Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Those first few years of your child's life, you take a pushchair everywhere, and it starts to seem impossible that they'll ever walk more than six steps, at any pace faster than a snail's crawl, in any direction resembling the one you wish to go in.  You look longingly at little paths snaking through woodland or striking up through grassy fields, and stick solidly to flat tarmac surfaces instead.  And then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, they become mobile!  You throw caution to the wind and venture out without a pushchair , and you don't end up carrying toddler and all his stuff for three-quarters of the journey.  Life has new and exciting horizons! Of course it helps if you still don't expect to get too far, and you have somewhere interesting to go.  A recent walk near the local village of Ticknall had pretty much everything a kid could want - and adults too!  We parked in the village car park, set off and promptly bumped into an old tramway, complete...

OK, I don't know if the East Midlands is secretly the cherry-growing capital of the UK, or if it's just been a good year for them, or what, but there have been a lot of cherries around.  I only ever remembering seeing the little ornamental ones before, more stone than fruit, but these are the real deal. It started when we went to the little playground down the road, and I noticed this tree with big black juicy cherries, right by the swings.  So next time we went, I lugged a ladder along and picked a boxful.  Wouldn't you know it, that was the one day that a guy from the council came along to pick up the litter and empty bins.  I wasn't actually on the ladder at that point, so he looked at the ladder a couple times, and he looked at me, and I'm thinking, "Hey, if you don't say anything, I'm not saying anything."  He didn't say anything.  I made those cherries into cherry sauce and we ate it with ice cream.  Yum. Then we happened ...

I didn't plan this to be a theme week, but Toby's new refrain has become, "I want to do something else " (how does he know it's the school holidays?)  Something else turned into my digging out my body-themed activities and roll of cheap wallpaper.  So here we go! First thing to do is draw a body, and fortunately I had a handy template.  Lie down, Toby! Just ignore the face.  And lack of neck.  I know it's not a great likeness, but he really is that tall.  How on earth did that happen? He knew pretty much all the body labels already, so I can't really claim it as a learning opportunity.  Still, revision is good, right?  And everyone enjoys colouring on a huge sheet of paper. Another sheet of wallpaper became a blank canvas for hand and foot painting.  Fortunately it's been great weather, as outside is always the best place to do this.  Even with a strategically placed tub of water for washing off in. I've gone gree...

Hey, you didn't really think I'd keep up a weekly blog for that long, did you?  It feels like we did planets weeks ago now, and I actually started writing this back then too, but then I needed a few more photos, and then things got busy, and then... I'm finally finishing it now.  We've had a few weeks off from themes due to a couple of long weekends away.  But now all the playgroups are almost finished for the summer, I may blow the dust off my planning notebook and get motivated again. Anyway, to finish what we started:  Planets. Unfortunately we didn't quite manage a field trip to see the planets!  But we did have a lot of fun painting them.  They seemed like they would be good candidates for rolling ball painting, so we gave it a try and it worked really well. First you need some small balls.  I purchased a bag of marbles, which were just the right size to drop into our little pots of paint.  Obviously if your kid is given to swallowing sma...