Happy New Year 2017

Just a quick post to wish you all a belated happy new year, I hope you have got the year off to a good start. We have all been quite poorly with the flu over the Christmas season so were out of action a little bit and everyone has been resting up well to recover, however we are definitely much improved now. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas season.

The children have spent their recovering time enjoying all their presents including the many games, lego sets, education sets and craft kits to learn and complete to name a few things. They have also been catching up on some very interesting documentaries and are currently enjoying the royal institute Christmas science lectures.

I was able to make good use of the elderberry syrup made earlier in the year as we all had the flu and it has been lovely to enjoy all the homemade and home grown produce over the Christmas season. This year we made our own pickled onions grown by my husband at the allotment, these tasted absolutely amazing and we will definitely be making them again. Our redcurrant jelly also went down well.

The new year is bringing exciting projects and new challenges, we are expanding our plant collections and planting many more interesting things from seed. For me this means extending my cactus and succulent collection and starting off these new seeds when the weather warms up.

So as you can see we are still here and I hope to be resurrecting this blog more as time goes on, adding more crafts, science and other learning projects with an added taste of our lifestyle too... Happy New Year from our whole family at Lightly Enchanted.

Not back to school 2016

Over the years we have been to theme parks, zoos, beaches and picnics to mark the occasion of not going back to school as a home educating family... it has become a kind of tradition. However this year we have decided to take a more leisurely approach to the day as we have a really busy week planned out ahead of us.

So to start the day we went to visit a local park for a spot of hill rolling and playing, it turned out to be quite a relaxing day.

After this we went on a nature walk to look for the common lizard colony we have been watching for a few years. Many of them were out sunning themselves and we even managed to spot several young baby ones which shows the colony is doing quite well. Thank-you to my wonderful husband for this photo as they move to fast for me.

We also took the chance to collect the elderberries for this seasons elderberry syrup, we had noticed that they were very ripe and didn't want to miss the chance to be ready for the cold and flu season.

If you would like to make your own elderberry syrup or to read about it a little more, my post can be found right here.