New Boots and the John Bunyan

Noah's got new boots!

Noah (in the new boots), staring up at one of England's famously ginormous trees...

This is ahead of our Easter holiday trip to Snowdonia, about which we are both very excited. So of course, on Saturday, we had to go for a walk to break them in. It had to be quite a short walk because we didn't get to set off until about 4pm, but it turned out to be a very enjoyable one. We drove to Marford Road and had a stroll down to Coleman Green, where the John Bunyan (so named because that prestigious gentleman once stayed the night in a nearby cottage, of which only the chimney remains!) offers a pleasingly wide range of vegetarian food in the midst of a quite astonishing selection of willow pattern plates and Toby jugs.

Near the beginning of the walk

PP#12: Rusty Gate

Sunset through a (different) gate

Pathfinders Weekend

So this post is a whole week late... well, life's a busy thing sometimes. I did take this photo on Pathfinders Weekend, an exciting excursion for our 11 to 14 year-olds to long-established scouting centre Gilwell Park. I took many more photos, of course (though Noah took even more than I did), but as most of them had young'uns in the frame I thought I'd better not use any on my blog. To be honest it was raining most of the time, so the pictures didn't come out great. I like this one, though, of the prayer room we set up on Saturday evening. Illooms are quite literally brilliant!

Pleasing Photo #11: Prayer Room

Lollipop Tree

PP#10: Lollipop Tree

Yesterday was Anna and Matt's wedding. Noah and I arrived a little flustered, only a few minutes before the start of the service, bearing the fruit of the morning's labour: a caramel mud cake, iced after the fashion of a five-year-old with a white chocolate ganache simultaneously too runny and hideously lumpy.

I enjoyed attending an entire service with my husband; it was something of a novelty that he didn't have to stand up or give an announcement or preach a sermon or run a youth group even once during the service! We held hands and enjoyed the ceremony, in many ways reminiscent of our own nuptials now almost a whole year ago! We should really think about taking down that "Just Married" banner sometime soon...

The party after the service was rather good too. There was a lot of cake, and then, because they felt we'd probably had enough cake by the time we got round to the speeches, they gave us ice cream. Yum! And the heavily laden cake table gave me the opportunity to snap this week's Pleasing Photo of the Lollipop Tree, seen above. A fun wedding!

Not as fun as ours, of course.

I was gratified to see that, despite the lumpy ganache, my cake was gone within minutes of the guests entering the large hall. Perhaps something to do with its judiciously central placement on the table...

Oh, and for an added bonus, here's a photo Noah took of me enjoying one of the lollipops*.

Kate enjoying the fruit of the Lollipop Tree

*Yes, I agree, it's better than the PP. But I didn't take it!!