Friday, October 19, 2012

Dinosaurs Down The Road

Tash had been especially keen to visit Knebworth house this summer.  Our first attempt was scuppered by some popular music group taking over the venue and so we tried again a few weeks back (29/09).

Little did I realise but its basically a big dinosaur jungle with a side order of giant wooden play den.  Oh my God, it was awesome!!!

As we started our wander we were greeted by a little chalk board where kids had scrawled various dinosaur type images.  Alfie went crazy with chalk, and Tash had a little doodle too ... but I'll come back to all that later.

As we walked on I found this awesome lake and fallen tree.



We also met the plastic chap on the bench.


And then we went on the hunt for dinosaurs.


Alfie and I had an awesome time running about and he loved shouting out to Tash, Esme and I to pinpoint where the dino's were hiding.  No doubt that he full grasped their enormity too!


Dinosaurs didn't scare me though!


With Stegasaurus tamed we made our way to the wooden fort.  We passed by the aforementioned chalk board to see that amazingly Tash's picture hadn't been erased by some toddler.  It had been the victim of 'yoof' and been valdalised instead!!  I laughed SO HARD!


What I was greeted by when we reached the fort was the BEST.  PLAY AREA.  EVER.  They even let Alfie go down the sack slides on his own!




Esme thought it was a pretty amazing place too!  The state of the knees says it all!




And the perfect way to end the day, the family on a swing!

 
All my pics from the day are here.

Ink And Animals

Life seems to have been super busy recently and I've fallen way behind with the blog.  Well the catchup starts here ... I hope!

Nearly a month ago (23rd Sept) Tash took a day off work so we could have a family day out down to the south coast.  My friend Nicky now lives in Australia and I hadn't seen her since the days when I worked in the city.  She has a young boy, Riley, who is just a little older than Alfie and we had often spoken about how lovely it would be to see the two of them play together.  They were in the UK for three weeks and ridiculously busy but we managed to squeeze in an afternoon shortly before their boarding call was announced.

This also presented an opportunity for me to visit Skelly in the morning and get some ink on my leg!  With the day planned out we set off ridiculously early and comfortably reached Portsmouth for 10:30am.

This piece was started over 10 years ago, but I wanted to give it a freshen up and so we squeezed in a few hours before lunch.  That gave us time to do the outline and a large chunk of the biomech shading.  I hadn't seen Skelly for nearly 10 years either so it was great to catch up and check out his new shop.  Next sitting will see the biomech shading finished, the leopard gecko touched up, and then start to think about introducing the weeping angel around the other side.


Here's the before and after pics. I am very excited for my next sitting and to see the leg all finished off!


 

With my leg all wrapped up we made our way out to a farm just outside of Pompey and met up with Nicky and Riley.   This is Riley, such an awesome little dude!


Animal feed was purchased and the kids were let loose.  And what fun they had!


And whilst the boys enjoyed being boys Esme enjoyed some quality sling time with Tash.


Some went high and some went low.


Whilst others went left and a few went right.


A few years spent around the Aussie bush has led Nicky to forget all about British farms.  The goats caused her enormous surprise!

 
 And she made for a very awkward customer at the kids 'shop'.


 Eventually chickens, goats, pigs and alpacas get tiring though and it was time for refreshments.


But its as we were about to leave that the real fun was found.  Cos what more do kids need than a pair of wellies (or not in Riley's case) and some muddy puddles.




And if the pictures leave you in any doubt here's the video to back it all up!


It was a great day, and just a shame Riley and Alfie can't play together more often.  But maybe days like this wouldn't be so magical if they could.

And to round off a great day we rolled round to Hayling Island and enjoyed fish and chips with a view out to sea.


All my photos of the day can be found here.