I've finished!!

At about 6:30 this morning I closed the back cover on HP6 with a satisfied sigh. After a slow and meanderng start the book certaily finished with a bang. Yet again we have been left hanging, breathless with anticipation for the next book. I know at lot has been said about the writing style and the originality of some of the ideas but I have really enjoyed the books and have nothing but admiration for JKR. To get so many people so excited about reading is a wonderful thing. Even sam was excited about the new book and can't wait until he is old enough for me to read the series to him.

Finishing the book this morning was a nice way to round off a nice weekend. As you can see from the pics below we were hard at work turning our back lawn into a patio. Sam and I mixed the concrete while M was in charge of spreading and measuring and leveling. M's parents are kindly giving us the paving stones from their patio as they are having a new one laid. The garden should look really nice when it is all finished-hopefully the weather will stay nice long enough for us to be able to enjoy it. Sam really enjoyed helping, especially making up the concrete. He is very much a doer and loves to be given a job, particularly if it means he can make a mess and not get in trouble.

Sunday we went to M's parents for a bbq which was lovely. M's sister was there too so he got a chance to see James. We are honored to have been asked to be James' godparents. Sam and Benjamin got on really well and had lots of fun in the paddling pool with squirt guns. they were very good about not shooting people who weren't in the pool but Sam kept trying to convince all the adults to come in the pool as he had a nice surprise for them!! Yeah right...we weren't born yesterday you know.

Today we have had a really good day. We spent most of the morning catching up on our sonlight science and sam was enthralled. The unit was on pollenation and we ended up cutting up most of the fruit in the fruit bowl looking at the different types of seeds that different plants produce. He was amazed at the size of a mango stone and is very keen to plant it in the garden to grow a mango tree. We then used all the fruit to make smoothies, which he declared to be the best ever. We wrote up all our experiments in his nature journal-a cunning way to get him to practice writing without realising it. We finished off the morning with our normals and finished off book C of Get Set for the Code. We have enjoyed the series and will now start on explode the code. Tomorrow I think we will start the day with math and then move on to reading. I must sort out something fun from Gobble up Math for us to do.

We also sat down and worked out a few activities to take to muddlepuddle this week. Sam wanted to try and make toy parachutes so we are going to give that a go as well as paper airplanes and waxed paper stained glass butterflies. I think we are going to be busy the rest of the week getting all the templates together!

A quiet morning at home tomorrow doing our normals etc and then off to pick more berries with friends. I just hope the jam sets this time!