As Autumn tries its hardest to keep everyone smiling with the late Sun so does our Budlington! We have been away the past two weekends trying our best to string out the good weather and spend some quality family time together.
First off we tagged onto the back of Karen's parents holiday for a weekend in the beautiful Snowdonia National Park. We stayed in a lovely old cottage which offered a great new environment for Rosie to explore. She enjoyed shuffling around, getting to know her surroundings and pinching the odd novel from the bookshelf! The cottage had a couple of steps, one down from the kitchen and one down into a conservatory – this became a bit of an issue for Rosie and we'd keep catching her shuffling up to the step, pondering, then lowering one leg over at a time to test the distance – this is one of the first times we've seen her show caution which is a promising sign for any parent of a seemingly fearless child! At one point however, Grandad did find her in the conservatory and we have no idea how she made that manoeuvre – thankfully there were no tears although when we encouraged her to try again she wasn't interested. Getting up the step offered a different challenge altogether and although she didn't achieve it we watched as she tried several times to work out the best route. She put one leg on the step then realised that wasn't a feasible option, leaned over onto it but wasn't sure what to do next then she turned around reversed up to it and tried to bump herself high enough to bounce her bum up! We did try encouraging and helping her but seeing as she doesn't front crawl at all it was never going to be easy.
The highlight of the weekend came when we took a trip on an old steam train and Rosie sang to the whole carriage – I've included a short clip of this in the video below.
The singing carried on into the next weekend where Rosie entertained and (most likely) woke up fellow campers as we braved the October weather to go on our first camping weekend as a family. Thankfully Rosie took to it like a duck to water and slept quite happily both nights right through! We had my sister and her family there on standby next to us with their plush caravan just incase it got too cold for her but she was fine. Rosie enjoyed being made a fuss of by her cousins who offered her plenty of cuddles and different hairstyles!
Singing-in-the-train from SwissBaldItalic on Vimeo.