Our week in review

Outside our window: Sunshine and lots of bird visitors. We managed to watch the pair of goldfinches for several minutes and marveled at their beauty. We don't often see them, they are still shy however we notice the seeds go down consistently. We also have two new regular visitors, two starlings who now show up every day to have a taste of the fatball and the mealworms. Our regulars are also often to be seen and as they aren't shy anymore we can have a very good look at them.

An update on that orange balloon, it is now ripped in half and now looks like a bow on the branch.

From the kitchen: Sunday we had a very lovely lunch out at the pub on the way to the seaside, made particularly nice as it meant no work for me. We also had a special treat of cake and smoothies at our favourite bakery, Sable d'or. At home we had stir-fry with salmon, marinated beef, Pasta with bacon and a mushroom (the biggest ever).

 



In the learning room: Maths, no surprise there, eh? The Romans in Britain and a trip to the Museum of London. We also finished our weather project and our home made rain gauge has worked and we were able to read how much it had rained last week. We also started on the organs and where they are in the human body. Big Monkey now can name the major bones in both English and German. We also started with the wonders that are irregular verbs, the English ones aren't that surprising, occasional some mistakes slip in but of course they don't provide many surprises it's the German ones that produce much eye rolling. Big Monkey also had another saxophone lesson and we now have to decide whether we buy the instrument as our rental agreement has run out.

We've been creating: Big Monkey found her French knitting again and has been busy with that. I made lots more layouts from my Counterfeit kit so this has proven very successful for me. But now I'm ready for the new kit. Not too much longer. I also made a few cards and four more postcards for the Alphabetica swap.

Favourite things: An evening out with Daddy Monkey with nice food and a movie. We found a great pub in Hampstead that had great food. We even had time to browse the bookshop before and I bought a book, a real book! I thought briefly to wait and get home and order it for my kindle but then decided it might be nice for Big Monkey to read some time so got it with its new lovely paper smell and heavy weight (not really just compared to the kindle). Friends visiting and Little Monkeys who do their speech exercises even when they scream them and add lots of other words in. We tried an iPad app "ArtikPix" and it lets us record his voice which he loved listening to. The free version comes with only one sound set so I'll have to get the full one soon to practise all the sounds he has problems with, which unfortunately are nearly all of them. I might give it a few more attempts with the free one though to see whether we can reproduce last nights success.

Things we did: Big Monkey went to Messy Play with Little Monkey and decided it was just too messy for her and she wouldn't go again. They played with shaving foam and colours and apparently it was absolutely everywhere. She had paint everywhere she said, and whenever she touched something she got messy again. Well, that's the idea and that's why Little Monkey goes there and doesn't do it at home. However, it's at Missus Wookie's Quaker meeting House.  But it sounds that the messy play teacher is very good at tidying up after herself as so far I haven't hear anything negative from Missus Wookie. I think she just doesn't want to have a look at the going ons. I'm with her on this one. It sounds crazy. We also visited the Museum of London, with Missus Wookie, and Little Monkey wasn't terribly impressed so he "entertained" us with his singing.