And just like that half term is over and we’re back to the home learning today. It does seem likely that BoJo will announce tonight that schools will reopen in two weeks so like parents all over the land I’m crossing everything that it happens!

We’ve had a fairly enjoyable half term all in all. We haven’t done much, but it was nice not to be nagging the boys about school work every day. As I mentioned last week we did get out for a short walk on Monday and managed a bit of time in the garden on Tuesday but other than that we haven’t been anywhere. In fact I think they were the only two days Toby got dressed all week!

He’s still insisting on approval of photos – I hadn’t managed to take any of him all week and when I was trying to get a quick snap last night he wasn’t being very cooperative so this it what we ended up with.

This is Eddie (after Edvard Munch) – we got him on a visit to The South Lakes Wildlife park when Toby was only about 18 months old. He has been played with on and off over the years but recently seems to have become the toy of choice. In fact the boys have been playing a lot of imaginary games with their cuddly toys lately – I think they’re taking the place of the other children that they would be playing with at school.

Even thought we didn’t really go out much last week we did do a few activities at home. I set up an escape room type thing one afternoon where the boys had to solve clues to find Eddie who had been kidnapped. They mostly involved different ways of finding the codes to combination locks and decoding secret messages. The boys loved it and it didn’t take too much effort to set it up either. We got the idea from this episode of Let’s Go Live with Maddie & Greg. If you’ve not watched it check out Maddie Moate’s YouTube channel – they’ve been doing it since the start of Lockdown 1 and there are loads of episodes now and they’re all brilliant!

The boys also had a Zoom call with my dad where he showed them how to make a little electronic wiggly wire game with a kit he’d put together for them. They really enjoyed it and are now annoying everyone with the buzzers – thanks Dad!

And lastly, I mentioned this last week as well, we made a Great Fire of London house…out of biscuits! I was winging it a bit with this one but I was really pleased with how it turned out in the end. Gabe helped with making the biscuits and cutting them all out, and he supervised the decoration. Construction was a bit tricky to I ended up doing that myself but we got there in the end!

And the added bonus was of course that after we’d taken some pictures to show his teachers we all got to eat it too!

I hope you all had an enjoyable and relaxing half term whatever you got up to. Just a few more weeks to go now (hopefully) before the kids are back at school and we are back on the long road to something approaching normality…

This is my ninth year taking part in this linky celebrating childhood, based on a poem by Kahlil Gibran, “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth” .

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