Summer has arrived and it’s hot! We try shadow walking and play with the garden hose, then make a spa (ie, paddling pool) in the garden…
247 – Walking on the shadows
Tuesday 29 April. Sunny. 24°C
I’m not ashamed to say we stole this one from Bluey! Out for a walk after school in the steaming heat we play ‘stick to the shadows’. Rules are your whole foot must step in shadows and you have three lives to lose…
We adjust the rules as we go. There are lots of bits, on our urban street walk, where the shadows disappear. Then I sacrifice myself so B can walk on mine… we’re walking the dog for a bit too which is helpful, though I think confuses him! Trees and railings create some brilliantly tricky moments, though the moving shadows are definitely the hardest.
246 – Making rainbows with the garden hose
Wednesday 30 April. Sunny. 23°C
It’s hot. Thankfully we need to water the seeds we planted last week so we get the hose out. I’m wondering if we can make a rainbow with it and it’s surprisingly easy. B just directs it into the sun and there it is. I move to one side and it disappears. B moves towards the flowers… and it disappears. Guess you can’t have everything. We never work out exactly what makes it happen but it’s fun trying.
We’ve chalked todays number on the garden wall and B has fun trying to get a rainbow right in front of it and then watering the wall till it disappears. It’s only later when inside that we realise we wrote 346 instead of 246… idiots! We head outside and do it again but there’s no rainbows this time. Clearly our lucky moment passed!
196 – Making a garden spa
Thursday 19 June. Sunny. 27°C
I feel smug about this one. Every year we have the usual angry moment with the paddling pool, involving trying to get it blown up and full when it’s hot and you just want to sit in it. This year we thought about it a bit differently and wondered if we could make our own…
I must admit, we did a lot of the work for this the evening before when it was cooler. We were trying to use the plant pots to hold it up and wanted to get a water feature going but in the end we just raided the garage and garden for anything that could prove useful and used our existing paddling pool in the middle. We found B’s space hopper made a very comfy cushion and the water container we use camping made a good seat (we filled it first).
It was very nice. Rather mature and sophisticated. I think B probably would have preferred the one we made years ago when she was about three which had a slide in the middle but I thought this one had a lot going for it.
