About the House

 Breakfast Time

 Emma and Skye catch the mysterious blue tongue disease

Emma turns a full 180 degrees whilst sleeping

Emma showing the effects of jet lag

 Matching Minnie outfits - with Ellie

 Emma, Skye and Michael unable to take their eyes off the TV. 

Pottery with Uncle Brian, Noah and Caden

 Michael and Skye do some manual labour

 Noah reads Emma a story

 The best toothbrushes ever!

 Michael shows off his Jenga structure

Michael with Toffee, Katie and Shortbread

Sally and Brian have a lovely house.

They live in Alpine which is about 30 minutes outside San Diego, California. Alpine, as the name would suggest, is up in the hills a bit but is quite desert like as well. Brian has a lovely garden with loads of fruit trees and more cacti than you can shake a stick at. He did scare me a little talking about all the black widows and poisonous snakes he'd seen in the garden. The fruit from the trees were delicious.

They have three dogs and two cats. I didn't see much of the cats but the dogs were really friendly. Michael was nervous about the fact that Katie kept trying to lick him in the face. The photo doesn't show it, but Katie is a big dog. 

Sarah's cousin Alyson and her daughter Skye were also at the house. Emma and Skye got on very well sometimes, and not-so-well at other times. There was a lot of playing and accent-swapping between the two, but there was a lot of tears and refereeing required.

As you can see from the previous post, the pool was fantastic. It had a fence around it to help worry worts like me not feel too nervous about the kids being outside.

We'd brought over a Rocket booster thing which fired little yellow rockets up into the air. We started the fortnight with about 10 but only had one left by the end of our time there. The rest all ended up on the roof, in neighbours' gardens or lost somewhere amongst the cacti. There were playhouses outside and a big dolls house inside for the kids.