Is what Tarly wants to know, having listened to the song on the way over to Ali’s today she got out of the car, looked up at me with her big blue eyes and asked ‘Mummy, where did all the good ‘peoples’ go? Davies paraphrased yet further and said they were on the TV shows. Which reminded me of a song I loved a few years ago Where have all the cowboys gone? which I must see if I can find somewhere and play to her – now there’s an anthem for feminism if ever I heard one 😉
This morning we did some drawings, Davies has been after making a Backyardigans puppet theatre he’s seen shown on the nickjr site but my printer was protesting so I ended up drawing the characters for him to colour in and then I cut them out. We couldn’t find the pack of lolly sticks we both remain convinced we last saw stuck to the cork wall in the kitchen so we used pencils to stick them to. Gave up on any further developments due to lack of craft materials so he just played with them on their sticks. Which of course meant Tarly wanted to play with them too 🙁 Ended up drawing a set of Dora figures at her request for her to colour in with a view to making puppets for her too. She did fantastic colouring in – really neat and pretty much stuck to the right colours – almost as tidily and accurately done as Davies I would say, and I always think he’s pretty darn good at art. Glad they both have various art sets for Christmas, I think it’s something we might focus on and develop a little more – maybe a joint project of some description. We also watched Smarteenies as part of our retro revisit to Cbeebies yesterday and were inspired by that a bit. I think a trip to the Wizard store for some cut price glitter, glue and card is in order tomorrow to set them off on some festive craftiness 🙂
It’s been ages since we last saw Ali and Freya although we do keep in touch via IM 😉 so it was nice to have a proper catch up. Davies did very well despite Boyflu and played for a good while before retreating to my lap to watch Backyardigans. Tarly was also a bit hesitant at being sociable really and poor Freya who just wanted to play with her got told to ‘leave me alone’ a couple of times. I did explain that the novelty of having someone to play with is somewhat lost on Tarly for whom not having someone to play with is sometimes a more treasured novelty, but she came round in the end and they spent a very happy hour throwing stuff down the stairs together, cackling like harridans and then coming into the lounge to leap off of the sofa! Davies also impressed all of us by being rather excellent at a microscope matching thingy that Ali had printed off and laminated – pictures of everyday items and then pictures of them under a microscope to match up. He always responds really well to that sort of thing when it’s sprung on him (and even better when it’s not from me!) – lovely to see him so proud of himself 🙂 He then impressed me further all the way home by counting up the various numbers of children in various families, adding two together and then splitting them into boys and girls and so on – all using his fingers which is something I’ve never suggested so must be an innate skill!
They were both fading fast on the car journey home and as we got stuck in traffic as it got dark around us I was coming up with ever crazier ways to keep Tarly awake and thought it would be a very rapid tea, bath, bed routine.
They had tea and then both got a second wind so we did some puzzles for a bit – Davies brought out a matching words puzzle which Tarly also got the idea of and was pretty good at (snake connects to cake, ring connects to king and so on) and then we did a mix and match people set with heads, bodies and feet to sort out for various professions.
Bath, where I drowned Tarly’s very matted and rapidly becoming dreadlocked hair with conditioner and we all gave Davies lots of sympathy over a bruise sustained on his leg at Ali’s (by a cruelly planted doorway as part of Ali’s teach them about hazards campaign 😉 ). Ady arrived home and I’m currently cooking spaghetti while blogging (multi tasking lady!). So lots of educationally valuable stuff going on while I also got to do some colouring and drawing and sit chatting to Ali. Pretty good day all round then really 🙂