Festivities

I've been doing some present making and had left my button jar on the sewing table so we had to play with it this morning. The last time we played with buttons he mostly wanted to just put them in his mouth and throw them around but he was happy looking at the colours today and doing a bit of sorting by colour. Well until he got bored and just went back to jumping on the mattress.

I've been doing some more freezer paper stencils and have fallen in love with a moose. I'm getting better at the cutting out which means I was able to use the moose both in positive and negative. This tshirt will eventually be for Isaac but he needs to grow a lot first! The same moose will appear on other tees at Christmas.

Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah and I made latkes for the first time. And then more importantly we had doughnuts for dessert! I have various recipes for doughnuts but there's only so much frying I want to do so they came from the supermarket instead.

Granny and Grandpa have bought the boy a Hanukkah set which has gone down a treat. We've been reading a couple of books in the last few weeks about the festival and so the boy was familiar with the dreidal and everything as soon as it came out of the box. Hanukkah Gelt is usually chocolate coins, I'm not sure they'd fare that well in a frying pan but hey he doesn't know that!

Skeletons and santa

Yesterday Matthew took the boy into Oxford to meet up with some friends and they popped in to say hello to the dinosaurs (and Matthew remembered the camera this time!).

And then in the evening we had a visitor. One of the local charities sends Santa round every year complete with tractor and very loud music. We stood on the front wall and watched it all go by and Isaac did a lot of waving and then gave a round of applause when the tractor and trailer had finally gone out of sight.

He then came in and said 'big tractor with lots of lights and music and man on the back waving with big oven gloves on'. He doesn't understand about who it was or why they were there.

Messing Around

The boy loves his digger. He's been trying to move things around in the bucket - the phone was too big but bits of oatcake are just perfect and there's the advantage of being able to eat them too.

It's lovely seeing the changes in play and the development of his imagination. It'd be quite nice if he could do it without being physically attached to me though - he's usually either climbing on me or pressed up against me. This is not a boy who is passive in any way.

He's big into traffic jams and stacking and other ways to line up his cars. This was a new one though! And yes this is what a laptop screen looks like when you have a toddler.

The relationship between boy and bear is changing all the time. I'm not sure how much the dog likes the rough and tumble elements that have started to creep in though! This could be a hug or could be wrestling depending if you're the giver or receiver.

The dog puts up with it though if it means he can stay on the bed...

His treat of the week has been one of Matthew's old socks stuffed with yet more old socks. The house is now littered with bits of chewed sock.

There has been the odd case of doggie humiliation too along the way... (note the toe colours in case you can't see that he's wearing socks!)

Getting started

On making presents.

A tester batch of fudge...

And making headway with the patchwork throw for my friend's daughter. (Is it bad that I want to keep it?!)

Cookies

Yesterday, inspired by Kat of Slugs fame I made some oat cookies. They were delicious (even though I didn't have cranberries or a few of the other things in Kat's recipe).

Sock Monkey

We've been doing a lot of nothing just recently but there's always time for a cup of tea...

A bit of train building - complete with traffic jam...

And major incident aka the big crash!).

Time for a bit of football whilst doll-carrying.

And then "mummy made Isaac a special monkey". It was supposed to be for one of his Christmas presents but he saw it part made and then kept asking for his monkey so he's had it already. There's a sock monkey tutorial here and this one was made with some knee length socks so has extra long legs and tail.

He's already watched some rugby...

Been generally flung around...

And needed a minor repair.

It's a hard life being a dog! This is him under the table while we had dinner. It was just too much effort to stay upright.

Day out with Daddy

The boy has been on two outings this week but the camera only went on one of them. They got the train to Leamington and went to the park and for a milkshake and then got the train back. Lots of fun was had!