Visit by the parents the weekend before last. Seemed to go fairly well. Mind you, the kids did their usual in Toys 'R' Us. Mum wanted to take them out and buy them something. But of course, the children couldn't make it that easy! Enter big rows about what they were or weren't allowed to choose - made worse by Jessica choosing something that we had already bought for her for Christmas (which I then had to own up to to avoid serious meltdown).

Anyway, a nice tea in a pub down the road and they went home on the Sunday. It went OK.

Last weekend we went to visit Deb's sister Claire, stopping to return to Ironbridge on the way and staying one night in a hotel to break the journey.

Ironbridge was OK, although the kids didn't enjoy it as much as they did first time around. Jessica had a face on her all the way around. Even Enguinity which was always going to be the favourite didn't seem to enthuse them as much as it had done.

The hotel (a Premier Inn) was fabulous. We've not done hotels in a while because of the strain of all sleeping in one room. But they had given us a large 'L' shaped room and it went really well.

Claire has just had her second baby. He was very contented, and newborn. I almost said cute, but I'm not sure that any newborn is really cute as such.

The long and short of it is that we're now all really tired. The last week in the run down to the end of school before Christmas is going to be really hard, just to keep the feet moving.

The good news is that I've worked out how to get BBC iPlayer programmes onto my Palm TX so that I can watch them on the bus. But that'll have to wait for another day.