Saturday, August 15, 2009

Family time

Hi everyone. I have been too busy to post a blog for a while so today, as I am covering two very different subjects, I am going to do two blogs. Make the most of it. I don't know when the next one will be!
We have just spent a very pleasant ten days with Mike and his family. They always come to this
region for their summer holiday, usually to Roquettas del Mar, just the other side of Almeria city, so this year they came to stay with us instead. It is good that we have enough space to put them all up as well as Jonathan, without too much upheaval. It was, of course, very hot for their visit, but they seemed to cope with that very well. They were able to enjoy the same things that they would usually do, a trip to Mini-Hollywood, which is a theme park in the Tabernas dessert where the spaghetti westons were filmed, a day at the water park which Jonathan also enjoyed, as well as trips to the beach, meals out etc. The boys just loved going in our pool and they are both very water confident. Oliver did his ten meter badge at home before he came, but by the time he went home he had swum 90 meters straight off; that's three lengths of the big village pool. And Finlay, who is not quite three yet, swam a whole length without stopping, with his arms bands on. They were allowed in our pool at any time as long as there was an adult outside with them, and they enjoyed swimming after dark with the under water light on. Most of the time they were very good with the animals and vice versa. It took a day for the dogs to get used to them, but they have never encountered children before, and they are two quite noisy boys. We kept an eye on Chico as he is big, and he did bark at Oliver once and upset him, but Oliver had startled him, so it was understandable. Finlay chased after Destino whenever he could and Oliver took a real shine to Paco who let him haul him around all the time. It was Jonathan's birthday on Monday, so on the Sunday night we had a proper tea-party which he shared as a belated one for Mike whose birthday was a fortnight ago. We had nibbles and a cake and everyone enjoyed it. Then on Sunday we all went out to dinner at a nice restaurant in Mojacar. The boys were not a problem as Spanish families all go out together quite late, so they are used to children in the bars and restaurants. They were tired by the end of the meal and started to play up, but it was very hot and very late, and we soon got them home to bed. On Tuesday Jonathan went with them to a beach near San Juan and they had a lovely time in a fairly lively sea, jumping off rocks and body-surfing. Unfortunately Michael jumped onto a sea urchin and got spines in his foot. He pulled what he could out straight away, and I managed to remove some more with tweezers when they got home, but one went right in deep and I couldn't get to it, and it is now giving him a lot of grief and he can't walk on it, so hopefully he will seek medical aid for it. They arrived home safely on Thursday.
We have continued with the same walk routine for the dogs and we now let them off the lead for most of it. They do come back when they are called, though Foxy is easily distracted by cicadas in the bushes, and needs to be called back more firmly. Today we had to keep them close to us as we could hear gunfire quite close by. We have them on leads as we get back near the car because of the field of goats grazing there, and today we saw three men and a lad with guns, presumable after rabbits. So we may have to find an alternative route at the weekends.

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