Strawberry fields forever...

Thanks for the tip, Chloe - we rounded up Mamuks and Papuks at the crack of dawn for some sweet stawbie pickins'.
We also checked out the resident ruminants and other non-humanoids. Mudzuks, ever the enforcer, was very vigilant about making sure Vecais' fingers did not stray too close to the wire.



But she was much more adventurous when it came to feeding her new friends herself.

Mirror mirror on the wall...

Mudzuks and Chloe vie for the mirror's attention...

Meanwhile Mamuks wonders what happened to all of those anti-girly-girl mantras she chanted during her pregnancy...?
But not to dismay; Vecais seems willing to do any necessary breaking down of those gender stereotypical boundaries!

Ligo, ligo!

Another "Jani" (Latvian Midsummers') past. Beer drunk, cheese eaten, flowers crowned, fern flower found... and just wait til you hear what the adults got up to!

K-squared, with wreaths...

... thanks to Nan's (& Mamuks') hard labour


Vecais & Tanta Pele

Mudzuks sandwich

Mamuks & Vecais (musu Mazdzanitis)

Janu vagis

Mamuks & Pele

The Great Escape

Wagon rides, horses

100 feet up and climbing...

Achieving lift-off by alternate means

Ligo, ligo!

"Kidz with Kegz"

Januguns

And a more contemporary sort of januguns (midsummers' fire) ...

time travel

For anyone familiar with childish concepts of time - "tomorrow? is that now?" the chronological placing of this blogging entry will pose no difficulty - for the rest of you, pretend you know what's going on...

...imagine a land, a flat land, many many days ago - a land a lot like Belgium...imagine a lot of people coming to a big party...imagine no longer, because that's what happened at a former dairy farm in the middle of June when young Aka was formally provided with an identity by the Lutheran church.
















Apparently, it was jolly hard to do, because everyone had to read (in unison) long printed instructions which were tied to their hands with pink ribbons, just in case they dropped them. Perhaps they thought that Annika Inez Astrida was some particularly complicated piece of self-assembly from that Swedish furniture emporium.

Far from it. She's a sweet little bunch of fun, with a royal wave to boot who was happy to serve as the eye of this particular storm...

salmi galva (un kajas) - stuffed with straw

Having surprised Tante Stinky and cousin Aka with a flying visit to Flanders fields, Mudzuks and Papuks were themselves surprised to return to Blighty and find the place had been taken over by a bunch of stuffed shirts - not Gordon Brown's new cabinet, but surely the highest concentration of scarecrows that the crow population of England has ever had the misfortune to come across. That's right, it was the Tollertonian scarecrow festival (or something like that).

There were construction workers...


































and potato/grass-heads...





















and scottish widows....




















and pirates of the midlands...(is that a telescope in your pocket or are you just looking for something?)




















and their erstwhile pursuers...















and broom jockeys (?!)















and one scarecrow unwisely taking a bath















...and, oops, this one must have slipped in by accident...




















Needless to say, there were no people. Weird.

surprise, surprise

It's not often that you get the chance to completely surprise someone you love, but thus it was when Mudzuks and Papuks "dropped in" on Annika's first birthday party. Later the cousins got to chill out on the couch and swap gossip about their most recent respective adventures.






























It wasn't long, however, before the surprise holiday turned into hard labour...roll out the barrels etc etc - but Mudzuks was assured by Papuks, who did extensive and repetitive taste testing, that the rolling had not affected the contents in an adverse manner.
















However, there was ample opportunity to get up close with some of nature's dairy beasts...this one proving that cows, for one, are not exactly what they eat - otherwise we'd all be pouring grassy water on our cereal in the morning...yummy or yucky?
















And guess who just happened to be buzzing by on his latest wheels? Robis from the northern clan! Weeeeeeeeeeee!

Proof of Life

So the lax blogging of late is less to do with Mamuks laziness (the usual culprit) than it is to the fact that two weeks ago Mamuks and Papuks tiptoed down the stairs, carrying their shoes, in the middle of the night, and did a runner on us (although they will probably try to tell you that they deposited us with VJ and Nan in an appropriately parental manner).

Mamuks flew off to Saskatoon to flog her intellectual wares and Papuks met up with her so that they could head to Grasslands with Saulite and Johan to enjoy massive tracts of hiking terrain all to themselves. They did send us proof of life:


























Then they boarded a bus for the rockies , determined to get to three provinces in five days. Always the overachievers, they did it.




Apparently it was "a lot of fun." No worries - while the cats were away, the mice certainly did play.