Extreme Nature!!!

We didn’t make it to PYO today, a variety of events conspired to make us not actually manage any of our planned activities but we had a nice, if slightly frustrating, day anyway.

Ady’s phone didn’t arrive so he spent ages chasing that up and now it’s coming tomorrow. So while we waited in for that I did a load of baking (peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies, banana cakes, cheese scones) and loads of batch cooking (I’d cooked chicken curry overnight in the slow cooker so I dealt with freezing that into meal sized portions, stuck a batch of bolognaise sauce on and made a batch of pizza dough. I’ve since made a huge lasagne with 2/3 of the sauce and pizza for the kids tea and garlic bread to go with tonights lasagna, leaving one portion for a spag bol next week and a second portion of lasagne for the week after. All of which is not remotely interesting reading I’m sure but I’m proud of it so I’ll blog it anyway! :lol:). Ady did some more coal bunker dismantling and taking the rubble to the tip and the children had a whale of a time playing in the garden. We’ve moved their playhouse to the side of our house and it has inadvertantly given it a little patch of garden of it’s own so they spent some time digging that with little spades. They have also spent heaps of time finding all sorts of garden creatures (you know all the species preschools spend months doing projects on ‘minibeasts’ about :lol:) inlcuding rushing in the kitchen to show me ‘baby snails’ that they’d found inside a dead snail so assumed must be baby snails. Hence a lesson in larva as they were maggots. I don’t think they’d realised that pretty much every flying creature starts life as a wriggling thing of some sort not only butterflies, so we discussed ladybirds, moths, flies etc all coming from eggs as larva and undergoing chrysalis stage before becomming their final incarnations. They were filthy dirty but very happy and performing excellent examples of lovely free range autonomously learning children too. 🙂

We had lunch of cheese scones followed by banana cakes and everyone else went back outside again while I made an admirable start on what I am finding a really quite unexciting book for reading group next week. We were supposed to be heading out digital camera shopping for my Mum’s (very belated) birthday present but the arrival of Mum in person scuppered that idea. I stayed inside, Ady did some further garden related ‘stuff’, Mum joined in with the childrens playing and eventually around 4pm we piled in the car and headed down to the beach for an hour.

We had a lovely time there – it was still fairly busy but we found an empty-ish stretch, kicked off our shoes and paddled, then played at collecting as much seaweed from the tide washing in as we could. Great fun! 🙂 For once we had no camera, which meant there are no lovely illustrations of it on flickr, but also means we all gave our full attention to just playing rather than capturing images of it. After an hour or so both children were starting to shiver so we came home and they had a warm bath while I sorted their tea out. Mum headed for home and the children eventually went to bed and to sleep.

Malice is doing well still, she’d not been eating or drinking much today but has surprised us tonight by having ignored all our ‘brought to you on a silver platter in the lounge’ deliveries of food and water and headed out into the kitchen to eat where she always did. She also managed a really quite near miss with the litter tray too, leading us to conclude that just like the children she is probably better left to her own devices really and interfering with her and spoonfeeding is actually neither what she wants or needs. So that’s good. Both for her recuperation generally and our own laziness! 😆

Busy weekend catching up with various family followed by back to normality again next week. Almost looking forward to it! 😉