Rainbows

One of those coming of age posts.  Being 5 Marisca is now Rainbow-eligible, and so here she is ready for her first visit.  Rainbows is at church with her favourite church friends who run it (they are older than me but they're still my friends Daddy), and so we're sure she'll continue to have a lovely time, as she did today.  She's already got a stall to run at their Spring Fayre next week.

Happy 5th birthday

Our girl is 5.  So we had a party.  And being a 5 year old girl, that party was a Frozen party.  It turns out that there are a lot of Frozen birthday cards with '5' badges on them.  But they're all the same and are now all in our house!

In a somewhat random order here are some highlights:

Party tea, I clearly managed to achieve what is almost photographically impossible: a shutter speed fast enough to capture a picture of party rings actually on the plate.

The birthday girl.  Just a nice picture really.

We watched Frozen while waiting for 2:30 to tick around.  This gave Marisca the opportunity to show off her very pretty very frozen very twirly dress that Elspeth had sewn.  Check out the twirl!

My favourite game was pin the nose on Olaf.  Particularly as, unlike some parties I have known, there was clearly no seeing through this particular scarf.  At least 4 of them managed to locate the poster, which was a good start.

Pretending to be Elsa.  Awww.

Playing pass the parcel with the girls (and Tom).  Maia, Erica, Poppy, Emily, and Kinza.

And although she wasn't expecting to win any prizes, her being the birthday girl, Marisca excelled at musical bumps, and there's not much judgement to be had in that game, so she had to win.  And was very excited, as you can see.

Birthdays are tiring but a lot of fun.

Easter again.

Well the last post was from my phone and these are camera pictures so, well, it's just easier to keep them separate.  And if I didn't post this you'd not get to see the children enjoying eggs or (another) lovely day, at Yeadon Tarn.  Marisca's getting very confident on her balance bike, and Tom is still growing into his scooter...

Easter weekend

It's Easter Monday and it feels like summer - a beautiful hot and sunny day, and after playing at a local garden centre we spent a nice afternoon in the garden.  The first weekend of the year where we've had the back door open all afternoon with children wafting in and out.  Marisca did have a good time looking for minibeasts and exploring in the garden before falling back to her natural tendencies.

And Tom will thank me for this in future years...  He's just decided this weekend that he wants to wear pants so we're going with it.  So far false positives outnumber the messier mistakes and he's doing very well!

A walk in the woods

Back on Mothers' Day we had Grandma visit us and went for a little walk in the woods.  I've just found the photos on my camera and it's striking how cold it looks - this was only 3 weeks ago, a clear contrast to the Easter photos I'll post later tonight!  All 5 of us walked, as more-or-less evidenced below, but I spent most of the time walking with Tom which was brilliant as he did really well with the walk and had a lot of fun.  And I had fun photographing him too.

Reading and babies

Of late Tom has really started enjoying playing with his babies and teddies in small world play. Feeding them, putting them to bed, and playing hide and seek with them. It's quite lovely.

And he loves reading of course. So to turn away from the rugby just now to see him putting green baby to bed and reading Charlie and Lola to him was quite lovely.

We love books

We have just celebrated World Book Day, so it seems like a good time to talk about the children's relationship with books. It is fair to say they both love them.

Marisca got to dress up as her favourite book character at school - after some negotiation with me (no, Elsa from Frozen is not a book character, even if there are now books about Frozen available), we settled on the Little Mermaid:

This was princessy enough for Marisca, and booky enough for me, so we were all happy.

Marisca's reading ability continues to amaze us, but what is just starting to happen is her ability to lose herself in books for a long time. This was our latest haul from the library this week (spot the theme):

I haven't actually read any of these books to Marisca: she wants to sit and read them by herself. This is a new development : while she still loves being read to, and reading to us, she can more and more often be found snuggled in a corner with a book all by herself. Sometimes convincing her to put the book down and do other things is difficult:

I am so glad she is developing this love of reading. Marisca is the type of person who gets bored easily and can find it hard to think of ways to entertain herself - her default setting is to ask to watch TV. So it is lovely to see her finding something she loves which keeps her entertained. I am looking forward to introducing her to so many books over the next few years!

Meanwhile, Tom has suddenly left board books behind and is loving longer stories. He loves Thomas the tank engine and Hairy Maclairy and his nursery reports always mention him reading books. This is what happens when I try to tidy up their bookshelves when Tom is in the room:

I think every day is a book day in our house!