Pumpkins

So it has been a little while! We have been busy in our house. With Pickle and Penguin both having a birthday with a joint party in the middle and then half term with all the madness that brings.

We have been having fun with pumpkins in our house! We visited a pumpkin farm over half term and picked up a few beauties. Yellow Bean and Pickle picked out classic carving pumpkins and Penguin and I chose edible ones. We also picked some cheap ones up from supermarkets.

So....what have we been doing?

First we did some scooping. But I failed to get a snap of that one...too much excitement and mess.

The kids had some great fun with the squidgy squishy innards of the pumpkin and did a pretty good job scooping it all out.

Then we washed the seeds. Pickle, Penguin and I loved the feel of the slippery seeds in the water. A great sensory activity!

We dried the seeds and picked a few to put aside for planting next year. The rest we mixed with a little oil, some brown sugar and mixed spice and roasted in a medium/hot oven for 15min. Yummy!

Pickle enjoyed carefully cutting the face he had drawn himself out of his pumpkin. We used a pumpkin carving kit we picked up in the supermarket. It was great, the blade is serrated but not sharp, totally suitable for my newly 4 year old boy.

Penguin is still a bit too little, she had a fabulous time drawing all over her pumpkin with sharpie pen.

For another pumpkin activity Penguin used a hammer to tap some golf tees into another pumpkin. He then wound black wool around the tees to make a pattern. He decided that this was like a spiders web so we have since added a black pompom and pipe cleaners to make a spider.

Not a bad little batch of activities that the small people certainly seemed to enjoy. I am looking forward to lighting them tomorrow evening!

Until next time....S xx

Fungi

I love Fungi. Don't you? Have you seen the amazing range of shapes and colours that you can find in an early autumnal wood? Have you ever noticed how magical the world of fungi can be?

A wonderful selection. x

Dinosaurs of China

Over the summer we visited the Dinosaurs of China exhibit in Nottingham. It was great, a beautifully laid out museum with wonderful information and clarity of purpose.

I loved learning about the links between birds and dinosaurs and so did Pickle and Penguin. The fossils they had were amazing and clearly showed the features of dinosaurs reflected in modern birds.

They also had a fantastic tent outside with perfectly pitched activities for the kids to extend their learning through playing with various resources.

All in all a wonderful day and learning experience. Did you take any interesting trips over the summer? I would love to hear about them. Until next time. x

Picking Blackberries

We have done a lot of blackberry picking over the last part of the summer. Pickle loves to pick the blackberries but won't eat them unless they are in a crumble. Penguin can't seem to stop eating them from the bushes as we wander through the woods.

We have had a few crumbles, made some jam and some blackberry gin. We have also had lots of purple fingers and a few purple faces too.

Wonderful outside time with my two. x

Painting Rocks

This summer many people in my local area have been painting rocks and leaving them in the woods for others to find. Rocks, paint, woods, outdoors, art. It sounded right up our alley.

So we decided to join in and give it a go. We started out by digging in the garden, finding rocks and giving them a good wash. This was a great activity and Pickle and Penguin dove into it with all the energy and excitement that small people seem to muster from nowhere. They found a lovely selection and were really keen to get started with the paint.

I covered them in PVA once they were dry and the next day we went out into the woods to hide them and search for others. We found a few and have been back a few times since to find more.

Pickle and penguin love to see the different designs others have chosen, to them every single one of them is beautiful and exciting. I love to see the world through their eyes. Some are amazingly creative, taking into account the shape of the rocks, others are very much toddler painted.

I would highly recommend getting involved in community projects such as this, it is really great to see so many families getting involved and enjoying the outdoors. I have seen a lot of posts about this on the facebook community so it would be worth looking to see if it is going on in your area.

Until next time. x

Heartwood Forest

During the holidays we took a trip to Heartwood Forest. It is an interesting site where they have a lot of new woodland planted with some teeny trees as well as some established woodland.

We had a wonderful long walk around, starting with the Magical Meander. It is a beautiful trail with lots of carved animals along the way.

There were a whole range of different creatures along the way.

Pickle and Penguin loved to run up to the different animals.

This archway was beautiful, the other side had pictures of leaves from different types of trees carved on. Pickle and Penguin loved to trace the lines with their fingers and point out all of the different things they could spot.

There were muddy puddles and horses too. Pickle and Penguin found an area of the more established woodland and wanted to explore more. I just love to look up....

I love trees in the sunshine, I like looking up at the sky between the leaves and I love the dappled shade of trees in the summer time.

We had a ball in the woods. The kids were rolling logs around, we found a rope swing and had a go, peered into a badger set and built a den. It was such great family time all together.
And to top it all off we got a bit lost after wandering off of our route and ended up getting caught in a lot of rain and finding lunch in a little village pub. A perfect day.

I would definitely recommend a visit. x

Summer

Wow, where has that time gone? Six wonderful weeks of worms and muddy puddles, drawing and painting, dinosaurs, blackberries, fungus and digging. We have had a great holiday, spending time at home and a few family visits with a lot of time outside. I will be posting more in the next week or so about some of the specific activities we did throughout the holidays.

Pickle has completed the local library reading challenge, telling the librarian all about his books. I am always surprised about how much he can recall about his books, both fiction and non-fiction. He was particularly keen on a book about sharks...he told the librarian all about the goblin shark, whale shark and basking shark among others...

Penguin has recently been showing more unique interests. We try to keep toys non-gender specific in our house and don't push them into stereotypes. Both kids have a dolls, cars and dinosaurs. Penguin has developed a strong attachment to her baby and likes to try and dress it and take care of it, one day this week she insisted on putting her baby in her bed and taking the monitor with her down to pick pickle up from Nursery. Her baby is an old doll of mine and I love to see her playing with it like I used to.

I have managed to fit in a little bit of crochet among the madness...more to follow on that soon I hope!

Some Crochet!!

As well as our outdoor adventures I have also managed to fit in a small amount of hook time. I always have a few projects on the go at once but my most recent FO is this baby blanket....

I made it small, car seat sized really. I find this size handy for little ones and they make a nice doll blanket later on.

The yarn is Scheepjes Colour Crafter and I LOVE it!! It is so soft and yummy, lovely for an acrylic yarn. The shades are Weert, Ameland and Heerenveen.

We are visiting soon and I can't wait to pass it on. I love those scrummy little ripples. I haven't checked but I think it follows the Attic 24 pattern as I have used that in the past.

I found out recently that we will be having another niece in October so I have another one to make this summer. I am undecided on the pattern and colours yet so more exciting plans to come!
Until next time. x

Dinos and Ice

Today we had an adventure with ice and dinosaurs. We looked at the water melting, we used salty water and put the ice in the sunshine. Pickle and Penguin watched the dinos emerge and the colours drip down in channels through an ice block.

The dinos were really easy to set up. I squeezed some small dinosaur toys we bought at a charity shop into a balloon, filled with water, tied them off and stuck them in the freezer.

We also put some food colouring on the surface of a large block of ice and watched how it melted. Pickle and Penguin watched the channels running through the middle of the block.

This is definitely an activity we will be repeating during the hot weather. We spoke about the salty water changing the freezing point of the water, the kids felt the ice melting and how the surface was smoothed over.

An Ending

So we are now into our first week of the summer holidays here in England. Last week Pickle left his preschool. It was an emotional day as not only were the children moving on from a much loved setting but the preschool was closing its doors for the last time.

I have no idea of the schools motivation for asking the Ofsted Outsanding in all areas preschool to leave right as the 30 hour provision is about to kick in but these things happen.

Pickle has only attended the preschool for 7 months but it had a big impact on us as a family. It was the first time Pickle had been left anywhere that wasn't with my Mum and Dad. The staff were amazing and the whole ethos and practice of the place was wonderful. They took his interests and passions and ran with them, introducing them into their activities and topics extending the learning he did at home into preschool and extending their own knowledge in order to provide stimulus and excitement to his experiences there.

Pickle has loved it show much that he insisted that we now have our own kindness tree at home and has asked to make a learning journey for home now too 😆

They inspired me to try more activities at home with Pickle and Penguin which has led to a lot of FUN! Pickle has developed so much in his confidence and interactions with other kids and we will always be thankful for the experiences he gained.

I was very thankful for the work they did with Pickle and for their kindness and conversation so when they were talking about organising cakes for the final day I offered to make some for cost price. I made one large cake and 60 cupcakes. It was a lot of fun and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. The cake was sooooo tasty. (who doesn't love chocolate cake after all!!)

I hope that it shows how thankful we all are. We have a lot of fun things planned for the summer so come back soon to hear all about our adventures.

Until next time. x

30 Days Wild - Day 30

So!! We made it. Today was a great day. We had a full morning out going wild. We went to a field nearby and were catching grasshoppers. Pickle even managed to catch one himself! We collected a few natural materials while we were out and then Pickle and Penguin both made clay butterflies with what they found.

What beautiful art, showcasing the world around us and a perfect end to our month of wild!

30 Days Wild - Day 29

Today Pickle was playing in the garden with a water squirter. He loves to spray the plants, his play house, anything really. Today he sprayed some water droplets on these wonderful leaves.

These leaves always catch and keep the most wonderful water droplets on their surface. They are beautiful. We watched them form and join and little fingers poke.

Until next time! x

30 Days Wild - Day 28

Today we watched a brand new ladybird emerge from its pupa stage. It was great to see and Pickle and Penguin were really happy to watch, they love checking our plants for ladybirds, their pupa and the larvae.

30 Days Wild - Day 27

Today was a rainy day. It was a puddle splashing day. It was an opportunity day. We did the puddle splashing thing again of course. But we also started the day by putting to glasses of water outside on our garden lawn.

I hear you why on earth would you do that? How is that wild? Well today we were learning a bit about weather. We were learning about rainfall. I asked Penguin how much water he thought would be in the glass after all that rain and after seeing all those puddles. He understandably thought it would be full. Of course it wasn't. He was surprised and it sparked a little conversation about puddles and rain.

We left one glass outside to see how much more rain falls over night but this was our day rainfall...

Tomorrow I think we will find a ruler and do some measuring!