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!

Fossil Hunting

So.....one of the things we did recently was go on a very special trip! Pickle wanted to go fossil hunting, he is totally dinosaur crazy and kept asking to go Fossil hunting and it was hard to explain to a 3 year old why he is unlikely to find fossils in Hertfordshire.

So we went on a lovely little mini holiday to the Isle of Wight and it was AMAZING. We had the best time and we found real fossils on our two fossil hunting trips. Pickle and Penguin had a lovely time and Pickle is so proud of his dinosaur bone finds.

So these are pieces of hipsolophodon bone, Iguanodon bone and the big lump is a piece of theropod thigh bone.

Pickle found the thigh bone and I could tell it was a good find when the paleontologists jaw hit the floor. She asked if he had just picked it up and scrabbled for her camera to take a photo. Later when we visited the fossil museum another paleontologist took some more photos of the bone and showed us some marks on the surface which he explained were tooth marks. Eeek, exciting.

We saw the footprint casts on the beach and were told a lot of information about the rocks and the food prints. I remember bits and I have to say I found it quite fascinating. Our guides were fantastic and we all had a great time.

Before Pickle was into dinosaurs I knew just a few, I have learnt so much from him and from his interests. We have really thrown ourselves into the dinosaur things as a whole family and I love it. I really love the dinosaur thing, it is amazing, truly amazing.

We visited Dinosaur Isle museum and Dinosaur Farm, both are really interesting places with a lot of information about discoveries on the island. Pickle particularly liked the models set out to play with a Dinosaur Farm and Penguin loved the tooth sieving activity they had there. I must have a look at setting something up similar at home...

Dinosaur Isle has a lot of interesting displays of fossils as they were found in situ and Pickle was particularly enamored by the animatronic dinosaur demonstration. Both are well worth a visit for the dino enthusiast!

Until next time.....