Into Winter...

Still much of the same stuff happening around here really.

Going for walks on nice days (collecting and smashing ice slabs taken from the chicken's water bowl, the dog's water bowl and the bathtub in the garden for water collection due to a particuarly heavy frost yesterday).

Plenty of writing, drawing, figuring out numbers, making books, playing with lego, board games, puzzles, watching DVDs etc.

We went to the library yesterday and that always seems to liven up their curiosity and inspiration.

Nathan's been really into Pompeii and volcanoes and all the questions that could possibly be asked around this. I felt that I must have been missing explaining things to him because he would ask the same question over and over and over many weeks (but really I just think it was something that needed the time to process). He was struggling to process why the people died in their city and didn't leave. We have a documentary video that he'd been watching, we'd looked up the Net and then at the library I found a book that looked promising. We've read it over the past two days (I wasn't impressed having it thrust in my face at 6.30am this morning to launch right into it, so managed to set that aside till I was at least functioning lol). It seems to have explained things for him and was written by an archeologist who helped uncover a neighbouring city called Herculaneum. The book was written with a non-fiction story about her life as an archeologist and her findings as well as a fiction story slotted in amongst the chapters on how life might have been.

Yesterday on the way home from the library we went to a playground and Nathan wanted me to reread him one of the Magic Tree House books on Pompeii and Mt Vesuvius - so we did that while Danielle swung for half and hour (and apparently was dreaming of animals and butterflies!). He was interested to note some similarities in that story to that of the book written by the archeologist.

Then they got out one of the books we found at the library with some kitchen science experiments. First up we made the classic gloop one using cornflour and water. That was fun for about an hour!

This afternoon Danielle wanted to get out the face paints and have her fingers painted. Nathan soon wanted some of that fun too.

Meanwhile, Nathan got to put into action a plan that he's been talking of since the weekend. He'd found a length of spare hose and some old ice cream containers and wanted to make a water contraption. Since I wanted to be sure that his plan was the same as what I was imagining it to be I asked him to draw it so we could plan best how to use our resources (once they were cut up there wouldn't have been anymore to get it right) - so once I had confirmed this we figured out together how he wanted it and he set to work.


And it worked!

A few nights ago I had the urge to rearrange my lounge (I do that a lot - and Simon has just learnt to roll his eyes at me and get down to work lol).

I moved all of the kids visible toys from our main sitting area in the lounge and popped them in the far end of the lounge that used to have their activity/craft table (just left some things in two drawers like jigsaw puzzles, cuisenaire rods, geoshapes etc). Since Nathan has outgrown the table height and Danielle is quite happy to sit whereever, we moved the table out and I set the area up with their things including all the board games that used to be in the lounge as well. Nathan got a new bed/desk for his birthday from his grandparents and so most of their drawing materials are now in his room and any crafts/experiments can be done at the dining table (which was getting used for that anyway since their other table was really just a surface to collect junk! All their craft materials are now in some big drawers in a scotchchest that sits in the dining room next to the dining table.



And a length of cord strung up down the hallway for their artwork.

This evening Nathan wanted to write a list of things he wanted to do tomorrow, so set about writing a To-Do list with my help.