This weekend I was lucky enough to meet up with the lovely family behind the MS Mummy of Two blog for a photo session.

We had booked this way back last year but the weather had been conspiring against us for months. I woke up on Saturday morning to thick fog and my heart sank, but luckily it burnt away and we finally got to get together. It remained a bit cloudy but it didn’t dampen our spirits at all.

We had a stroll around the park, fed the ducks, tried out the swings and then headed over to look at the animals and feed the rabbits. Somewhere around we lost one of Beboo’s little pink shoes – oops, sorry guys.

I will admit to being a wee bit jealous of the awesome bear ear warmers that Pops was rocking!

The best way to finish off a morning like that is to have a sit down and enjoy the healing properties of a lolly (or dummy for those under 12 months old!).

It is also worth mentioning that Chelsea is doing a charity skydive in aid of the Multiple Sclerosis Society. I’d love it if you could please head on over to her JustGiving page to find out more and sponsor her if you are able to. It’s an amazing and scary thing she has chosen to do and I think she’s a very brave lady.

Thanks guys, I’m glad we finally got to meet up and I hope you enjoyed your sneak peek.

There is something so lovely about winter evening light, though the mud at the park and freezing conditions were less lovely!

Being 3 must be fun, you love mud and splashing in puddles (& don’t have to worry about the washing after), you are short enough to lie over a swing and watch your feet, your wellies are cute and cold weather just inspires you to run faster.

I really do need to take a leaf out of Annie’s book, worry less about muck and mess and enjoy the moment, however muddy or wet it is.

My anxiety levels are still way too high but I’m working on my baby steps and I’m certain the kids haven’t noticed any change. I think I need to include some late afternoon trips to the park to my baby steps for next week because the light and laughter from the kiddos was the perfect tonic.

I recently read an article about what makes a quintessentially English park and it got me thinking. We’re lucky to live in an area that has lots of parks nearby, we have small ones with nice play areas, large ones with lakes, ones in the town centre and ones that are large tree lined fields with plenty of room to run. One of our favourites is Pittville Park, Jon and I were married at the Pump Rooms many many moons ago so as well as being picturesque it has loads of awesome memories for us as a family.

This morning we celebrated the apocalyptic rain ending by heading over to the park for an explore. I had been sent a link to a printable quiz / game to do as you stroll around the park by 1926 Trading so we decided to take it along and have a go.

The idea is you follow the path and do the action or answer the questions as you go round. As Annie is so young I wrote the answers she told me to, or that we both Googled and found the answer to. I like the fact that we could do this game again in each of the seasons and the answers would be different.

The question about finding out the height of a tree by walking away from it until you can see the top of it through your legs was problematical to say the least! Annie was wearing a skirt which kept getting in the way when she looked backwards through her legs, she can only count to 20 reliably so I had to keep count for her, with the ground being so wet she was slipping and sliding all over the place and we ran out of room before we could see the top of the tree. Also she stood in a huge puddle and nearly lost a welly boot!

I liked that the last point was to do with cleaning up litter, I think it’s really important for kids to understand the importance of not littering, and keeping their environment clean from a really young age.

It has been raining non-stop for days and so the ground at the park was sodden and so slippery, poor old Jon managed to fall over and get himself covered in mud, literally head to toe!

Even after we’d finished the game we kept on exploring, examaning tree bark, searching for wild animals and mini beasts because Annie was so fired up with the idea of ‘finding things out’.

We had to look up the answers to see which tree our leaf and seed came from. I feel a bit bad that I didn’t know the answer automatically but now I do so that’s no bad thing.

Annie really enjoyed doing the game, despite the poor weather and mud. It was lovely to go out and have a purpose, I think we probably ended up walking a bit further than we normally would have done had we just been at the park for a stroll.

If you want to have a go at the game too it can be downloaded from here, there is also a printable badge for your young explorer to wear once they’ve completed the activities.

Please note I was sent the link to the game but received nothing for downloading it or writing about it, I just wanted to share it with you guys because it was fun. Let me know what you think if you and your family have a go, and hopefully none of you will lose a welly in the mud or slip over like we did!