2013 Mallorca Holiday

I thought it was about time I updated my blog, I seem to be finding it really hard to find the time to pop in here lately :-(  I was chatting to a fellow bloggy and real life friend about this and I think as I now take so many photos I am getting more and more picky about the quality of them and it is stopping me blog more often.  It takes so long to go through my 100s of images and then edit or watermark them that by the time I have done that I run out of time to type.  I am spending more time on facebook as on there you can just share and image with a one liner ...... hhmmmm maybe I ought to start doing that here???

Anyway I have gone off my original reason for popping in (probably another reason I run out of time lol) and that was to chat about our holiday.

We went off to Mallorca back in early June and to be honest I was rather nervous about our trip.  If anyone read my last years diary of events on our holiday you may remember that eldest Sweetpea was being held hostage by the teenage hormone monster :-(    Well I am glad to say that this year was wonderful, the hormone monster only visited very rarely and it made such a difference!

I did things a bit differently too, I took the children out on their own for a few evenings.  We went on nice long walks exploring, chatting, giggling, treasure hunting.  It was so lovely spending time with each of them on their own and they really enjoyed it too - wahhoo I must still be slightly cool if the older ones want to spend time with Mummy :-)

Above is a photo of some of those walks, the 'Coto Privado de Caza' sign made me chuckle as Little Sweetpea kept asking about those signs.  I told her that it meant that that piece of land was private property, this worried her so much that after seeing about the 3rd sign we had to turn back.  We were walking on the track next to the land but no matter how many times I tried to explain this to her she was still worrying :-)  The cloud photo in the images above is from an afternoon when we went to the beach for a picnic.  It was so windy there that we had to go back home and abort the picnic idea, we then decided to picnic on the villa roof and whilst doing that we were watching the clouds and guessing what they looked like.  There is also a picture of Mr Sweetpea doing our annual height chart of the children, my goodness Eldest Sweetpea is shooting up in height!  Precious memories.

Piggle had to join us on holiday again this year, he loves Mallorca and snuck into the hand luggage!  As did the gnome on the top right of the images above.  My Grandad loves gnomes so we took him out for him to see when he goes out there, unfortunately we are not sure if him and Nan will go out again as they are starting to worry if the steps up to the villa are too much for them and the long walk through Palma airport :-(  Mr gnome will however be a happy little reminder of their times out there in the sun.

We had lots of lovely beach time, the beach is fantastic as it is like a babysitter for us in a way.  The children are so happy there and hardly ever argue when there.  There was surfing taking place, sand castle building, exploring, fish and crab catching.  Little Sweetpea even had a little Hermit Crab pet for the day, he was put back where she found him before we went home :-)

I enjoyed many a happy hour creating a new crochet ripple blanket whilst down on the beach or in the evenings/mornings back at the villa.  I didn't get too many odd looks whilst I sat crocheting happily away at the seaside, well may be the odd one when I had to chase an escapee ball of wool down the beach steps :-)  I think I will call this one my tranquility blanket as it certainly made me feel tranquil.   As you can see it is very different from my last creation, I just love the bright colours of this one .....

Mr Sweetpea was busy cutting down tree branches whilst we were there.  My parents bought the villa many years ago when I was about 10 years old and not many years before that there had been a huge bush fire which literally burnt round the hills surrounding the villa.  This meant the land looked quite bare when we first got there but the views were fantastic so we are now trying to cut back some of the tress branches which are now blocking our lovely view, plus it keeps Mr Sweetpea busy :-)

We had fun exploring the coves around our favourite beach in Porto Colom ..... just loved the secret tunnel under a house near the beach (top right image).

 The island is just so beautiful ........

....... if not a little hot, it got above 40 deg C some days which meant we didn't go to the beach until about 4pm most days.  We had great fun people watching whilst there too, there was one chap who rowed to the beach most days from a big boat with his dogs Ronnie and Reggie.  One day were also saw a couple Paddle Boarding, I didn't realise that craze had got as far as Spain :-)  The girl who was doing it had her labrador sitting on the front of her board.

The children found lots of animals whilst we were there, some more welcome than others.  There were Octopus, crabs, Dresser Crabs (Dad did some research on these and found a fab video clip about them) and the not so welcome Jelly Fish which stung Eldest Sweetpea on two occasions.  I did offer to wee on it but he wasn't having any of it :-)  For any of you who don't know if you wee on a Jelly Fish sting it stops it stinging, I am not being ultra weird lol   The beach had an invasion of these Jellyfish for a couple of days, even the locals were shocked at how many came into the cove.

To end the holiday we had to have our annual family photo so show how much the children are growing ..... and Mr Sweetpea is shrinking :-)