Well, we’re back! We had a great Christmas and new years and have enjoyed having so much time all together. We’ve been back home the last week but really still in holiday mode and not doing much at all. Tomorrow hubby is back to work and we’re getting back into our normal thing. I have been thinking about the year ahead and our plans and goals and I’ll share a bit more about that in a post next week. I hope you’ve had a lovely holiday too! There was too much to share from our time away so I’m just going to update on the last week since we’ve been home.

We arrived home to discover the garden overtaken by weeds but the sunflowers were HUGE! The girls have been checking on them every day and we’ve noticed that some have now lost their petals and we can see the black seeds inside.

I’m always interested to see what they go to first after we’ve been away. This time it was the Magna-Tiles and light panel. They have been played with ALL week!

On Monday they found a skink in the garden. This was the start of lots of research. It was decided that the skink would be kept as a pet.

They used the iPad to find information on what skinks ate and how to set up an enclosure for them. They also wrote down lots of questions and looked up the answers to them all.

A new home was set up. Bye bye cake container, lol.

Next they found their new friend some food. I’m so amazed by Miss 5’s interest in bugs lately. The girl who would once scream if she came across a tiny ant on the floor found these ants and picked them up with her bare hands.

The skink stayed with us for the whole week until both girls decided that they wanted to let it go, telling me ‘we can’t look after it forever!’ Ahh, the pressures of parenthood.

I think the girls were glad to be back to their own home and belongings. They got straight back to doing their usual things and exploring their current interests. For Miss 5 that is fairies. She spent lots of time creating fairy worlds with loose parts and the fairy house she made.

Miss 3 loves dinosaurs. I found this little scene set up in the play room. A dinosaur world with some old things and some new that she got for Christmas.

Miss 5 would like to learn to ‘write small’ like me and asked for a book with dotted thirds. I thought I had one but we couldn’t find it. Next time we were at the shops we were able to find one amongst the back to school sales and she got to work. I wrote down the alphabet for her, showing her how the letters went on the lines and she began practicing underneath.

Design for a ‘fairy world’ by Miss 5.

A picture of us going to Bunnings to pick up designs for her fairy world. Ok, we got the message and it was off to Bunnings we went for a few little plants.

The finished fairy world.

And we ended the week with a milestone! Miss 5 lost her first baby tooth. It had been wobbly for 3 weeks and we could tell it would be coming out soon. Yesterday she could feel the sharpness at the bottom with her tongue and drew a picture of what she thought her tooth would look like when it came out. She drew a triangle shape with the point down the bottom. When it came out she compared it to her picture to find she was right!

That’s all from us this week! I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.

As always, be sure to jump over and check out what my lovely friends have been up to this week at HippyHappyMama, An Everyday Story, Memoirs of a Childhood, and Racheous – Lovable Learning.