Hello again. We have all settled down now after a couple of months of adjustments. First back to school for James with a later finish time and starting football after school. Also Lily started play school one day a week. Then I went back to work with more hours and a second class group to teach as my dear colleague Marion retired. Luckily Nuria, our lovely au pair, arrived back to us to help with everything. As they don't celebrate Halloween as much in Spain Nuria has been really enjoying the festivities here in Dublin which are gaining in momentum each year and have nearly reached American standards.
Nuria (in the middle) and her friends Ester and Christina as Bees going to a Halloween partyWe celebrated Halloween well this year starting with decorating our windows properly last week thanks to many supplies sent over from auntie Alicia! We also got sent an angel and a ninja costume from uncle Simon which got the dressing-up started a week in advance. James managed to do a lot of his pumpkin carving himself this year and got seriously stuck into scraping out the guts! He also helped with the making of his soldier costume sewing a few seams on the machine by himself. Lily changed her mind several times about what she wanted to dress up as. She wore her angel costume to her play school party which went down well with the other princesses. I had assumed she would want to be a bumble bee as she loves and copies everything Nuria does but as the colour pink is of paramount importance to her a pig was the final choice. Not shy at all to knock on doors Lily did extremely well at the trick-or-treating and she had a well rehearsed snort ready in case anyone asked for a trick. However she got stage fright when a trick was requested on two occasions.
Tank Commander James
Lily the pig
Ninja Paddy going for the punch while tank commander has a munch on a twix
We ended our Halloween celebrations with some sparklers and a night walk to the local bomfire.