It was beautiful today after a very, very wet night so we headed out for an adventure. We were going to go to the park but everything was so wet we decided to head to our local nature reserve instead and let the kids explore. They loved finding all the puddle and mud, watching the fast-flowing muddy river, learning about the sewage works which live alongside part of the path and playing with sticks. The inevitable did happen though and Tori managed to sit down in a VERY muddy puddle and Arthur found a puddle almost as deep as his wellies which he wasnt too keen on (those are his feet in the picture).

I love Mondays – Tori is in school and Arthur is at preschool until lunch time so I use the time to escape from the house on my own for a while. Today I decided I wanted to catch up on some reading as my book has just got really exciting – it was icy outside so I headed for Wetherspoons as I know they have an open fire and curled up with my book and a hot chocolate for some proper ‘Me Time’.

English Folkfan brought two Firefighter helmets round today for the Smalls which immediately set them playing at ‘Being Aunty Liam’ and running round putting the fire-coloured blanket out with loo-roll hoses & searching for burning things with torches. They are quite enamoured with the fact that Aunty Liam is a fireman 🙂

I hate spellings. Not because I can’t do it, or because Tori can’t do it, but because Tori has the attention span of a flea when it comes to writing. Once she has written out ‘I’ and ‘my’ she’s done – there is nothing left in the tank for more letter writing, there’s things to point at, random things to colour in, jokes to make up… I am left resisting headbutting the table (in front of her teachers, friends and other parents every morning or in the dining room at home) and wishing they only had to do two words at a time. I just don’t know what to do with her – I have no patience for it.

Arthur is feeling very under the weather today but when the sun poked its head out around mid-day he decided he wanted to go outside so we all went for a walk around the block. We came back and he curled up on the floor using his coat as a mattress stubbornly claiming he wasn’t tired. Needless to say we put him in bed and he was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

Arthur has been poorly today and couldn’t settle due to a mixture of his temperature and his cough so he came downstairs to join Caius and I in our Friday night game of Trivial Pursuit. He rolled the dice for me and was very good at rolling just the right number to land me on the pie squares and between us – we won! Though he did pinch my playing piece by the end so I was left using his toy ‘oppluss’ instead…

Tonight Tori helped me to make a new pudding which was actually a breakfast recipe from the My Daddy Cooks book. This is her eating some of the skin that we peeled off the pears during the prep.