Tuesday 30 December 2014

Boxing Day Snow and Semifreddo

We did a Christmas photo booth, it was quick but fun!







Moppet found a big piece of insulation that was spare from insulating the rabbit hutch for winter, and it's become her favourite play spot :)


Squidge and Moppet decorated this Grinch cake...


...then Squidge watched the Grinch film :)


Sprout devised a drawing contest for us...



The kids' grandad visited, and Squidge and Moppet dressed up as lots of superheroes to show him.


Moppet played make believe snow, and got Gruff to join her in making snow angels in it.


Sprout continued to grow more interested in, and close to, our cat, Mac.


We went on our annual Christmas lights drive around...


...and the kids declared this the best one.


Sprout was excited about the contents of his Christmas Eve box, especially his FNAF Tshirt instead of pyjamas :)


Christmas itself was fun and exciting and just lovely, with excited happy children and lots of play and snuggles together :)




We visited their grandparents on Boxing Day, taking a gorgeous semifreddo that Squidge made for pudding (no pic as it got made and snaffled down in the blink of an eye, but it's this one here that Squidge saw on one of Jamie Oliver's Christmas episodes http://www.celebritykitchen.co.uk/jamie-olivers-marathon-semifreddo ). The boys tried out their new Nerf guns on the target...


...while Moppet played with her present.


Sprout took the Maneki Neko (that we got him as a surprise Christmas present, and turned out to be his favourite gift!) to show them, and he wanted to tell them about it so we looked it up again. 


It snowed later on, so we had a snowball fight in the street and they drew lots of smiley faces in it :)


Squidge played on his new Trap Team game, investigating the world and trying to work out which other traps and characters he'd need to access certain parts of it.


Sprout watched World's Strongest Man to see one of the competitors that Gruff knows, then wanted to show me how strong he's getting.


He wanted to know what the kanji mean on the front of his Maneki Neko, so we looked it up.


Their grandparents surprised them with a puppet theatre they'd built for them, and puppets they'd made, and they all put on some shows :)




Gruff and the boys built some Lego together.


Squidge made some felt tip pens in custom colours by mixing the inks, and named them after appropriate Skylanders characters.


Moppet played with a new photo editing app.


We watched Nanny McPhee, and chatted about hibernation (totally unconnected but these things happen ;) )


Sprout told me all about the new game that Nerd Cubed has designed, and we downloaded Dishonored as it's been on his wish list and it came up on offer. He played on it for a couple of days straight, telling us lots about it.


He wanted me to look up a place that he had heard of from Skylanders, that he said sounded like Heisngard, so we looked up the possibilities of what word that could be and finally realised it was Isengard!


An interesting bit of etymology came up when he read the word tartlet as tart-lay, so we talked briefly about the difference/similarity between that ending for a more obviously French-origin word, and the suffix meaning little. 
I also looked up the specific tartlet itself and came across this brilliant blog, www.gourmetgaming.co.uk , where she cooks food from games! Sprout thought the things on there were brilliant (conceding that my Portal cake was better, but probably only because I'm his mum ;) http://sprout-and-squidge.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/diy-portal-2-cake.html?m=1 ) and now wants to make his own list of video game food to make.


Squidge and I made some doughnuts.


Sprout and I persevered for a long time to figure out a GTA V glitch he'd seen.it involved finding some map locations, honing our googling skills to remove common results that were unhelpful, and working out the mechanics of video game scenery programming. I also realised that he has a phenomenal memory for codes, and can remember sequences that he finds useful really well.



Sprout loved making this eyeball with a kit a lovely friend got him for Christmas. He prefers working things out before resorting to instructions so there was some discussion of whether the blood vessels go at the front or the back and why.


Following on from the conversations about light and how it moves, we did a water 'fibre optics' experiment with a bottle of water, a torch and some coloured lenses. They thought it was really cool, and that it explained the coloured fountains at the Trafford Centre too :)




New Year's Eve was the arrival of Little Big Planet 2, which he's been excited about for AGES, so he and Squidge had a big gaming session together on it, while Moppet watched The Hive and played with some play dough. And now I have several dozen sausage rolls to glaze, and a piƱata to go and fill for our usual little family New Year's Eve party!












We did some minute to win it challenges...






...and I surprised them with Boom Boom Balloon that I knew they'd been wanting :)


And so ends 2014! Looking back over the year I'm thankful again for my little family, and the life we lead, and the opportunity we have to support these three amazing people to immerse themselves in the things they find fascinating. They're happy, and learning, and it looks different from what I would ever have expected before I knew them, but I couldn't imagine it being any different now: Five people living together, doing what they each love.