Don't rain on our parade

What I love about our days is that things often flow seemlessly from one thing to the next, that is, the smalls don't seperate life into subject boxes and change their thinking from learning about geography to history to P.E. We move from minecraft to lego to comic book writing to angry birds games to the park to pirates to books to junk modelling and so on it goes.

Friday was a free day, planned to be at home day, with a trip to Boys Brigade at the end of it. We began at breakfast by getting together any ideas the boys had for the day. Playing lego together, hide and seek, and going to the park around the corner, were the three requests along with my own, spend some time working in the garden. And then we laid out when each thing would happen in the day. It worked really well as a technique.

The boys spent two hours in their room upstairs playing lego happily together whilst Plum and I began tidying the garden. She was very unsettled after a rough nights sleep and ended up in the sling for a long while (which we haven't used around the house for months.) As we finished and Plum fell asleep, the rain began. We all ate lunch and did some drawing whilst we waited for Plum to wake and eat, and still the rain came. But it not change Bean's mind about going to the park. So, we pulled on our waterproofs and walked to the park in the rain, and played in the park in the rain, and walked home in the rain. The slides were extra slippery and all three smalls slide extra fast off the end of them. We spent most time with Plum and Pumpkin in the swings and me and Bean pushing them.

We zipped home and ate sandwiches before heading out to Boys' Brigade, except we didn't quite make it as Pumpkin fell asleep on the way there. We drove home and he slept for two hours waking just as everyone else was finishing their dinner about 7.30pm. The evening was spent bathing and reading stories and watching a dvd together. Plum was clearly tired but not giving in until daddy took her and laid down with her instead of mummy.

And Saturday became a lego orientated day. The boys having been saving their pocket money for ten whole weeks so that they can by some lego. It's the first time we've given them pocket money and I didn't think they would save it for so long but they did. Today they had (nearly) enough money to buy some lego and daddy and I decided to pay the excess as they have done so amazingly well. Our decision to start giving them pocket money came from the constant asking for this or that or the other whenever we went out. We decided to give them some control over what they could buy and how they use their money. Today they choose a star wars lego item each and daddy found the most cost effective source and we ended up journeying to Brighton for the afternoon. We bought the lego and spent an hour in a large park playing family football and exploring the play area before we headed home to begin building our new sets. They're bigger sets than we've previously had so it may take us the rest of the evening, in between eating and bathing.