This was our first non-work weekend in the new house (and I’m back at work again next weekend) so we wanted to take the opportunity to invite a few people round for a little party. The button heart wreath above was one of the many lovely gifts that people brought for us, and the ceramic heart inside it was a birthday present from one of my oldest friends.
Please excuse the graininess – every light bulb in the house seems to be the lowest strength available, but it seems wasteful to change them before they’ve blown. Though we might take them all out and save them to use up in a bedside lamp, which doesn’t need to be as bright as a dining room!
It was lovely to be able to show people round, and have enough space for more than two people to come and visit us at the same time! Nobody had to sit on the floor if they didn’t want to, there was space to mingle, and it was lovely to have everyone just popping in and out over the course of the afternoon. I might even brave my hermit-like tendencies, and invite people round again.
This afternoon we found ourselves with a rather more unexpected visitor. We’d just eaten lunch (in a dining room! at a dining table!) with my parents, and retired to the living room for a coffee. Paul went back into the kitchen to put the kettle on, and then started waving madly at us through the glass door because he’d discovered that there was a robin in the kitchen!
We didn’t take a photo, because the poor thing was desperate to get out of the house and had started flying into the kitchen window. So we opened the back door and gently herded him out. He must have come in through the open bedroom window, and flown all the way through the house into the kitchen!
Originally we’d planned to trim back the shrubs outside the bedroom window, because they’re bigger than they need to be for privacy, and they block out a lot of light. However, we’d already discovered that a lot of birds live in one of the bushes in particular, having been woken up several times by a blackbird and a wren at startling volume very early in the morning. So we don’t really want to destroy anybody’s habitat… but we’re obviously going to have to be a lot more careful about the windows in future!