National Gallery

...won't be knocking on our door anytime soon, but you never know, with a little practice? Fridays are always Art Day and last Friday, we decided to spend a very nice morning painting. The Tabby Cat is of course the work of Isabella and the table of fruit (which I have been working on for more than a year!) is mine, still as yet unfinished. I wonder if I can get away with keeping it that way. Hmmmmmm....

The Temple

This picture of Isabella and her Grandmother (Muffa) was taken last year in the summer outside The Temple at Wanstead in East London. Wanstead Park is a really beautiful place which is local to us and we use it regularly. It has a very rich and interesting history which I won't go into here but I think later I will post up some more in-depth information about it. Amazingly unknown to many Londoners, it's kind of like the Hampstead Heath of East London. Anyway, the one remaining building recently opened to the public and we took a stroll around it last summer. It's not terribly large but it's still quite an interesting, quirky place and a beautiful example of 18th century architecture.

Halloween

Okay - so it's a bit early for Halloween but, as my favourite time of the year, I just had to post up the pictures of the stuff that we made last year on Halloween (2010). We had a really great time as always and my Halloween decor continues to increase year upon year. We now have two, yes TWO boxes of Halloween decor to put up...and take down. Anyway, we made a papier mache pumpkin which turned out really well actually - I was so impressed with myself!! We also made some spooky boutique style boxes, trimmed in black glitter ribbon and emellished with errie tea stained labels such as "Pixie Potion" and "Witches Brew" etc. We also made a fantastic Haunted House which lights up!! Okay, so I am a big kid when it comes to Halloween. How many more months to go??!!

Norton

Isabella's reading is really coming on in leaps and bounds! She has suddenly developed this passion for reading almost anything she can get her hands on, although books with animals as the central characters are her favourites. She recently finished reading, "Norton; The Loveable Cat Who Travelled the World" by Peter Gethers and she thoroughly enjoyed it. She read it in two days, reading mainly in the evening. She liked it because of the fact it was "very funny" and reminded her of her cat Buxton, who is our youngest, incredibly naughty cat. Another book she has read about five times is "The Four Ugly Cats in Apartment 3D" by Marilyn Sachs. This was a book we found by chance at Embankment Book market, one of my favourite places for finding all manner of books. Not sure if you can purchase it on Amazon or Ebay, but it's well worth a look if you have kids who enjoy books about animals - cats in particular!

RSPB Garden Bird Watch

Yesterday afternoon, Isabella and I participated in the RSPB Garden Bird watch experiment which involved watching birds for an entire hour and recording the largest number of birds that you saw at any one time, for example four Starlings etc. Although you could do the bird watch anywhere, we chose our garden simply because it was freezing cold outside and we could watch the birds from the upstairs bedroom window! We are members of the RSPB and Isabella is a member of the Wildlife Explorers, so she is pretty good at identifying birds. We feed them daily and have various feeding stations for them, and because we live in very close proximity to a park, we tend to get lots of different birds. Our favourites are our two resident Robins - they are so cute! We also have two residen Blackbirds (male and female) and lots of wood pigeons, which are kind of annoying actually because they tend to eat everything. Anyway, we duly submitted our findings and rewarded our efforts with some yummy orange cake. I think for Isabella's birthday this year I'm going to get her a really nice pair of binoculars and take her to Rainham Marshes for the day - they have all sorts of interesting things to do down there and a club for kids to get involved with.

New Year!

I am useless at keeping these blogs of mine up-to-date. I think perhaps I have too many on the go at once, along with a million other things that I'm involved with. Anyway, I'm going to try and keep this one up along with maybe two others. We'll see how we go! Doing a project on Africa today, so will be posting up the outcome of that in the very near future, along with some field trip reports!

Let's hope 2011 is a good one. :)