Letterland and a trip to the farm...

Anyone else do Letterland when they were growing up? Annie Apple, Bouncy Ben etc etc?! I always found the "kissing cousins" a bit random... I mean... there is absolutely no "x" in kissing cousins! How on earth is that meant to teach children the letter "x"???

Anyway, we had plenty of kissing cousins today, as Ava met her second cousins Izzy, Ruby, Phoebe, Harry and Lucas!

We had a lovely time catching up with family, having a yummy lunch together (where I was introduced to "Birds Cobs" - midlanders should apparently know what I'm talking about!) and playing with the dolls house. It was very cute to see how Ava's bigger second cousins looked after her...

There was great interest in Ava's multilingualism, which led to a very funny conversation when Ava started throwing her sandwich on the floor...

Me: Ava, nein!
Ruby (2 years old): nein!
Me: That's right, Ruby... that means no!
Ruby: No it doesn't... its a number!

Don't you just love kid's reasoning?!

After lunch we packed up all the kids and headed to the farm! We paid £1 for a bucketful of food and headed round feeding all the animals, looking at giant bunnies and having a sit on a tractor! Ava was in her element, making all the appropriate animal noises, and all three of the big kids loved getting up close and personal with the barnyard animals! (Although one cow tried to get a little too friendly which didn't go down too well with Izzy!)

Ava, Ruby and Izzy ready to feed the animals!

Feeding the goats!

Harry and Phoebe look on...

"EE-AH, EE-AH!"

Ruby was quite shocked to discover that donkeys have teeth! 

My little farmer... 

Dave and the girls on the tractor!

Tomorrow we're having a family day; just the three of us... and I'm hoping the weather is nice enough for us to visit my favourite place in the whole of Derbyshire - as Aunt Gardiner puts it in Pride and Prejudice: "the celebrated beauty of Chatsworth"