2006 Noyce News

We spent the first week of May in England, on holiday in Bournemouth. We originally planned on going over to visit my family in Cornwall but they decamped a week before we left so we decided to stay in Bournemouth and have a beach holiday.

Bournemouth is actually a really nice holiday town, with beautiful parks, a good old-fashioned pier, an enormous sandy beach and lots of shops in easy walking distance. We had a nice modern apartment looking out on squirrel-infested trees with all mod cons.

The weather cooperated too and we got pretty good spring weather, a little rain but two very sunny beachable days too. On the rainy day we trucked the toads into the local aquarium and there were plenty more things available had we needed them. The boys were bemused by the variety of exotic trees in the Winter Gardens and Daniel was particularly taken with the “feather tree” (Palm in the picture).

The little film confusingly refers to our holiday in Brighton, but that is just Marjolein being dappy… This month she started thyroxin to bump up her thyroid production, the last of her family to do so. She is hoping that the mass of little niggling complaints she has (listlessness, very dry feet etc.) will clear up now.

Back at home and back to school and Daniel got to hand out treats for his birthday. That should have happened before the holiday, but his teacher was ill then so it got delayed.

Mother’s Day rolled round and the monsters showed Marjolein in handicrafts: Falco had made a very beautiful flower, Daniel a papier-mâché piggy-bank and Matthijs a beautifully hand-written “Things to do with Mama” sort of mind-map: very original.

The next weekend we visited Marjolein’s aunt and uncle in Drente. They have a lovely big garden with trees all around it and a huge fish-pond, so the kiddos had a fine time and played outside a lot. Marjolein had made a DVD out of all the old family cine-camera films as a present. It made her rather nostalgic as there were lots of pictures of her father from 1970: he died five years later. Strange to see people walking and talking when they are no longer around.

The picture shows uncle Onno retrieving a pool-side light from the rather chilly pond after Daniel knocked it in in a fit of foolishness: we were not amused…

Back at school we were looking forward to having a three-toad school photograph for the first time but got called up by Daniel’s teacher because the little rascal had fallen asleep at playtime. We took him home and he got a headache and a temperature so we put him to bed. Matthijs came down with the same thing, a couple of hours later, so we packed him off to beddy-byes too and congratulated ourselves on a quiet evening for once…

At ten o’ clock Daniel came crying to us because he had a fever-dream of animated tress trying to eat him, so we tucked him up in our big bed. At two in the morning Matthijs roused the house with blood-curdling screams because he thought his ears were getting bigger and bigger and would presently explode. After a visit to the bathroom mirror he settled down, but at four ‘o clock he crept in to bed with us because the dreams were too creepy. Given that our alarm clocks were set to go off two and three hours later respectively we called school the next morning that they would not be coming in and so there is no school picture this year. The next day they were fine again. Such is life.

The children saw some re-runs of the Flintstones on television and fortunately Marjolein watched too, so that when, the next day, Daniel piped up with “Dragons are more dangerous than Dinosaurs, so that’s why they use dinosaurs for stairs” she could place it. Mostly we can’t.

The month closed with “Playing Outside Day” and lots of great games and activities organized by volunteers for the kiddos. Our monsters had a fine time, Matthijs got cool sunglasses, Daniel got face-painted as a lion and Falco perplexed the face-painting lady by demanding to be King Kong.