Is it here to stay?

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Shhh! I might scare it off by saying this but, do you think summer might be on its way?

This morning, after dropping the car off for a quick service (pah!), we ventured out in the pushchair for a jaunt up town. Well, him in the pushchair, me 'jaunting'. The sky was azure blue and the sun was beating it down. Very quickly I regretted wearing black, but the rather scrummy frappucino from Starbucks soon made up for it (did you know you can have skimmed milk frappucinos now? Significantly less calories, surely? Means I can have a big one!). We went to the Under Fives playgroup for the first time. They put an apostrophe in the 'Fives' which really annoyed me but I refrained from rubbing it out. Just! The Boy had a fabulous time and I wondered why I had never been there before.

The day went a bit haywire from there on in, mainly because I had mild hysteria that the 'quick service' turned into a 'you need new brakes and a new pollen filter' situation. At the start of the month you can do without double + the amount that you first expected going out the bank.

Yesterday was a much better day. Yesterday saw us trotting off to Barry Island with Little Miss Cheeky and Oldest-Friend for fun in the sun. She brought along her older children, both boys; Curly-Mop and Football-Mad, who commandeered a decent section of the huge beach as their football pitch. Little Miss Cheeky and The Boy had great fun digging for water and building sandcastle, while Oldest-Friend and I had a good old chin-wag and avoided footballs and flying sand.

We were very comfortably ensconced in our cocoon of oblivion; stunning canvas windbreaker from EcoFriendlyBags and parasol, which was bought from Lyme Regis beach years ago. I must be a snob here and say how nice it was, not only to be shielded from the wind, but also to be shielded from some of the sights on the beach! Put it away woman, cover yourself up mister (who looked 11 months pregnant); I don't want to see it!

Anyone fancy winning one of those windbreakers from EcoFriendlyBags? You can over here.

Swirly Science

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Science and me? Nooo! I scraped a C grade in my GCSE and have always found it a challenging subject to teach. I'm not so bad with biology, chemistry I can just about cope with, but physics has me quaking in my boots. I've even been known to swap teaching a science topic to avoid it (I taught the other teacher's art lessons, she did my science for the remainder of the term). I've managed to find that by reading up and staying one step ahead of the children in my class that I managed to con them into thinking that I knew what I was talking about. In a way, the avent of child-led learning means that I don't have to panic so much because I can't turn it around and say "I don't know, let's find out together!"

How will I help The Boy with his scientific enquiry? Eeek! We already know that there is not enough interest in Science in schools; the curiosity needs to be started young. However, I'm as compatible with Science as oil and water. So when MultipleMummy and MummyMummyMum came up with the idea of Science Sparks I rejoiced!

I've been admiring their weekly experiments and saving the e-mail notifications in a little folder, but have still been too scared to do them. Until Monday when I had a go at Week Four's idea of Colourful Milk. Here's the video of our attempt. First of all please excuse the snips in the footage; he kept saying his name! And secondly, I know I keep correcting him with the colours, I felt stressed out about the Science!

Now you should pop over to Multiple Mummy's Science Sparks page and check out a master at work and the other link-ups.

Like Mummy

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At Christmas we bought The Boy a little laptop of his own in the vague hope that he'd stop wanting to fiddle with ours. Fat chance! It wasn't a proper laptop; it was one of those Learning Laptops from the Early Learning Centre (£17.00). Unfortunately he wasn't at the right stage of development at that age and wasn't at all interested in it. It has been given the odd cursory glance and prod until today.

He wandered into the dining room where I was sat with the laptop and looked at me. The Boy then toddled off and returned with his own laptop. He proceeded to place it on the table, climb up into his chair, strap himself in and play with the laptop. The photo is my 365 for today.

However, I wanted to show you what happened next. The Boy's clearly learnt more in the last few months than I originally thought.