We've been loving the beautiful Autumn weather. Have only felt the need to light one fire so far and the lack of rain has meant that I am continuing to water the garden occasionally.

We had Danielle's 5th birthday party over the weekend (birthday not till tomorrow).

We've had our final Keas of the term and Nathan was presented with 4 badges that he's earned over the past 6mths. He stood up in front of the group and presented his poster that he'd made as part of his Conservation badge.

Then he also lost his first tooth!

Just in case the tooth fairy wasn't sure where to find the tooth...

Yesterday we sat in the gentle sun watching all the wild birds in our backyard as they came to visit the sunflower plants, feasting on the soil and drinking water from our pond. We took out pencils, paper and the bird book from which Nathan wanted to draw some of the birds and a monarch butterfly that we saw lazily flying around the garden (he then discovered a ruler in the pencil container so proceeded to measure his picture).

Danielle's lovely birds. The top ones are a boy and a girl bird - the circle is them living on Earth. The second picture is of heavy rain that gradually got lighter by the time it hit the ground.

This morning we headed out for a walk down to one of our local playgrounds.

We discovered Club Penguin today, so Nathan had a wee play on that - unfortunately we seen to have blitzed through our broadband allocation for the month now so he'll have to wait another week before he gets another go, so had to make do with the Reader Rabbit CD-rom in the meantime.

We discovered this stick insect in our lounge this afternoon - must have travelled in with me when I was busy in the garden.

Removing the seeds from the pinecones in the afternoon sun...

We heard of a Lego competition being run, so both kids designed their "dream creation" first and then went off to make them.