Yeah, Yeah...I know, I know...

Okay.  So it has been...a while...since I updated.  A year, in fact. If this is a problem, I suggest you contemplate my productivity on a geological time scale...in which case, I come off looking rather prolific.

But let's not focus on the fact I'm averaging one blog post a year.  Let us instead focus on chocolate.  Because everyone likes chocolate and hey, it takes the heat off me.

It would be too hard to condense the activities of an entire year into a one post (other than to do what I usually do, and to cheat it with photos...which I withhold the right to do, mind...).  So I'm going to wax philosophical instead.  Because you all love that, and it goes well with chocolate.

The Wigster is now five.  Not sure how that happened, but there it is.  Here's a photo of it, covered in choc milk and looking five...

 As a five year old, it enjoys gymnastics, Lego, My Little Ponies and playing complicated games involving all three.

We have been making in-roads into our new life in Northern Antarctica.  Can't say there hasn't been the occasional bump in the road (and sometimes off the road), but on the whole, we are finding our way forward, while remembering to enjoy the scenery.

Enjoying the scenery.  It's such a good metaphor, isn't it?  Sometimes, scenery is all there is - so it pays to enjoy it...or at the very least, to take note of it.

Take our walk, the other night, for example.  It was quite late in the afternoon/early in the evening, and hyper-child was bored, and my furniture was under threat, so I suggested a quick trip to the park before dinner.

"Let's walk there!" suggested hyper-child.

I pointed out the darkening - but calm and peaceful - evening sky, and the length of time it would take us to actually reach the park, walking, but hyper-child was adamant.  She wanted to walk.  So we walked.  It was a nice walk, but by the time we got there, it was almost dark.  We looked for the platypus, and we did see where it was in the water by the ripples, but it was too dark to actually see the animal itself.  And it was too dark to make it to the playground.

So we headed home.  Amidst much in the way of woe from not-so-hyper-child.  Not screaming, wailing woe; rather, lamenting, moaning woe - the kind of woe where phrases such as, "Why...oh why did I ever suggest walking to the park?  Now my whole night is RUINED!" emanate with all the pathos of a Shakespearean monologue.  For about the same length of time as Hamlet contemplates mortality.

It's time like this the narrator (aka long-suffering mother) can take one of two paths.  She could gaffer tape her offspring's mouth shut and frog-march her home (and that thought never even crossed my mind, I swear).  Or she could commiserate, not at all through gritted teeth, and try to encourage the mournful protagonist (antagonist??  *cough*) to see beyond the failed playground attempt to the scenery of the journey.  Albeit it through the growing dark of night time...

Lucky for the narrator, on this occasion, the stars happened to come out.  You just can't get better scenery than that.  From the moment we spotted our first star - wow, what a perfect journey we had together.  The Wigster even managed to spot a satellite...which we then tracked across the sky, which also then prompted an amazing conversation about what was orbiting our planet, at that very moment - and the relative speeds of such objects in relation to the speed we were currently travelling.

We found Betelgeuse, which prompted a very cool discussion about what happens when a star goes supernova, and we both hope Betelgeuse will oblige us in our lifetime.  Then, we found the Pointer Stars and the Southern Cross, which prompted discussions on the Australian flag, the southern hemisphere, finding due south (and north, and east and west), and navigating by starlight in ancient times...which led to talking about how ancient people lived, and found their way across the earth...about how they lived in caves, or made homes or shelters out of animal hides...and how they had to make every single thing they needed completely by hand, using the materials around them...to cave paintings...to walking in the dark with your eyes closed and only using your ears and nose to guide you (she walked nearly 200 metres with her eyes shut, and managed to work out she was near the wood shed and cattle pens by smell, and identified 5 different species of bird, frogs and the sounds of the river and trees)...



It was almost a shame to come back inside, when we got home - to find ourselves so suddenly cut off from all that splendour in the dark, and that wonderful, inspiring conversation...

Anyway, our walk to the playground was declared the "best walk ever" - even though we never actually reached the destination.  I was also declared "the best Mummy ever," and Wiggy was declared "the best Wiggy ever."

That's my favourite kind of scenery.

(Oh, and we did make it to the playground the next day...)

More on Colours...and some science thrown in at the end...

I hereby dub July, "Colour Month."  Okay, maybe as a choice of name, it is a little counter-seasonal.  It is winter here, after all.  (Counter-seasonal...is that a word?  Words?)  Anyway, since winter here in sunny Western Australia is hardly dull, drab or grey, I think Colour Month is a fitting title.  And grey is still a colour...

Following on from yesterday's revelations on how to make colour a more interactive, tangible experience, today, we had great fun with the colour pink.  Borrowing THIS wonderful Montessori-inspired idea from the brilliant Totschool blog, I made Niamh a little water activity.

Here, she is using an eye-dropper to drip water I coloured with pink food colouring onto wax paper:

 A bit hard to see, but I had drawn some little circles onto the wax paper, with the aim of getting her to try to drop a single drop into each.  A bit ambitious for a first try with the eye-dropper, maybe, but it did give her the idea...although it was instantly WAY more fun to make BIG pink puddles, rather than little ones:

 It was fun to make little dots onto pictures:

You'll notice she is not wearing an art smock (but is wearing her PJs - really, sometimes that battle just ain't worth fighting first thing in the morning), and we are using a glass for our pink water and not a paper or plastic cup.  I really wanted her to a) engage in having fun without all the cumbersome bulk of the smock, and b) to work with real materials in order to learn both care for her clothing, and her tools.  If the glass had fallen, so be it.  If things break, we clean up the mess.  (The glass is still in one piece, by the way.  Even 1 year olds can learn to be careful with things that break.)

She loved, loved, loved this activity!  It was enormous fun to watch the water beading on the wax paper, and to break it up into smaller and smaller beads just by giving it a little push with the eye-dropper.  It was hilarious to suck the water back up into the eye-dropper (complete with slurping noise - think spaghetti, but pink).

Dyeing our fingers pink in the droplets was fun too:

 Next, we experimented with different kinds of paper and a paintbrush, as well as the eye-dropper:

On plain white paper, you could paint the dots into stripes and blobs, which was lots of fun.  Or just make really big, wet, pink puddles:

On paper towel, the drops made blotches which spread out:

It was just as much fun for me as it was for Niamh, I assure you.  We spent nearly an hour just playing with pink water, an eye-dropper and a paint-brush.  How's that for cheap entertainment?

After I finally won the day's "Ye shall now be dressed," battle, I was thrilled when she immediately asked for more painting, but this time, "a different one."  A week or so ago she had started to paint a little wooden jigsaw puzzle (a great idea - you buy the puzzle in plain wood, along with paints, then decorate it yourself - you can find them Here), and I suggested we finish it.  She agreed.

You'll note the art smock this time.  She was wearing a fairly new top and, well, the "mama-hates-a-washing-challenge" panic button over-rode my higher philosophical ideals...  Glass and pink dye smashed all over the floor is one thing.  An impossible washing challenge is something else entirely.  Ah, sweet, merciful, human fallibility...thy familiar embrace is a warm, numbing comfort.

When the painting was done, she immediately requested MORE drawing.  Here she is drawing some stripey balls with crayons:

The balls are actually in black on her left, and the stripes are separate on her right.  I love it.

After the artistic frenzy (seriously, 2.5 hours doing nothing except drawing and painting!), we headed to the park for a picnic and some fun with her favourite thing in a whole world - balls.

Running down the hill (she is "very fast"):

 Rolling the balls down the hill:

Uh-oh, better catch them!  (I love the look of concern - those balls are getting away from her.)

 I asked her, "Who goes faster, you or the balls?"  A rather stern look in return.  "The balls."  Duh.  Obviously, mama.  "Do you know why?"  Another look (you know, the one you get when you're an idiot), "They're round."

Wait...is that...physics...coming from the mouth of a child not yet 2??  Dagnabbit.  How dare she learn naturally!  I was probably in high school before I had that one spoon-fed to me.

Later, we made a slide for our fairy stick people to play on:

(I might not know physics, but I can ram a couple of sticks through a leaf.  Take that, science!)

Roll on, Colour Month!

Rain!

Isn't it amazing how that first day of rain after...well, in our case, a drought, is enough to put a smile on your face as soon as you wake up?  Listening to the pitter patter on the tin roof this morning almost made the 6.10am wake-up call from Niamh bearable.  Almost.  I am NOT a morning person, no matter how I seem to be living the life of one.

The smell of rain and wet grass is something that touches me on some kind of cellular level.  One of those true, "Ahhhhhhhhh," moments - like when you've left the city behind on a long drive south, or (way back when) the first day of school holidays.

 We made the most of the weather by taking a walk to the park.  Niamh had a wonderful time running up and down the "castles" - which are nothing more than a few concrete paving stones set into a small grass hill.  Everyone had to have a turn climbing up and running down - the bike, the ball, Mama, a leaf...  It was all great fun, and amazing to watch Niamh's imagination take shape.  Seems like only yesterday she was a little pink and squeaking bundle of random noises and jerky movements (*cough* I say, as she runs around the kitchen as I type, squealing at the top of her lungs and flinging her toys around like a small tornado).

Every day now, I am treated to new surprises.  Today, she chugged her way through the alphabet, hampered only by her physical inability make the correct sounds for K, S and Z.  She loves to see the letters written down, and will point them out enthusiastically - even cheekily turning M upsidedown to make a W and back again.  She gets it.  Not even 2 years old, and she gets it.

Yesterday, when I put her lunch on her table, I got a big smile and a, "thank you, Mama."  Proof absolute that children don't need to be shamed into having good manners forced on them, since we have never made her say please or thank you.  They learn what you teach them, plain and simple.  But more on that whole topic another time...

Tomorrow, I will hopefully get time to finish and upload some photos of the new games I have made for Niamh - some tactile numbers for counting, and a colourful counting fish game, inspire by the one I saw HERE on the wonderful Counting Coconuts blog.  We have a version of it at our Montessori playgroup, but I like Mari-Ann's version much better.  I will hopefully also get a chance to work on a little caterpillar/butterfly display I thought up today, after finding a few cocoons at the park.  All up to the boss, of course...

(I also have a few hobby horses to make, a cloth doll pattern to trial for Niamh...and a billion other things to do.  Bah.)

I hope it rains again tomorrow.