Snow is falling

All asleep at 7.15am when daddy left this morning, five minutes just for me to drink a lovely hot cup of tea in bed mmmm...

7.30am and the day began leisurely with the boys helping to get their breakfast, which we are finding helps with the contrary Pumpkin who asks for one thing and then cries loudly when it is put infront of him because it's not what he wanted. it has been getting a little wearing but this new strategy seems to be helping. The boys then loaded up Reading Eggs and Bean asked me to help him write a story for the story writing competition and I drank a second cup of hot tea whilst they played happily together. Plum didn't wake until gone 9am. We were all ready for our days activities by 10 which was a good thing as i hadn't factored in the 15 minutes it takes to get everyone suited and booted and then the car defrosted and cleared of snow! 

Pumpkin decorated his eyes today whilst out at Little Verse
(the eye lids are coloured too)

Bean continues to enjoy his gymnastics class and it's lovely to see how he is begining to do things that he once worried about. Today he did a forward roll on the beam without falling off and jumped onto the vault with very little assistance. 

We followed Little Verse and gymnastics with a trip to the park as Pumpkin was very keen to play in the snow. It was completely absent of any other (crazy?) families and we had the whole place to ourselves. The boys chose to go to the maze and spent a very happy and excited 45 minutes running around and playing hide and seek and tiptoeing through puddles. On the way back Pumpkin wanted to check and see if the ducks were okay. They were clearly expecting bread as they were very happy to see us and very noisy too!

Pumpkin making a grassy path in the path     

It was snowing quite hard whilst we were out!

The afternoon was spent drinking hot chocolate, Reading Eggs, designing our own lego mini figures, emptying the kitchen cupboard, making banana muffins, drawing, cart-wheeling, scuttle-bugging and playing musical cushions.

Bean's glow in the dark figure
(the orange outline is the glow)

Pumpkin drew the planets. He took the photo so it's difficult to see but there is definitely a sun, earth with moon nearby, Saturn with its rings, Jupiter with its red spot and enough other spheres to represent each planet.

Plum's favourite game: emptying the kitchen cupboard

Cart-wheeling

Plum in her new best position!

Legomania

A bridge. If you look hard enough you will see the gap for the river to flow under (bottom right between grey and pink brick)

giraffe

star wars lego

Plum giving it a go

Plum in the castle built by her brothers

Thursday 28th February 2013

Legomania in Basingstoke! Our furthest journey to date. I normal cap travelling time with the smalls to 1 hour especially when going solo but thought this might be worth the trek and i was right. It is actually placed within the living history museum but i don't seem to have any photos of the museum bits. We did enjoy looking at vehicles and old arcade games and buying our ration of sweets from the sweet shop plus looking on at the dressed up characters from different eras. But most of all we enjoyed the lego.

We made and watched and look at meticulously. The star wars death star (pictured above) rotated and Bean was fascinated by all the detail in it. He watched it solidly for 15 minutes and then kept returning to it. This display was a much more friendly version than the one he had screamed his way around at lego land and he loved it.

Pumpkin was fascinated by this light projector which projected the moving star wars logo onto the floor.

My personal favourite was the Lord of the Rings set.

They say it's spring

Monday 4th March

Some say it's spring...but they are wrong! there are a few more days to go before it's officially here but today's weather gave us a little taste of what we expect, although the forecast says this is only a tantaliser as the weather is due to become wintery again very soon. 

but today, the sun is out! so, today extended our normal monday to a warm sun filled play in the park with friends. plum is still suffering at night with her cough so she slept until 9.30 so we didn't make it to our favourite rhyme session but gymnastics has been brought forward a little so it worked out well. 

i had forgotten the freedoms that the park can bring and am thankful that the boys are able to exlore and play and that this gives them a place to do that with some great equipment and landscape to use which they do make full use of!

i also like 5 minutes to chat with friends :) 

all in the mix

Friday 1st March 2013

inspired by yesterday's legomania trip today has been more of a lego day than usual. plum continues to be poorly in the night so we settled for an at home day and the boys busied themselves with lego for the duration.

inspired by a friends pyramid yesterday both bean and pumpkin set to building their own. bean also found and modified and lego fire engine to submit into the build your dream transport competition. He took the photos himself and i think this may be the first thing that he has said he wanted to do and then followed it through to the end.

I am always in a quandary over desserts: we like a dessert but i often forget until the last minute or generally don't want to spend an enormous amount of time on it. today we found a recipe for these individual sized chocolate sponge puddings, easy to whip up as long as i leave enough cooking time. yum yum. one to add to our (very small) list.

climb every mountain

Tuesday 5th March

today we met friends in Rackham. we spent an incredibly welcome warm few hours eating, playing, climbing, hiding. the winter months have hidden some development in the boys, bean is happily disappearing off on his own, mosty playing alongside others in his own game but not yet with them (although many of today's group were new to us) but pumpkin is also happily making his own way. last year this worried me, that pumpkin was a bit at sea and lst but he seems very independent and happy with how things work out. we'll see as we get out more with others in the coming months.

bean mastered the rock face climb and enjoyed playing around at the top of the rock. pumpkin scaled it twice with me in tow but was very unsure and was nervous coming down the path too so finally settled for burying his feet in the sand and playing hide and seek. plum sat on the picnic blanket and was very unimpressed with the sand!

Relax

today's adventures took us to nana and grandad's house where we had an unexpected day of relaxing. the boys played with cousinJ on arrival followed by building a train track together and a fantastic lunch with fa#3 and cousinC too. the afternoon was filled with computer games and 'resting our eyes' (daddy)  and tea drinking and cuddling babies. 

A short recount today because sometimes doing nothing is enough.

Sing out my Soul

Wednesday 6th March

oh how happy i am! After many a cold day and wintery months we returned to Nymans Gardens, i would truly miss this place if we ever moved from here. The house is open again after being shut for the winter which is the main reason for us to return as it breaks up the outdoor visit. It also happened to be the first thing that Bean asked when we got there and as i was trying out a new idea (a visit after lunch) we actually only had half an hour before the house shut. They have been working at their activity sheets again and have gone laminated as are the new information sheets in the house, all in all   positive improvements. Even after two hours and only half an hour of closing time Bean and Pumpkin were disappointed to be going home, definitely a picnic and full excursion next time.

The morning saw us spend an hour in the garden, continuing to prepare it for planting and playing football. Pumpkin played indoors on more reading eggs but did come and join us after 10 minutes and we sat Plum on a blanket and she played with a selection of balls. Bean and Pumpkin insisted on lunch being an outdoor affair!

Lunch Alfresco