Just messing about at home

The last couple of weeks we've been having lots of fun at home and out and about doing our usual activities too! Everyday Isla cuddles and kiss her sister lots. Evie loves watching Isla and always smiles when she sees her face.

Evie enjoys looking at toys and watching us a lot more now. She is happiest when she is having a cuddle watching Isla playing. She also spends time on her playmat looking at toys.

Isla has been colouring in her Cbeebies magazine and sticking stickers too:

Isla also has been doing some gluing with sparkly shapes and gems making different pictures:

We've been doing a lot of baking. Chocolate cornflake cakes were delicious, although Isla prefers the mixture to the finished cakes. We also made lemon and white chocolate muffins from a Jo Wheatley recipe but jooshed them up with some lemon butter icing and sprinkles of course. 

A very exciting package arrived last week from New Zealand! Isla loved unwrapping the gifts from John and Jude. It felt a bit like Christmas! The customs labels on the parcels describing what was inside brought back memories of parcels under the Christmas tree from Grandad, Quita and Nana from New Zealand when I was young. Though of course I never peeked to read the labels......! Isla loves the teddy bears inside the package and plays with them a lot. 

Isla wore her kilt one day with cute tights now that it is colder here. She likes building a tower with cups and pretending it is a lighthouse and then making boats to sail around it. They sometimes crash into the lighthouse though! Evie gets a bit concerned when this happens.

Painting has been requested a lot this week, and is fun to do when it is raining outside. We also tried doing some bubble paintings by blowing through straws into a mixture of washing up liquid, paint and water and then putting paper on top of the bubbles. We got some really nice pictures by doing this. Isla got a bit of a shock  though when she sucked on her straw by mistake ending up with blue lips and a worried mum. She just helped with stirring after that! 

We had a nice meal out with Grandad David and Granny Margaret the other weekend.

Back home, Isla insisted on having a photo with her friend Gadget one morning:

Evie had a lovely bath and ended up with a cool hairstyle:

Evie has a great personal trainer during her tummy time sessions:

At pre-school, Isla is learning about environments (which seems to mainly consist of walking like a penguin). She likes polar bears as she has a Kinder egg polar bear toy and so we decided to pretend to be polar bears for a change of continent. She wore her little fluffy waistcoat and also a muslin as a polar bear hat. We looked at videos of polar bears swimming on the iPad and also drew some pictures on coloured paper, making use of our white crayons at last (they don't get much use normally). We looked for the letters 'p for Peter' and 'b for bear' in Isla's alphabet puzzles to complete our polar bear session!

We saw a beautiful rainbow one afternoon. Minutes before I took this photo, the rainbow was the brightest I have seen, and stretched right across the sky. Isla loved it and keeps asking if we can go upstairs to look for rainbows now. She also said that she would like to be able to fly and thought that it would be nice to fly to work! 

Various cuddles:

Foxy Loxy bouncing in the garden:

Just after blowing out the candles on Andrew's cake:

Evie's first smile and Isla is a tiger

Evie gave us her first proper smile this week, when she was having a cuddle with Isla and I, just before having some milk! She then had some smiles for Andrew when he came home. I'll try to photograph a smile next time!

Isla was very happy at the weekend to have her granny Margaret and grandad glasses to play with, especially enjoying having a new shopkeeper serving her. We enjoyed the bank holiday weekend, doing gardening and eating and playing outside. Evie did quite a bit of sleeping, which meant that I could take Isla for a bike ride.

Evie gave Pob a stroke one evening. The cats had their annual vet trip today and we found they had both lost a little weight since last year! Isla jumped on the vet scales too but didn't need the flea treatment.

Yesterday, Isla went to pre-school in the morning, and Evie went to the gym for a work-out:

It was a very tough work-out:

It was pretty tiring too:

We went to pick Isla up and found that a scary tiger cub had gobbled her up, so we took it home instead. We stopped for a picnic by the park on the way:

Cuddles and cake

Isla and Evie had their last cuddles with granny Ilene and grandpa beard for a little while at the beginning of this week. We enjoyed some summery weather and so were out in the garden quite a bit. We visited the library and park for the first time as just a mum and two little girls on Monday, and then braved Morrisons today. This felt like a big scary trip out, but was actually fine! 

Isla has been enjoying playing with her happyland toys, with random creatures driving random vehicles. We were both very excited to find Applejack's friend, a small purple snail who had been lost for ages, as well as Applejack herself. Today we have been mastering dominoes and are getting the hang of playing the Peppa Pig version. This morning we made a car out of cushions, and Isla drove Violet and baby to the doctors, where the doctor (me) had to give Violet a check up. Then Isla brought puppy to the vet (me again) to be weighed and have some flea medicine put on. We are preparing ourselves for Pob's big annual weigh-in next week! I then became the shopkeeper, selling Isla many lovely items of food, and finally pre-school lady looking after Violet for a bit.

We ran out of greedy snacks this week, and so made a chocolate victoria sponge cake on Tuesday with buttercream icing and crushed flake on top. Then that evening, they were doing the same on the Great British Bake off!! But a bit more elaborately, and without toddlers to assist them. And I managed to avoid cutting either of my thumbs whilst baking a cake...

Evie has had a growth spurt this week, with a non-stop feeding frenzy on Wednesday (a very tiring day, and Isla was so patient with us both) followed by lots of sleeping today. The lovely health visitor paid us our final visit today, measuring a new weight of 10 lb 3 oz and she is certainly getting chubby cheeks (Evie, not the health visitor).