Tales of the unexpected with The Boy, my pride and joy.
We went to Cardiff Museum today and visited the art gallery with the specific intention of looking at the Monets there. He was entranced by the paintings, possibly as much as he was by the echo.
This is for a forthcoming art project initiated by RedTedArt, keep your eyes peeled!
The Boy has a little song at the moment that he sings, 'A cuddle and a kiss and a walking stick'. As a result when I saw a plastic one filled with sweets recently I bought it for him so he could sing the song properly. I removed the sweets and binned them because they were foul and I may as well just have poured E numbers down his throat. He was slightly disgruntled so I put a few mini eggs in to appease the situation. Over the course of the past fortnight he's eaten them gradually.
The other day he said, "Please could I have one because (with a cheeky smile on his face) I'm greedy?" and so I opened it up and three broken bits (the remaining pieces fell out). He put one in his mouth, I asked if I could have one and he put another in his mouth. I asked again and he looked at me and put the last one in his mouth.
Astounded I pointed out that I'd asked to share them with him and looked at him open mouthed. He promptly took one out of his mouth and put it in my open and disgruntled mouth. Nice hey? At least he shared.
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I've linked this up to Thinly Spread's 'The Funny Things Children Say and Do'
For Christmas, Mr. TBaM wanted to get The Boy a clock and I vetoed it; I felt he was too young to deal with the concept of time other than demarcations of the passing of the day. I suggested that we look at it for his third birthday (in June). Lately, The Boy has shown an increasing interest in time asking what day it is, is it night time/lunch/breakfast/dinner etc. He's finding Sundays particularly confusing, every sunny day is a Sunday according to him!
I was recently told about a new programme starting up on Nick Jr: Ticket Toc. The British produced (you know I'm a stickler for native accents in tv programmes) pre-school animation series features twins who help children gain and develop their awareness of time.
As a child, my grandparents had a genuine Swiss clock which didn't feature a cuckoo, but featured a little girl and boy that would come out of opposite sides of the clock to greet each other. I was obsessed with the thing, waiting and wondering where they went and what they got up to. When I read the information about Tickety Toc I smiled to myself.
'On the wall of an old clock shop hangs a very special clock. Every hour, on the hour, it chimes and out pop our little heroes. But what happens when they go back inside?'
When chime-time has finished, Puffity the puppy-dog train takes the time-twins Tommy and Tallulah Tockey off to the other side of the clock for adventures galore in this CGI action-packed adventure perfect for curious and imaginative pre-schoolers. We loved the colourful and charismatic collection of characters, especially the ping-ponging Madame au Lait and knitting Chick-a-dee.
Ticket Toc will air from Monday 23rd April 2012 at 8.15am every weekday on Nick Jr (Sky 615, Virgin 715, TalkTalk 318)
Today we met up in Somerset with Jenny, Burton and Jenson from Mummy Mishaps. We'd both really wanted to go to the Warner Bros event earlier in the week but were unable to make it, so we decided to meet at Puxton Park, just off junction 21 of the M5.
The weather was typical April with brilliant sunshine one minute and lashing rain the next. However it didn't deter us from having fun both indoors in the massive soft play, and outdoors in the digging sand pit, adventure park, climbing fort and having a quick look at the animals before the deluge.
[slickr-flickr tag='Funwithfriends']
The boys had a great time together, and even though the weather cut our time short I suspect we'll be meeting the Mummy Mishaps mob again there. Worth a visit!
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I've added this to Coombe Mill's Country Kids
I've previously written on the TOTS100 that I don't agree with asking for nominations for awards ceremonies, and I maintain that. I personally feel that people should nominate a blog based on the fact that it clearly speaks to you about that subject.
However, I would like to acknowledge that some kind souls have thought my little corner of cyberspace worthy of an award and have therefore nominated me in a few of the categories:
It means a lot that my tales of life with The Boy and Mr. TBaM have made an impression on some of you. And after my lonesome 365 project last year, and the success of this year's 366, I'm overwhelmed that people have nominated me for Best Photography blog. We have a big discussion group on Facebook for this project, and I'm guessing it's from that that the nomination for Most Helpful Blogger has come. As a primary school teacher, my job is to help, to have people recognise that is humbling. Thank you so very much.
If you'd like to nominate anyone else for the MADs, or if you agree with these above and would like to reinforce that vote, click the badge below to register your vote. But hurry, you have until Friday.
Thank you!
There are two ways to my son's heart: making things and reading books. And chocolate. Ok, so make that three things and we'll ignore ice-cream for now.
If someone was to send my son a big box of books (and I mean big) then I would undoubtedly be indebted to that person forever, and so would The Boy. Little Tiger Press were those people.
When they first contacted me about reviewing for them, I took a little browse of their lovely and engaging site and was pleased to discover that we already had quite a few of their books. I will post in more details again about the books that they sent us, but I wanted to share two specifc books with you for the moment, both of which are picture books with a CD featuring the vocal talents of one Justin Fletcher.
I was recently sent some products from the Rachel's Organics range to try out some of their new Spring recipes. The Rachel's Organics website has some amazing and inventive recipes using their yoghurts, and there was me thinking that pouring it over banana in the morning was adventurous.
I've adapted the following recipe because I didn't have some of the ingredients, but the main ones are the same.
For the salad:
For the dressing:
I was sent some Rachel's Organics yoghurts for the purpose of testing the recipes. I wasn't asked to blog about them, I chose to.
This isn't the best shot in the world; it was taken on my camera phone which doesn't cope well with movement or indoor lighting, both of which are here in abundance. However, I've chosen this one today because of who is in it: The Boy and his two cousins that he adores. Boy Cousin (6) was happy as Larry on the ride-on, Girl Cousin? Well, she's nearly 9 and wasn't very impressed with the situation, and who can blame her?
