Today was St Patrick's Day. John was off work, the kids were off school and the weather wasn't too bad so we had quite a busy day.

In the morning we went to the beach for a walk. Liam threw stones (and himself) in the water, John, Ewan and Rebecca explored the rock pools looking for mussels and I practised taking photos with my zoom lens. The lens has a manual focus so it's quite difficult to get the perfect clarity when you have astigmatism and everything looks slightly blurry anyway. But I think I got the hang of it (until I dropped it at home and broke it - it's still usable though).

Looking out to sea, on the horizon there was loads of smoke and through the zoom lens I could see it was coming from the back of a fishing boat. It didn't seem in too much trouble though as it pottered about for a bit and then came around the coast to the right of us, accompanied by other vessels. I still don't know what was wrong with it but hopefully everyone on board was OK.

Just as we were about to leave, we saw a large group of people stripping off so we went to have a nosy. It turned out they were about to take the plunge and have a Paddy's Day "swim" (ie paddle) in the sea for The Children's Cancer Fund charity so we stayed to watch a bit of that.

In the afternoon we went up to Skerries for the Paddy's Day parade. We didn't fancy going into Dublin for the big parade as the kids wouldn't be able to see anything and it's full of very drunk people so not all that much fun. Skerries is very much a local event with local teams and clubs walking along, business sponsoring floats or just driving around being adverts for themselves but I like the atmosphere. The kids loved the lollipops and other freebies being handed out and John tolerated it quite well for someone who doesn't like that sort of thing at all (bah shamrock).

For tea we went to the Plaza Chinese restaurant. Sometimes meals out can be quite stressful, particularly when we go somewhere different from That's Amore, our usual haunt, as the kids end up complaining about the food. This time was no exception but we managed to feel all 5 of us for ?49 which included some crispy duck, starters, main courses and ice cream for the kids.

I took a lot of photos and I struggled to decide which one I liked best to put on here. There were lots of the kids on the beach, the swim, the boat on fire and the parade but for some reason I just kept gravitating back to this one. It was a toss up between this one and one of a man in a morphsuit (I just don't GET morphsuits - their sole purpose is to make people look ridiculous!) but this one was taken just before the charity swimmers did their swim. It's not the most artistic one, but with the confetti in mid-throw it's sort of like a moment has been captured and I loved the laughter from the lady in the wheelchair.