Planting seeds and a pompom hat

Last week was lovely and sunny so we made the most of it in the garden with Natalie. We did some actual playing with the sand pit and lots of chasing about and see sawing.

Isla found a little fly. If you're wondering about the hat, it's an octonauts one that we made:

Evie likes sitting up and playing with toys now. She has started doing a lot of rocking when she is sat up and can move backwards around the floor on her tummy. She enjoys a little music group we go to. Isla joined us for it this week as she was too poorly for pre-school and slept all day long. Evie has been very content and is really enjoying her food especially yoghurts. She tried raspberries for the first time and also met her first rabbit and guinea pig today at a friend's house. She's stopped saying a-boo all the time now and instead says awaawaawaa a lot. Evie loves standing up and laughs when you tickle her tummy and chin, make funny noises at her or let her grab your nose! She's started to get a bit scared of the hoover though.

Pob overseeing the playing:

Our gardening has begun again for the year. Isla planted lots of seeds last week and they have all germinated this week. We have tomato plants, courgette plants, pumpkins and runner beans. Isla had another birthday party to attend at the weekend. They had a bouncy castle, party games (Isla won musical statues again!) and hats and branches to decorate with colourful pom poms. Our decorated branch is on display for all to see:

We made a pithivier using our left over roast chicken. Isla helped brilliantly with the egg wash:

Isla having some puff pastry and pulling a face:

As well as our normal seed growing, we are running a couple of experiments. First of all, we have a runner bean growing in a jar so we can watch it germinating. The jar is a bit small so it will be interesting to see what happens to the shoot. We also have some "fairy" seeds and cress growing and today we set up some carrot tops in water to see if they will grow. Isla is much better than me at remembering to water the plants everyday, so this year we might actually use our own tomato plants to put in the garden rather than killing the seedlings off and buying plants like last year!

Evie is loving the door bouncer and now does proper jumps in it like a baby kangaroo! She bounces all over the place and is very funny to watch.

Funny faces and tiny feet

We had a return to summery weather for some of this week, British summery weather, that is, rather than the Mediterranean summery weather of July! Andrew took the opportunity to take Isla to the park quite a bit, which she really enjoyed. Especially going on the swings. If we had a suitable branch in our garden, I think we'd definitely put up a swing however now the tree behind our house has finally been cut back properly, we don't have any big branches to swing from anymore. So trips to the park instead!

Here are Evie's tiny baby feet:

Evie is looking around a lot more in the last couple of days, so Andrew thought that she'd appreciate a few more things to look at so setup the play mat for her. She is also getting a bit stronger at holding her head up and so we've started her fitness regime of tummy time on the play mat - she doesn't really enjoy this much yet and makes lots of grunting sounds at us. She enjoys grunting quite a lot, especially during the night.

Our garden centre/park visit was great, except for the huge number of wasps following us about and landing on us. They didn't bother Isla at all, as she was enjoying riding the tractors so much. Evie was kept covered up inside her pram with a sunshield as a good wasp deterrent. Isla also went on the swing of course. She went so high on the swing that it caused a granny pushing her grandchild at the next swing to look quite amazed. I think her grandchild was jealous at not going so high.

A new sandpit had sprung up at the garden centre, and Isla could probably have stayed there most of the morning playing. However, we were caught out by the good weather and forgotten the sun cream and summery clothes so had to move inside for a bit. The sandpit was almost as good as being at the beach though.

Isla's second trip to the park that same day was also very good, and was my first proper trip out into the village since having Evie. It was lovely to bump into friends in the village and introduce them to the new baby. Isla enjoyed the zip wire with her dad, as well as the swings again! Now if we had room for a zip wire in our garden, that would be really good!

At dinner time, Evie decided that she had to be held at all times, while Isla showed me some of her funny faces!

This morning, Isla helped her dad with the supermarket shop while Evie tried out her chair for a different view of the world. She had quite an active morning with not much sleeping, unusually for her, although she drifted off after lunch when Isla and Andrew went for a bike ride to......... the park! 

A fairy at the bottom of the garden

Today we found a little grape-eating fairy at the bottom of our garden:

We gave Isla a special fairy costume as a present for doing really well with her potty training this week. She had a nice morning with her daddy going to the park on the bike and going to the pet shop. At the park Isla can now go on all the big slides herself and went very fast on the zip-wire (with a little bit of help).