It’s been a rather exciting and busy time since I last blogged. It snowed, actual real snow that the kids could play out in, the sort of snow that made us decide not to travel but to stay home and have snowball fights and hot chocolate.

I really regretted not buying the kids any waterproof trousers or the sled we’d seen in Asda the day before. I had explained to Annie that it probably wouldn’t snow and if it did it would only be a dusting which wouldn’t warrant a sled – how wrong I was!

When we weren’t out in the Narnia-esque back garden we were playing inside. Jon wrapped my birthday presents and the kids went crazy with the packing paper. They wrapped each other up, threw it around, chased it and hid under it, who knew brown paper could be so much fun?

In addition to that excitement I celebrated my birthday in a lovely relaxing way with the family. There are no photos of my ‘big day’ apart from a blurry one on Annie’s camera and that’s good with me.

It was nice and quiet, we stayed local, Annie went swimming while the 3 of us mooched around town, I treated myself a paper trimmer, we shared a Happy Meal (Annie’s 1st one) for lunch, we watched a movie and then in the evening Jon cooked a gorgeous dinner and we watched The Great British Bake Off.

I got lots of lovely books and Jon and the kids bought me all the Project Life bits I’ll need for the year, I even got to finish my first 3 weeks as the photos arrived with perfect timing.

We will be seeing my family at the weekend for more birthday fun and then next week we’re heading off to ‘the big city’ to wander around the shops and eat in my favourite restaurant. I maintain though, that until we all the activities have been done and the presents unwrapped it is still technically my birthday, so on we roll with my big birthday, day two…!

How was your weekend, did you get any snow?

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!

SInce Ezra started moving around under his own steam he has done every thing in his power to get to Annie and play with her / harass her / tweak her nose / pull her hair / get her attention etc.

I think it’s very cute but Annie  is (understandably) less keen. She puts up with Ez’s constant attention for so long and then she will go and sit on the back of the sofa where he can’t reach her.

On Saturday I photographed the evolution of the kiddos playing together…

Ez zombie-shuffled over to where Annie was practicing writing her name. He tried muscling in on the action which Annie put up with for a while and then she headed off for her safety zone high up on the sofa and left Ez to play with the Magna Doodle.

There are days when the two of them play together really nicely, Annie puts up with all of Ezra’s flapping and pulling admirably. On other days though you’d think Ez was poisonous, Annie won’t let him anywhere near her.

I know that as Ez calms down, learns more words and starts playing rather than chewing on Happyland figures or destroying train tracks then they’ll get on better, but rght now I love watching them interact, the good and the bad!

How do your kiddos get on together?