Saturday 24 November 2012

Tennis balls and leaf falls!

This is the time of year where I start thinking, Oh my actual god, where has this year gone? I think it every year, and the more children we have, the busier we are, and the quicker it speeds past, so this has been our fastest year yet! 

One of the things we've spent most time on over the past fortnight is the Link Romania family shoebox appeal, loads of generous people dropped a total of 103 filled boxes with us this year and Squidge absolutely loved all the bits of organising, money-counting, box stacking and form sorting that went along with it. We also looked up the route we thought the boxes might take, via Kent where the charity's warehouse is, then maybe through Belgium, Germany, Austria and Hungary to get to Romania. The longest roadtrip we've taken the boys on was to Cardiff last month, so the idea that the boxes would be going over ten times as far as our trip down there was amazing to them.


Sprout and Squidge have been doing more things together over the past couple of weeks, notably playing games together (and helping each other and cheering each other on, which has made me so happy!), and watching videos and films. We picked up The Incredibles DVD this week, and the high tech gates at Edna the superhero couturier's house raised the question for Sprout of whether force field gates would be possible in real life, if money was no object. Some searching led us to find out about brief electromagnetic forcefields being developed for tanks, which was the closest thing we could find.
The games they've been playing the most together are a bit of a Mario-fest - Mario KartMario Party 9 and Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii. It's so brilliant to see a recent increase in how much they collaborate and help each other out with games.


Squidge was over the moon too earlier today as he came first in a Mario Kart race for the first time ever!


In terms of his own games, Sprout has discovered Dungeon Keeper and has been engrossed in designing dungeons; Gruff thought that this was pretty cool as he remembers it from when it was out originally.

Out of the house we've had a new gymnastics class, a couple of trips to the park, a day at Funsters with friends...


...and an afternoon at their grandparents' house where they decide to rake up a huge pile of leaves...


...leap into it (that blur is Sprout)...


...throw them in the air...


...and make leaf angels :D


We also had a rare family trip into town, where Squidge was really enamoured with this mural...



...and we had lunch out and Moppet demonstrated what a big salad bowl she can now put away!


Aside from the eating, Moppet had also been making strides in grinning...


...bouncing...


...and snoozing...


Squidge has started enjoying drawing, which he's never been very interested in before. He doesn't normally like me taking photos of what he's drawn but he made an exception for this little self portrait :)



And in the absence of any fair weather for playing out much, his new favourite indoor game is tennis...


He had a whim yesterday to go and play crazy golf, so we took a trip to Fletcher's to play a wet and windy round...


...looked at the Christmas decorations (and talked about the nativity, the relevance of stars being in lots of the decorations, and which parts of Christmas came from the religious roots and which didn't seem to, like reindeer)...


...stopped for lunch and kisses...


...and the boys investigated how many things they could make out of a paper cone (hat, loudspeaker, party blower, snowman nose, ice cream... and a flat piece of paper apparently!)


Squidge loved some terracotta warrior statues they had in the garden centre shop, and we talked a bit about Qin Shi Huang and why he had the original ones built. (We watched this video when we got home but I'd hoped to find something a bit more interactive for kids online about the terracotta army, if anyone knows of anything I'd love to hear!). Sprout picked up a 3D puzzle of Cologne Cathedral at the Gentleshaw Wildlife Centre charity shop, and built it almost immediately we got in. He was really excited that I found this 360 degree tour of the real building, and we spent a while trying to match up the inside bits we were looking at on the computer to the outside of the model.
 

He enjoyed it so much I've ordered him a Tower Bridge one too, so I can't wait for that to come!












3 comments:

  1. Lovely! I want a go of that jigsaw :-)

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  2. Beautiful father photos. This is the equivalent of "Madonna and Child' for father and child :)

    ReplyDelete