Hubby has been away on a business trip recently and I had a full day of respite organised on the Saturday of the week he was gone. As usual, I decided to get out of the house and go do something with Daughter Number Two and The Hungry Boy. We love to try out new venues and seeing as we hadn't used our English Heritage cards for a least a month or two, I decided it was time get them out, dust them off and put them to use again in making some more memories!
We left Heni at home in the capable hands of Laura and set off on our adventures to..... Audley End house. It is about an hour and a half drive from where we live and so wouldn't have been a natural choice of places to go if Heni was coming with us....plus the fact that it would be a full day out.... long trips tend to takes their toll on her these days. Seeing as it was just the three of us we packed a quick picnic, stuffed it in a cool bag and hopped in the car and headed out...
When we arrived we were surprised to see that we had by chance chosen a day on which they were hosting their apple festival.... so we followed the signs....
...past all of the beautifully planted plots of vegetables...
....beneath the gorgeous gourd arbours...
...and the pleasingly pleasant pumpkin displays...
... following the fiery flourish of flowers
... all the way to the kitchen Garden....
The autumnal decorations around the gardens looked gorgeous...It made me wish I could create such splendid scenes in my own back garden with a few potted geraniums and a wheel barrow full of apples....
Somehow everything
appeared to be not only a feast to the eye, but to the palate as well. It made us all want to have apple sauce and caramel apples and apple crumble and ...and... and...
We never knew there were so many different varieties of apples! We even found an apple with the same name as Daughter Number Two (her real name that is!)
The hungry boy went dunking for apples...
and we all wandered around the produce stalls taking in the sights.
After buying some pressed apple juice for our picnic we decided to venture around the rest of the gardens and the vine house ...which contained the most enormous tomatoes that we had ever seen.
All the vines were beautifully manicured and pruned.... (unlike my own vine which trails haphazardly over my trellis)
Hunger pangs struck and so we decided to have our picnic on the lawn in front of the grand house facing the lake...
We roamed around the stables .....where we had fun trying out all the different saddles...
We stepped back in time as we chatted to "Mr Barker" the stable man who gave us a message......
...to tell "Sylvia" the kitchen maid that he "Ardently admired her pies!"
...we meandered in and out of the rooms being filled with a plethora of sights from the house's history...
...and got a sense of what life was like "way back when".
It always makes me appreciate living in the 21st century and how grateful I am for all the modern conveniences we have in our lives today. Life was physically hard back then with all the chores that needed to be done everyday ...just to stay alive. People grew a lot of their own food, baked their own bread, and took all day just to prepare their meals and wash their clothes.
We may very well have it easier in a lot of ways in today's world but we also have certain things a lot harder. I doubt very much that our ancestors would be able to cope with the never ending series of task that we have to do on a day to day basis and would probably recoil from the hustle and bustle and busyness of our day. In some respects stress as we know it today was probably very alien to them...but life was just very "different". Pluses and minuses both ways.
Parenting a special needs child can feel the same at times and it can be tempting to compare our lives with other " normal" families who live life in a different way. We just have to remember that our lives are just "different"....pluses and minuses both ways (see Italy and Holland post)
It's good to escape the day to day stresses of being a special needs parent (and sibling) by going out and having days like our "Audley End" day ....with all the sights, sounds and stimulation of the senses that we received. Whenever we make the effort to go out we always return, renewed, refreshed and have a restored sense of gratitude for the lives that we are living ...even amid the challenges and hard times.
I invite each of you to take time out to RENEW, REFRESH and RESTORE in whatever way best suits you ....and I hope that you too, can receive that much needed regeneration and respite to carry on amidst your own particular personal challenges.
Until next time
Jx
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