The big summer adventure: Adventure 1 - The Castle

Well it's nearly the summer holidays.. Although its been summer for nearly a month for me. But for my siblings summers only just begun! Since my Mum works during the week I've become the "Summer Mum" for my siblings. I'm devising a plan / summer to do list for them so they won't get bored and I don't end up pulling all of my hair out haha! My siblings have quiet a large age gap. There's 7 years between my little brother and sister and 7 years between my sister and I and an enormous 14 years between my little brother and I! I could actually be his Mum! But lets not think about how old I am haha!! Because of this age gap it's kind of hard to get them to do the same activities.. I mean what 13 year old girl do you know that would love to go hiking up a hill or go exploring caves for hidden treasure?

You don't right? Unless your lucky enough to have a 14 year old daughter/ sibling who acts her age and not yours! The first adventure I took my little man (Jakey) on was to one of the National Parks we have in England. Lyme Park.. it is huge! We got lost about 3 times but it was sort of fun between the tantrums and sulky faces.

We got pretty lucky with the weather as you can see, blue skies which makes a change from all this rain we have been having. Before the trip I made a Jake an adventure rucksack with things you can find at the poundshop; magnifying glasses, compass, torch that sort of thing I'll post the full pack in detail in a later post. He loved the pack! I advise anyone with little boys or girls to make one for your adventures they will love it!

I got Jake to keep a look out for flowers, leaves and insects. I brought along a disposable camera for him so we had to excuse but to print the pictures to see them so he could scrapbook them throughout the summer.

A let Jake have a go of my camera so he'd have something to show my Mum when we got back, pretty good shot he got here of a lovely flower which I need to look up before he asks me what it exactly is.

The castle was so far away but it was totally worth walking up and down hills to get to it, Jake enjoyed taking pictures of the Castle and it's details. Thinking about it now it would have been a great chance to get some wax rubbings but at least that's an idea for next time.

Jake here sporting his adventure rucksack! This was on the way back down from the castle, which we misjudged as going down. In fact we took about a 3 mile circle back to where we where standing we got a little lost. The amount of things these children can moan about is just beyond me, I tried to keep them occupied with a game of eye-spy but of course my teenage sister was too cool for eye-spy but she joined in towards the end when she realised how much fun we was having. haha

After the long walk we all needed an iced cream break or in Shaun's case a quick nap!

Everybody loves iced cream! Even teenagers, they love chocolate iced cream the most it forces them to do break out in this terrible rash, I think they call it a smile! haha.

After our not so quick break we went off to look for the Reindeer's which was the sole reason for coming. These Deer's however did not wish to be found! We'd been walking for so long that even I started to moan a little! The map back at the information point didn't help much either but we got there in the end.. eventually.