it got cold again today

But we went out anyway. Twice, in fact. We visited the post office this morning to post some things I sold on eBay, which took us over an hour. We popped into the local butcher's to pick up some pork and chive sausages while we were out. Although it's a fairly boring walk we still managed to have fun, chatting about various things. About 2.30 we decided to walk up to the local playground, and went via the primary school the sprogits used to go to. While there we dropped off Small Clanger's old school jumper and a school library book, and put a huge tub of batteries in their battery recycling bin. We also took a couple of bags of glass bottles and jars to the bottle bank and the residents club. When walking we saw a few people who we knew locally, and when we were nearly there I stopped to chat and the kids grabbed the bags off me, walked the 100 yards to the bottle bin and had posted almost all of them into it by the time I got there! Then we spent some time in the playground but not too long because of the temperature. On the way home I got shouted by the sprogits for stopping and talking (again!) which is fair enough cuz we were all cold, but I did arrange for a couple of friends to come over next week :)

After lunch, before we went to the playground, the sprogits and I were talking about what was going on this month and I drew out a grid of this month and wrote on it our usual things we do like gym, forest school etc and showed them (particularly Small) when we are going away. I had previously mentioned that it was important to me that we do a bit of reading/writing etc type stuff each week, and how did they feel about doing Reading Eggs for half an hour on a morning or two? Well, frankly, 'going down like a lead balloon' would be an understatement! They both protested very loudly, said they hated it and it was terrible and awful and was like being stabbed in the eyes with blunt pins... ok maybe not those exact words, but that was definitely the sentiment. So I said I was ok with them not doing that, if we could come up with something else instead. So we pondered for a bit, and eventually between us we came up with 2 things: firstly, that I would try to find them both pen-friends for them to write to; and secondly, that they would each choose a book tomorrow, read it by themselves, and then write a review of it next Thursday morning, and then choose a new book, and review that one the following week. I haven't asked whether they want to use a form to do the reviews, but we've agreed we will keep them all in a file so that we can go back and read them over if we want to. So we added book reviews to our calendar on Thursdays, and Little Clanger suggested we do them until the end of Feb and then discuss whether they were enjoying them or not, which I was very impressed about. They also both wanted me to write cooking on Tuesdays, so Tuesday morning will become our cooking time, and we have agreed to make splat biscuits (chocolate brownie biscuits) next week, and then butterfly buns the week after. I think this was inspired by our cake making session yesterday. Well, good! Cooking is fun :)

Anyway, they've also played with the cars, the duplo and the lego today, drew some pictures this morning straight after breakfast, and this afternoon Small Clanger wanted to draw a game board so got the ruler out and drew a grid, then asked me to draw him circles with numbers in them in each of the squares. When I asked why he said he couldn't draw circles very well so I got out a stencil and he used that to draw each of the circles:

Oh, and we have reserved something very exciting! Really want to say what it is but the surprise will be better :D we pick it up on Friday afternoon after construction club! Will post about it then!