Backyardigans…

Is what we have mainly be doing today 🙂

The children, Davies in particular love it, so we’ve watched it, played the game on the nickjr website and then made some playdough and made all the characters from it. Well I say we, aside from entering the competition via the website and making the playdough up I have not really had any part in it. I’ve been mainly writing a draft post for Scarlett’s birthday. It’s not for a couple of weeks yet but I was uploading pics to flickr and sorting through which ones I wanted to use and got all nostaglic and melty about her so I thought I’d write it while I was in the right frame of mind. And it duly made me cry!

Tumbles Tots and Gym Bobs day today as well. Scarlett was a complete minx in her session – again! either way I’m sort of glad she’ll be moving up a class in a couple of weeks – she’s either playing up because she’s ready for more of a challenge or playing up generally, in which case I’ll be glad to hand her over for an hour! Davies was also lurking instead of entertaining himself which he usually manages well. Sigh. Need to decide what Davies and I will do with that hour when Tarly goes in on her own, I think we’ll probably just select a couple of books to read together each week or something else quiet and cuddly 🙂

Scarlett and I sat and read books together while Davies did his Gym Bobs – and played with some Dora picture cards too. There are two little girls, only slightly older than her (who are in the class before Davies’ and then wait for older siblings who are in Davies’ class – I imagine their’s is the one Tarly will go into soon) who are clearly great friends and sometimes they come over to see what Tarly and I are doing and even try to join in (if we’re doing puzzles or something) and then other times when Tarly clearly is desperate to play with them they are really horrid and excluding to her. It’s really hard to watch and I’m pretty staggered that the whole ‘we’re not playing with you’ thing starts so early, I don’t recall it being an issue when I was a child until I was much older. For the most part Tarly is oblivious, but today they were being really mean to her when she clambered under some chairs where they were to try and join in and I could see from the expressions on their faces they were saying nasty things to her. She came back all hurt and said they’d told her they didn’t like her and she couldn’t play with them 🙁 I asked her how that made her feel and what she thought of them. She said they were smelly slugs and they were silly and it made me laugh so much I told her to go and tell them, and she did! I know, probably really crap parenting but it restored her faith in herself to know that just because someone didn’t like her it didn’t mean she was not worth liking and made her see that actually if that’s the sort of children they are then she probably wouldn’t want to play with them anyway! Slate me in the comment box if you like but I’ll just come and do the same back in yours 😉

I think that’s about it for today, Davies has produced some very good playdough figures which are now a bit squashed, Tarly’s done some creative stuff with a big lump of colours all marbled together with bits of car sticking out (we’ve got a vehicle playdough set with plastic bumpers, exhausts and wing mirrors etc) and I’ve taught them how to be childish 🙂