No more babies :(

I don’t have babies any more. It’s official. Because when I was panic shopping for a ski coat for the smallest yesterday, I had to go upstairs in the Cambridge branch of the Gap, aka Where You Go To Buy Big Boys Clothing!!!!

That’s it. My boys are no longer babies or even toddlers. Perhaps they aren’t little people? Maybe they are dudes?

Anyway, it’s E’s 6^th Birthday Very Soon and we’re doing a bowling party for him, which he’s very excited about. And seeing as we have no more room in this house for toys or games, we’ve elected to go outside and start filling up the space out there!!!

Buying a climbing frame is a tricky thing because want something that’s going to be big and challenge them and enable them to have hours of fun with their friends outside, but also something that’s not going to dominate the garden too much. And it’s got to go in the top garden because there’s ropes and climbing stuff in them, so that they are in relative sight of Lovely Bloke and safe. (The office blocks the view of the bottom garden….)

So I went to the people who gave us a tepee to review and checked out their climbing frames. And the Glastonbury Climbing Frame arrives next week.

It’s expensive, but relatively, in the world of climbing frames, not very expensive at all, so I hope it’s going to be well built and durable like the tepee is. I didn’t go for one with a swing as we’ve already got one in the garden and our boys aren’t that keen on them. Climbing things to dangle from however, that’s a different story altogether!

And it’s that, that’s got me thinking. It’s funny how some of the things that I assumed our boys would like, they don’t – like swings. And some stuff that I never thought they’d love, they do – whether it’s E reading to me as proudly as he does, or W obsessing over putting things on his wrist to be Ben 10 watches, I’m coming to realise that part of my job as a mummy is to give the boys as many opportunities to play and try new things as I can and to let them choose what they want to do, have and play with. I suppose it’s like how I thought the boys would have wooden toys, that were only educational for their first 5 years of their lives. A house full of plastic from the likes of the Early Learning Centre, that’s mostly half broken and incomplete has shown me just how effective my planning was on that one…..

I’ll let you know as to what E thinks of this climbing frame, once we’ve got it in situ – frozen ground dependant ……