A 'SPELL' ATC swap and Day 4 of the family visit

I recently did an ATC swap with Alice from the Yellow House Studio blog. She picked SPELL as the theme, but not as in witch's or wizard's spells, but as in abc, script, alphabet soup, fonts, learning to write, books, letters, documents. Loved it! As Alice has received mine, and I have received hers, I can post the photos of them now :-) -

Alice's SPELL ATCs -

She also sent me some Finnish ephemera, which is a lovely addition to my stash! -

And these are the ATCs I sent to Alice -

I really enjoyed this swap, hopefully it was just the first of many.

And on to day 4 of our wonderful family holiday. On Tuesday morning, before girls arrived at our cottage, I put up the 'fairy castle' I had prepared for them. Filled with a pretty pink blanket ( over a thick old duvet for comfort ) and lots of plump feather filled cushions, it looked very tempting, I may have tried it out for a minute or two :-) -

My beautiful boy Hector had to watch everything I did, of course from the comfort of his very own lounger -

Nick was getting ready to take photos with his brand new camera -

and then Stefan and family arrived and the girls made a beeline for the fairy castle -

Breakfast, more ball and frisby games in the garden, and the morning was soon gone. Time to settle down for lunch under the trees. Again :-). I thought I might get some photos of the family without them noticing it if I took them from an upstairs window, but........

dang, they saw me!

The boys had requested potato salad, pasta salad, and of course we had green bean salad and tomatoes from the garden as well with the cold meats -

A little rest after lunch,

for grown up princesses as well,

and then it was back to more silly games and another swimming session in the river. Another beautiful day with my beautiful family.

The girls were determined to stay until it was well dark enough for the fairy lights to come on -

Thank you for your wonderful comments on my family, they meant a lot to me. Toodlepip xxx

PS - I have no idea why some text is on a white background and some isn't. Weird. Anybody got any ideas?