a quiet day at home

My new resolution is to post more frequently about our day to day activities as well as bigger trips and holidays, so here are some pics to show a few of the things we did on our home-based day today .......

We were excited to get a letter from one of our sponsored children, Silveria, who lives in Bolivia. It was a short note written on Silveria's behalf by her brother Vicente, thanking us for the colouring pens and book we had sent with our previous letter, and included a photo of her with these things (we are going to assume that she was happier to receive them than she looks!) ......

Brodie built a huge train track .....

Both Tess & Brodie had a play on the computer, including Education City (for some reason, they keep doing the number & colour games in German and Spanish, where the words are spoken and you have to click on the correct item, so Tess in particular is starting to recognise a few of these words) ....

Making fresh fruit smoothies ........

... and more importantly, drinking (and enjoying!) them ......

We started a slightly (but hopefully not too) ambitious project today to make bunting to hang around our tent when we go camping. I had a bit of a brainwave to combine two planned projects into one, and so we are going to use a variety of fabric dying techniques to decorate the individual flags (bunts??) instead of using normal coloured fabrics. Today, we mainly did the preparatory work of cutting out and sewing the flags. And Tess & Brodie decorated a few with some colourful fabric crayons. For the rest of the flags, we will be using dyes to try out tie dye, batik and African paste dying. We are camping with some friends over the bank holiday weekend, so it will be good if we can get the bunting finished by then.

Tess is getting quite adept with the sewing machine now, and was managing to sew the individual flags on her own .......

In training for future child labour (I can hope!) .....

Using the fabric crayons ......

Brodie proudly displaying his designs ......

....... which don't really show up at all in these photos, but seemed to comprise dismembered train and digger parts - he was obviously going for the Picasso approach to drawing today!!!! .....

Tess was a little more traditional, with a castle complete with duck pond, a cake (with a cherry on top) and a rainbow ....