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. :)

Introducing, Bibo!!

This is Bibo, Isabella's new pet hamster. As part of her 9th birthday, we decided to allow her to have her very own pet to care for. Of course, we already have three cats, one crazy labrador and a tropical tank to look after, but Bibo is really just for Isabella. He has a super-dooper 21st century housing unit which he is totally happy with. It's a Habitrail Ovo suite and we bought a few extra rooms like the den, the mini-maze, a handful of tunnels and two transportation units which can also be fixed to the main unit and used as "rooms". Bibo is a Syrian hamster and Isabella chose him herself from Pets at Home. She was so excited!!! It was a great day and, one month later, Bibo is quite happy and well cared for. We clean his house out once a week, which is pretty easy actually - a lot easier than the fish tank, that's for sure - and he has plenty in there to keep him busy. He's not remotely bothered by the cats although Aslan still doesn't think it's quite right, keeping a rodent for a pet!

Great Fire of London

Here is a little project that we did as part of our "Great Fire of London" study unit. It was a lot of fun to do but did take a few days. It's quite large (A3 size) and involved a lot of drawing, cutting, pasting, colouring etc - Isabella had a great time putting it all together. On the reverse is a little summary that she wrote about the Great Fire. We're lucky because we live in East London so St Pauls and that entire area is only a quick tube journey for us. We absolutely love the Museum of London and we're really looking forward to going there in a few weeks to see all the new exhibits/make-over!! It's my favourite museum so I can't wait to see what they've done with it - hope they have kept the little Victorian "town" as that was my favourite. They do a brilliant Great Fire of London exhibit, so we'll be taking her to see that too!

Easter Bonnet

This is Isabella proudly modelling her bespoke "Easter Bonnet"! Her grandmother provided that hat and gave her a little kit to decorate it with. I think it looks pretty impressive! Having been a teenager who was constantly wearing hats (in the 1980's when it was fashionable to do so!) and doing all sorts of interesting things to jazz them up, I think Isabella is well on her way to becoming a millinery artist!

Update

Well, I haven't been able to keep this blog updated of late due to my beloved laptop having to undergo some pretty serious and intense surgery!! After taking years of abuse from my constant speed typing and everything else that I demand of it, it finally "died" once and for all. The monitor screen kept falling forwards and backwards, quite often wouldn't even come on even though the machine itself was running - finally that stopped too. Luckily for me, I am married to an IT God who was able to rebuild it - he has the technology. It did take a while though, as we had to buy a new screen, new motherboard and various other bits and pieces. Of course, we have other PCs that I can use, but I'm not able to upload photographs - I can only do it on my laptop. So, anyway, here we are! These recent pics are of Isabella and her cousin on a trip to Valentines Mansion yet again! I need to go back too, because there were a few things in there that I want to get for myself from the gift shop!!