Last week was all about Toby’s birthday in our house (and a bit about Gabe’s too even though it’s not for another 5 weeks!) On Thursday Toby turned 6 years old and he has been totally spoilt with presents and a brilliant party yesterday.

Thursday was a school day for Toby so after opening some presents in the morning he headed off for a day at school, wearing his own clothes which he was very excited about! While he was there and Gabe was at nursery my dad and I (although mostly my dad) spent half the day building the boys’ surprise present – a 10 foot trampoline.

They were both very excited by the trampoline when they got home, but they are still very much learning about what they need to do to play on it together without ending up fighting, or with Gabe crying. I’m sure they’ll figure it out soon enough, although I have to admit the squabbling has been at record breaking high levels lately. I’m really hoping they sort themselves out quickly once the holidays start – if past experience is anything to go by we’ll have a week of them being really awful and then they’ll realise they’re going to be together every day for a long time so they best get along!

Yesterday we had a mini beast party organised by our local forest school. Although Gabe’s birthday isn’t until the middle of August he will have left nursery by then, but not started school, so we decided to make it a joint party. Actually Gabe only had two of his friends from nursery there, my friend Claire brought her twins who the boys have known their whole lives, and then the other six guests were Toby’s friends from school.

The party was really good – I’m so glad we managed to find something a bit different that everyone could enjoy, and especially my two who aren’t really big fans of soft play parties, or children’s entertainers. We were lucky with the weather too which was a bonus. All the children enjoyed hunting for bugs, lighting the fire to cook marshmallows, and just spending two hours running around in the woods!

I’ll be sharing some more pictures from the party soon, but for now here are the boys in this week’s Living Arrows pictures…

Gabe managed to catch a woodlouse in his bug pot and was having a closer look at it.

And here’s Toby practising his fire lighting skills. He hasn’t quite got it yet but we’ve booked in a few different forest school sessions over the summer and I’m sure it won’t be long until he cracks it.

If you’d like to see the rest of my Living Arrows posts you can find them all here.