A weekend spent outdoors

It might be a grey morning today, but we had such a lovely weekend that I don't mind! It felt like the first real warm days of the year and I spent almost the whole of the two days outside.

On Saturday morning we did our first cut of the grass. It was very overgrown so it took two cuts to bring it down to a reasonable height. I had already gone around and cut down the large thistles (our 'grass' is mainly weeds!) then it was just a case of ploughing through with the lawnmower. Along with some weeding we filled up both our brown bin and the overflow bin! 

That left plenty of space to get out the garden toys - I set up the swing ball and the children discovered our old badminton racquets and shuttlecocks in the summerhouse. It was lovely to see them out in the fresh air enjoying playing together. We also treated them to a couple of new water pistols as the old ones were broken. Then for lunch we had our first barbecue of the year - delicious sweetcorn, halloumi and burgers!

I also retrieved our nicer garden chairs from the garage - I'm not sure they even came out last year because there just weren't that many warm days. I spent time sitting in the shade, dozing, reading and watching the birds.

On Sunday we ate outside again, and this time it was pizza. Over the winter we treated ourselves to a new Ooni pizza oven. We've been enjoying the Ooni Koda outdoor pizza oven for several years, but we mainly used it over the summer. We now have an Ooni Volt which is an indoor pizza oven and it's amazing, we've used it almost every weekend this year. It's so much easier to make an evenly cooked pizza, and you can use it all year round (once you've cleared space for it in the kitchen that is!) 

We enjoyed three long walks - up on the Downs from our house and twice along the beach just outside Worthing. I love going down to the beach when the weather is good and seeing everyone out and about enjoying themselves. There's always something interesting to see! Last night it was two people flying over the beach in contraptions that some googling today has told me are Paramotors. It's a single seat attached to a powered paraglider and they were flying really low over the sea and the beach. It was fascinating to watch them!

The weather might have turned again this week but at least the temperatures haven't sunk too low - this morning I even went out for my run in shorts which is a very rare occurrence! Fingers crossed we'll have plenty more weekends like this over the summer.