Outside

On Wednesday it snowed serious snow and we got quite impressively cold on the way home from Steiner

We made a reasonably sized snowman and failed to take any photos of it.

Then yesterday it was warm, and today it was postively spring-like. The snowman met a rather violent end:

And then we played in the garden.

Thea took great delight in playing with balls ("ba"). She picks them up and carries them around and then throws them and chases after them. I love watching her a)throw and b)run!

Then she decided that it was time to play with the wheel barrow. This was her idea, communicated with a range of firm and persistent squeaks and pointing.

And to be fair, she didn't really cry when she got ditched out sideways onto her head when they tried to take a corner too tightly! Then they hit the sandpit.

And Nathaniel made a complicated assault course using everything in the garden. He fell many times, but was kind enough to have previously laid out spectator stools for me and Thea to use so that we fully appreciated his foolhardy nature!

The rest of the afternoon was spent levering Thea in and out of the baby swing that is still in the garden. I think it may well be time to start to scour ebay for a proper sized climbing frame and swing....

Activities

It is nice now that we have got to the stage that activites can interest both Dorothea and Nathaniel. We're still limited by factors such as Thea not being able to reach the kitchen table easily and thinking that its funny to watch people's reaction when she puts stuff into her mouth and pretends to swallow, but more and more things are becoming fun for everyone.

Today we got the coloured lolly sticks out of Nathaniel's craft box. You can tell that they are engrossed, because there is no hint of a smile on any of the children in these photos!

Nathaniel made polygons and insisted that there were two words for five-sided shapes (???!!), and then sorted according to colour and made up some complicated game (I didn't understand the rules), where he had to sell Thea the sticks in a particular order.

Thea put sticks into various tubs and poured them between them. We made more use of our trusty dishwasher tablet box. It's pretty sturdy, so perfect for puching holes in which to post items. We now have different holes on all of the sides. The most useful is the side for posting block crayons. The stick posting end was ony useful if I held onto the box because otherwise Thea couldn't see where the holes were!

I have a great plan for what to do with them next, but I need to pay a visit to a craft shop..........

Thea's Car Seat

As a baby, Thea was always surprisingly happy in the car, and cooed contentedly while we drove up and down the country. So it was disappointing when she decided that she wasn't having it any more and that the car was an evil that she did not feel she should have to endure and decided to ensure that we were made aware of her dislike. It's hard to persuade Thea to un-banana when she is determined to arch her back into the most contorted shape possible.

But we remembered how similar Nathaniel was at this age, and also remembered what solved the problem. And so went out to buy some bathroom scales just to make sure, and then declared Thea big and heavy enough to go into the bigger car seat. The one that faces forward so that she can see out.

This is her first outing. I think that we have a success!

Thea

Since Christmas, Thea has really become a proper little person. She can understand and react intelligently to pretty much everything you say, though this does mean that she has developed a very clear "no" where she shakes her head and does a sweeping gesture with her hand.

She really loves being outside. After breakfast, the first thing that she does is go and get her shoes, pass them to you, point to the back door and say firmly, "yeah, yeah". In fact, everything she says, she says firmly. She gives the impression that everything has been considered carefully.

Once outside, she likes to be swung on the baby swing which she is getting rather too big for. Otherwise, she wanders round the garden looking for bikes and trikes to get on. They are all still a bit big for her, so she retreives an adult, leads them to it, points to the seat and says, firmly as ever, "yeah, yeah".

She is also a big fan of the bike, and will bring you a bike helmet, pass it to you, point to her head and say, firmly (getting the picture yet?!), "yeah, yeah" and then point to the door. At present she seems happy to compromise and will simply walk around the house with her (or anyone else's) bike helmet on. This is handy as she is really enjoying the ball and mallet set that she got for Christmas, and gets rather carried away with the malleting!

She's an independent little thing and will quite happily just walk off to explore on her own. I'm having to remember this, as I'm not used to a child who is capable of being more than 3 metres away, or can find something interesting to get involved with without having to tell me about it on a minute by minute basis! She really enjoyed the diy shop the other day, and was quite happy to be left to gather important items that she felt were essential to our needs (polystyrene coving was a favourite).

She is extremely fond of Nathaniel and her whole face lights up when he comes downstairs in the morning (yes, she's still doing that 5:30 wake up thing!). She gives him a giant grin and often holds out her arms to, well, I don't really know what. She doesn't hug him. I think she just wants to menace him - stick her fingers up his nose and pull his hair and generally be affectionate!
They play best when they have lots of space. Their favourite place at the minute is the library. They roam around - Thea marching off with a grin on her face and a backward glance at Nathaniel. He follows and two seconds later they are rolling around on the floor together like lion cubs, giggling and screeching. Thea clambers back up and off they go again. This morning Nathaniel wasn't well and so we sat down to watch The Clangers on a DVD and Thea was determined to be involved. She asked to be lifted up onto the sofa and then snuggled down next to Nathaniel to watch, every so often glancing over to him to check that she was doing it right. She was amazed and overjoyed when the clangers themselves appeared on the screen (there's a reasonably long intro featuring shots of planets/moons). She had to stand up and point at them and make happy and astonished "oh!" noises.

Like Nathaniel, she doesn't seem to practise things - just watches other people and then miraculously performs. She has shown no interest in wooden blocks, and just watches me with faint derision when I have demonstrated stacking them. But then today she sat down at the table and flawlessly stacked up her 7 cuboid crayons. I didn't start filming under the third or fourth time when she had lost some interest, lost several of the crayons, and was distracted by what Finn was up to next to her.
She is very intesested in books, but, at present, solely in those with flaps or textured areas. She got very excited about Maisy goes to the Library the other day, but got bored after the first couple of pages. Her absolute favourite is Spot!

She likes to climb. The kitchen stool has to be left by a wall now, otherwise you find her trying to help herself to cereals, turning on the oven or getting into the sink. My current favourite is her getting stuck on a ledge made from two plastic boxes which happens on a a daily basis. You hear a yelp and find her clinging to the edge of the boxes with several "treasures" in each hand which she has rescued from the top. But any apparatus that is off the ground will do.
Most things that she does are done with a cheeky grin. When I get a good photo of it, I'll post it! All in all, she is great fun.

Snow

There's been snow on the ground for a about a week now, but it's been a bit token, and the most interesting aspect has been the ice. Nathaniel has been filling up sawn up milk cartons in order to create interesting pieces of ice to play with and then taking great delight in destroying them!

The snow proper (sort of), came today and so we thought we better go and enjoy it while it lasted. We took the sledge and Nathaniel insisted that he also needed a wheel barrow, which spent most of the outing being a snow-powered train. This necessitated much filling, emptying and refilling.

We found a suitable slope on the moor and prepared ourselves. Thea wasn't desperately interested.

Then Nathaniel gave them a big push off...

And Thea thought it was brilliant!

Of course, it was impossible to take a photo when she was still enough to not be a blur and also pulling her happy, grinny face! So here's another one that's in focus for those who like photos of Ian and Thea.

Thea's reaction to the whole thing was to get back onto the sledge and sit down firmly, which we regarded as a sucess, even if she did do this at the bottom of the hill instead of the top. Nathaniel was pretty happy too, but he remembers the much better snow and much steeper slopes of last year, so contented himself mainly with dealing with the snow-train.

We decided to head home before people started to feel cold, and although everyone was still grinning while they were whizzed up and down the bumps on the way back, we couldn't get a photo with everyone smiling!

Bicycles

The trailer has been wonderful, but there are some times when it would be helpful if we didn't have a giant lump of metal and canvas to lug around. So it was time for Thea to learn about the bike seat.

She didn't look amazed by the whole experience, more the typical solemn expression which hides intense interest!

Our subsequent bike ride would have been most excellent if it hadn't been for me getting over excited and embarking on something that was a bit far for a day when we didn't have gloves and it was starting to sleet!

The new normal

Its been complicated week. It's the first week back to normality after the excitement of Christmas and everything is a bit different. Nathaniel has been attending Steiner chreche as well as nursery, and Thea has started nursery as well. New things for everyone. Colin has been demolishing our bathroom and on Monday I'll be back at work!

So I decided that we'd just keep everything else simple. We walked in the sunshine pretending to be solar-powered cars with spinning solar panels:

We played on funky wind instruments: whizzers, water flutes and train whistles:

We messed around in the garden:

We discovered that Nathaniel rather likes wasabi peas!

It's all been low key and quiet!

Thea walks

Thea has been thinking about walking for a bit and doing the occasional step when she absoutely needed to, but on the whole, she has been resolute that the fastest way of geting anywhere is to crawl. And she is quite right, she crawls extremely quickly (like a prancing pony, Grandpa Beard says!).

But over the last couple of days she has suddenly seen the use of walking, and got really into it. Here is the proof:

What fun.

A Monday

It the first Monday of the holidays and so we have been bumbling around doing stuff as we fancy it.

The day started with carboard boxes. You can never have too many!

Then we played with Mary Poppins (who can remember why the crocodile is named Mary Poppins? And why he is still a he despite the name?). Interestingly, both children are perfectly happy to allow him to eat their arms, legs and heads despite neither being very fond of crocodiles that they see in books.

Then we danced around to crazy Christmas music. Everyone's favourite is "Santa Claus is coming to town". Thea starts bopping as soon as she hears the introduction and Nathaniel does a good wiggle.

Then we made the most of the Christmas tree. Thea is entranced by the decorations and spends as much time as possilbe removing them for playing purposes. The ringing bells are rung and then deposited over the house and the balls and placed in things. This affords hours (literally), of fun!

Meanwhile, Nathaniel and I have been enjoying Thea's hair which can only be described as a ginger mullet! I do hope she grows some on the top of her head next....

Reading

Nathaniel has been dabbling in reading for a good year, but not with any sticking power, and not wanting to be a pushy parent, I have just let him play with it when he wanted to.

But he is being horrid at the minute, and that normally means that he is bored! So we got out the dreaded castle books!

And one day later he read his first book!

He is very proud of himself!

Update: The next day he read the next one, and it looks like the third one is not going to be far away!

Play Dough

It seems to have suddenly become that time of year when you find yourself faced with a long afternoon to entertain ratty children in. This is partly Thea's fault - there is only so much time she can spend playing in the garden in the cold until she can walk, and she is refusing to even try at the minute! Nathaniel is going through an easily bored stage - he needs a new challenge, but is resisting all my efforts to provide him with one.

So it wasn't a very promising afternoon. But then Nathaniel remembered play dough, and it was a roaring sucess!

Nathaniel made worms and words and cogs and bread and biscuits. Thea put play dough marbles in and out of tubs. I made butternut squash and lentil soup (not pretend).

Its really interesting watching Thea play. At the same age, Nathaniel would put all the items into a container and then look around for something else to do. He had completed that task and needed a new game. Thea is more creative. She put all the balls into the pot. Then she poured them into another. Then she dropped them from a great height into another making a good noise. Then she put them in another and squished them all together. She found sufficient variations on this theme to last a whole hour of play dough and only then resorted to taking nibbles out of each one with a cheeky grin on her face!

A most acceptible afternoon.

PS I wondered what Thea had been doing so quietly while I was typing this. She's just come back into the room and now I know. She has taken little bites out of every item in the veg box!

Advent

It's starting to feel a little like a Victorian Christmas with sharp white frost coating every outside surface each morning.

Today it was particularly cold and so we slipped and slid along to the moor to see what was happening there. In the last few weeks we have had so much rain (more obsession about the levels of the Ouse, now available online), that the moor has looked like this:

So now, after the cold, there is quite a lot of ice. We had fun breaking it up and throwing it, all the time trying not to let Nathaniel go skating, either by accident or on purpose!

He got quite ambitious regarding the amount of ice he thought he could throw:

In the afternoon we went to the advent spiral at school. This is one of those wonderful traditions that doesn't really work with a bunch of pre-schoolers, but having participated for a few years, when they are a bit older, they really appreciate.

Everyone assembles in the gym (freezing cold!), and sings carols while, one by one, each child walks through a spiral made on the floor from boughs of fir trees. When they get to the centre, they light their candle from the central candle and then place it along the sprial. So after a few have done it, there is a spiral of flickering candles as well and greenery. Its very beautiful, but entails getting toddlers to sit still and quietish while 200 kids walk around the room!

Our two were pretty good, probably because they got to walk the spiral about half way through, breaking up the time rather well, and becuase we were sitting close to the "band", so they both spent most of the last 20 minutes watching the instruments carefully. Nathaniel was particularly enamoured by the flutes.

I guess someone has to be.