As long as it has wheels......

Nathaniel has a wide range of interests, but many of them centre on things with wheels, the bigger wheels the better.

Today we were about three quarters through a rather fine game of Moomin dominos (a brilliant gift that Mikey brought back from Finland - home of all things Moomin. It's a pity that Nathaniel has no idea what a Moomin is!), when Nathaniel suddenly had a moment of clarity.

"It's just like a road!" he exclaimed. "Drive cars on the road"



And that was the end of dominos for the day.

Sailing

It is no secret that we are quietly indoctrinating Nathaniel into the joys of sailing, but it is a very nice surprise to find that he is absolutely obsessed with the sailing club. He has always enjoyed going there, and once almost had a total melt-down when we went on a walk along that stretch of river without the sailing club keys and had to walk past without going in.

He is well aware that Sunday is sailing club day, and can be persuaded into all sorts of terrible things (getting dressed sensibly, eating boring breakfast cereal, not playing driving in the car), if he is told that this will speed up our arrival.

This year he has been enjoying it especially, and enjoys getting out the two petrol lawn mowers and "mowing" the concrete if he can't persuade anyone to actually mow the grass. He'll show you exactly how they both work (someone explained the combustion engine to him), and how to add extra petrol and oil and where in the club to find these things.



He helps people rig their boats (he has a tendency turn up at people's knees, politely requesting "Want to get in boat please"), and will sit and hoist spinnakers and thread sheets through fairleads for quite some time. He's been impressed to find that he needs no assistance to climb into a RS200 or a topper, and will often be found quietly "rigging" them with any bits and pieces that have been left around.



At other times he just potters around looking for rabbits (we once scared one with the lawn mover), playing with empty trolleys, and helping people push their boats around the boat park.



He's made firm friends with the majority of the club, who treat him as a short but fully paid up member and have long discussions with him about boats, mowers, hosepipes and his other interests. He has ODed with Hugh and myself, and been in charge of raising the flags on the starting sequence. He is a great fan of bringing in the buoys at the end of the race, and will sit carefully at the front of the rescue boat on his own, holding on and enjoying the splashes. He enjoys watching people trying to start the safety boat engine (it's a bit temperamental), and will shout instructions and encouragement from the bank.

He is great friends with Steve P, with whom he is growing potatoes in the allotment. At lunch time, the two of them go off with the hosepipe and water everything thoroughly (though interestingly, rarely themselves).





Now that he has got his sea legs, he normally wants to go out in the boats, and often gets a joy ride with Daddy at lunch time, normally in no wind, but once in the RS200!

But on the day of the open day, he was so desperate for a sail (despite the force 3 wind), that he nagged me into asking Steve if he could go out with him: "Mummy, please ask Steve now". So I did, and Steve and Phil were overjoyed to take him out for a joyride. Ian sailed in the vicinity in a topper, but I stayed on the shore, and all I could hear were delighted squeaks and "Daddy, we going faster than you!", "I pull in jib now", "Uncleat!", "Daddy, your boat is tiny", "I in yellow stable boat" "We going very fast now", "Little bit wobbly now".

The little man was in his element!



That is a very happy little boy. He let Phil move around him to balance the now rather tippy boat, and pulled his sheet when asked and uncleated on the call of "Ready about!" He didn't seem phased at all that other boats were capsizing and that the wind was gusting pretty hard.

Sometimes its really hard to remember that he's only 2.

Leeds

I was in London at the start of the week (somehow changing jobs has not stopped me from having to attend all the same meetings at the IoP!), and found myself wishing that I could bring Nathaniel down to see all the bustling streets and exciting stations, many sorts of buses and awe-inspiring museums.

So I decided that, sickness or no sickness, we needed more adventures. Believe it or not, despite regular trips to the station and the National Railway Museum, Nathaniel has never been on a train! So he and I decided to have an adventure to Leeds.

In the last few months, he has become quite cautious of very loud noises, and shrunk back into the back of his buggy, almost shaking when the first train approached the platform:


But he was surprised at how quiet it was and started to look forward to the trains arriving. Actually being on a train was pretty exciting!


He enjoyed chatting to the ticket collector and examining the buttons that release the doors. And there was plenty to spot out of the windows - lots of stations to see as they whizzed by.

And then, another, albeit very different, station! With more trains!


Many "hours" were spent looking at the strangly small train wheels and discussing why the trains always left the platform in the same direction.

What I had forgotten about Leeds station is that there are only up escalators, so we were forced into the lift to go down. This did not go down well with Nathaniel who is not a big lift fan. After 5 minutes of patient reasoning, I had to carry him in, kicking and crying! It was rather sad. Fortunately he recovered very quickly once he realised that the doors were closed, and was all ready to feed our ticket into the barrier to get out of the station. The station staff were very sympathetic to his desire to crawl under the barrier to go back and do it again! And again!

Once in Leeds, we made use of a couple of shops that we don't have in York and then decided to give the museum a miss (we'd been to see the fossilised hippo before), and hit two extremes of Leeds. First the Victorian quarter with doormen in top hats outside Harvey Nichols (who won't let you try on their hats), incredibly elegant decoration and pretty fountains.




Then to the indoor market to hear market sellers shouting out their offers, pick up gold unitards off rails, and explore glittering sari material stalls. We bought some cherries from my favourite fruit seller and had great fun along the fishmonger aisle.


I always loved going to buy fish when I worked in Leeds - they have the most amazing range and the aisle is always full of asian ladies with bulging fabric shopping trolleys, picking over the sea food and bantering with the fishmongers. We went to my favourite fishmonger (who introduced us to pomfret), and he made whole mackerel swim around and talk to Nathaniel! N was very impressed and enjoyed picking out the fish and stroking their smooth sides. We ended up buying a great selection to freeze - after all, we're never likely to be able to get half of these (and never at such a good price) from York's paltry attempt at a fishmonger. While we were there, a couple of people from Opera North wandered past, and after what was clearly established banter with the lady fishmonger, proceeded to serenade her with Rossini! The quickly-gathered crowd and I were pretty impressed, but Nathaniel declared the singing to be "wobbly" and "too loud" and said that he prefered "One, two, buckle shoe".

As a special treat, we had lunch at the cornish pasty shop and I relented and allowed Nathaniel a special packaged kids meal which came in a box with crayons and other tat. In the end he was most excited by the inclusion of ketchup and the giant cup of milk with a straw!


Yes, we were tired when we got home (we even got the bus back from the station, much to Nathaniel's delight), but it was a mighty fine adventure!

Indoctrination

Today Nathaniel made these:


For those to whom it is not obvious, you are looking at a red RS 200 sailed by Daddy in a red boyancy aid, and a rescue boat manned by Hugh.

There was almost tears because Nathaniel couldn't work out how to build the main sail and jib (even he admitted that the "spinker" was too hard to build!). In the end we agreed that Daddy had just capsized (we watched him do a lot of that at the weekend), and had taken down his sails.

Here he is demonstrating that the RS is a wobbly boat!

Easter

Our Easter lunch and egg hunt went very well indeed. We were up bright and early to put the new kitchen through it's paces, and everyone was very jolly:


The great thing about cooking is that there are lots of interesting things to explore, and there are so many interesting foods that there is always some new to examine in detail:


Before long, the kitchen was starting to smell wonderful and we were realising that we were running out of dishes and baking trays!


Once everything was in the oven and Ian had taken over minding the carefully written timings list, Nathaniel and I went out to hide our eggs. At first I was concerned that they were all going to be far to easy to find, but we enjoyed finding elegant perching places:


As it was, hunting for eggs turned out to be harder than we expected and the kids needed quite a lot of help to get them started so that they didn't just walk round the garden aimlessly asking "Where the eggs gone?"


But they did get the hang of it, and soon most of the eggs were found:


Some required some careful looking!




At the end, they exchanged their eggs for a chocolate lolly, and I think it's fair to say that they were greatly enjoyed!


Of course, once the food started to come out of the oven, the smells were so amazing and enticing that all thought of taking photos of the wonderfully laden dining table went out of our heads. Needless to say, it was very delicious!

After some extensive playing outside and general running around, the kids started to flag, so we put them down for naps upstairs. Nathaniel declared forcefully that he wasn't tired and didn't need a nap, so we compromised with some quiet time in his cot with some books.

I think that my assertion that he was tired was right!

Chocolate

We are having some friends around for an egg hunt and Easter lunch over the weekend, and Nathaniel and I have been busy preparing. We've decorated eggs with oil pastels (plastic ones rather than real - I chickened out!), and today we made our chocolate lollies.

I decided that fun though the idea was of filling two two-year olds with chocolate eggs minutes before we insisted that they sit to the table to eat lunch, we were better off limiting the chocolate content of the morning. So the plan is that they can exchange their basket of eggs for a chocolate lolly.

Nathaniel and I had a happy morning melting chocolate and decorating with various delicious (if you are 2!) toppings:




Some of the reults aren't altogether unpleasing!

A happy morning

Take one sunny, warm, spring morning when birds are chirping and merrily hopping around the garden looking for worms to take to their young squeaking from the nests in the tree and hedge. Add a little boy, a back step, a pile of interesting pebbles and leaves and grass and a tub of water. Drop items into water to see if they change colour, float, or do anything out of the ordinary. Admire the shiny stones and set up a check out for buying them or using them as money to buy other things.

Play happily for ages!

Bagels

We've all enjoyed eating bagels recently, so we thought we'd make some of our own on the marvellous beast that is our new oven.

Nathaniel has become rather good at kneading:


And enjoyed watching the dough rise while we had a snack in the sun. He relished the punching down bit:


And did a good job at rolling the dough into sausages before I shaped them:


I have to admit that I did the poaching and baking after he went to bed - I couldn't really see a way that he was going to be able to poach without a total disaster!

I'd love to show you pictures of the stodgy (on purpose), glazed, yummy bagels that resulted, but we ate them rather quickly. Suddenly 1kg of flour was lining our stomachs!

But I think we'll be making more!

What's going to happen?

Nathaniel's favourite game at the minute revolves around falling beads.

First, you place the car helter skelter in an elevated postition:


Then you pour a jar of beads down it:


And catch them with various vessels:


Then it gets more complicated. You add obstacles on the helter skelter such as blocks and cars, position catching vessels such as dumper trucks and diggers at different distances from the bottom of the helter skelter, and add slides and other paths for the beads to follow:


After every change you retorically ask with glee, "What's going to happen?!"

Yes, that was the best 99p I've spent recently!


We've threaded the beads on thread using needles, sorted them, "cooked" with them, rolled them down things to investigate the effects of slope and friction and made interesting patterns. Here are Nathaniel's flowers:

Stockton Heath

We spent a very pleasant weekend with friends in Warrington, remembering that there are other places worth inhabiting as well as York. We explored the picturesque village of Lymm, which was much nicer than it's position on the map suggested. Nathaniel enjoyed his first hot chocolate in a cafe, but was rather distracted by the exciting prospect of visiting "Hine's house".

We had a lovely walk around Lymm Dam (which is a lake!), and appreciated the sun and the ducks and the trees and the waterfalls, and Nathaniel declared that fishing looked "silly".


In the evening, Nathaniel and P did some serious triking on P's trike, and some rather impressive sharing. Never have I seen two two year olds ride a trike together so peacefully. Most impressive!