crepe paper art

All you need is some water, a spray bottle, crepe paper and cardboard.
We sticky taped the crepe paper onto the piece of white cardboard and then sprayed. Once it dried we peeled off crepe paper and had a cool artwork to display at home.
We will have to try some different patterns next.

Arthur loved spraying the spray bottle best but got a shock each time it hit him in the face!

little boys are made of...

grubby hands, caterpillars, snails and lovely, dirty, orange fingernails (looks like we are rewriting the classics!).

This little caterpillar was Artie's best friend this afternoon. He was held and air-kissed. He was named Greeny because he was, to quote my young man, 'green, not black' . He even got to go for a ride in a Playmobile wagon.  We have released him into the wild, I hope he was not too traumatised by all the lovin' he got today!

toddler science

Pour the water in.

Add some food colouring.

Mix up the goop.

Enjoy the mess!

How cool is cornflour when it is wet! If you've never played with cornflour and water you should go make a mess right now. Artie loved this activity. I had it all set up so after he woke up from his nap and had a snack, we were straight into it. We spent well over an hour playing with our goop. The only reason we stopped is because he accidentally slipped and bumped his chin.

We mixed, poured, squeezed and made mess. We also cooked, made car tracks in the coloured water, played find the farm animal/spoon/key in the goop. The possibilities go on and on. We will definitely make this goop again. 

I also put a bowl of soapy water and some towels out. This proved just as much fun. Not only washing and drying our own hands but also washing naughty toys who got so very dirty in the goop.

Around the garden

We've been trying to get back into the garden. It is overgrown again. Anything we do plant gets eaten by these pesky possums or scratched up by those rascally brush turkeys. So we have been coming up with some ideas to keep the pests away and so far our nets have been a success. Lots of pruning and chopping to go, but it's made a little more fun with my two favourite men by my side. 

Australia Zoo

We got a yearly pass to Australia Zoo. We love having the pass, any weekend when we feel like an adventure we can jump in the car and spend the morning with the animals. A lot of fun to be had! Here are some photos from our past couple of visits. 

Pretending to be a tiger

We told him to stand next to the turtle and smile! What a clown.

He's thinking of running away to join the Irwin family.

Balancing like a possum, very proud.

colouring

Back at Easter time we picked up a colouring page from the local supermarket. Artie worked on it at home and we took it back the following week. He loved seeing it hanging up every time we went and did our groceries. We were surprised when a few weeks later we got a call telling us Artie had won his age group- he got a little toy. I wanted to record for prosperity Artie's first win at 19months old. It was very cute and he was proud as punch.

sick days

Artie was sick this past week. He had a mouth full of ulcers and a few high fevers. It was a tough week.

There are moments in parenting that seem impossibly hard. How did our parents do it? How do people do it with more then one child? It was a week of little sleep, messy house, grumpy adults and one poor, sore, screaming boy. In an effort to keep Arthur indoors and help him mend there was a lot of play. 

After the pretend play, reading and drawing had been exhausted, I remembered I had the the holy grail of activities for sick days. Looking through a box of old toys. Three boxes of my childhood Disney collection came out to play.

The living room resembled Mickey Mouse war zone. But it did the trick and kept the boy entertained and inside for the good part of an hour, and the same the next day and the day after that.

My parenting lesson from all of this? I have made a smaller, more manageable box that is going in the linen cupboard and is full of some of my favourite figures. Next sick day I am set and hopefully without the Disney explosion.

Adam and I are still relatively new at this parenting gig. Each day gets a littler easier and we get a little more confident. Some days we do it all beautifully and easily but other days we bumble our way through.

We are learning, I am learning. There are a couple of things I have found out about myself from the tough times. The first is to take and appreciate any pocket of time I get to myself. And sit quietly in this moment. The other thing is that taking photos can turn a bad day good. It gives me a new perspective on the situation and allows all the big, messy out-of-control moments to seem smaller, less   terrible and controllable.

So there you have it. A tough, terrible, no good week that we survived. Maybe we are getting the hang of this parenting thing after all.