Sam, Emily and I have had a lovely half term week together doing all the important things that we’ve been too busy to get done over the last couple of months.

We’ve spent some time writing letters to our friends over in Australia.

Learning how to do some proper stunt scooting on the local ramp.

Searching out the first signs of Spring.

Exercising the frisbee.

Making some new Pokemon cards with friends

Planting out seeds in the hopes of growing some new flowers and tasty veggies.

And playing lots and lots of board games together.

Over the summer holidays Rich got hold of some exciting tickets for us to attend an iTV sports day on the film set of Coronation Street.

We got to pretend to be sporting stars in our own Team GB t-shirts – don’t we all look fine with our groovy matching headbands?

Sam meet a real olympian – Bianca Walkden who won a bronze medal in the Woman’s Taekwondo.

We all had a try at the different sports avaliable, Emily really got into the table tennis (see that look of fierce concentration on her face) and Sam did a great job on the climbing walls. Rich got to do some badminton with Sam and before leaving we all did some hula hooping!

Summer seems to be properly here at Tea Towers now – the paddling pool has finally been dusted off and filled and much fun has been had splashing about in it.

Water everywhere

We’ve been busy with work inside the house too with Sam and Emily doing a spot of baking.

Baking fun

I’ve also had them working hard at getting the sofa hovered… though this seems to mostly involve making towers of cushions to jump on!

Cushion testing

The sun has come out so we’ve just been for a walk round our favourite park.

We gave some recently repaired rhinos some love.

Blew some bubbles.

Gazed up…

…and enjoyed the beautiful sky.

Then finished up by improving our frisbee skills.

Over the bank holiday weekend we made the most of our time and did some exploring in new places

We spent Saturday at Alderley Edge – an area maintained by the National Trust which has some fantastic views.

While there we meet up with some friends and had a lovely time exploring and playing together.

On the bank holiday Monday we decided to take Sam and Emily out to the natural caverns in Poole.

These strange stalagmites are formed super fast due to a lime ash dump situated on the ground above them. They are also a ‘Site of special scientific interest’ due to their strange orange coloration that no one seems to be able to explain.

After our trip down into the caves we came up for an explore around Poole – here is Emily pointing the way up to a strange castle shaped folly.

Lots of fun 🙂

We’ve had another few opportunities to dress up recently with World book day in March and then much parading in our bonnets for the Easter bonnet parades.

Sam decided he wanted to dress as ‘Charlotte’ from Charlotte’s Web so this is the spider costume we came up with. Plenty of kitchen rolls were used to produce all his legs, the scary spider mask was fun and then a bit of crochet finished it with a special ‘Some pig’ written across.

Emily and Sam helped put together their Easter bonnets. Emily worked on painting and decorating the eggs surrounding her crown. We added lots of chicks and she loved showing it off on the nursery parade.

Sam did most of the work on his bonnet. He came up with the idea to just have it as a big egg around his head… I helped do the cardboard construction and then left Sam to decorate it. Apart from it being a bit top heavy and catching a few of his classmates while doing their spring songs on the stage it brought plenty of smiles to all who saw it 🙂

This weekend Emily got to go for a pony party with some of her new nursery friends.

To start with they got to groom a very docile pony who was so gentle and let a whole bunch of little girls pet her. Emily started out quite shy but quickly decided she liked the pony and giggled whenever the pony turned to look at her.

Emily then got to ride a rather grumpy pony who had already shaken a little girl loose earlier and would occasionally try to nip the young girl who was leading her. Emily did fine though and really enjoyed the trotting round the practice yard.