As high as a rainbow

Last week, Evie got a bit worn out watching Isla and I cutting out a paper lantern with Isla's special toddler scissors that cut only paper:

"As high as a rainbow" - how Isla described flying on her dad's feet this week! 

We've had lots of interesting discussions recently. In the car one day, I had to put the windscreen wipers on a little and Isla asked where they had gone when I stopped them. We also had a discussion about what campervans are, she found it very strange that a van should have a ladder on the back. "It would be nice to go camping in a campervan" and I'm sure we'll do that one holiday. Another day Isla said "it would be nice to go and see some frogs" and so we talked about where frogs live and that they are all hibernating at the moment. 

Pob had a little sleep on the sofa beside Isla one morning, which thrilled her! She cuddled him a lot after that. Pob had lots of attention on Saturday as Isla's cousins came to visit and he was the star attraction at one point. Archie seemed delighted to see such a huge cat, probably the biggest he's ever seen and is ever likely to see. And he has a very nice tail to pull on.

Isla has really enjoyed playing with her happyland people and village over the past few weeks. We make up little stories about the little people going to the vets with their cats and dogs, and people always seem to be "bonking their knees" and having to go for an x-ray with the polar bear doctor. Postman pat and Mrs Goggins feature heavily in our happyland world. Also people are always falling in the pond and needing to be rescued. Today I popped out to start dinner (in the real world) and came back to find a whole line of ten little characters helping to pull someone out of the pond.

Isla made funny faces at me while she was enjoying painting in her new magic water painting book:

At the weekend the weather was suddenly cold. Feeling a bit Christmassy, we went to the local garden centre to visit the reindeer (Moonbeam and Starlight) and see the amazing Christmas lights and ice rink. Isla had never seen an ice rink before and had been asking what it was, so we looked at the people with skates on zooming around on the ice. She had been asking what noise a reindeer makes, but unfortunately they were too busy eating their hay to make much noise. We looked up deer noises on the internet later on. At the garden centre, there were mini trolleys for children with 'trainee shopper' signs on them and Isla enjoyed pushing one around the place.

Today Isla enjoyed pre-school in the morning, after we had watched a very exciting Octonauts episode featuring a huge crab submarine/vehicle and lots of grumpy fiddler crabs. In the afternoon we painted some rigatoni with blue and yellow paint. The plan is to thread the pasta tubes together to make a necklace and glue sequins on to make it sparkle. Isla found that she could paint with the pasta on a piece of paper and liked doing some finger painting too, although this proved a multi-tasking challenge for me when Evie wanted feeding at the same time. Never breastfed and painted pasta simultaneously before whilst wiping painty toddler hands but actually it was easy. Later on, grating cheese over gnocchi (which didn't get eaten anyway) whilst breastfeeding baby proved more tricky.

Evie, mid-raspberry, learning how to paint pasta:

A bit later on, Isla made a beautiful leaf picture. A couple of days ago she had picked a few bright red acer leaves from the garden, one clematis leaf and one keria leaf. We dried them, and pressed them between two sheets of paper in a hefty tome (actually Delia's Christmas recipe book!) and squashed it with Nigella, Jamie and more Delia. After being VERY patient for a couple of days (Isla had wanted to check on them about a half hour after putting the leaves in) we looked and found some lovely pressed leaves to glue onto some card. The red leaves were pretty impressive!