Grandparents and their endless supply of sweets argggghh!!!

We decided to meet the kid’s nanny and cousin at Avon Heath this afternoon. 

It was absolutely heaving, with very few parking spaces left and no picnic tables, how am I supposed to enjoy a cup of tea while the little monsters play with no table to sit at and to tie the dogs to!

Alex was having a bad day, and was feeling very tired and emotional to start with, in fact I was tempted to give her away after the first half an hour of moaning. Luckily the fresh air and wait for nanny to arrive, seemed to get her into a much better mood, thank goodness.

There is a very real reason why Aidan calls my mum “sweety nanny”, and after two chocolate bars from her bag I had to cut them off from the sugar supply. This is usually a struggle with nanny smuggling them sweets at every opportunity, but today it was relatively east.

Aidan is currently very keen on ropes and spends every moment he can playing with any rope he can get his hands on. Today the rope was mainly used as a pulley system after he climbed a tree, and as a pull cord to drag along a massive dead tree.

It’s amazing how a lad with no concentration, who struggles at school, and won’t try at anything academic, can spend over an hour hauling a dead tree stump up hills and over lumps and bumps. This activity was carried out to the extent that he even ended up with sore and blistered hands. At one point the lads even combined the two activities and tried to haul the dead tree up to the top of a very big and very much alive tree that they had climbed!

The girls opted for the much more sensible activity of riding a large stick and pretending they were horses in need of sugar lumps and apples.

What more could you possibly do with the humble blackberry?

What more could you do with the humble blackberry ( other than actually eating it!)

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/AH_Marketing_leaflet_2010.pdf/$FILE/AH_Marketing_leaflet_2010.pdf

We packed the bags, threw the dogs in their crate and jumped in the car. Alice Holt is a Forestry Commission run Country Park, where a day’s parking ticket costs £6.50. At 9.30 in the morning there was plenty of parking, but later, on a really busy day in the summer holidays the car parks were all pretty full.

Feeling in dire need of a cup of tea  I decided to be very naughty,  and to let the kids have a lolly to start the day, tut tut. At least filling them with sugar kept them quiet for a few minutes, and gave them the sugar high to get walking with no moaning.

The play area was great, with a large pirate ship, and a nice variety of wooden play equipment. As usual Cat my youngest girl and ET ( my baby) loved the swings, while their older siblings ran amok on the climbing frames.

Our destination was the easy access trail, so Elliot could travel in his buggy, rather than the sling. It was a lovely clear path, which is a mile and a half long. You would expect to do this in a relatively quick time, but as usual my lot took ages and we only emerged from the trail over 2 hours later.

Blackberries rule! and the various uses for them seemed to be the theme of the day. Obviously its fun just to pick them and eat them, but the kids thought that idea was just too simple. The kids started picking them, and Elliot enjoyed having them shoved into his little mouth on a regular basis.  Its just not so adorable when the bigger kids eat one that is not so sweet, and decide that spitting it out is a good option, this usually involves a ton of blackberry juice dripping all over their clothes. Its no wonder they always look grubby!

After they got fed up of eating them they decided it would be fun to splat them, to see how big a mark them could make. Cat chose the stamp on them method, while her brother Aidan decided that throwing them was way more fun. The conclusion was that squishing them a little by hand before the big splat left a bigger and much better mark.

Aidan then decided that it would be fun for us to chuck them at his face, don’t ask! Cat went one step further and  washed her hands in them and then her face, until she used the baby wipes she looked a lovely shade of purple.

This year no blackberries have yet managed to make it home for me to attempt to use them for a crumble or cake.

Balance between the great outdoors and childminding gadgets?

As a mum of four and a parent supporter I have spent months and even years hearing all the horror stories about what we are doing to our children. Obesity, unhealthy food, lack of exercise, too much time spent watching TV and playing computer games, limited social interations, and only a tiny amount of time spent outside.

We are not meant to admit it, but this message is starting to get a little repetitive and boring. In the modern world us parents are usually busy enough just trying to keep our heads above water, without the added stress of dragging our sons and daughters kicking and screaming away from the electrical gadgets.

I am certainly very fond of my little electrical babysitters, and there are times when I would lose the will to live without their help. At the end of a busy day, when all four of them are at that point of exploding exhaustion, and I know that the crying and fighting is just around the corner, a little TV is just the cure they need to find a little brain and body turn off time.

Luckily Abby and Kelvin ( our two beagles) have forced us, as a family out of the house, and into the great outdoors on a regular basis for over 2 years now.

 

Say hello to Abby!

After reading an article in the National Trust magazine, I thought it might be interesting to make a note of some of our best and worst outdoor adventures. The article made me think again about this issue, as it had some scary statistics about the activity levels, health and mental health of the current generation of children.

Stephen Moss ( the author of the article) mentioned that:

- 11 - 15 year olds spend over half the hours they are awake in front of a computer or TV screen
- Only 1 in 10 children regularly play in wild places
- Children recognise fictional characters before they can identify common wild animals
- 50% of children are predicted to be obese by 2050
- In the 11- 15 age range 1 in 8 boys and 1 in 10 girls have been diagnosed with a mental health problem

Is this what we want for our kids, its certainly not the future I had in mind for my lot, what do you think?