Where did my baby go?

This past ten days or so has been a time of reflecting on our family.

The Saturday before last was my parents in law's golden wedding anniversary.

We all headed up to Worcester to help them celebrate with an afternoon open house in their lovely back garden.

Fortunately the weather was good and kind to us - not guaranteed by a long stretch here in the UK.

Not only have Brian and Judy made 50 years together - after all some people aren't even lucky enough to get to that age - but both their bridesmaid and their best man were also there to celebrate with them.

Between us all, their three children and partners, we've given them 12 grandchildren aged from 22 down to almost 3. Sadly because the celebrating couple didn't announce their arrangements until quite late in the day three of the grandchildren couldn't make it but here are the other nine who did - not often we get them all together for a photocall. It just made me realise how they are all growing up - the two girls sitting to the right of Sarah on the chairs were bridesmaids for Nigel and I when they were little dots.

And here are the happy couple cutting one of the two cakes (misunderstanding on arrangements between bride and bridesmaid meant a duplicate but the kids helped them demolish them).

Then last Friday it was Sarah's Year 11 school prom.

The hair took the best part of two and a half hours at the hairdressers - yes you read that correctly!

Our neighbour is a beautician in a local department store and kindly offered to do Sarah's make-up for her.

This picture was taken in front of our side gate as Nigel is still endeavouring to dig to Australia outside the front door in readiness for the new driveway, and as she had cream satin shoes on I thought trecking across the lawn to pose in front of the flowers probably wasn't a good idea either.

Her dress came from Sassi Holford - a local dress designer whose most recent claim to fame was designing and making the dresses for the royal wedding of the Queen's grandson Peter Phillips.

She has a shop in London and one here in Taunton - we're not ones for extravagant overtures and wouldn't normally have even considered looking somewhere like this but we were passing the Taunton shop during February half term as she was having a pre-refurbishment sale. This was one of the bridesmaids dresses which was a real snip at £50 - the bargain of the decade. It's a beautiful quality with buttons and loops down the back of the bodice and an invisible zip in the back of the skirt. Not your usual off the peg quality - some of the other girls had spent upwards of £200 to £300 on their dresses and they weren't a patch on this one.

Sarah travelled to the do, at a local golf club, with the rest of her group on a converted fire engine.

But despite looking like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly (ok I know I am a tad partisan!) she still kept that typical Sarah sense of humour

And here she is sharing a joke with Stu her prom date - I just love natural photos taken when the subjects aren't aware they're being snapped.

Finally a more posed shot outside the golf club - lucky with the weather yet again.

This morning I've waved off her younger sister on a school trip to the Isle of Wight until Friday and next week we have Louise's induction evening at the secondary school ready for starting in September - they're certainly all growing up so fast.

Now we only have my parent's Golden Wedding to go to at the beginning of July and we can then relax for the summer.

On a last note no doubt you want to know who won the strawberry 400th post hanging.

We used a very technical method to pick the winner - the other four members of the household were asked to each select a number from 1 to 69 and I averaged them out and rounded to the nearest number.

This turned out to be Meggie in Australia , a blogger who usually makes me think and often smile at her witty observations on life, so it has a long journey ahead of it once she lets me have her postal address.

Thank you all for your lovely kind comments - I only wish I'd had 69 of them to send out.