Dolls? You still play with dolls?
Tee hee heee, yes I do!
But Honey, you’re 30 years old?!
Oh dear god, what have I married??!
Exactly, it’s too late now!! 
All photos by my *UBER* talented friend Jennifer Skog.
I’m feeling much better today thankyou. The annoying thing about migraines is that they can wipe me out for days. Nothing is worse than the day itself of course, but here we are on Friday night and I’m still a little under the weather. At least I can see out of both eyes now though.
I’ve been having intermittent migraines since I was about seven years old and remember clearly the first – I had no idea what was wrong with me and naturally thought that I had been stricken with some horrible illness and was going to die. I was a hypochondriac even back then. But all these years on I now know how to recognise them and how to deal and ’survive’. They usually creep up over a couple of days and I usually feel a bit off and don’t know why. Then on the morning of, I wake up and usually something is WRONG. This time for instance, I woke up and practically had to prise my eyelids apart from all the crusted goo. It was absolutely not usual and clearly very WRONG indeed. Naturally I thought I’d come down with some form of (probably life-threatening) eye infection, but to my disappointment nothing really came of it after that. Instead, a couple of hours later it took ten minutes for my face to turn green, followed by disco lights strobing in my peripheral vision and then slowly but surely everything in my right eye started to go white. From experience I know that by this stage I usually have an hour before the nausea sets in. As you can imagine this isn’t very convenient when you’re more than an hour from home, but thistime I was in the kitchen. So I quietly finished my ironing, gulped down three big mugs of very strong but very milky tea and headed to bed to go to sleep. Given that migraines cause the blood vessels in your brain to overly dilate (which causes all the trippy weirdness) and that caffeine causes them to shrink, I thought up this little home remedy in the hopes that they’d cancel each other out and it seems to work….well for me at least. Anyway yes, then after that I went to sleep for about ten hours. Sleep, I hear you cry, after three big mugs of tea? Yes, sleep. As any migraine person will tell you, you get overwhelmed with a wave of exhaustion (which if you time it well it means you can sleep through the other nasty side effects), and it’s this exhaustion which tends to linger on for up to a couple of days….well for me at least.
But all is better now and finally I have got around to sorting through the photos that we took last week. What with there being 750+ (the curse of the digital camera) this was by no means a quick task and I’m about 90% there now. But for the most part there are enough to show you what we got up to for the week.
Firstly, this is where we called home for the week. We were in the end cottage on the right which was right on the shore of Coniston Water and absolutely lovely. There was an original slate floor in the kitchen, real wonky ceilings upstairs and a real log fire in the hearth. That’s our front door with the ivy around it.
And in the front was a nice garden that we shared with the four other cottages. This was the view out of the front door, we were right on the waterfront, it was idyllic!
Although I had ideas of us doing nothing all week, we actually were rather busy in the end and were out sightseeing every day. There was so much to see up there… we saw ancient stone circles…
Pretty lakes…
More wildernessy lakes (that’s England’s highest mountain by the way)…
Really tall forests…
We went for nice walks…
We drove over mountain passes…
We drove over even higher ones and took pictures at the top… (you can just about see the windey road; this one had nasty steep drops on one side and sharp switchbacks and I had to drive up in first gear)…
We climbed up the peaks…. well DrMrNin did, whereas I sat in the car eating fruit cake to calm my nerves at having to take on the 33% gradients that were ahead of our drive…
We saw waterfalls…
And took full advantage of the nice photo ops there, and for all the girls wherever we were…
We met the world’s most friendliest sheep…
We rode our bikes…
We saw pretty sunsets…
Dramatic sunsets…
And drank lots of tea in historic tearooms…
Cecily got a little bit homesick one night…
And Scarlett cried a little bit on the walk as she was tired and thought we were lost…
But apart from that everything was lovely, and we had a throughly relaxing time in our little stone cottage in the Lake District 
When I’ve got all the photos sorted out (there are all the other pics of our outings to the other lakes, all the Beatrix Potter things, John Ruskin’s house, and a visit to the slate mine to name but a few) I’ll put them all up in a slideshow if anyone wants to see more… I know our family does. Cumbria really is a special place and well worth a visit.
Oooh, before I forget, we also stopped at Blackpool on the way home, it was one of England’s first holiday resorts and a bit of a national treasure. This is the pier which alongside Blackpool Tower are probably its most famous landmarks.
It wasn’t really Paige’s sort of thing – loud amusement arcades and little ears don’t really mix – but she agreed to have her photograph taken in the end…
And now I have to keep my end of the bargain and make her some more clothes
