Ickwell Nature Reserve

Lychee woke up, now officially a four year old, and decided to commandeer one of my T-shirts as a dress. More and more she is wanting to wear my things, be it slippers or hair clips, she's just so desperate to grow up. When all the other children are playing she likes to have a cup of tea with the mummies. Sometimes I can't decide whether she really is shy or if she just really wants to be a grown up.

To be honest, she looked remarkably cute in the T-shirt/dress (more so than I did!) so I'm going to let her keep it.




The T-shirt was originally my little sisters (I got a massive new wardrobe when she emigrated -sad story) and I love it. The 'Beloved' logo is cute enough, but what you probably can't quite read underneath is the red script which says 'because you never looked more beautiful than in His eyes'. I really do love the One Truth brand clothing.

Lychee wore it to come on a fun day out with some friends at Ickwell nature reserve. Several people were camping for the whole weekend, sadly we had to leave because I had a wedding today.

Cosmo and Lychee had great fun climbing trees, catching insects with her new bug hunting kit and generally building dens and stick fighting with lots of new friends.

Cosmo's highlight was teaching other children how to use his fire steel to make little fires. He just loves it when he is confident in a skill that takes others a bit of practice. It's a great way of getting him to talk more easily when he is feeling shy.

Lychee's favourite part was catching crawdad (my kids love that song) and cooking them. She didn't eat them, but both kids loved running around checking the traps and seeing how many were there. We of course, did eat them and they were very delicious.

Here's the video:

Wicksteed Park

It's the end of the summer term and our home ed co-op decided to celebrate with a visit to wicksteed park.
It was awesome.

Our musical garden

Behind the scales I built last week there's a secret passage that led to a massive compost heap. 

We dug all the compost out and used it to build our raised beds, but it left us with a massive crater that was just begging to become a play space. 

A few xylophones and some tambourines later and we have what the kids are calling their 'musical den'. 

All that was needed was a little fishing wire for hanging some cheap plastic instruments.

And a screw driver to remove some of the fun parts from said plastic instruments.

And the best part is that now all the noisy play can happen in the garden making our home a much more peaceful place ;-)