Our days are feeling very driven by the weather at the moment. Fortunately there are enough sunny ones in between the rainy ones to keep ourselves sufficiently busy in many areas without feelign too contained inside all the time.

Over the weekend it was rainy on and off and quite cold. Simon took the kids down to a local car museum and then they went for a drive around discovering sights.

On Monday Nathan opened his birthday presents (a day early, but Simon was home with us so it was neat to inspect and spend time together checking out what he got). We had bought him a box of magic tricks - so many hours were spent learning them all and having a ball.

Tuesday was his birthday and I took them on a Farm Walk. We were out of the house by 9.30am and spent a lovely few hours wandering through the farm and then the tourist shops surrounding it. On the farm walk we spent ages looking and patting the baby rabbits and guinea pigs who were inside in the barn from the winter cold. Danielle was a bit concerned about where all the mummys were, but we soon discovered them outside in the usual enclosure in the cold! The farmer invited us to come back at 11am as he'd be bringing Cuddles the cow down for milking if we wanted to watch. We didn't expect to get a go too! So Nathan was keen to get stuck in and was rapt that he managed to milk her right away. Danielle wanted to, but wasn't keen when it came to grabbing her teat, so I had a go since it wasn't something I've done before either. Nathan was then totally engrossed with the milking machine the farmer put on her to finish off the milk and asked a heap of questions about how it worked, why it did what it did, what the certains noises etc were lol. We then got to take the bottles of milk outside and feed a couple of hungry calves. So all up, it made for a totally new experience which was really neat and one we weren't expecting (shame I forgot my camera!).

The kids chose a Spongebob DVD (groan from the mother lol), and they've both been spending time over the past few days drawing all the characters and making them to the correct ratios out of lego.

Today we headed out to the library and came home with a stack of "I Spy" books. We came across one last week that Nathan totally enjoyed (and Danielle a wee bit) and were pleased to see about another 5-6 books so we grabbed them. They have pages with hidden items and a list of things to find.

Nathan also came home with a "learn to draw" book and went through and drew all the types of trees in there.

This afternoon we headed off to meet up with our unschooling group and had a lovely afternoon out catching up with friends. Nathan and Danielle were down running around their lovely property and collected a bunch of large autumn leaves - Nathan has many plans for them! LOL.

We're almost through our Under the Mountain book and lining up which book to read next.