Monday 29 September 2008

Morning tea with Sam and Liam

It was such a glorious spring day today. It was cool bright and sunny. I decided to invite Catriona and her twins Sam and Liam over for a play and morning tea. The boys are all roughly the same age and get along very well. Catriona and I were able to enjoy a coffee and a chat while the boys played happily and harmoniously. Neither of us could recall having been so relaxed in such a long time. I set up a little table under out outdoor umbrella and made morning tea for the boys. Being boys they all pounced on the cake and ate the icing but not the cake.

The iced water posed the challenge of removing all icecubes before they melted.



And then it was time for trucks in the sandpit, accompanied by water iceblocks. What a great day! Life couldn't get much better than this!

Saturday 27 September 2008

Make that a strong babycino please!

The boys are fairly partial to a trip to a cafe now. They like to order a babycino and cake and sit there watching the world pass by.........................William commented on the satellite dish and the speakers of the CD player and then gave an impromptu dance concert to the world music which was playing. How different life is from when I was two!

Something obviously caught his eye

But what?

Someone has opened the door!

We're back!

I'm not quite sure where the last two months went. Somehow the coldness of winter kept me involved in knitting and therefore not blogging! Now that Spring is fully upon us and the knitting needles have been put away you should be able to expect some more regular entries. I discovered a whole world of beautiful hand-dyed and handpainted yarns and have incorporated some of them into sweaters for the boys and a couple of lovely warm scarves for me. Inger doesn't seem to feel the cold so a sweater would be lost on him!
For Oliver and William the warmer days mean water! They have just discovered the joys of mud pies. They like to run the water into this muddy hole and sit and roll in the mud. I have now learnt from experience that a change of clothes is always prudent! Before learning this I had to strip both of them off and drive them home in their nappies.



Oliver is concentrating carefully on tipping water from one cup to the other. He has a great liking for all sorts of cups at the moment and has a couple of special teasets which he enjoys playing with. Both boys now always ask for a babycino when we go to a cafe and Oliver has a preference for a china cup!

Here he is looking rather serious at the park. On that same day we had a fantastic time enacting the story of 'We're Going on a Bearhunt" with some other friends and their children. I found myself dancing through the park like the pied piper with a trail of children behind me. We ended up in a 'cave' which consisted of a clump of bushes with an inner cleared area. The children nearly all collapsed in excitement when Kirsty roared like a bear outside the cave. It was terrific fun!

I took this little photo quietly and without the boys knowing. They really are so sweet together. Here they are holding hands. They are just starting to play well together at times.

Last week was the last week of the school term so it meant dress-up at kindergym again. This time it was free choice so the boys decided that they wanted to be the Wiggles. They are looking forward to going to the Wiggles concert again in December. This year we have seats in the 2nd row.............very exciting for the boys!


It was also the last week of our Waldorf Steiner playgroup. We have been attending for a term. The group is quite unique, homely and very friendly. Each week the boys make bread there and also butter in a big old butter churn. The 21st century is left behind as the children are encouraged to enjoy their natural surroundings. At the last group we celebrated the beginning of Spring. Each of the children wore a floral wreath and we had a delicious picnic on the lawn.


I'm going to sign off now. It has been a very long day. This morning we had our 2nd garage sale in a month. We had lots of things we wanted to clear out of the shed. Over the two sales we made over $1400! Inger couldn't believe it. He had been quite sceptical about us selling anything at all, with his preference being taking everything to the dump!
William has set up an office in the kitchen. It is complete with computer and telephone. He adopts a serious look on his face and tells me he is talking with patients!

The coming week will be a very interesting and exciting one. We are welcoming Britta, our new American aupair, to live with us for a year. She arrives next Saturday. A few days later we will be receiving a half dozen fertilised speckled sussex hen's eggs in the mail and hope to hatch our first baby chicks. Two of our hens are broody so we thought we'd like them to become mums. Already we have someone interested in taking some chooks if we are successful.