One of Me, Three of You

This is a very belated post to help me remember A's early years. His first word, shortly before Christmas, was 'boo'. And if he doesn't know what else to do with himself then he still resorts to a couple of 'boos' to get a laugh from me and his brothers. He is now saying a couple of other things - 'yes' (in an oddly clear way), 'more', we've just about got 'ball' and a bit of a 'mmm' noise for milk. T is doing his best to teach him to say 'nah' which I am trying to knock on the head as I find it incredibly irritating!

I'm not a big fan of new year's resolutions (or New Year itself if I'm honest, although not really sure why!) but December was a bit mad this year so I have found myself calming down and taking stock in January. Alongside wanting to dedicate a bit more time to my blog, I have been thinking about our time at home. My aim is to be more inspired and organised with our play and activities in 2019. My preference is to be out and about all the time but with the constraints of school runs, toddler naps and a growing baby bump we are going to continue to spend a fair amount of time at home this year. None of us are very good at coming up with lots of imaginative play ideas on the hoof so this is partly about having more ideas up my sleeve and more resources to hand when a prompt is required. If all goes to plan and I am spending the summer pinned to the sofa feeding a tiny baby then anything that helps to entertain the boys is going to be useful. And I am also hoping that ha

Middle son turned four last weekend and, to celebrate, we had our first go at a soft play party. A January birthday means that parties at home have to be mostly inside and it often gets a little mad - we hired soft play equipment for his first birthday that was far too big for our sitting room and it was chaos! This year he was adamant that he didn't want a party at home and he wanted to invite his nursery friends for the first time. I must admit I was less than keen on handing over my money and signing up to the list of terms and conditions but it went surprisingly well. We tried out a couple of soft play places that host parties back in November to see what they were like and settled on the local leisure centre (even though it is strangely tucked away in the corner of the shopping centre). I'm really glad we went for somewhere that gave us the place to ourselves. Even though not all the children knew each other beforehand (we had nursery friends, family friends and cousi

A December filled with last minute Christmas craft and middle son's birthday in early January mean my blog has been a little ignored recently. However, Christmas and birthday are now out the way, school and nursery have started back and I have a bit of time to devote to this again. So I'm starting with a very belated post with my Christmas makes. These mostly went into the boys' stockings so I have to pretend they are Santa's handiwork but I am secretly proud of (most of!) my efforts. - Rainbow peg dolls We painted a set of six rainbow peg dolls earlier in the year to match our mini Grimms rainbow, and I wanted to fill in the gaps for the 12 piece rainbow for T's stocking. I was pretty pleased with our colour mixing efforts for the second six, I think the lime green doll is my favourite. - Rainbow cones In hindsight, it probably would have been easier to spend my money on the Grimms rainbow forest rather than decide to have a go with liquid watercolours