Outside

Spring is officially here! The dafodils in the garden are blooming and you can go outside without the wind nipping your cheeks!

Nathaniel and I celebrated with our first visit to the Very Young Friends of West Bank Park, a toddler group that meets in the park that will soon be round the corner from us. It wasn't really a venture into the unknown - the group is run by a good friend, and we already knew most of the children and mothers at it!

So we poddled off to the park in rather too many layers to learn some new songs and look at some frogs. Today we all went to the pond and watched the frogs do what frogs do at this time of year, and made houses for suitably themed cuddly toys (chicks and ducks and owls rather than purple dinosaurs) out of sticks and straw. Well, everyone else made houses. Nathaniel learnt how to operate the gate from both sides (you have to fit your hands through the gap in a specific way to lift the latch from the other side of the gate), and let people in and out of the wildlife area. Is he just the son of two scientists, or just not not inclined towards ducks at the moment?

After learning a new song about a farmer and a tractor ("trac-da-da-da, trac-da-da-da TRAC-DA-DA-DA!"), we went to see our friend Paddy's favourite hidding place - a hollow tree accessed from a hole in a hedge. It took Nathaniel a while to decide that he wanted to push his way through the hedge, and in the mean time he spent a very jolly time picking crunchy, dried leaves, holding them up high and dropping them. They floated on the wind and swisted and turned as they floated down. Cue giggles and clapping of hands.

Its too complicated to catch this on a rubbish phone camera (I am really tempted to go and buy a decent phone that has a reasonable camera on it), but here is the picking of leaves: