Rainy Car-less Day

Today it rained, it rained a lot. Normally if it rains we can find somewhere to go in the car, there's a load of really good museums and national trust properties nearby, but our car is out of action (or at least long distance action). I firmly believe in the saying "there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes" so we wrapped up the kids and headed out to enjoy Loughborough. 

First off was a bit of shopping, we needed some boring stuff from Wilkinson's, but instead of trying to hurry Beth so that we could get on to the "fun" part of the trip, we decided to slow down and enjoy the boring bit which lead to this moment of comedy gold from Beth.

We took the time to enjoy the towns architecture as well, we climbed every ball and walked on every wall between the shops and the library.

We are a bit of a family of book worms so Beth was very excited to find out that the library was selling books. Luckily the majority of the children's books were missing pages so that limited how many we brought home; it will at least put off the heartache of a book cull.  We did manage to find some Biff, Chip and Kipper books, so Beth was happy. After we had scoured the sale, Beth and I settled to read some books and we found a young puzzle book. Beth also read a good chunk of "Fat Cat on a Mat" to me, which was fantastic. She is in the very early stages of reading at the minute and it is so exciting to see her recognise a sight word or puzzle out a nice phonic word (today she read tree, after being told the rule about ee). We also indulged my love of Julia Donaldson books and read "The Smartest Giant in Town" which was new for me but Beth told me "We have that one at my school".

Outside the library Beth wanted to slide down the hand rail but it wasn't very slidey so Daddy help give her a push...

By this time Daniel had woken up and we'd migrated to the park. Queens park in Loughborough is fab! It has everything you could every want from a park. We started out at the aviaries, but very quickly Daniel had spotted his current favourites, ducks.

It looked quite a lot like mummy duck was nesting so we tried to keep our distance

After a while we managed to move on to the "stone duck" (well it's a swan but thats how I sold it to Daniel)

After a little squabble over who got to sit at the front Beth decided she would let Daniel have a turn at the front so she could teach him how to steer the duck (I have no clue how you would steer a stationary stone duck but apparently its an important life lesson that can only be imparted by your big sister).

We then moved on to tree climbing, I have never had any skills in tree climbing but after daddy gave her a few clues about possible footholds my fearless baby got about 3 foot off the ground. Which is when we saw two young men tying straps to trees....

Beth was very intrigued by what they were up to and watched them as they started to tightrope from tree to tree, after walking past several times, and copying their movements on twigs I finally got the hint that Beth would like to talk to them. Normally Beth will talk to anyone and had only just finished a pretty long chat with an old lady we didn't know, but she was a bit shy of the "grown up boys".

For numerous reasons that are better left to a foot note* I (out of character) decided to speak to them for her. It turns out that they were slack lining, which if you've never come across it is sort of a cross between tightrope walking and trampolining Learn more here. I am so mad at myself that i didn't get a photo but they were amazing and asked Beth if she would like a go.

My internal voice was screaming "are you crazy you want my baby to walk a 5cm wide twisty, tape 4 foot of the ground?' my outside voice said "wow beth that looks like fun would you like a go?" I lifted her on and the guy tried to hold her other hand which freaked her out a bit and she started trembling like a leaf. I reassured her that I would catch her if she fell but that she didn't need to do anymore, that seemed to do the trick and she managed a few steps before over balancing into my arms. She got off saying that it was really really fun, which I counted as a win.

* Recently it keeps coming up through one thing or another that we need to model the behaviour we want our children to learn or retain. I've never really felt confident talking to people and I worry that will rub off on Beth. I'm also enjoying stretching myself at the minute and "being the change I want to see" (sorry to Gandhi for using that quote in a much more self-centred way than it was intended)