years ago and Leo wouldn't have remembered her.  Leo loves to look at photos so in the week leading up to her arrival I showed him lots of photos so he knew who was coming. I think she was quite surprised he took to her straight away like he'd seen her every day of his life, even before she showered him with presents! Regular readers (and fellow ex-pats) will know that one of my least favourite things about living in Cyprus is the lack of reasonably priced clothes (and toys, books, stickers among many other things) so Larisa had been gathering goodies for us for a while. I'd also been on ebay winning random items to be sent to her, I'm surprised she had any room left for he...

Sunny Cyprus has not been so sunny at the moment! After what looked like a change in the weather we've had some huge storms and so much rain. We were lucky with the weather for the week that Di and the boys were out, it was nice every day and we spent time at the beach and by the pool. Far too cold for most normal people to go in the pool, Tomas got over the cold and enjoyed it, James not so much! In a moment of madness I did throw myself in but not for long! The day after they left it started raining and boy did it rain! We had some drama on Thursday when my Mum came upstairs and told me there was water coming through her ceiling. It turned out the the drain holes on the balcony of the apartment between us and hers were blocked and the balcony flooded into the apartment! All is ok now though as we called the developer and they came and swept all the water out. We then had a day of sun -handy as I managed to get 3 loads of washing done - if the sun's not out it takes days for...