ilultham

 For a long time now I've been saying how much I'd like to build an earth oven. The trouble with saying it lots, that doesn't mean it happens!  So yesterday each of the children had asked to do something with me (eldest wanted to do green woodwork, middlest wanted to use my pyro pen to burn some pictures onto wood and the youngest wanted to carve some dinosaurs) So I thought maybe we should do something we can all be involved with.  The day before I had started to clear an area for a proper clay oven with the digger. The trouble was I'd never used clay or cob as a building material. The book we were using suggested we make a small oven first (all the materials can be reused anyway) so we set about mixing some cob! We started with some old building sand that had stuff growing in it to make a former for the clay. the girls were hard working in getting the sand up to where we were going to build it.  Once that was roughly built the fun could begin! The boy didn't want ...

 For a long time I've been keen to take the girls camping, but something always comes up or gets in the way. That's why I was pleased when a mate mentioned that for his daughters birthday he'd like the girls and me to go "wild" camping with them.  So no tents. My eldest has been camping before (admittedly in different circumstances as was a huge scout camp!)  but not like this, and my younger daughter is yet to sleep outside (bad dad I know). They were both super excited about it though.  We were camping in a "wild campsite" where the is a long thin woodland along a river the other side of Brecon. When we arrived the others had already picked a camp so we strung up our tarp and set our bivi bags out with sleeping bags inside.  Luckily the girls fit in one bivi bag so it would help to keep them warmer (it got down to about 2 degrees C), also saved me from having to buy a third bivi bag just yet!  We ate like kings the whole weekend - in fact probably too ...