Buns

Made these for tomorrow. Realised at 10.45pm had no cocoa as Toby will be very annoyed they are not choc cakes. Mike had left to go to tesco to pick up a few things as well but was already on his way home when i rang him so it had to be plain sponge.

Had nice relaxed morning pottering with the kids in the garden. Mike took Nell and Charley on a pack walk with the behaviourist and had a really good walk. Nell encountered a very snarly rotti and began to snarl back but apparently mike took a few steps back and slackened the lead and Nell backed down lay down next to him. It's counter intuitive but seems to work so well.

Lunch in the garden then we headed into Leicester to go and see Fantastic Mr Fox at The Curve. It was amazing.

Had dinner in town then home via stables. I have been reading up recently on a-typical myopathy in horses (just came up on FB news feed) which is caused by ingesting sycamore seeds which contain toxins in various concentrations. The toxins are also present in the leaves and shoots. Lime has just moved into a new paddock for a few weeks whilst he is lame so i thought i would check and was horrified to find loads in one corner. I started pulling them up but the kids were getting impatient in the car so we got a load of electric fencing and fenced off one corner of the field. I am not sure how many are in the rest of the field as they obviously blow everywhere away from the tree but apparently they are particularly bad this year. Been googling and panicking since. There's very little research on it and no one really understands why some horses are affected and not others and how much they need to have but once they have it, most cases are fatal. Have been wondering if that's what happened with Jack. That was 2008 so not so much known about it then. Some of his symptoms were similar others not. Maybe if we'd known what to look for then something could have been done. I will never know now.

Anyway it was a stressful end to what had been a lovely day. We hadn't intended to be at the yard so long as i had some cats to do and by the time we got home to the dogs one of them had an accident. Felt horrible :0(