Country Kids: Fun In The Sun

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With the cobalt blue sky and the sun shining so beautifully all week, getting out and about has been an absolute must for us. It coincided brilliantly with the start of the holidays, and has ensured that we haven't wasted our time together!

Sunday – Gruffalo Hunting

On the way back from Silverstone on Sunday, we stopped off at an RSPB nature walk to stretch our legs. While we were hunting for The Gruffalo and calling out to mouse to see if he knew where he was, we came across a cave and The Boy just had to explore it to see if anyone was inside!

Pebble Plopping

After Mr. TBaM got home from work on Monday, we nipped down to our local beach to partake in some pebble plopping. Mr. TBaM was determined he'd be able to skim stones, whereas The Boy just wanted to make the biggest single plop possible.

Sandplay

We met up with our toddler group down at Barry Island beach and managed to avoid high tide, but only just. Then, because we hadn't played with enough sand, we came home and built some more sandcastles.

Clifftop Picnic

On a Friday morning The Boy goes to nursery. While he's there he has lunch, but because he has so much to say for himself, he never eats well and quite often doesn't like what they give him anyway (spinach and potato pie for example). I'm not bothered because the socialisation is more important for him, but when I pick him up we always have to have a second lunch to make sure he's had enough to eat. I decided to take him to the clifftop park for he could burn off some more energy and eat a picnic lunch.

Pirates at Barry Island

The sun today heralded more outdoor play so we headed for the beach again. We originally went further down the coastline to Southerndown beach, but the problem is that when high tide is approaching there it covers all the sand and only leaves a swathe of rocks. Cue an about turn and off to the old faithful of Barry Island! More sandcastles, more buried The Boy, and finishing up with a round of pirate mini-golf!

Hope next week is just as activity filled!

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Country Kids: A Cloudy Carnival

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Every Summer our town has a holiday fortnight, culminating in a carnival and fireworks.

Well it used to be a fortnight, and it used to have a parade with about thirty floats in it. It also used to be sunny in the Summer but there you go. I wonder if it was health and safety that put pay to that as well? The dreaded H&S ensured the end of our very popular parade as community groups and schools could no longer afford the spiralling costs of the insurance. We haven't had floats in about ten years, nowadays it's a walking parade which quite frankly, is pants. And because there's no focal point for the day now, it has slowly dwindled to a handful of stalls down the beach front, a few children's rides, and a few bands who take their turn.

Today was carnival day, so we prepared to head down to the beachfront late afternoon. And while we were standing in the porch it started to rain. Just for a change. So we donned waterproofs and wellies, and trundled down anyway.

While everyone else was huddling under any shelter they could find, we splashed through the puddles. All three of us. We had great fun, as did the people watching us. Sometimes you just have to embrace the weather and deal with it.

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Country Kids: Sandcastles

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I've noticed recently that we've stopped making the effort to go and do things on the weekends. We saunter along from household chore to supermarket trip to ironing pile, and at the end of the weekend have very little to show for it. Enough now! The year is passing us by and we're missing out on family time together.

So when Sunday dawned and I excitedly drew back the curtains, I saw… rain. Yet again. Bored of this I decided we'd hit the beach anyway and put The Boy's waterproof trousers and wellies in the porch next to the bucket and spade. We did a last minute toilet trip and the sun came out. A quick change of clothes later (with wet weather gear firmly in the boot) and we headed off for Barry Island.

By the time we'd managed to find a parking space (four laps of the island!) the sun was blazing down and we had a really pleasant two hours building sandcastles, paddling in the sea and eating chips!

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Country Kids: Sports Day

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Today started with the rain pelting against the bedroom window. Marvellous! After such a lovely day yesterday we were going to have to put up with rain spoiling our plans to work in the garden. I may as well just give up trying to sort out any weeds or plants, as it will be October before it's dry enough to make it look vaguely attractive.

After a leisurely morning pottering around the house, we headed out to one of The Boy's favourite places; the local softplay centre. Never again! The less said about that, the better.

When we emerged from the dingy, smelly pit, it was brilliant sunshine and glorious blue skies, so we headed to a beautiful park in a nearby town that I haven't been to for twenty years. While there, The Boy was able to practise his bike riding a little more. Considering it's only his fourth time riding it, he really picked up speed very quickly and scared the hell out of me in the process. I was so impressed with him for pedalling and steering so efficiently, he only had one tumble and that was because of a small pothole.

After he'd had enough of pedalling (and my stress levels couldn't take anymore), he decided to have a race with daddy, competing in the 100 metres with a good time of 37 seconds. Clearly going to be a cross country runner like his daddy.

A potentially boring day was saved by the Summer sun, it makes you realise how much better you can feel with the sun caressing your skin and bird song in the air.

God only knows what's happened to the sound on this video, apologies.

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Going To The Island

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Recently I wrote a post that was our own version of the National Trust's list of Fifty Things To Do Before You're 11¾, adapting it, as The Boy's birthday was imminent, to Five Things To Do Before You're Three!

About a month ago, we decided it was a glorious day and the tide was out (the Bristol Channel has the second highest tidal range in the world after Nova Scotia) so it would be an ideal time to attempt a walk over to a nearby 'island'. I use the inverted commas around it because at low tide it is connected to the mainland by a causeway covered in rockpools, at high tide it's an island. There's nothing on this island apart from a wrecked boat, a swamp and some rather spectacular views of the Bristol Channel and England, it's also only about two hundred yards wide and four hundred yards long, if that. However, an island it is and it was on our list.

The tide was very low when we set off under the midday sun (and wind), giving us at least three hours before it started turning back in again. Plenty of time for us to have our picnic lunch on the beach, explore the rockpools and get to the island and back again. I wasn't convinced The Boy would manage it in all honesty, but it's amazing how little ones can just keep on going if you take it at their pace.

It was an eye-opener for not only The Boy; all the aspects of living on the coast that I assumed everyone knew about, always amaze my husband as he grew up in the heart of England. We discovered mermaid's purses, the difference between wet and dry seaweed, barnacles (Like Captain Barnacle Mummy!), there was a small crab in one rockpool, and salt crystals in a dried-up pool.

And when we got to the island, I realised that I've lived here all my life and never been all the way there before! And the view is spectacular.

[slickr-flickr tag='GoingToTheIsland']

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Five Things To Do Before You're Three

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I was chatting with my sister-in-law earlier and she mentioned something that she'd read through her work (outdoor adventure leader for children with behavioural problems) which I found fascinating, and wanted to share.

The National Trust, as a part of their nationwide campaign to encourage outdoor adventure and play in our couch-potato children, has published a list of 50 Things To Do Before You're 11¾. I'm a big fan of Country Kids over on Coombe Mill and try and take part most weeks with photos and posts of The Boy having fun outdoors and generally getting mucky. This list has a great range of things on there, quite a few of which he's already experienced:

Climb a tree (04/11/12), roll down a really big hill, camp out in the wild, build a den, skim a stone, run around in the rain, fly a kite, catch a fish with a net, eat an apple straight from a tree, play conkers, throw some snow, hunt for treasure on the beach, make a mud pie, dam a stream, go sledging, bury someone in the sand, set up a snail race, balance on a fallen tree, swing on a rope swing, make a mud slide, eat blackberries growing in the wild, take a look inside a tree, visit an island, feel like you’re flying in the wind, make a grass trumpet, hunt for fossils and bones, watch the sun wake up, climb a huge hill, get behind a waterfall, feed a bird from your hand (09/12 – Coombe Mill), hunt for bugs, find some frogspawn, catch a butterfly in a net, track wild animals, discover what’s in a pond, call an owl, check out the crazy creatures in a rock pool, bring up a butterfly, catch a crab, go on a nature walk at night, plant it grow it eat it, go wild swimming, go rafting, light a fire without matches, find your way with a map and compass, try bouldering, cook on a campfire, try abseiling, find a geocache, canoe down a river.

There's obviously quite a few things on that list that are a bit tricky for a two and three-quarter year old to do, but he's got nine years to scare the hell out of me and try abseiling and canoe down a river. However, I'm going to set him a little target of five things from the list to do before he's three years old in six and a half weeks time (eeek!):

I reckon they're achievable?

What five things are you going to do with your tiddler from the list?

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Fun With Friends On The Farm

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Today we met up in Somerset with Jenny, Burton and Jenson from Mummy Mishaps. We'd both really wanted to go to the Warner Bros event earlier in the week but were unable to make it, so we decided to meet at Puxton Park, just off junction 21 of the M5.

The weather was typical April with brilliant sunshine one minute and lashing rain the next. However it didn't deter us from having fun both indoors in the massive soft play, and outdoors in the digging sand pit, adventure park, climbing fort and having a quick look at the animals before the deluge.

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The boys had a great time together, and even though the weather cut our time short I suspect we'll be meeting the Mummy Mishaps mob again there. Worth a visit!

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I've added this to Coombe Mill's Country Kids

The Gallery: Easter

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It's been a few weeks since I've entered Tara's Gallery, unintentional but life has a habit of passing you by sometimes, to use the wise words of Mr. Bueller. However, when I saw that this week's theme was Easter, I couldn't very well ignore it much longer.

We went away for the weekend and so I needed to make sure that we had everything ready so that the Easter Bunny could find us and leave the necessary confectionary for The Boy. After a fraught Friday morning packing up various bits and pieces, we popped down to our local country park for my toddler group's Easter Egg hunt. The weather was perfect for wandering through the woodlands, finding shiny red eggs and avoiding bunny poop, and it refreshed us wonderfully for the drive down to west Wales.

The weekend saw us searching for numbers, as well as Easter chicks on a treasure hunt through the woodland. We went swimming in one of the best waterparks I've seen in a while, even if The Boy was 10cm too short for the waterslides. The Easter Bunny managed to find us, and then have a cuddle with Oliver Monkey in The Boy's bed. We discovered that The Boy had a penchant for vintage motorcars, saw pigs and newborn lambs, dug for buried treasure and ate more chocolate. And then we thanked the Lord for Charley Bear and Jaffa cakes when we got stuck in traffic in the pouring rain on the M4.

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All in all, a fairly decent Easter weekend.

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