Hallowe'en Monsters

Toy Soldiers

Timeless fun!

Autmun Play

Our homemade solar cooker

We had an unusual sunny day so we made the most of it.

snapshot in time

Here we are making cardboard tube apples.

The best part was the painting

A model of big brother :)

A handful of holiday snaps

Rock Climbing at Newbiggin by the sea

And some relaxation with hama bead design.

We miss this park

It is so much fun to play with big brothers,

And little brothers.

To balance,

And hold,

And take giant steps,

And scramble,

And Climb.

There are good parks here, but we miss this one.

Good Clean Fun

Shaving foam is such a lovely medium to play with even the grumpy teens get sucked into the fun...which soon turns into foam ball fights :)

Bubbles

We like bubbles, and while we were packing we blew lots and lots of them. Here are a couple of pics...

Our World

We went walking in the spa and found some lovely landscaping materials to create our small world. We have bark bridges, moss hills and leafy trees. We added in some tin foil water, some bright animals and some massive spiders to inhabit our world.

I have not forgotten the blog...

...am just busy settling in after the move. I will be back either later this month or early next month.

Brother's Rock!

Sumo and the Lookalikees!

X-boxing it together.

Stuff

We were trying to pack the kitchen and our little helper was being ever so slightly less helpful than he thought he was. So after we finished emptying the drawers I gave him the collection of things that had no obvious use. Sumo had a blast all day - all over the floor!

Den Making

One of our favourite ways to spend the day. With most of our home packed up for the move Sumo was struggling for things to build his den with.

This meant our sofa had to fill in for the walls, and the lacy bits of old curtains were the roof.

Still, at the end of the day, a den is a den!

Little Ducklings

We took Sumo swimming again today - no pics sadly - he is doing so well now. He went right under the water quite a few times and took it all in his stride, just wiping of his eyes with his hands and carrying on. I can't say how proud I am of him. I feel that our approach to learning to swim organically is definitely the way to go with Sumo. He is learning so fast without ever being taught.

I am a big fan of organic learning, learning through play.

We Play...

With Oil Paints.


Sumo has been painting rocks with his water paints for the past few days, so today we pulled out some of my oil paints for him to experiment with.

Together we set up a palette and some brushes outside. He was wearing his lovely new art smock he decorated himself with fabric pens and his big brothers old school shirt.

We had one brush for every colour.





But we soon discovered economy children's brushes do not work well with oils, so we switched to cotton buds, which worked soooo much better.







Soon the palette began to look like a cotton bud hedgehog as he mixed the oils to create new colours and shades.





He finally proclaimed he was finished, and went off to play with something else.





Sumo loves to mix, and mash, and create. His favourite play includes all three of these activities, so this was very much enjoyed and will be revisited frequently I think. The rocks are now permanently painted instead of being washed away whenever it rains now (at least they will be when they eventually finish drying). He loves the fact he is impacting on his own environment in a more permanent way. And I loved the fact he was so restrained with the oils - not something he has ever been with waterpaints.

Right, we are off to share this with Childhood 101 for we play Tuesdays. You'll find loads of other ideas and activities there too.

Air Heads

We just popped out to the shop to get some balloons to make some stress balls, only to get home and discover they were tiny little balloons and no good for what we wanted. So we grabbed some old magazines that I had found and cut out some face bits and created our air heads. It ended up being much more fun than stress balls - although we will come back to them when I find large enough balloons.
We have 2 lady balloons (one of them is Mrs Elvis if you look closely), 1 bald daddy with a moustache, and 1 Cyclops airhead.

An invitation to play...

After a couple of days of, 'Mummy play with me!' every five minutes, I realised that somehow Sumo seemed to have forgotten how to play independently. After an inspirational post by a wonderful provider I decided to set up an invitation to play for the morning for Sumo.
There was to one side a large box of various cardboard resources, a large box of little people and a box of cars. All kinds of scenarios were played out over the first 3-4 hours of the following mornings, and I got to surf and drink coffee and enjoy watching my son instead of leading his play.

Homemade paints

We used up all our squirty paint a couple of weeks ago, and I don't want to buy any more before we move house. Sumo wanted to do some painting however, and he was not going to be fobbed off. So we decided to make some at home, which works really well for Sumo cos he does love to mix, mix, mix.

So, using a new recipe I had found at this blog we got cracking. We chose to use grated chalk to colour our paints rather than food colour. Sumo loved to grate - I would add a pic of it but I have packed my lead and the pic is on the camera not the card.
So after the paints were made, and left over night to dry we began to paint up the cardboard castle.