A very Sunday sort of Sunday today.
Up at 7ish although Ady had been up for a couple of hours (children had woken him and he couldn’t get back to sleep) so he’d done croissants and tea and then went back to bed.
The children were playing with plasticine and making flowers. Davies did some excellent roses, daisies and dandelions with lots of detail and then they both got caught up in some complicated game so I left them to it.
Ady got back up again and occupied himself hoovering or something while I made a sponge cake for Frazer to take over to my parents for lunch. Which is where we went, taking Fred and Albert with us.
It’s rained pretty much all day today (I’d consider getting plans drawn up for building an ark but due to the drought we’d not have the water to mix the cement 😆 😉 ) so after lunch and between downpours we all trooped outside and Davies ceremoniously released Fred and Albert into Dad’s pond. Hopefully they have already made lots of new friends with the 50 odd fish Dad has in there already and won’t be needing the fish equivalent of a cushion for the emotional trauma of being big fishes in a small bowl to being middle sized fishes in a large pond. He expressed some concern about whether they would be OK with the food Grandad feeds them – we use flakes and he uses pellets so he had a bit of a pep talk with them about that before he let them go, explaining that they needed to try new things and not be scared to swim up to the other fish and say hello – that sort of thing 😆
Then we went up to the aquarium shop and chose two new fish, smaller but in the same style as Fred and Albert, imaginatively christened Fred and Albert 🙂
Dad, Frazer and Ady watched football, I read my book and Mum played with the children and then we came home. I also had Davies come to me for a cuddle at one point and as I happened to be on my laptop we flicked about through my del.icio.us stuff and ended up looking at a load of stuff about the brain. So we talked about that and then did a quiz thing about strokes. Ady’s Dad died of a stroke so we chatted a bit about that and how the various parts of the brain control various functions with various examples.
We came home and I cut Davies’ hair (bit severe but good for the summer), the children had a bath and I read them Earth Story and Life Story by Eric Maddern as Davies has been asking various questions I thought Eric answers better than I do. A particular one being ‘how is water made?’. In Earth story the rivers, lakes and oceans come from millions of years worth of rain and storms as the steam from the big bang falls and the Earth cools down. So he liked that explanation and now wants to do some sort of experiment to see it actually happen. We did some practical stuff about weather a while back but never really carried on with it much so maybe it’s time to do so – I’m fairly sure I’d got various water cycle things planned but never did them so I need to dig back in my blog and see what I come up with, or just google 😉 We also talked about reptiles, fish, mammals, birds, insects and amphibians and I was impressed that Davies could give examples for each and characterising features for them all, following on from our chat about mammals the other night. He then wanted to know exactly how evolution theory worked in terms of us coming from apes, so I did a very brief whizz through of that explaining how each generation or two might have subtle changes until over many, many generations a different species evolves. Think he got it.
Nigella’s ham in coke for dinner whilst watching Dr Who recorded from earlier and then tomorrow me and the small people are off to see Curious George. Nice weekend 🙂