We Three Kings

Next week Callum has his school nativity play. This year his class is just singing carols and tonight Callum came home from school with print outs of some of the songs to practice. Here he is doing his rendition of We Three Kings. Tomorrow night is Silent Night.

Save the Panda... the Tiger...the Polar Bear...

We're in a recession, Christmas is coming and endangered animals need help. So what do we get? TV adverts for WWF asking for help, which is nothing wrong in itself. Where the problem comes is when your six year old son sees said adverts. The first time it was the Panda's.

Callum: "Mummy! Mummy! We have to save them!"

Me: "Save who?"

Callum: "The pandas! They are all dying, they are endangered. I need your money, quickly and you have to phone this number... now!"

He then recites the telephone number... correctly.

Next it is the tigers and then it is the polar bears. Oh and then you have the TV adverts about the dog that needs a new home.

Callum: "Can we put Dash up for sale on eBay?"

Me: "Why?"

Callum: "So we can get some money to give that dog on the TV a new home."

Me: "Erm..."

Hubby: "You'd be lucky to get £1 for the dog."

I was told last week by Callum that all he wanted for Christmas now was money. Why? Well then he could help save all the animals that are endangered... and give that dog a new home. It does make me proud that he has this huge heart. I even asked him wouldn't he be upset if all he got was money to donate for Christmas and he replied by telling me that of course he wouldn't as helping others is more important and anyway if you pay WWF money you get a cuddly toy of an endangered animal.

Which brings me on to today's photos. The other while hubby and I were having a tidy up I spotted something in one of our plants. Can you see it? Yep a panda. One of Callums toy pandas. He'd been building it a Lego house a few days before and left it on the floor. Suddenly Dash was in the room and about to make extinct another animal. Luckily we saved it! We then told Callum to put the panda somewhere safe. This was obviously the safest place he could find. Hubby and I haven't told him that we've seen it, we're waiting to see how long Callum leaves it there. Adds a whole new meaning to "Save the Panda". lol.

Half Term, Speech Therapy, Little Big Planet and Art Day

Life with a Callum monkey always has you busy in one form or another. This week has been non-stop! Firstly we had daily appointments (well were meant to) for Callum with a speech therapist. Back in July he had been assessed again on his speech and they informed us that he just had a few sounds he had trouble with ("f'" and "v") but as therapists are fully booked that we would just have to wait and see if and when one became available and was sent home with worksheets to get started on with Callum and to help him. Then a few weeks ago we got a letter offering us a daily one hour group session for the half term week. Obviously knowing how hard to get something like this offered to you is we took up the opportunity. Turns out that Callum's speech has come on tremendously since July and that the sounds he had problems with weren't big problems now. He went from having a group session to a one on one session and we are now being sent worksheets to work on different sounds with him. As mentioned we were meant to be going for the whole week but yesterday Callum woke up in the most grumpy un-cooperative mood ever and said that he didn't want to go, he was feeling tired and his teeth hurt (oh yeah this week he has gotten two new wobbly teeth and the sounds he has to practice now ("th" and "f") sounds are sounds you use your top row of teeth to help pronounce the sounds and he was worried it would make his teeth more wobbly), thankfully his speech therapist was superb and totally understood and said that she would forward us the worksheets by post and do a follow up phone call in 2-3 weeks to see how we are getting on but not to hesitate to contact her if we had questions. She did tell us that in all honesty after this week that Callum wouldn't really need any speech therapy which is something Daz and I are so proud of Callum for.

So yesterday we went from having a week of nothing planned because of speech therapy (it had been in the middle of the day for one hour) to the rest of the week with free days. What did we decide to do?

Well yesterday was spent playing Little Big Planet and doing colouring in and watching Top Gear which is a pretty cool way to spend a day with your son. I do have to say I am a little tired of Little Big Planet now though and Daz and I told Callum we would be having a no Little Big Planet day today. It's been heaven. lol.

As for today, we've had Mummy and Callum Art Time and as Callum said earlier "It's been a brilliant day of all arty things Mum, best day this week." I couldn't have said it better. This morning I found a box of modelling clay so we made people and monsters/creatures which we now having drying out and setting before we paint, colour in, decorate them. After that we did some drawing and colouring and gluing and started decorating a make your own rocket kit (hopefully we'll try the rocket out this weekend but first I need to find a bicycle pump!) which I'd found under Daz and mines bed (that's also where I found the modelling clay, I have a couple of wicker baskets under there full of art stuff... that I'd forgotten about. lol). Then we had lunch and then we made a Robot out of old boxes and used toilet rolls. Then... yes there is more... we painted some clay flower pots which I had been given as a birthday present and we hadn't gotten around to painting them yet.

Now we're all cleared up and Callum is watching tv in the front room while I have five minutes to myself. Tomorrow Callum and I are hoping our clay models have dried out and we can decorate them, otherwise I don't know what we'll be doing.

As always there are photos here and below are a few selected ones.

Today I saw a little worm.

This week at school Callum's year are learning poetry and how to write a basic poem. Yesterday they were given the first line to start with and had to come up with a short poem from it. Here is Callum's.

Today I saw a little worm
He was sad and he looked sad
Perhaps he would come inside
Come inside and was mad

Simple and cute.

The Eye of the Tiger

There is no denying it our son is a complete rock monster. Don't believe me? Well here you go!





Of course it isn't just rock music that he loves in fact he will happily sing along to Bob Marley or a bit of Scouting For Girls or even Take That's Rule the World, but if you put Eye of the Tiger on or his other current favourite song Sex on Fire he just goes mad and does his little rock out moment and his Freddie Mercury dance, not that he has ever seen any Queen videos... boy we have to introduce him to those!

I couldn't love him any more than what I do but when I watch these clips, apart from laughing myself silly my heart bursts with love and pride and joy that this little fella is mine and something I helped to create and those moments when he completely drives me insane and I want to scream I just think of the moments like in this clip and the others and it reminds me of what a fun loving cool dude he is.

Superheroes eaten by giant sweet dog

I do wonder what goes on in that head of that little monkey monster of mine. Last night he started back at Beavers and one of the things they did was to create a piece of artwork using sweets. Here is what Callum created:


Now I could tell that basically it was an animal and that animal being a dog but well the rest...

The small round marshmellows on the left hand side are apparently Batman and Robin.
The dog only has eyes and a nose as there wasn't enough room to fit a mouth on.
BUT the dog has got a mouth because... well it's eating Batman and Robin up.
And please don't ask me why the lollipop is sticking out of the dogs bum, the lollipop is the dogs tail but it got shooved in there. As for the three M&M's by the tail... well they are certainly something our dog Dash doesn't have any longer and I have no idea what Callum thinks they are.

Still it's Callum's creation and it sums him up pretty well, he loves our dog Dash and he is a total geek.

Amazed we made it through the maize

Yesterday Callum, my sister Katie and I headed out to The Great Maze near Braintree, Essex. We'd decided that it was something different to do and would burn off some of Callum's never-ending energy supply and walk off some of our booze drinking and sweet eating from the weekend (notice the booze drinking was by Katie not me!!! LOL).

Getting there was meant to be easy, gets on the M11 and then when you get to the A120 (I think that was the one) it'll be sign posted. Yeah right! We ended up having to back-track on ourselves on the A120 and just guess which turning we needed to take. Needless to say we thankfully found a garage where the helpful assistant gave us better instructions and we were properly on our way.

We were lucky to arrive nice and early (even given our little detour on the roads) and the sun was shining brightly and there was a nice cool breeze. On their website they boasted of having 10 acres of maize maze which they change each year, this being their tenth anniversary. Also added bonus you can buy a map but it's in a sealed envelope and if you don't open it you get the money back for it. We lasted 30 minutes before Callum begged us to open it, we'd had quite a lot of "which way now Callum?" moments.




As well as making our way through the maze there was a competition going on where they had placed imitation caged animals around the maze for you to find and on top of the cages were what their names were and you wrote these down on the entry form and first prize is £100! We found all but two of them but the kind ladies at the kiosk desk gave Callum the names of the two we couldn't find. Here is one we did find though!

Mike the Magpie

At the beginning of the maze Callum had volunteered himself as our leader and we had to follow him which was fun and he made good choices when it came to which way now as crossroads.





Although he did on occasion try to leave us behind:




But we did make it to the middle of the maze and the "tower" to view the whole maze.



And eventually to the end.



All in all it took us I think 1 hour 23 minutes but 30 minutes of that was before we opened the map and don't forget we made sure we tried our best to find all of the caged animals. I don't think that's too bad going. Thank you Katie for a wonderful day out.