Garden play!

One of the reasons we wanted this house (and went over budget for it), was for the back garden. It's not acres of wonderland, but it's there and it's very private and it's ours, and I think it has big potential.

We moved in at the end of last October when it was freezing, and the back garden looked like a junk yard covered in freaky leaf creatures and moss monsters - some seriously scary looking weeds! and I was way too focused on Halloween (I love Halloween!) to even think about it.

Now it's spring I'm determined to be a slave to it whenever I can. I'm a total gardening amateur, but I really want a lovely outdoor space for Charlie to play in during the summer (and barbecues and a couple of loungers would be lush!)

There are so many outdoor activities available to you when you have a garden!

We're going to start on the lawn tomorrow by ourselves. I'm guessing it's going to be a long, strenuous process; pulling up all the weeds and what look like doc leaves (which means nettles are around somewhere, I think!), raking up the bald patches and planting all the lawn seed - then manually watering it all (we left our hosepipe at our last house so we now have a watering can!)

So what we did, along with our mini-Gardener, is tackled the flower bed which leads up the path. We managed to finish a third of it before Charlie started his whinges. He's only 21 months so I'm pretty proud that he lasted half an hour!

We pulled up all the dead trees, shallots, and weeds, and saved all the worms by putting them onto the grass (hope they escape into next door!)

Then we raked it over, mixed in some Miracle-Gro, and planted some peas and some other mixed flowers. We also planted carrots, pumpkins and sun flowers in little pots which are in the kitchen, ready to be re-plotted outside in large trays and pots outside. (We have a little patio at the top).


Carrots, pumpkins, and sunflowers.

Please note: All the junk at the back is NOT ours, it was kindly left dumped there by the previous tenants and our landlord is taking forever to get it shifted!

My little helper :)

Pulling up the prickly (half dead) tree!

Exploring the overgrown grass!


   Raking up the soil.


Fascinated by the worms, he thought they were snakes!

                                        Digging and planting the seeds!

I'm planning on buying a wooden bird table and making an activity out of painting it multicoloured. I LOVE how many birds there are around here even though the place is crawling with cats! (Cleo isn't an outdoor cat so she won't be catching any!)

I really want to plant a blossom tree at the back of the lawn for Earth Day.

Linking up to fun activities in the outdoors over at Coombe Mill! :)

Colour play: Week 1: Yellow.

I sincerely apologise for the quality of photos . My Nikon broke (again) so had to use my phone.

Yellow

I know I dress all dark and gothic, but I actually really love colour.

Charlie's doing well with his, he recognises pink, (sometimes red) and orange straight away, but struggles with others.

So I decided to focus on one colour a week.

Every day this week we highlighted the colour yellow.

1. On Monday we went to the park and explored the yellow sunflowers
2. We came back and painted them (breakthrough with messy play, yay!)
3. On Tuesday we planted some yellow sunflowers in little pots.
4.  On Wednesday we went to the park again and found some different yellow flowers.

1. Snack time: Yellow banana crisps.

2. Yellow beads on the abacus

3. He (eventually) found the yellow key on his xylophone!

4. We matched a yellow lemon to the lemon in his colour book.

                                         
                                                           "Yeh-whoa yeh-wan" (Cuuute!)

(Funky punky yellow bandana)

My new little painter!

This is really good fun now that Charlie loves painting.

We painted one yellow coloured object a day.

1. Monday: Yellow banana
2. Tuesday: Yellow chick
(Apologies for my appalling drawing - at least Charlie could somehow tell what they were!)



1. Thursday: Yellow sun
2. Friday: Yellow duckling (daddy's efforts!)

I was dead set on making some yellow coloured rice - but life got in the way a bit. So instead I'm going to make different bags of one colour (for each colour week) and a bag of rainbow rice for him to have some rainbow play with.

We also attempted a yellow dinosaur swamp... but it went green - which is kind of more realistic I suppose! I'm going to do a separate post on that because it was a great activity.

Charlie has actually started saying 'Yeh-whoa' now, which is more than he was doing before so I'm going to deem this colour-week-idea-thing successful! Go me! And go Charlie! :).

Bring on Green week next week! :)

Puddle jumping in Cleadon Park & shell collecting on Marsden bay.

I've had a bad week. The first couple of days I had agony with toothache, and then came the terrifying, horrible dental surgery experience, so we didn't get out of the house at all until Friday, which was awful for everybody. (Mammy gets a bit "caged-cheetah" when she's housebound!).

We also had some seriously impressive thunder storms. All fiery-fork lightening and hail, which even I didn't want to go out in!

So when it got to Friday and I felt a bit better, I grabbed Charlie and his wellies, and we went hunting for some big splashy puddles in the park.

My personal highlight of the week has to be the breakthrough with Charlie's messy play. He allowed himself to be absolutely covered in yellow and green paint this week, and for him that's massive. He actually sat in the tuff tray and put his hands and feet in it himself; whereas before anything sticky or wet or slimy would have him running for the safety of familiar things. He was always curious, but his nerves held him back.

I've had to be very patient with him, but with some gentle encouragement and praise (and mammy & daddy getting stuck in too!), he's starting to realise that getting messy can be fun!

Picking up a dirty stick and digging with it in the mud! (So proud!)

He did all this himself. Swirling the water around with his finger and then putting his entire hand in and feeling the mud.

Couldn't wait to go off by himself exploring!

He found lots of flowers, and correctly named the colour pink.
He needs a bit more help with yellow and white.

I really want to grow some of these of our own!

Heading home

Mothers day

It still feels really strange being one of the actual mothers on Mothers Day and not just the daughters! I love it though. This was my second Mothers Day, and we have a sort of tradition going where instead of buying cards to send each-other "from Charlie" we get him to finger paint reusable card, (when he's older he'll be able to get more crafty with glue etc).

A few days ago he discovered painting with a paintbrush, and loved it! So daddy helped him to paint me too cards, made out of some of the ridiculous amount of cardboard that his tuff tray came in!

One of the cards is a purple dinosaur and the other one is daffodils, trees and a sun. I love them both and will be proudly displaying them on what will be our 'art' wall in the play/music room upstairs.

They both have lovely messages inside :).

I also got two gorgeous lush items which I'll be reviewing at some point next week.

For a Mothers Day outing, I asked if we could all go to Marsden Bay because I love it. There's a gorgeous pebble beach, loads of cliffs with seagull nests, "Seagull island" and a "Grotto" inside the rocks.

It was really foggy and misty. The sea was wild and dramatic and the tide was coming in which limited our time on the beach, but I still loved it. We collected shells, scooped sand,  watched the waves and then had a lovely time in the Grotto.

It was a perfect Mothers Day. 

    I tried to get him interested in my brilliant shell-find but he'd found another fun activity, picking up sand and gravel and sprinkling it onto a big rock! He shouted "rock!" as he was doing it, and as I was carrying him up the steps afterwards "Bye rock!".... I think he likes big rocks. That's okay!

Charlie found a huge rusty.... thing... he called it "wheels!" I was cautious of him touching it (and banging his head on it) but he was really interested in dropping pebbles through it and feeling the rusty texture.


                                                                     In the Grotto in the cave!

A great mothers day!


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Some fun activities and a lot of 'firsts' for Charlie :)

We've been having lots of fun in the last few days trying out new play ideas that mammy found through her new uber-obsession with instagram and pinterest! -I love my new first ever smart phone :D.

These are some of the things we've tried:

                                    Play-dough

 

There's recipes for play-dough all over the internet but I used:
1 cup of plain flour
1/4 cup of water
1/3 cup sea salt
1 table spoon of oil
Orange & Yellow food colouring

This was Charlie's first time with a 'squidgy' texture and his (what we call) 'danger danger!' barriers came up. He was extremely cautious around it. He didn't want to touch it with his fingers at all and it took about 10 minutes to persuade him to stab it, and stick sticks and coloured pegs into it. He made a lot of "Eww" faces at it!

Daddy stuck all the coloured pegs into it to make a dough ball "hedgehog", and he enjoyed pulling them all out again, counting them and saying the colours.

I kept my dough-ball in the fridge and whopped it on Charlie's tray a couple of days later. He amused himself by sticking the wooden spoon into it and then watching it fall over.

Fun with Blocks

It's not a new idea but it's a classic one and it's just brilliant.
Charlie has an absolute ton of blocks and they're so versatile for learning and play.
The tuff tray is a great quick-and-easy flat surface for them too. He doesn't yet understand the concept of building. Well he probably does, but he's not interested in doing it! He likes to pick them up, feel & say the shapes, say the colours, count them, put them in out of various containers, and push them around the tray. His favourite thing is to push down towers that mammy & daddy build as quickly as possible!

Pipe cleaners & a colander
Such a simple idea but it really works! Charlie was squealing with excitement and shouting "Ooo! Oooo!" as soon as he saw this in his tuff tray.

 

At first he started feeling them and twanging them.

Then he started pulling them out and showing us.

Cleo thought it was an epic cat toy, which Charlie found hilarious.

Pulling them all out and collecting them.

Stashing them in his truck.

Tipping the colander upside down and shaking it to get them all out!

Got them!

I sorted them all into different colours and asked Charlie to help me! Which he did, for about two of them!

But really he just wanted to stash them in his truck :)

Springtime walk to Cleadon Hills

We had some seriously gorgeous weather going on this morning, so we did something we've been meaning to do for ages - we went up to Cleadon Hills. You'd never think you were in the middle of Tyneside stood up there!

It reminded me of being back on the Yorkshire moors at home (lots of jolts of nostalgia, happy & sad at the same time) Up there you can see Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham, and a very squinty-distant Scottish Border. It was such a beautiful, fresh clear day. The views really were amazing. It felt brilliant to breath in the fresh air, looking at the huge big blue sky and the miles of lush green grass. And of course you can clearly see the North Sea as well - you don't get that in Yorkshire!

You also can't miss the old 1820's Windmill. It's built on the highest part of the hills (this put out Out N about "all terrain" pram to the test!). In the 1870's a freak thunder storm severely damaged the Windmill and destroyed the sails. Afterwards it was used in the 1st World War as shooting practice, but it stands tall and proud and me being me, was pretty fascinated by it!

According to local legend, the mill owners heartbroken daughter Elizabeth Gibbon threw herself from the top of it after the storm, and her ghost has haunted it ever since... *spooky music*

Charlie loved the friendly horses.

The Mill - it's a lot more "upwards" than this picture makes out!

I've decided I like sky/cloud pictures :)

There is is!

 

 

 

Playing "peekaboo" though the Mill!
(Hope Elizabeth didn't mind)

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