Its Raining, It's Pouring

Take one torrential downpour, and in the words of Forrest Gump, I am talking big old fat rain here;

Bundle one toddler up in their newly-gifted rainsuit and wellies;

Hand toddler a cup to 'catch some rain for mummy',

Usher toddler out of the door and into the downpour.........

The novelty of being outside during such heavy rainfall transfixed Poppet, she mostly stood very still, staring & listening, enjoying the sensation of the rain landing on her.

The sound of her singing drifted up the garden- she sang "It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring" and "Inchy winchy spider". Good choices.

Whenever her hood slipped down I was shouted to come and "put hood up!" but other than that she was happy to wander about in her own little world, singing to herself, knocking off any pools of rain she found on the leaves and jumping in puddles.

She dutifully returned with a rather pathetic amount of rain collected in her cup, and was inordinately proud of it. I felt a bit cruel at this point as her little hands were freezing so she got dried off with a warm towel and a mug of hot chocolate for her trouble.

She must have enjoyed it though as a couple of days later the heavens opened again and she responded with a "Rain jacket on?"

Green Day (not the band)

Following on from the success of our yellow day I thought a day of green things would be easy but it was a bit of a wash out..........

We started off shopping at the greengrocers and I gave Poppet a free reign of the shopping basket as long as the things she chose were green - she excelled at this task and chose apples, cucumber, mangetout and a green packet of crisps. At home she helped make lunch and was astounded to find the big green watermelon we had was red inside. 

After lunch I set up a small world underwater play scene in a plastic under-bed storage box using green glass beads, green milk carton lids, shells and a couple of boats. To this I added green ice-cubes in the shape of fish. Unfortunately I completely over-estimated how long these would take to melt and they were gone in a couple of minutes before I had a chance to take a photo. Poppet spent the rest of the afternoon asking "where fish gone?" over and over and over. So at least she learnt an important lesson in the properties of ice and it's tendency to melt.

Once she got over the sudden unexplainable disappearance of the fish she spent a while filling the boat up with beads (she loves these glass beads) and emptying it and filling it again. This was the first time she had played with a play scene like this and it really captured her attention.

To round our green day off, we sat down to watch Shrek (what?, that totally counts as a green activity).

Poppet: 2yrs 5mos

Little: 9mos

Messy Play - Jelly Smash!

It looks like summer has finally arrived! Today has been gloriously sunny so we took the opportunity to  engage in some messy play outside, introducing Poppet and Little to the sensation and texture of jelly!

I had a few farmyard animals and a shell suspended within the jelly, and I also gave them various tools that they could use to explore it. It looked very jelly-fish like sitting there and Poppet spent quite a while just poking at it to see it wobble!

She liked nudging the jelly with the wooden spoon in order to free some of the animals. Little got stuck in with her hands as usual. 

Poppet's weapon of choice was the toy mallet and she spent the rest of the time bashing the jelly up into pieces. Little by this point had figured out that it tasted good.

Poppet also liked eating it. I even gave it a taste.

  Little preferred to use her feet and legs to mash up the jelly. While eating it. She is multi-talented.

Two sticky, happy babies then had a paddling pool bath (£1 from Poundland!) to clean off. I think this was Little's favourite part.

Poppet: 2yrs 4 mos

Little: 8 mos

Hand and Foot Painting

We tried out our Tuff Spot outdoors for some hand and foot painting the other day. Once again Poppet needed some encouragement to get messy! I gave her paper plates with paint on, toilet roll tubes and cones for printing with, and white sheets of paper weighted down with stones.

She isn't very smiley doing this kind of thing, takes it very seriously. She had a go at it but wasn't overly enthusiastic!

The highlight was, I think, getting to clean up afterwards! Although she did manage to put her slippers back on and cuddle Little before I brought the basin of water out.

Poppet doing what she loves best, washing.

Water Bottle Skittles

We got caught in a hail shower on our way home from toddler group yesterday, but after lunch the sun made an appearance and it was a lovely day again so Poppet and I played some garden games while Little slept.

We brought out a basket full of all the balls that we own and a collection of plastic bottles from the recycling to play skittles with. Our garden has a long sloping path down it and Poppet has always like throwing balls down it.

We filled the bottles up with water from the outside tap and using the watering can and funnel. This in itself was a game for her!

We then put them at the bottom of the path and Poppet starting flinging balls at them. It was too easy with the footballs, every throw was on target. But she found it harder with the smaller lighter balls. So she preferred to stick to the footballs! Every hit was met with an excited scream and shouting for mummy to "pick up the bottle!".

This was repeated many times. Bottles refilled. Repeated many times again. Felt slightly guilty about the waste of water but this was quickly outweighed by toddler laughter. Also this is Scotland we have no shortage!

We rolled the balls down the slide as well.

When we were all skittled out I told her to use the leftover water to water her garden, so she gave her sweetcorn plants a wee water.

Then the heavens opened up again and we made a dash to the greenhouse for shelter. The hailstones sounded pretty loud in there. This is her amazed face!

Foot Spa Water Play

In this house, any kind of water play is always going to be a winner. I decided to use this to my advantage to squeeze in a sneaky foot soak this afternoon. All this sandal wearing weather recently has highlighted the sad state of my feet and I have a lovely pot of peppermint, tea tree and rosemary Epsom foot soak that has been calling out to me. We're all a bit under the weather with colds so could do with a bit of pampering!

We already had lots of towels down as Little has a nappy rash so is getting lots of no nappy time. I gave the two of them their own bowl of warm water and a few foot spa type things to play with - toe separators, a nail brush and nail shiner (brand new ones!).

This was the first time Little had experienced water play, but being as she is such a big fan of the bath I knew she would love it. She would have crawled into it if she could.

 

Poppet started off using the toe separators as a comb for Little, proudly exclaiming how pretty she looked afterwards! 

She also wanted to copy mama and brought her little chair over so she could sit with her feet in the water. She then decided the toe separators were cleaning implements and set about washing her chair legs.....

And finally dolly got in on the act and had a foot soak too

While all this distracting water play was going on I had a chance to sit with my feet in a nice hot tub of lovely smelling water. All the wet towels and children were worth it!