The little one's room

A few snaps of the little one's bedroom.    We don't really follow any specific theme with the boys bedrooms so they are a bit of a blend of nautical, cowboy and vintage, plus they both have the ubiquitous expedit!  I am so not an Ikea person but I do love an Expedit for storing kids books and toys on!

I found this chest of drawers in my grandparent's garage when my Dad and I were sorting through everything after they had both passed away.  It was covered in layers and layers of different paint but I could tell that it was made of cedar so I figured that it was worth trying to restore. It still needs a lot more work done on it but I kind of like the industrial look in a boys bedroom, so I might leave it how it is.

This chair was my uncles.  Still going strong and must be around 50 years old now.

Some favourite toys.

A tolix stool as a bedside table!

The boys made these out of the Djeco Mosaic kits and we framed them in cheap Target frames.  

This mobile hung over both their cots and I can't bear to pull it down.

The suitcases store toys that aren't in regular circulation.  The cowboy fabric in the corner is a teepee. Speaking of cowboys, I just saw the most divine flannel fabric in a cowboy print and am now longing to make the boys some pjs out of it.  Anyone know a good easy boys pj pattern? Easy being the operative word here! xx

  

Back into the swing of things

It was an interesting week, last week...  the Captain's school partially burnt down and all classes were cancelled whilst the damaged classrooms and library were demolished and all the hazardous materials removed from the school site.  I volunteered to help out any of the parents from the Captain's class who were struggling with child care issues and thus found myself operating a day care centre for 6 and 7 year olds.  It was great fun.  Amazingly I either ended up with all boys or all girls each day.  The day that I had all girls (save for the Captain of course), we did lots of craft and a lot of dressing up!  We have mostly "boy" dress up items but that didn't stop the girls... I had a couple of cowgirls and some medieval Knights and would you believe they had an all out battle in the backyard!

The Captain was King of course!  I would love to show you some more photos but there are too many faces in them to put on the web unfortunately!  Yes...I am one of those Mums that lets her kids play with toy swords and the girls were thrilled with them. Much more so than any boys that have ever been here to play!

Apparently this is my future daughter-in-law.  

The days that I had boys were dominated with Lego, Thunderbirds and a trip to the local Waterfall.

They spent hours trying to build a dam and yes, one fell in and yes, I am pretty sure it was an accidentally on purpose thing.   Ah, you just have to love little boys! 

If anyone has any good fundraising ideas for a small school to do I would love to hear them.

Little and Big

                 
                                                                      Or Little Richard and Big Richard.

These lovely lions were presented as gifts to the Captain when he was born.  The little one came from my brother and the big one from my sister in law.  Cute as they are the Captain only ever had a passing interest in them.  The little one however adores them and yes, they are both named after Richard the Lionheart.

The reason for this post is partly to document the presence of Big and Little in our lives.  If you ask the little one who he loves, he will invariably name Big and Little first.  He talks to them, carries them around with him, rubs his face into them and if I insist on washing one (or if it is a particularly disastrous) both of them, he has been known to sit in front of the washing machine ensuring that they emerge safely. Lucky for him we have a front loader with a 15 minute cycle and a lovely viewing window.

Big and Little are well travelled, having joined us on all family getaways.  One eventful trip to Melbourne even saw Little left behind on the City Circle Tram.  We managed to console the distraught child with a hastily concocted story that Little had gone off on an adventure and that he would be back shortly.  Consoling the distraught mother was not so successful.  I rang everyone I could think of trying to get the original Little back and then conceding defeat started to concoct ever more fanciful stories for the boys about what Little was up to on his adventures.

A few weeks later, the little one came to me and said, "Mamma it is time for little to come home!"  Oh the guilt!  He had even taken to pointing at every train we passed,  in his mind trams were obviously trains,   and asking if that was the one that Little was on.  Fortunately, this heartbreak came to an end very quickly.  We were on a shopping trip with my parents, when my Dad whispered to me, there is a shop here that has the right size Little's, should I go buy one?  oh yes!!!

My Dad went and bought him while we were having lunch and placed him discreetly in the little one's pram.  The Captain spotted him first, shrieking "little's back" and then loudly announcing, "he looks different." The Captain was no match for Mummy however:

 "Well, clearly Little was desperate for a holiday.  Look how fabulous he looks now that he has had a decent break and he probably squeezed in a few trips to the day spa as well.  Of course, he looks fabulous now!  His hair has even grown back!"

The little one bought it!  Nowadays these two lions are guarded almost as carefully as the two children.  If you look closely in the above photo  you can see that Little even gets to use the infants attachment seatbelt on a plane.  Safety first people!

The reason for this post though is this post, on this lovely blog.  I showed the photos to the little one and said "look this little girl has a Richard too, although she hasn't cut her Richard's hair by the looks of things!"  "No, Mummy, that is me when I was a baby" he kept insisting.  I gently tried to convince him that there was someone else out there with a Richard but he was outraged by the concept of this.  It ended up triggering a tantrum of fairly phenomenal proportions!  Now, a month later he keeps asking about the little girl with the different Richard!

The red bed...

We had the Captain's old iron bed powder coated red and I can't begin to tell you how thrilled I am with the end result.  I wanted the bed to be a little pop of colour in amongst everything else and it most definitely is!

The powder coat guy thought that I was crazy choosing red.  He questioned my husband when he dropped the bed off and even rang me to confirm that I was going to spend "good money powder coating a bed lipstick red."  Oh yes I happily reassured him, although I do prefer fire engine red as a description for it!

Now I just need to hang some art on the walls... what to do, what to do...

I seriously can't stop grinning at how good that bed looks and I have now got my beady little eyes fixed on the bed in the spare room!

The Captain's Bush Detectives Party

So.. this was a little while ago, but for the sake of posterity I thought I should document the event with a few photos:

Yes... they came across three of them during the course of the party and yes... it is a Red Belly Black Snake.

Happy Sixth Birthday Captain!  At six years old you are a passionate Lego engineer and can spend hours either creating a masterpiece of your own design or following the instructions to build the model.   Playmobil, Superstructs, the vintage Thunderbirds toys, craft and reading are your other biggest passions.  Your favourite books are The Secret Seven series, The Magic Tree House, The Famous Five and more recently the Just So Stories.  It started off with me reading to you and now we are taking turns at reading pages to each other. 

You love school and regularly tell me that you are friends with everyone in your class.  You often play goodies and baddies and divide yourselves into Teams which you refer to as the BB Team and the Fairy House Team.  You leave the house for school looking pristine and come home filthy.  At school this year you have learnt how to play chess, the basics of fencing, about respect, to recite verses of Shakespeare, about friendship, the Pause and you earnt so many Merit cards that I could probably wallpaper a wall in your room with them!  Your buddy Ethan from the sixth class helped you settle in and was a great role model for you.  You will miss him next year when he goes off to high school.   

At home when you are not busy destroying our backyard with your brother creating dams and construction sites, you love to swim in the pool, swing on the swing out the front (you both LOVE that swing), have your dad (not so much me) throw a cricket ball for you to bat and throw paper planes off the deck.  You keep pestering me to get you some more tadpoles.  You are onto your third Venus Fly Trap plant, you solemnly promised not to feed this one any insects and so far so good.  I think it is about 4-5 months old now!

Your favourite food is pizza made by your Dad.  Your favourite DVDs are The Thunderbird Movie, The Adventures of Clutch Powers, the Lego Megafactories Documentary, Tom and Jerry and Miniscule.  I am pleased to say that you really have no idea about computers and certainly have no clue what a DS or Wii are.  Please let it stay that way for as long as possible my darling! 

You told me once that you are my precious and it is quite right, you truly are my precious boy.

Photo Challenge - Day 11

"Something blue"

Apologies for the interruption in service!  It has not stopped raining in Sydney for the duration of the long weekend and we have C.A.B.I.N.F.E.V.E.R!  Back to the photo challenge though, I found these gorgeous Eric Carle flash cards at an Op Shop the other day and I have been trying to decide what to do with them.  I am leaning towards framing them and hanging them in the new playroom...

or should I just leave them as flashcards and let the boys play with them?  

They are so pretty that either way they will be well loved!

Photo Challenge - Day 5

"From a high angle"

Who am I kidding... I look at everything from a high angle!  At 180cm tall I tower over many.  I snapped this photo only minutes ago when I went in to check on the little man.  Poor wee chap is sick at the moment so am a bit worried about him. He is tucked in with "big Richard" his lion, named after Richard the Lion Heart.  We also have a small Richard, but he is on an extended holiday down at the beach house at the moment. (I know, bad parenting moment # 792).  The Wind in the Willows sheets are vintage, they date back to a family holiday to the UK in 1980.  I adore them and are so pleased that my mother saved them for me.  Get well soon little man. 

The joys of boys...

As the only female in the house I feel a little outnumbered, especially when I come home to find...

A tadpole on the dining table... (plus random peg)

Alongside, a very furry caterpillar...

Just in case you couldn't see the little guy (yes, everything is male around here I am sure of it!)...

and... that would be a bike in the background.  Apparently it needs to live in the dining room until it is added to the insurance.  Hmmm.

The school holidays so far...

We have had a fairly quiet holiday. R (husband/dad) has started up his own business so we don't anticipate travelling anywhere anytime soon. Instead we have had lots of play dates and pottered about at home.

The pond yachts in these photos are family heirlooms! We were in London in the early 1980s on a family holiday and my father bought them for me and my brother at the most extraordinary and amazing toy shop...Hamleys! It was basically a toy department store, I think there were 7 different floors of toys. I can't remember what else we bought but these little pond yachts have lasted well and are now close to 30 years old! The boys have been playing with them in our almost empty pool (it is about to be resurfaced) every day.

The Captain is growing up so quickly. We have completed his school enrolment for next year. It hardly seems to be possible that he could be heading off to big school in six months time! We have chosen a very small (120 students in K - 6), slightly alternative private school that I am confident is perfect for him. They teach meditation (perfect for his somewhat volatile temper!) and provide a hot lunch (hooray no school lunches to pack and ideal for his endless appetite!) and teach classical languages and literature! The whole school even performs in an annual Shakespeare festival, including the lower first , as they call kinder! So looking forward to that!

To assist with entertaining the boys these holidays, R built the boys a fabulous sand pit. In the centre of which is a lovely old wooden row boat that was destined for the tip. It now has a new life as a pirate ship, police boat, naval aircraft carrier, submarine and even occasionally fills in for the Manly ferry! We have all sorts of sand pit toys and endless trucks but the Captain's favourite sand pit toy? Some old wood off cuts that we made into a wooden version of the northern beaches!

Ah yes, Manly Hospital... been there a few times with my rascally boys!

Make and do: More volcano fun!

The volcano that we made recently is well-loved, treasured even. The pirates play with it nearly every day. Mostly the volcano could be described as dormant, however there was a surprise eruption earlier this morning.

A number of dinosaurs had gathered to observe the lava flow...

plus one random donkey (there he is in between Brachiosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex ... probably not for long though... I am pretty sure Spinosaurus is eyeing him off! )

Oh the joy on their little faces! They just love it!