Santander

I promise that I will post some sewing soon. Really I will, but in the meantime, I thought I'd share some photos of our recent holiday to Santander. If you follow me on Instagram you've probably seen most of these already, and this will be a pretty photo heavy post.

This was the first time we'd taken the boys abroad. The first time they'd been on a plane. So we thought we'd start fairly simple. My brother is actually getting married next year to his Turkish girlfriend, in Istanbul, so this was the test run so to speak. Closer to home, a much shorter flight, a language that I have at least a vague chance of being able to pronounce and relatively familiar currency.

We flew Ryanair from Edinburgh direct to Santander and stayed in our first Airbnb, which was lovely. I realise I haven't taken many photos of it, so the link is here.  It was really central, spacious and had a nice mix of period details and modernity.

Santander itself is a nice city. It's on the North coast of Spain in Cantabria, not far from St Sebastian and Bilbao. It's a financial rather than touristy city, but it's pretty nonetheless and the beaches are gorgeous. It also has amazing play parks.

The food was nice, but I don't feel that we probably had the best on offer. Trying to find places that catered for us all was tricky. I don't consider my kids to be overly fussy, but Baby Boy pretty much lived on bread, chorizo and ice cream for 4 days. The stuff I thought they would like - tortillas, croquettes, even the spanish ham and cheese - were pretty much rejected. They far preferred the cheap hamburguesas that our guidebook said to avoid.

Lately

I haven't been doing much sewing since I last posted. I was feeling a bit poorly and tired, and then it's been half term this week.

Since I feel like I've been out of touch, here's a bit of what I've been up to in the meantime:

We had Bobby Bear (Small Boy's class bear) home for the weekend. We went to the library, the zoo and Bobby got his own homemade pizza for dinner on the Saturday night!

I've been trying to stop biting my nails. It was going well until they started splitting and basically disintegrating. Sigh.

I got this embroidery kit for my birthday. It's by Nancy Nicholson, and as you can see, the stitches are printed onto the fabric, making it very easy to keep it neat. It's nice and relaxing to do on the evenings when I want to do something, but not get the sewing machine out.

Valentine's card from my boys.

A visit to the Botanics

For half term, we went to Dundee for a couple of nights. It's only about an hour away from us and our hotel was free, as my husband has loads of Best Western points from working away so much last year. It's not the most beautiful of cities, but it has lots of heritage and there is quite a lot to do.

We visited the Science Centre, which was excellent. It's fairly small, but we had animal handling (including a meercat,of which we failed to get a photo), and 3 seperate demonstrations/experiments/lectures. Plus lots of fun with mirrors, and the opportunity to pretend to be a bogey, by sliding out of a giant nose.

I always seem to manage to sneak something sewing related into a family holiday. This time it was the Verdant Works, a museum about the Jute Mills, a major part of Dundee's history.

The boat is the Friggate Unicorn, the world's oldest still floating battleship, or something similar. We were advised to avoid Discovery, and were advised this was better. It was certainly a lot cheaper, and there was enough to keep Small Boy interested for an hour, or so. Baby Boy just liked the "horsey".

Small Boy and I even ended up as the Facebook and Twitter page header photo for Dundee City!