Origami

At the last Fun Club, one of the activities included making an origami box.  Consequently we made some boxes to put some little Easter eggs we made for friends in.  It has since become a favourite activity.  We've been using this site, which has really good clear instructions for a huge variety of things.  K & M have been very busy, here's a selection of their creations: a rabbit, a smiling frog, a mushroom (turned into a fairy house), a table and a dinosaur.

Walking with Beasts as inspiration

After a game of Pairs in Pears, M took inspiration from an episode of Walking with Beasts (the sequel to Walking with Dinosaurs), where Neanderthals risk life and limb to hunt mammoths, using fire to push them backwards down a cliff. With a little bit of help from Mummy and a dictionary, this is the result, which I am allowed to post but not allowed to tell anyone about.

Holiday weekend.

We've had a lovely long weekend with Nana and Little Grandad to stay. The girls have spent plenty of time in the garden with Little Grandad, which is his natural habitat and is also the thing that means the slide into dementia is a gradual one for him at present rather than a steep one. We've previously talked with the girls about how, when you get a lot older, your body starts to wear out, which is why very old people, like their great grandparents for example, can't walk very far or fast any more. After this visit we touched on the idea that for some people their mind gets worn out too, which is why Little Grandad always makes the same jokes and calls everyone 'Your Majesty'.

In other news both K & M have rediscovered Lego. They've got daddy's Lego from when he was little, plus quite a lot of people (daddy didn't have a single one!) and various more interesting bits (monkeys, a parrot, a dragon, coins, a treasure chest and much more) that we were very kindly given when I asked on freecycle a couple of years ago. They've been spending ages making houses (here's K's)

and other things, such as this family of dragons

and, apart from occasional wars over particularly important pieces, it's been rather quiet for ages at times! M also made a character from one of the story cd's they've been listening to whilst playing - King Rat (a baddy).

We're also making the most of the Easter holidays to meet up with our schooly friends, 5 different lots in 10 days and that's with the long weekend in the middle when the grandparents were here and we didn't see anyone!

Good Friday

Although I am a practising Roman Catholic, I am at times at best ambivalent both about my faith in general but more specifically about the instititution of the Catholic church. Both of the girls are baptised and K is currently (from her own choice) preparing for her first holy communion. We do go to mass every Sunday, at the moment as much because the girls want to as at my prompting. One of the very positive things about it is being part of the church community (that and the music, because I love to sing!). Yesterday we went to the rehearsal and today M took part in the Easter equivalent of a nativity play, acting out the Stations of the Cross. Last year M stood in as the understudy for the part of Mary, when the child playing her didn't show up to the rehearsal, and very disappointed that she did come to the performance. So this year, I was very grateful that the lovely S who did much of the organising remembered and gave M the part. We did have some discussion about whether Mary would have worn odd shoes (as M always does!), but although several Mummies joked that they were sure they'd read something about it in the bible, in the end we concluded that it definitely doesn't say that Mary doesn't wear odd shoes, so it didn't matter that M did. The performance went very well and I was able to have the lovely experience of watching my little girl play one of the important roles in a little play.

How things change.

Today, being the first Tuesday of the month, was Fun Club and the theme was Easter (or Spring) crafts. I was thinking that much has changed since we started going to Fun Club, I think it must be about 4 years ago, because I'm pretty sure K wasn't school age. Even now M sometimes sits on my lap for a little while to start with, but I no longer have to carry her around until about half an hour before the end and K often hares ahead to get there faster now.

Today we took along a craft to share: quick pompom chicks, which K learned how to do at Brownies recently. Instead of wrapping wool round a pair of cardboard circles with holes in the middle, tying and then cutting off, wrap around a single square piece of cardboard, then slip off before securely tying in the middle and cutting all of the loops. Then you can add eyes and a beak. Here's K's example (we used more traditional chick colours at Fun Club):

You end up with a much shaggier pompom, but they take less than 5 minutes instead of closer to an hour or more.

While I sat a table helping small children with this K & M were off making miniature Easter gardens (see below), loo roll Easter bunnies, chocolate cornflake nests and more. Even last year it would have been really quite tricky to do that, as I would have had a child glued to my leg, protesting at me talking to someone else or dragging me off to help with something. I can even help with washing up after lunch these days, although if it takes too long I'm sometimes summoned to watch something.

Take one seesaw,...

.... 4 assorted children and a couple of grown ups (optional) and what do you get? Physics in action!
How many children balance one grown up?
All of them :-\
How can the two bigger children balance the two smaller children?
Be closer to the fulcrum.
Etc etc!

Literary play.

This is what K & M are up to at the moment:

Sailing away on the Jolly Roger to camp on an island, on a boat made of cushions (with some inspiration from a certain theatre trip to help with making the sail), with a crew of 4 plus a parrot. They've packed plenty of sandwiches but are planning on visiting a farm to get milk and stock up when necessary.

At the HE meet up at Rushcliffe Country Park (mentioned previously), they were up a tree with friends finding out what magical land was at the top today.

Given that K is re-reading the Shakespeare stories I read to them a while back, I'm wondering what might come next!