Finding ways to play with and in the biggest, most climbable, garden tree including: climbing the garden tree; putting a hoist and pulley system into the garden tree; B makes an animal feeder.
356 – Climbing the garden tree
Friday 10 January. Weather: dry and cloudy. Temperature: 2°C.
B’s idea. We have a lovely tall evergreen in the garden which she worked out how to climb last summer for the first time. I think she just got tall enough. It’s got a good step up branch and she can get about 1.5 metres above the ground in two bounds. Higher is harder as she has to wiggle round the branches but that also means she feels safer. She’s risk averse, like me, but has really got into climbing it recently.
She gets a good two or three metres above the ground this time. After going up the normal way she tries different routes and experiments. A swing hangs from one of the low branches and she sees if she can climb on that and get up from there (it’s tricky). I ask her if she can chalk a ‘356’ sign on the trunk and she has fun doing that and then seeing if she can climb higher than it. Then suddenly she’s done and heading back inside.
It was a great way to start the weekend anyway and got her energy levels reset really well after school. Hurray for trees! Afterwards I wonder if I could have got her out there longer. Maybe I could have got her to tie things round the branches (she loved getting the lights down from the park – see challenge 362 – Taking down the Christmas lights). Or maybe she could have picked things off the tree for me? It occurs to me that we’ve got a hoist set somewhere we could have set up in it. I make a mental note to try this one again.
Gathering ingredients for potions (355) >
The alternative challenge 337 – hoist and pulleys
So it’s Wednesday the 29 January and we’re officially making peanut butter treats for the birds. Well I am. But B has other ideas. I mentioned the idea of putting a pulley system in the tree on the way home from school and she’s running with it while I’m trying to apply the peanut butter covered brakes!
She’s got an engineering set in the cupboard which she’s had for years and years and it’s got a hook and pulley system on it. It’s not what I’d have gone for but I’m not supervising and she’s up the tree before I know where she’s going with bits of wool, trying to tie it onto the tree.
It’s only afterwards I realise how cool it could have been. I’m busy and she gets very cross and angry as it fails to hold where she wants it too and keeps breaking and changing in ways she doesn’t want. A total failure but we’re definitely going back to this idea. It just needed a bit of adult guiding to the best equipment I think. Telling myself it’s all a good learning curve.
325 – Putting a pulley system in the garden tree
Monday 10 February. Cloudy. 5°C
It’s a cold Monday afternoon and we’re tackling the challenge of getting a pulley system in the garden tree. I really like the idea of making one but we haven’t got a lot of time. We’ve got a basic pulley set in the cupboard so pull that out. It’s a basic round one with a carabiner attached. We get some garden wire to attach it to a high branch and she climbs up and ties it on. It’s tricky and it takes her a while but she gets there. We have a wooden box and rope we use inside sometimes to make a pulley and we decorate that with a 325 and she climbs up again to get the rope through. Then we satisfy ourselves that the box will go up and down easily.
It feels like a short little challenge again but the next day a friend comes over to play and it takes off completely. They realise they can potentially use it to get things up high in the tree and they move the whole system about a metre higher and start fetching ribbons and toys to try moving them up and down. I think this challenge might roll on and on. I’d love to have a go at making the pulley system from scratch and I think B wants to build a tree house now (there’s no space up there!).
324 – Making last years Christmas tree into a den >
< 326 – Playing in the sand dunes
320 – Making an animal feeder
Saturday 15 February. Rainy and cloudy. 6°C
It’s rained all day. B has been having a playdate and, apart from a couple of damp forays outside to see the rabbits they’ve stayed inside. I’m doing a massive tidy of B’s stuff while she’s not looking and deep in it. Needless to say, it gets to 4pm, friend has gone home and we haven’t done the challenge yet.
I panic a bit. The last two weeks have been a struggle to find things. The weathers been consistently cold, grey and unhelpful and I feel we’re in desperate need of a new idea. I don’t have any.
B rides to the rescue again. She’s a bit obsessed with the garden tree this week. Putting the pulley system in on Monday has opened up lots of possibilities and she keeps getting drawn towards it, spending ages making slides out of ribbon for the little garden fairy toys. I’m worried we’ve done it to death but remind myself it’s meant to be about her having fun not me.
Me: “Why don’t you try and build a birds nest at the top?”
B isn’t keen. It’s cold, she’s low in energy and doesn’t like the idea. “I’ll do something here”.
Slightly to my distress she heads off on her own idea, grabbing sticks and cutting the pine leaves off, finding peanuts and carefully making a little pine ‘plate’ of nuts on a branch. It takes her ages and she’s pleased with it.
I’m not helpful. “I don’t think that will work! What’s going to find it there?”
She has the last laugh. The next day we have a new garden visitor – a very enthusiastic squirrel. He finds the nuts in the tree and the pot that B used to cut pine leaves into and explores both thoroughly. We spend ages watching him and his interactions with the rabbits (who fail to frighten him at all) and our cat (who has a lot of fun watching him through the kitchen window).
This challenge makes me think a lot about how the challenge is going and how it works. I definitely broke one of the basic challenge rules by trying to pull B back from the direction she wanted to go in. I realise there’s a basic conflict between my desire to get a lot of different clearly expressed ideas for the website that other people can follow… and the way B plays, which is instinctive, intuitive and sometimes doesn’t fit into a box. Definitely a mummy fail moment but maybe one I can learn from.
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