There are loads of little apples on the apple tree! The potatoes are doing epically well, I have been living off of garden salad for weeks and we have for the first time ever... Chillies! I have never been able to keep the plants alive long enough to get anything off of them 🙂
However the slugs have pretty much eaten all of my squash plants 🙁 Which actually just as well as we still don't have an allotement and after pestering the council it looks like we still wont have one by the end of the year so I had nowhere to plant the braccias - I popped them in where the squashes had been this weekend. Also our neighbours have rearranged their garden resulting in them giving us a plastic chest seat thingy - the sort I have been saving up to buy! So I have finally managed to clear all the potting compost and spare pots and what not up 🙂
The 'grassy area' is basically were I am growing stuff for now until we get the allotement. Due to roof fixing there is a big bag of stuff to be burnt and planks of wood randomly scattered around the garden and I'm not sure when we will next have a weekend to sort that lot out! Once our budget has recovered from buying roof sealent stuff I think we are going to have to get decking paint as it is starting to break up in places. There is a bramble in Mary's bit of the garden which we need to sort! Jean's Pirate Cove is starting to look good and I think it is all generally moving forward!
My tomatos have fruit on them but just haven't looked healthy for weeks :/ Buns still hasn't gotten his bigger run though he's not in a small one as it is and continually gets to run round the entire garden!
Jean and her friends decimated my salad by making a salad for Alaric - just as well with the weather the way it is the radishes I hadn't already harvested began to 'run' and were getting a little woody so they picked all of those , and the chives and the lettuce - Mary just ate the salad from the pot!
Alaric enjoyed his salad 🙂
So I made the mistake of trying to have a bath whilst the kids were awake.
Mary who up until two baths ago was screaming the house down at the mear mention of the word, took all her cloths off and neatly removed her nappy and attempted to hoist herself over the side. We don't put bubble bath in her ones due to her exma but it looks like she loves them. She had the normal screaming fit but this time when she was taken out of the bath!
Jean wanted to get in as well :/ and spent ages stealing my bubbles and making excuses as to why she needed to be in the bathroom.
And then the kitten! Who once the baby was safely in bed came climbed onto me in the bath! She also spent a while by the taps fishing for my feet :/
We went into the woods with cubs to talk about climate change and so that they could get muddy in the stream 🙂
Mary adored the adventure running around trying to get over gates and finding dappled sunshine on the forest floor - of course she also tried to go into someones house when we came upon it!
This is not a brilliant pic but - I found a moss pig! It was on what is known as The Winni the Pooh tree and I just really think this bit looks like a pig (piglet?).
And of course the muddiest of all the children was Jean who had decided to go out in crocks and pale yellow trousers instead of wellies and water proofs like she was supposed to!
I only just managed the walk but it was completely without stick and did involve chasing a certain toddler for about an hour!
The Science festival was amazing - I just picked out the photos here that aren't going into their own write up about a specific event etc.... It was crazy and mad and informative and showed me just how valuable science communication is!
There was the normal fun circus stuff - lovingly science themed 🙂
This rather elegant dude reminds me of someone? 😉
Mary loved exploring.
Ok so mainly it was running off but excited running off.
She did grudgingly come back when I started counting.
I found a random hospital trolly outside one of the venues!
I found a BBC dude with random props wondering around a little lost so I photographed him and then found him the place he needed to be 🙂
I found a ferret!
I don't think it was with the festival but was someone walking their pet - it was funny because one of the suggestions Al had given me for getting more people to fill in the highly important research questionaire was that I should find a ferret!
Unfortunately I just missed him filling the bag with stuff from the hydrant can - but oooo random stuff at a festival - really?
Once more aliens seemed to have taken up residence on the roof of the town hall!
Thursday the kids came and joined me after school - they all loved the explosions bit run by the BBC.
When we first arrived Mary was over awed and just kept saying WOW! and Ooooo 🙂
Jean and her friends found the racing car simulator 🙂
She rather liked it even if she did keep crashing!
Dad found an old sports car with gears and things inside it 🙂
See cogs!
It was rather a nice car
The kids made LED torches 🙂
They were all just so excited 🙂 Mum found knitting and Al and Andy found robots - it was brilliant 🙂
Construction toys like stickle bricks, lego, play mobile and umpteen others are fabulous but soooo expensive. We tend to get them in lu of other gifts which seem funkier as they are the toys that just keep giving. They are not that age dependent as the older the child gets the more complex the items they build with it. It improves spacial awareness and hand eye coordination, it taps straight into engineering and with things like lego technic it begins to be something more.
But it is not just science and engineering that it feeds into, it relies on the child's imagination, it is design skills and then it is pure and simple play, once they have made the set up they want. Above is Jean's Antropolis or Ant City. She imagines all the little ants making their homes in the stickle bricks and how they would interact with each other, how they would get there in the first place. The stickle bricks were a christmas present for Mary who is happy to act as stickle brick goffer fetching the little spiked rectangles for her sisters latest piece of ant arctecture.
It has gotten to the point that I am story boarding the escapades of these ants which Jean reads when she remembers.
Maybe one day I will draw up the adventures of Ant Ee Matter and Antropolis and yes he has a cape.
The point is that we think construction toys are one of the best things to give children and we have also found a set of convertors you can print on a 3D printer so you can make lego and stickle bricks and all the others fit together into one huge great big uber construction kit!
I'm not sure who is more excited about this - me or the kids or Al!
Of course you need access to a 3D printer - oh look - hello Bristol Hack Space have we told you how much we love you?
Animals, Building Maintenance, Gardening, Jean, Mary | sarah | 
Sun 23rd Jun 2013 8:44 am | 
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