I've realised a lot of images on my website are of Tyrannosaurs.
This week was half term, so we took the boys up to London to register them for their American citizenship (they now have dual British-American nationality, British from me, American from Steph). After 3 hours sitting waiting in the US Embassy, we rewarded the boys with a trip to the National History Museum, and particularly the dinosaur gallery.
Baby X is a little young for it, but he likes crowds, but Mr D had what may have been the absolute best time of his life. He loves dinosaurs and adores animals, so he tore around, identifying species and boggling at everything. We chased after, trying not to lose him in the ridiculous crowds.
Anyway, we had a good time, and half term is over tomorrow, so Mr D is back to school and Steph and I have to get back to work.
Right now I’ve cleared out all of the freelance work I’ve had, so I can dive into writing. I don’t have long to draft my new book, and I have loads of figuring out to do before I can even start, so it’s going to be a busy few weeks.
It was a beautiful, warm, sunny Sunday here in Wales today. This doesn’t happen very often. Mr. Darcy, Baby X and I decided to take a long walk, first along the nearby canal, then up into the hills. We went up to Keeper’s Pond, in Blaenavon.
This whole area is absolutely fascinating. The Welsh valleys were big mining and industrial areas, so parts of the hills look like scenes from Mordor, with great heaps of old slag. Keeper’s Pond was actually the pond that supplied water to an enormous forge that produced hundreds of tons of iron. This is what it looked like in the nineteenth century:
Now that entire forge and the village that came along with it are completely gone.
We sat and had our sandwiches looking out over the pond to the bleak moors beyond. There was hardly any breeze but plenty of haze, and the sunlight intermittently breaking through. Mr. D. searched for predators, checking for footprints and investigating ‘scat’ (thankfully just lumps of soil…), while Baby X stared around with wide blue eyes from the safety of his buggy.
It was Mothers’ day over here in the UK, too, and the boys did a fantastic job of choosing a Mothers’ day present (a lovely heart necklace).
