At the ATM today, as usual I clicked the 'No' to the question 'do you want an advice slip?' . I always click no, but am intrigued by what the advice might be. Is there a webcam and if you are commiting a fashion faux pas, is the advice on better colour choices? Does it tell you to put a tenner on a horse in the 3.30 at Lingfield? Or is it into bigger things - can it cleverly work out by looking at your bank details that you spend too much money in B and Q and on online cycling websites? I needed the cash in case of high expenditure at the National Trust Easter Egg trail we went on this afternoon, but I need not have worried, for just £2 per child we managed to get a Cadburys egg head each and did the trail along with half a trillion other families who had managed to find Hinton Ampner. I have been there a few times before, and as the crow flies it is not far from my front door. Every time I go there I arrive by a different and uncertain route, the second time I went was the first time I trusted a sat nav and I ended up in a field gate going nowhere, with it telling me to plough straight on through. This time, I cunningly did the Bishops Waltham route, but tried to cut some corners by taking the route I did last Sunday on my 28 mile bike ride. More on that later. Anyway, the corner cutting failed and we took a while to get there, but it was a pleasant day and the girls were great company. Unfortunately for me, the trail to get to the Easter Eggs at the end involved bird identification, we were ok with robin, pigeon, blackbird, but the national trust clearly assumes we all live in the countryside and know about these things when we had a heron and a nuthatch or something to identify. I thought the heron was a stork ( it has a fish in its mouth which looked like a flap, ok?) and A gallantly remembered that there was a bird called a chuffinch.

The other excitement of the visit was the lambs, whose field we walked through, and some were not even one day old. There were two being kept in a pen while some farm helping NT people drove around on a quadbike catching their mother, who was not in the mood for mothering lambs and had gone off to a nightclub or similar. The last we saw of her was on her side on the back of the quadbike being carted back to her offspring. But where are the fathers, I ask you??? Its alright blaming the single mums, but no sign of the dads. We managed some good puns on you/ewe/yew as we sneaked around under some yew trees nearby. H was a bit put off the lamb field when we spotted some bloody membranous item on the floor and she asked what it was, and I told her it was sheep placenta/umbilical cord and would soon be eaten by crows. She moved pretty rapidly out of the field, in fact climbing a wall to escape.

My exclusive blog starts next week. On Tuesday I had my first photoshoot for the magazine, and after a night of little sleep at the Holiday Inn in Bath I had to hang around a photographers studio for a hour, then be driven for an hour to hang around and then cycle a million times up and down the same road while we were photographed. Then an hour back to the studio, for lunch with posed shots, then shots of us being set up on our bikes and being 'massaged' by our cycling coach, Ben. It was lovely to meet Ben and the rest of Team Cycling Plus who are all much more knowledgeable and technically skilled than I am. Regarding bikes, that is. I am good at baking and pastry, I and the girls made a great French style apple tart yesterday, following Hugh Featherly Whippingspool's recipe in his Family Cook Book. I took my bike on the train to and from Bath, which was easy, and the journeys were ok, a delay at Bath but once we got going all was well. It was a change from routine but I am glad I am not a fashion model, all the hanging around waiting for photographers to be ready. I have been making a massive effort with my nutrition lately, eating a million different salad and fruit items per day, and cutting down on my bread. I need to up my protein levels though. Last Sunday I went for a ride with the tri training group at the gym, and found a banana was amazing at half time, when I was struggling up the hills, suddenly I was transformed and shooting off ahead. I was pleased that through the whole 28 miles I was never the one everyone was waiting for, which I had dreaded, and although my legs ached that day, they were fine the day after. It was a lovely route similar to one I had done back in the autumn with Rachel, and heading straight out from the club at West End to the lovely villages and countryside north east of Southampton, around the Meon Valley. I was really pleased with the fact that I had done it, and enjoyed doing it with a bunch of other nutters. Next Sunday I am doing a 30 mile Evans Ride It! on my own so hope I can keep up momentum on my own.

This morning I took a quick sneaky run, as Sialou and Digson were staying over and not awake, and the girls were reading in bed, and I felt strong and bouncy in my new trainers. Like Tigger. We had messy church this morning, with Easter story and crafts and I think it went well, we enjoyed it.

On Friday we dropped R off at his school to go skiing, and left before the coach arrived to avoid the busy bit and as he would be concentrating on the kids it made sense to say our goodbyes early on. H cried and is really missing him. We had got back to Fareham when I saw two missed calls - he had left his wallet in the car! We got back to school to see the students getting on the coach, and giving R their travel documents. Tee hee. We did a Easter Egg hunt in Fareham shopping centre to win some goodies, don't know yet if we have won... and got our faces painted for free by the best ever face painter. Beautiful. H felt a bit rough and has felt ill yesterday and today too, shes been keeping going but not her usual self. Yesterday we did a lot of reading, we have now both finished all the Little House on the Prairie books I got from the library, and I need to track down some more. They were a hugely big part of my own childhood reading and reading them again is a delight, made all the better for sharing the stories with H. Laura was one of my heroines, and she and Anne of Green Gables have a huge part to play in my becoming a teacher. The Laura books are so so powerful because they are autobiographical, the stories of simple pleasures, of hard chores on the farm and of the conditions her family lived through to get their claim on a homestead in the USA in the late nineteenth century. Her Pa is an awesome man, with skills as diverse as skinning a muskrat, shooting a buffalo, fending off a prairie fire and building a house - many houses in fact. He can butcher a pig, make hay, make doors, build a stable out of grass, you name it, he can do it. What a guy! She ends up marrying another bloke with similarly awesome farming and DIY skills, who owns the best horses in town. Her mum is pretty amazing too, being able to raise four girls and feed her starving family on potatoes alone. She can make dresses, curtains, mattresses filled with hay, dinner for 18 men with no notice and keep a vast garden, make preseves and sweetmeats and teach her girls their grade books when they can't go to school in the snow. It makes me want to head to Dakota and start farming, though I guess things have changed a little in the last 120 years there.

I have realised there is a problem with the new car. It seems to not be able to park. Honestly, it is an embarrasment to me, the way it leaves itself half up on the kerb and half out in the road. Our road has really gone upmarket, I always said we were at the posh end of Thornhill and now we have 7 little trees along the verges in front of our row of houses. We have rechristened it Hinkler Avenue.

So much to tell you! Yesterday morning the girls and I did some errands in Bitterne, which was lovely, as the girls don't go there much anymore, and yet it was a huge part of their early life. We walked down an alley and H said ' I can't smell baking bread' and despite the supermarket not having sold bread for about 3 years now, I was touched with the association she had with that place. I know I go on about Bitterne, and you may be thinking it doesn't deserve such good press, but it is a child friendly shopping centre like no other, with little pieces of play equipment down its pedestrian precinct. H is too big for the slide now, and it was weird to remember when she was too small for it and I had to help her on to it. I will try to take them more often, they really enjoyed the trip!

Matthew, I know there are not enough paragraphs in this one.