"Wherever you go, go with all your heart."

Day 71:

Today was one of those days where everything just seemed to fall in to place. A mixture of great moods, fun, creativity and a picnic in the woods. Last year Opeie and I found a really lovely area not too far from where we live which we've used a few times to sit and do home-ed work. This evening we decided to take the garden parasol, a blanket and some art supplies for a relaxing peaceful evening under the trees. Just what we needed to take out minds off the current madness. We took loads of pictures of our paintings but this little guy that joined the party (with his heart shaped markings) really summed up how I was feeling.

'In a Heartbeat'

I'm not one for sharing videos on the blog unless I am writting about Opeie's music tastes but Mrs M sent me this video and I had to share. It seems that even though we are in 2017 I still hear negative comments about homosexuality weekly which can be really difficult to explain to the boys if they overhear as they have been brought up in the correct way, knowing that we fall in love with whoever we fall in love with and gender, race and all those other ridiculous things that hold some people back mean nothing. We live in an age where we should be able to embrace these things and it is great to see that short movies like this are being made to help children understand that they can be in love with whoever they choose. The world would be an even more interesting place if our hearts could physically do the hard work for us.

There is real power in video! watch it peeps!

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”

It seems that the macabre stories of Mary Shelley have made a lasting impression on that boy of mine. So much so that while writing about her in his history book that we have been creating, he decided to immortalise her in LEGO. His creation gave me the chance to show him how to take the colour out of the image and highlight the heart that he had added, giving his photo a little more character.

"Christmas is, of course, the time to be home - in heart as well as body."

Since taking Opeie out of nursery last year , he has refered to our afternoons together while Mrs M is at work and Seth is at school as 'Daddy nursery', which i love. Ive noticed over the last few months though when Opeie has mentioned the term, Seth has looked a little down, almost like he feels he is missing out on some of the fun that we have. A few days back i could hear the boys in their room and Seth was asking Opeie what we do at Daddy nursery. After Opeie excitedly listed off some of the activities we have done recently, Seth came downstairs and asked "can we do a Daddy nursery activity today please?".

Well i wasn't going to say no was I!! Plus the weather wasn't great and doing things at home during the Christmas break is great. There was a fun activity i have wanted to do for some time but just hadn't got round to it, probably because i couldn't find our big roll of paper. Moving house though had unearthed all manner of fun things we had previously misplaced. We started our activity with Opeie lying down on the paper so that we could draw round him...

I thought it would be interesting to get the boys to draw internal body parts. I wanted to see what shape they thought the parts were and the size using Opeie's body outline. Most importantly though i wanted to see where they thought these body parts were located and what they thought their purpose was. I knew that Seth knew this but i was using it as a 'Seth teaches Opeie' activity without him realising as Opeie really takes in everything his big brother tells him.

Seth was very much 'this is what it looks like and this is what it does!' obviously the things he has been learning at school have stuck. As expected his drawings were excellent and it was interesting to learn from Seth. He thought we had one very large lung for the "good stuff we breath in" and a small lung for the "bad stuff we breath out". Also the large and small intestine are virtually the same size. He had no idea what shape the kidneys were but based his drawing around kidney beans which was awesome. Seth also showed an interest in drawing testicles??, which looked like grapes on a thin string, not bad i thought.

Opeie, having very little knowledge of internal body parts was a little more creative with his drawings and descriptions. The stomach (i was informed) has eyes and a mouth, it smiles when it eats nice things like Broccoli and Chocolate but it has a sad face when it eats meat (I'm sure that will make Mrs M smile when she reads this). I also found out that we in fact have three lungs that are all stuck together, kidneys look like donuts and both intestines look like spears. It was cute to see that the heart was 'heart shaped' to Opeie but Seth had drawn a more detailed version of our very important muscular organ.

There were other parts i wanted us to go through but the boys were eager to put their sketches on Opeie's drawn outline out in the hall. We placed the brains on first and when Opeie put his just above where the stomach should be i knew it was going to be interesting.

The human stomach is usually located in the head! or so Opeie says. Seems a long way down for evacuation after your food has been processed in the torso area and sent back up. This may have been placed here though because of the smiley face (it did look cute).

Polly as always came to get involved and was happy plonking herself down in the middle of what we were doing (i wonder if we could do a similar activity with a cat shape?). Intestines in the legs and kidneys in the hips and wrists, it was turning out to be a very fun activity. They both knew exactly where the testicles were located (no surprise there though, remember the planetarium post?).

The activity is a two parter, the next part being me drawing the correct shape/size of the parts and showing where they are located. Seth did an excellent job of explaining to Opeie the purpose of each part drawn, all except the kidneys as he wasn't sure.

Seth wants us to draw around him next so I'm thinking we do a similar activity to talk about bones as Opeie is always talking about skeletons and skulls. Our afternoon of learning gave me a great idea for Opeie's home teaching and something that Seth can be involved with regularly too. A fun afternoon was had by all at Daddy Nursery and clearly Seth loved being a part of it and of course we loved him being there.

"Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness."

Yesterday marked the day of our friends Gareth and Vikki's wedding. Although I don't know them both that well, I get the feeling they are big kids like me. Gareth is a big fan of the Aquaman phone cover I made a few months back so I decided to make them a Lego themed wedding gift. I love a challenge and it was something to keep me occupied. Like anything we build together the first step is to find an empty container and look for pieces that 'may' come in handy...

I had an idea for a decorative box that opened up with the bride and groom inside. I picked white and pink as a colour scheme and started building but it looked overly femanine. I then changed the pink to red but a bow we made crossing the box looked like the st George's cross (not great for a wedding). I was getting stressed out at this point but then Seth suggested I change the red to yellow as he said he liked it on my original phone cover (always good to have Seths opinion on these things). I should probably point out at this point that before we had even begun building together Seth had made a Lego wedding piece of his own a few weeks before, which we all thought was really cute and very well thought out.

We started out building a plain white box to encase the minifigures that we were going to make. The plan was to make a bow going across the box from each side but as we carried on building we added little bits of detail in like the white and yellow corner pillars. The box seemed far to dark so we opened up the sides with archways letting light in from every direction.

   I wanted the box to open up wide so we added a tooth hinge (which are probably my favourite Lego pieces, sad I know). Because of the angle of the bricks on this part I couldn't have matching arches. So I sat for quite sometime working out a door with a heart shape cut out, it was a pain but I got there in the end. It ended up looking so good that that I made a matching one for the top.

We built a circular platform (Seth's idea) for them to stand on and kept Seth's original table he had made as I thought it was great. A bottle of wine, glasses and flowers set the scene and it was starting to look pretty great.

Then it was my favourite part of any of our builds, minifigure time. I ordered the bride online as we didn't have one in our collection. Vikki has red hair though so I had to change the hair and rummage through our box looking for a face with matching eyebrows etc, Gareth was easy apart from the hair (his is short dark and curly, a style I've not seen on a minifigure so he got a hat instead (more about Gareth's hair later though).

Although the piece was really coming on we wanted to make it a little more personal, the problem is with a minifigure bride and groom is they can kind of look a little samey so we needed to accessorise. We raised the base of the box and added in a draw at the rear, inside we added a costume change for them both. Vikki is a fitness instructor, so sweatbands and a boombox were a definite, black and red gym attire is his colour scheme at the gym. Apparently he's always talking about how much meat he eats so having a leg of meat in our collection worked out well and then it's back to Gareth's hair. And Gareth if your reading, my apologies. I was told your minifigure NEEDED Afro hair so I ordered the disco dancer minifigure for the look. (after meeting his brother last night I realised the hair would have suited a minifigure for him perfectly).

The gift was finished...

Next was packaging and we wanted to keep it simple. A plain vintage looking brown wrapping but we made a Lego gift tag that ribbon could be threaded through

Obviously we had to make a card to compliment the gift too, simple yet elegant (I love Lego).

I started this post a couple of days ago, the wedding yesterday was amazing and it was so nice to be a part of it, I will write about in another post, our Lego gift went down really well and apparently will take pride of place in their home, which is always good to hear. Although I got stressed at the start, this build was a lot of fun and myself and the boys enjoyed being able to use our creative flair to create something that brings a smile to someone else's face for once. 

Congratulations Gareth and Vikki you look so happy together and it meant a lot to us to be able to share your magical day with you xxx

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."

Weve been looking about to take Opeie to some sort of toddler group for quite some time. Ive taken him to ball pits etc but our problem is that we find many of these places quite dirty. plus although its nice for children to run about we really wanted to be taking him somewhere a bit more educational. Opeie hasn't had a lot of interaction with other children apart from Seth and we don't want the inevitable going to nursery to be a problem so it was time to get him mingling.

Today we took him to a pottery class in Ironbridge which was a lot of fun, i studied ceramics at uni for a while so i was also in my comfort zone. when we got there we met Sarah...

... a lovely bubbly woman who welcomed her new class mates with open arms. There was lots of activities to choose from, not all ceramic based so we started Opeie off with some paper plate painting

as with most activities when it comes to young children after making his mark on three plates he had lost interest and wanted to turn his hands to something else so we headed over to the clay table and Sarah got us a large chunk of clay to play with. There was a great selection of cutters and tools, perfect for beginners. Opeie was happy pushing his hand print into the clay and then destroying it. Mrs M cut out stars and Opeie added texture but then.... yes you guessed it, destroyed them.

Mrs M eventually made a miffy without it being destroyed and i cut out a heart shape for it to go on. We cut out a bear and Opeie made some eyes with mommy while i made an upside down Muno-esque finger bowl. Their all going to be fired so hopefully when we go again we can have some fun glazing them.

The conversation was great and everyone was so friendly which was great as it was the first time we had been and sometimes these things can be a little daunting. I would definitely recommend this group to anyone that wanted to take their children to something creative and we will definitely be going again. after an hour and a half Opeie started to look sleepy so we got our coats to head home, but the fun didn't end there. Before leaving we brought some ceramic flowers and a magnet for Seth to paint when he had finished school (we didn't want to leave him out of all of the fun). So as soon as he got in we got the paints out.