Friday 3 May 2013

Monkeying around

This week has been the week of paintings. Drying. Everywhere.
Squidge is feeling arty at the moment, so almost every surface in the house is currently home to a wet painting. He's mostly been using acrylics, and has been experimenting with folding over paintings once he's done.
So here we have a bug...

...and The Hulk!


We've spent a huge amount of time in various parks this week since the weather's warmed up, so Squidge has been practising his scooter jumps at the skate park, Sprout has been trying to beat his own best time for climbing to the top of the spiderweb climbing frame, they've both enjoyed watching a street artist at work on the graffiti wall (and now have a project planned for next week!), and Moppet's at the stage where she can play on lots more of the playground...








We had a lovely walk and picnic with friends at Apedale Country Park, where the boys looked at some fossils... 


...took some photos, climbed some trees...


...and generally explored! Sprout was excited to see that at weekends they have tours of the old mine too, so Gruff is going to take him soon.


Sprout built a wheelbarrow at his Kids Can Do It class, in which he is now keeping his Minecraft Diamond Steve figure and Pikachu :)


One of Moppet's new and favourite activities is taking things in and out of containers, so she has several little cups for meals at the moment and moves things between them all as she eats :)


Squidge has been itching to go bowling as we haven't been in a while, so we headed to Tenpin as they have bargainous half price bowling some days, and Moppet looked on bemused as her big brothers bowled their hearts out :)


I was so absolutely proud of them, they can still struggle with winning/losing, but although Sprout won (using a ramp vs Squidge bowling by hand), they both got some strikes and spares and at the end Sprout gave Squidge a hug and there was no animosity at all. Win win!


They also played some pool...


...were gleeful to find a giant 'iPhone' with Doodlejump on it...


...and both loved the big strongman hammer game...



We also had a repeat trip to see The Croods, which is, in Sprout's words, "Just about my favourite film, like, ever!" his favourite characters being Eep and Guy. Here are the boys relaxing in our own middle-of-the-day-deserted-private-viewing at the cinema :D


Sprout bought the Ninjago Golden Dragon with his pocket money...



 ...which led to conversations about whether dragons had ever been real, other real life creatures that had the name 'dragon', and the physicality of fictional creatures (from how many legs dragons have to why zombies are often shown to be green). The dragon conversation prompted another trip to Gentleshaw Wildlife rescue centre where they have a couple of bearded dragons, and we took along two big bags of fruit and veg for the animals as well.
They'd rescued some new animals since we were there last, including a couple of wildcats and a wolf-dog cross. We noticed these marmosets too which we hadn't seen before...


...and spent ages watching their favourite animal, Toto the capuchin monkey. They were fascinated to watch him play - he found a curved piece of something on the floor of his enclosure, and was testing it on his hand and foot (to see what it felt like? Whether it was sharp? That's what it looked like but who knows!), and then he picked up a stick and was putting the two things together and playing. Fascinating!


As we were watching the peregrine falcon and remembering back to when we drove at the speeds of different animals, Squidge noticed the sparkling reflection from the water dishes on the back walls, and that one reflection was much higher than the other. Sprout pointed out, "Oh! It's because that bowl is so much further away from the wall!"


Before we left we were lucky to catch an owl being flown too...


On the way out we saw they'd added a Bob the Builder ride so they had a few goes on that...


...then we went home to open up the goodies they'd picked up in the charity shop, including a couple of jigsaws and this gorgeous insect book (which is so cheap to buy used on Amazon (although not as cheap as we got it haha), I'd totally recommend it) full of beautiful and intriguing pictures.


We're all home for the bank holiday weekend now, and the boys have big plans to help Gruff fix our new-to-us van, while Moppet and I have some quality snuggle time scheduled :)






No comments:

Post a Comment