The weekend started off with the usual early start for football. Again Alex’s empathy and kind heart are displayed as he asks a child that fell if he was okay and helped pick him up. The child that fell reacted quite interestingly, not wanting help (or thinking he shouldn’t get help?) even though visibly upset. After the ritual of nuggets and chips, I took the kids to ‘Art Sauce’ in Laverton – a free art workshop for kids. This week it was painting and collage. The kids used the watercolours – Alex created a 3 page long underwater scene with sharks and a sea snake. He painted the 3 pages separately, then they all seemed to fit together quite seamlessly!
At home, Alex made a bower bird (like the one we saw at the museum) as it was part of the activity box he’d received. He didn’t like the way it came out, so he made started to make a nest – he used the tape measure to wrap around the egg and measure the size of straw length he’d need, telling me so as he did it. We played some monopoly too. When I went to work, the kids played outside with Vio – they used wax crayons to colour in their cars!
Once the school holidays had finished, we jumped on the chance to visit the zoo. We checked out the new outdoor space. We liked it, though we spent more time back inside. Alex loves playing with the animal table -he paired up lions with tigers. We have animals at home that he never plays with, this has left me wondering why? We saw the new red panda enclosure and the twin babies! We visited the butterfly house, and saw lots of stages of butterflies – we found tiny caterpillars, eggs and even a butterfly laying eggs (we often see butterflies mating). Daniel loved the elephants again, and names the animals he sees according to our family!
Coop day took us to the city, where we saw the 52 storey treehouse at the Arts centre. Alex laughed lots and enjoyed it – I’m glad we read one of the books now! After that we headed for chips and ice cream, then for a play at Birrarung Marr. We’d taken the train to the city, as we often do and the kids wanted to get the bus home too so we did. However, the bus route has changed slightly since the last time we used it and so I asked the drivers which bus to take. It seems they didn’t actually listen to my question and misdirected us, leaving us in Kealba! Daniel fortunately slept on my back, but Alex and I had to walk 30 minutes home (from the train station it’s only a 15 minute walk!) So we stopped at the shops for yummies and when we got home we collapsed in front of a movie.
The next 2 days saw scalextric set up using the picture on the box as a guide, playdough (cooking, making animals), iPad, fixing feather collection and creating “Alex’s Feather Museum”, cuddles, making the wooden train track from the picture on the box, rediscovering old action figures, making a cardboard spider. Alex started doing this with 2 boxes – one for head and one for body. So I showed him some pictures of spiders and how their bodies are divided into 3 parts – head, thorax and abdomen, he proceeded to make his spider with those parts instead. He used pipe cleaners for the spider legs and I heard him counting in 2s (who need teaching, right?) and the best part of all was the tape he fixed onto the abdomen for web release!
