This week.....

Will and daddy finished his Fire Station for his new fire engine...

We had friends over to visit and we swopped some books and DVD's, which has indeed kick started our pioneer/native americam indian/Little house books theme again. I have read aloud the beautifully illustrated Little House easy readers (in one sitting!!!), we have finished our Native American Indian lapbook, and looked back on the Little House in the Big Woods one we did last year. David is keen to do the next Little house book now.



It was good to see another HEing family with similar views and values as us. It is always reassuring and inspiring to talk and share ideas and stories. We took them to one of our local woods and all the children had a great time on the rope swings and exploring the woods.
We have also been watching The Coal House at War, which is a BBC series about three families that go to live a mining village in Wales, set in 1944. It is really good and very different from The 1940's House, because you can really appreciate the community spirit that must have been so important to people during that time.
Jonathan plays darts quite alot here....we have a board up in the living room!!!! He plays 301 with Rob and we call it maths!!!! He goes through a fair amount of flights, and he decided to recycle these odd flights and fashion these....

Here's a close up....its made of wood...of course, what else?!!

The best thing is that it actually flies straight and you can play with them like the normal ones...they are just less dangerous!!!
And I have been knitting more little projects. Rob has been wanting a hat for running to hold his MP3 player ear phones in, so I did that at the weekend from the same WW2 pattern site that Will's balaclava came from, and I finished Tom's first sock (pictures to follow).I also knitted this face cloth yesterday.

I'm really pleased with it. It was made in the spirit of Use it up January and was made with a very small ball of left over cotton yarn form Will's poncho that I knitted. I literally JUST had enough to make it.
Rob has managed to get the kitchen painted with extra durable paint, as the last time we painted it, we must have ued the world's only wash-off-able paint!!!! No good when your kitchen sees as much mud as ours!! So now I have to do the skirting boards, which we didn't even get round to last time and are still yellow from the previous owners obsession with yellow!!! Once we realised the paint wiped off, we kind off lost interest in the whole thing, but this time we have even bought some tiles for the splash back, which is just currently bare wall. Not good when the paint just wipes off on the cloth!
Tom went on Explorer camp in what remained of the snow at the weekend, and came back relatively clean but extremely tired. Scouts it seems do not have as much common sense as you would think....if I mentioned aerosol cans and lighters in the same breath you would probably wince. But in a tent????? The boys in question were sent home and, this is the 'best' bit, one of the parents asked for a refund as her son was missing the second half of the camp????!!!!!!!
So it has been a busy week despite some or all of us being under the weather with sore throats and coughs. Now time for some relaxation..... ;-)