Olympic Planes

Another beautiful day!  It got very hot very quickly today, so Mummy nipped out for some more oranges, lemons etc for the ongoing 'cocktail inventing' (any chance to encourage the boys to consume fruit!), while our fabulous lodger played with the boys, reading Spongebob stories and playing 'guess the Ocean Creature'... followed by LOTS of water play in the garden.
Not content with the hundred paper planes made from the Usborne book over the last few days, Eldest decided to make some more of his own design, decorate them according to the flag colours of different nations, and then host his own version of the Olympic games, called "Olympic Planes".  There were four events: Fastest Fliers; Furthest Fliers, Highest Fliers and Most Acrobatic Fliers.  The countries represented were China, Japan, South Africa, Italy, Germany and England (who unsurprisingly got the biggest cheers from the spectators (Middle and Youngest).  Eldest took on the role of educator to his brothers, explaining which plane was from which country :)

Italy won the fastest round, England won highest - and then there was a break for the essentials of trampolining and water-gun fights... after which Germany won the furthest round, and Italy won the most acrobatic.  Eldest drew up a nice chart (more writing - and maths) so he could work out that the over all gold medal winner was... ITALY!

By the way, we did discuss the fact that if you have two competitors in joint second place, you wouldn't usually award third place, but we thought seeing as it was England we'd make an exception! ;)

Then except for fruit-juice cocktail making, more water-play and other garden-fun (including finding a millipede, and slurping ice-pops while lounging around), that was pretty much it for today :)
Oh except for the day's caterpillar news: the Painted Ladies are now measuring in at 3.3cm and the Cinnabar enclosure has five new baby caterpillars (the chrysalis remains unchanged).
So that's all to report from us for the day - now, if you'll please excuse me, I'm going to go and make some more vitamin D :)

Olympic Flame

Today's outing was to see the olympic flame come through our town.  Before we went, we got out our Olympic Torch Kits that we had bought from Yellow Moon, and the boys assembled theirs (Eldest doing most of the assembling as it was a bit fiddly in places) so they could take their own torches to wave at the man carrying the real flame...

 

Similarly to the Queen's recent visit, going to see our part of the torch relay involved a lot of standing around & waiting - and again I was impressed that the boys actually remained in one place for over an hour - even through rain showers - without too much complaining (I'm glad we watched the weather forecast and took umbrellas)  I have to say though, we were all pretty tired by the time we got home!  We had a good chat about the Olympics on the way there and back - the origins, the flame, the games etc - and the boys came up with some great questions for us to look up when we got home, including how does the flame stay alight?  We found some other great Olympic websites while searching for our answers, including Activity Village, the London 2012 mascot page, and the official Olympics website.  And of course, there were a few books left strewn about this afternoon too... The Story of the Olympics, Olympic Poems, and Olympics (Young Reading).  I read a couple of the juicier facts out 'to Daddy' (such as the races being run in the nude for 1,000 years), then unsurprisingly the boys loved fnding and tittering over the illustrations that included bare bottoms... :)
So that was our foray into the world of the Olympic games.  Still all very gentle - being led by the boys' interest, rather than forcing information on them - but I'll be making sure we see the opening ceremony in a couple of weeks, and then who knows?  Maybe they'll be interested to watch a few of the games while they're going on (nobody's particularly big on sports in this house, but I bet they could get into a race or two...)
Anyway, once we got home and had found out as much as we wanted, the boys were just making the most of having Daddy home before he goes back to work tomorrow - Middle wanted to show him the fun that could be had making rude noises while trying to blow bubbles in his slime factory kit, and Youngest wanted to show him the map (ie level) that he had got to on Reading Eggs. Eldest was a bit droopy and just wanted to watch Barney's Barrier Reef and Richard Hammond's Blast Lab on TV - which was fine, we'd been out for a long time, after all!
So, another lovely (if tiring) day - and all the better for knowing that tomorrow is 'lazy Monday' - ie nothing scheduled, just pyjamas and more laid-back learning and fun.  Bring it on :)