Wilderness Woods - Fun Days Out - Review by Bex

We had a brilliant morning playing at Wilderness Wood in Hadlow Down yesterday.  As well as being a beautiful, family owned and run woodland, there is lots to do including organised activities and adventure playgrounds and a cafe selling delicious homemade cakes and other food.

Caramel Cake

For the twins, the playground by the cafe was the best bit with a mud kitchen, pirate decks and a tyre swing (which they're still a bit young for but Priya did a great job of holding on!)  There are picnic tables outside, beautifully decorated with wild posies and there's an outdoor kitchen with wood fired pizza oven.

Kalyan wanted to push Priya on the tyre but didn't quite get the concept of it swinging back towards him!

After a play next to the cafe, it was time to head off and explore.  We found muddy puddles, a wigwam, logs (which K tried to lift before giving up and trying a piece of bark), lots of trees and birds.

 The adventure playground area was quite small with just a zip line and a slide but we all had fun!

And then we set off on another trail through the Christmas Tree field and down, finding bugs, brambles, butterflies and sticks along the way...

Before heading back up to the cafe for cake!

Mum and I had the caramel cake and Nik, Dad and the twins all had the orange cake.  Both were moist and delicious and extremely generous slices.  For 5 pieces of cake and 4 coffees it cost £23.  For entry to the woods you just "pay what you feel" to help maintain the area.

Afterwards, Nik had to go to work so he and Dad left and Mum and I took the twins for another little walk in search of the fairy garden we heard about.  We never found it (the map could be better!) but enjoyed another trail exploring through the woods.

It was a great morning out and we will definitely be returning!  We could easily spend a whole day there if the twins didn't get tired and need a nap.  I'd like to go for lunch next time and sample some more of their yummy food!

They run lots of workshops and activities for older children too with lots going on in the holidays and monthly BBQs.  You can also camp there or just hire a space for a BBQ yourself.  They do weddings and have a Yurt with fire pits and there's also a Forest School for little ones (age 2.5+).

See the Wilderness Woods website for more details and check out the Wilderness Cafe website for their menu and info too.

The day of 'Wasp Tutu' nightmares

by Bex

You may well have seen this horrendous episode unfold on Instagram and Twitter this morning as we discovered dozens of dead wasps in our attic!  Urgh!

It was all the more creepy as we'd just been up there days earlier (and a few times before that) and never noticed any buzzing, no wasps and no sign of the infestation that was apparently hiding there!  The first we knew of it was when the building inspector came round to check if the wall we want to partially knock down is load bearing or not (it is, bugger).  He was checking out the attic and opened the hatch with me standing behind me and about 10 dead wasps fell down on top of him!  Aaaarrrrggghhh, so glad it wasn't me, there would have been screams!  At least they were dead!!

So the mystery was, where did they come from, why did they die and where were they just 3 days before?!  The building man went up to check his joists or whatever and reported back down that there were a lot more dead wasps on the attic floor!  He even offered to sweep them up for us, bless him!  (Everyone around here is so lovely!)  Mum was happy to deal with the wasps so we let him just carry on with what he was here to do.  Our only idea of what might have happened was that next door had a nest dealt with and the wasps tried to escape and came to our house and died?!  What worried me most was whether something here had poisoned them that might be unhealthy for us or possibly even deadly for the babies?!

Once he was done, Mum went up with a broom and dustpan and started sweeping them up out of the way, we certainly didn't want dead wasps crunching under foot as we put more stuff up there out of the way as we're getting on with sorting stuff out!  I of course passed her up my iPhone for some photos (luckily pregnancy is the perfect excuse to not be climbing attic ladders as there was no way I fancied going up there!) and then contacted the council pest department (after horrified tweets, etc. of course).  The tutu I made for the AOW hen do is full of them!!  :(

The woman at the council was lovely and seems convinced there must be a nest up there and as it's autumn and it has gotten slightly cooler the last couple of days, the wasps have just died off.  She said as there may still be a nest and queen alive up there, they would recommend getting Rentokil out to fumigate (I've to ask them about whether I need to leave for a while due to the twins as she wasn't sure if it would be dangerous or not.) and check it out.  The council contact them on our behalf  so now I'm just waiting for Rentokil to get in touch for payment (£39.50 apparently) and to arrange a time to come.

As I've been writing this, Rentokil have phoned and as we haven't seen an entry point or found a nest they can't do anything, they need to spray a specific area so we'll have to try and have a proper look for the source of all the dead bugs!!  She said they wouldn't have come from another place that's been treated as they'd stay close to the nest, they've probably just started dying as it's coming into Autumn.  I really hope we find the nest and get this dealt with before the babies arrive as no doubt come summer these little stripy buggers will be back in full force!!

There are still about a dozen live wasps buzzing around the strip light up there and Mum has left my tutu for now as she could see some amongst the tulle were still alive and wanting to obviously avoid stings, we're waiting for them to die before fishing them all out!  (Not convinced I can ever wear it again after that sight though!)   *Shudder*  It was only up there temporarily out of the way until I boxed it properly with the other Halloween items you can just see (the candelabra and lantern).  Typical!

My gorgeous homemade tutu before the wasps died in it!!

Nik doesn't even know about this yet as he's in theatre today so he'll probably see this blog email before he comes home!  Hi Love, fancy clearing out my tutu of wasps for me??  ;)