A perfect outdoor day

We have had a superb day! It was a warm, Autumnal sun and we spent nearly the entire day outdoors with our friends. We are so lucky to be able to spend days like this together - there is nothing else I would rather do than be outdoors in nature with the boys and like-minded friends enjoying the seasons.

I squeezed in a bit of work first thing, as I expected we would not get any more opportunity to do it. Harry stuck his postcard from Center Parcs into his outdoor book and drew and labelled a red squirrel. He looked up red squirrels on the internet too and I read him the page we found. He wrote his most interesting fact in his book - that the babies are called kittens. He also completed a few pages of his phonics workbook.

Peter was drawing and he wanted to glue his post card on too and said he was writing 'duck' - of course he wasn't actually writing but it was quite nice that he wanted to join in!

We then went out to meet our friends at the Rising Sun Country Park. The children played in the adventure play area and we ate our lunch there before walking to the woodland. Harry collected some good helicopter seeds which he enjoyed watching as he let them fall to the ground. The boys had a box each and they collected some nice Autumn treasures along the way - rowan berries, bright yellow leaves and fluffy thistledown. We also spotted acorns and elderberries growing, as well as blackberries.

We stopped at the pond to watch the various birds. The swan family was very interested in us!

We also saw horses close up in the fields and a stag, although the children were all convinced it was a Christmas reindeer!

I took along some supplies for painting and we collected blackberries on the way to squish and use the juice as paint. My children weren't really interested in doing this when we got started but others were. Harry was far too busy making his den with huge sticks!

We walked further to the community farm where one of the volunteers picked plums from the trees for the children and gave us cooking apples. He also took everyone to see the pigs in their field, although I missed that as Peter was sitting on the floor protesting at his weary legs - Harry went along with the others though. We have all done a lot of walking today and Peter was asleep at 6.30! The apple crumble we made tonight from the cooking apples has restored my energy a bit though.