Monday

We decided this morning that we'd go out and collect pine cones from a local mountain bike park to use in our fire this winter since Simon has Monday's off. We discovered masses of blackberry bushes - got quite a few, but not enough to take home to make jam or anything. Afterwards, we went off to a nearby BMX park for a ride around.

While I was on the phone sorting out my loss on internet connection this morning, the kids had made up a game which seemed to come from The Magic Treehouse books. They would stand on my rolled out yoga mat and Nathan would say "I want to go there!" (while pointing to his palm) and they would travel off to England, India and the Artic (and fortunately their clothes changed into warm jackets).

I was tidying up the kids activity table last night and came across a bunch of drawings. These kind of represent where each of them is at.

Danielle does heaps of these. Little squiggles around the outside of paper and in lines (I think they represent letters, coz she did it one day telling me it was her name).

Nathan has progressed in the last 6mths into drawing scenes and occasionally decides to colour them in. He also uses different colours instead of a single colour for each picture.

This morning Nathan was singing "heads, shoulders, knees and toes" and a while later he was over at their table drawing. He came over with it and was asking what other body parts he could add to his picture - so we came up with a few other ideas. This picture wasn't of a person, but all their body parts just placed on the page. He then got out his Body book and found a few more things he wanted to add.

Danielle's right into putting things into things at the moment. She loves to put things to bed and spends ages playing with her dollshouse and the duplo in this way.

Charlotte's Web is our latest book.

This was a creation Nathan made at the beach a few weeks back. It was a day where the tide was in right in up to the stop bank (it seems whenever we go to this particular beach access the tide is in, so the kids always play this game), so we played up on the stones with the beach debris. He really likes creating a mini "camping" scene with a teepee, log for sitting on, fire and spit for hanging his meat to cook and a couple of trees.