Treasure!

Boy number two has mastered the art of sitting up. He's very pleased with himself.
It also means that we can properly crack open the treasure basket (or box in our case).  What now? I hear you cry. Well, let me explain; exploring treasure baskets (or heuristic play if you want to get all technical) describes the activity of babies and children as they play with and explore the properties of 'objects'. These 'objects' are things from the real world.
Heuristic play was a term coined by a child psychologist Elinor Goldschmeid in the early 1980's. 
What that means in reality is that we have gathered items from the kitchen and bathroom and raided the local 99p shop and popped them all into a handy low box. Amongst other things we have corks (lots of these for some reason!) pieces of wood, metal spoons, shells, wooden jewellery and a dish brush. Add a few plastic bottles filled with lentils and beads and were good to go.
Boy number two loves to explore all these new textures and shapes.

Boy number one also has also been making to use of some of the the objects as swords and other soldier paraphernalia.
So everyone's happy then.

So, it's been a while...

It's been a looooong while since I blogged!
Some stuff has happened. Mostly I had a baby, so three became four (to misquote the Spice Girls). Another boy so now I am massively outnumbered in our house. But that's ok, besides I sort of feel like I know what I'm doing with boys. Sort of.
So here we are again, more sleepless nights just when boy number 1 now stays in bed until a relatively decent hour, nappies when we had potty training down to a fine art and little bits of baby sick on the shoulder of every piece of clothing I own. But you know what? That's ok, I wouldn't swap it for the world!

I'm still here!

It's been too long!
But in the meantime here is the boy being a robot! I mean, everyone knows that cardboard boxes are way more fun than actual toys!

Crafty Christmas

So the stockings are finished and (mostly) hanging up - two more to go!

There's Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus hanging on the tree;

And a jar of light on the table;

Happy Christmas!

Stocking update

Knit, knit, knit...
Still frantically knitting those teeny tiny stockings - last count 19 - only five to go! Wish me luck.

Going retro...

So the boy and I decided to go a bit old school yesterday and give playdough a try. It turns out there are about a million variations of the playdough recipe and nearly all of them use a cup measurement. So I did a bit of googling and quite a lot of guessing...
The boy, as always, was up for a bit of stirring.

Then, I, as the nominated grown up did the hot bit.

Once it had cooled down we got down to the serious business of cutting,

Squidging,

And rolling.

As well as learning some new words (squidge and squash!) it was fascinating to see how quickly the boy picked up the different ways of handling and working with the dough.
We put it in the fridge for another day. And it's just possible that Father Christmas might be bringing some playdough toys too!

Little acorns and great oaks

We've been to the park today. As well as the obligatory go on the big slide and some time on the swing we found lots of acorns.
The boys the was intrigued by these little things and their 'hats' and had great fun putting them on and collecting great handfuls. We decided to bring some home so that we could plant them and watch the grow. Hopefully.