Quarry Bank Mill

This morn­ing we met up w/ B and Co. for a day at Quarry Bank Mill. While I was there I became a National Trust mem­ber.  It’s some­thing I have wanted to do for a while but just never got around to doing it.  The QBM is very nice– I had never been there so was pleas­antly sur­prised but it all.  The only thing we went for was story time at the Secret Gar­den.  Now the only secret bit about the gar­den was that it sucked  and wasn’t all that kid/pushchair friendly but we man­aged.  Here’s a photo taken when we were about a third of the way down.  Can you say HOLY STEEPNESS BATMAN!!

We got all the way up there and then had a bit of a pic­nic with the kids. Squidge was being a PITA about eat­ing– sud­denly she didn’t like sausages or toma­toes!  WTF kid you’d nor­mally eat those with­out a prob­lem.  So after threat­en­ing her (cuz that’s how I roll, although I will have to be care­ful or some­one might arrest me) she ate enough to sat­isfy me.

After a bit of run­ning around in the tall grass it was time to head back down.  It was a bit nerve wrack­ing as it was very very steep but we all made it down in one piece.

Then it was time for the real rea­son we went there story time.  Squidge is crazy for sto­ries so I knew it was going to be a big hit, I was just sur­prised at how big a hit it was.  There were no books the woman just read from memory.

I thought she was going to be bored but it ended up being the best ever as there was noth­ing to dis­tract her.  The last time we went to sto­ry­time at the library the woman read­ing was very cross w/ Squidge.  She was soo irri­tated that at the end she refused to read the last book and just ended it rather abruptly.  I was a lit­tle upset about it because the story time is for preschool­ers so she can’t expect them to be per­fect lit­tle angels and LORD KNOWS Squidge is no angel.  All she was really doing was say­ing she had a cer­tain book or why was this/that hap­pen­ing.   So I’ve been work­ing on her about this– chat­ting to her about how she can’t inter­rupt the per­son read­ing and to stay sit­ting down– yah know that sort of thing.  This is usu­ally pretty dif­fi­cult for Squidge when they have inter­ac­tive type books– open pic­ture win­dows or pull tabs– she want to do it all the time.  Do I inter­rupt and tell her to sit down dur­ing the story or do I wait until after and have a chat w/ her.  SO any­hoo off track here but this time she was pretty good.  Not too much talk­ing.  C & N got tired of it after about 3 sto­ries (I don’t blame them so was I!!) but not Squidge she stayed for over an hour lis­ten­ing to the woman repeat­ing the same sto­ries over and over.  I’m won­der­ing if the fact that I usu­ally have CD ver­sions of her books play­ing in the car helped her stay focused.  She was pay­ing atten­tion too because later on I asked her what her favorite story she told me.  She also was able to tell me a bit about the actual story.  Not bad for a 3 yr old and no book. I’m very proud of her.  Now if only she would fol­low­ing direc­tion when there’s a book involved. *sigh* baby steps. baby steps.

While Squidge was being enter­tained the rest of us were off to the side enjoy­ing the sun and kick­ing balls around and mak­ing friends.  Then it was off to a play­ground for big­ger kids (5+) were we didn’t have a very good view of the equip­ment so it wasn’t as relax­ing as it might have been.

We walked around and ended up in Styl vil­lage and just have a very pleasent day. Not much there but a few houses and a cou­ple of churches.  So it was back down the path to the cars.

It was  bit pricey (£4 carpark, £5 gar­den (so not worth it) admis­sion) but really we would have spent that much if we had gone to a soft play area and this way they got to enjoy the fan­tas­tic weather.  We need to get out there while we have it because lord knows it will prob­a­bly rain again soon enough!