Well, over the past week we've been busy catching up with friends near and far, going to the beach and parks, bike riding, kids stayed at nannie and grampies, goign to playcentre and generally just hanging out.

We've spent time in the garden, digging holes, smashing frozen toys out of ice, reading books and drawing.

Today we made some playdough and used beetroot coloured water to provide the pink colour.

We read quite a few books together this afternoon and Nathan's right into his second Tintin comic book. At bedtime we're now reading the 5th Little House book (By the Shores of Silver Lake),

Just as he was jumping into bed Nathan pulled out a little paperweight abacus my mum had given to him about a month ago (I remember playing with this as a kid). He asked what it was for and I replied that it was used to add numbers. So he turned it up longways and used it that way to add different numbers but didn't want me to explain the 1's, 10's, 100's etc at this stage (but he understood that it was the same concept as one of the CD-Rom reader rabbit math games that he plays where the monkeys eat the bananas and they add up to larger numbers). So he sat there for a while asking me to give him numbers to add up.