We had a beautiful morning in Nana Jones's garden - what a lovely place for Audrey to play. She spent so much time out there every day, even when it was raining.
Her favourite thing was watching the bees in the flowers and bushes, and buzzing at them. Closely followed by jumping in puddles and climbing on patio furniture.
She loves her Great Nana so very much. There were lots of cuddles.
My Uncle Peter came round to visit, and all together we headed off to Scorton, Nana Jones's favourite place to have lunch. Once again, so very many childhood memories are wrapped up in that place for me, so to share them with Audrey was incredibly special.
While we were there we visited a shop called The Barn, and that's where she saw her. Goggy. A big, heavy toy dog sat on the ground. She ran over and flung her arms around her, saying "goggy goggy goggy" over and over. She had never said dog or doggy before, only "woof". She sat on the stone floor and cuddled that dog and would not let her go. She wouldn't even let go of her for the woman at the cash register to scan her price tag, when Nana decided to buy goggy as a gift for Audrey. She held her tight for just about the rest of the holiday, muttering "goggy goggy" under her breath the whole time. Goggy still goes with her everywhere. It was absolute love at first sight.
She pats it and strokes it and says "good goggy".
The next day Aunty Holly and Uncle Sam arrived, and we all went out to lunch at the beach front. Audrey got to go on a train ride - her very first!
She wasn't too sure about the ride, bless her. But she bravely waved at everyone whenever we went past.
To finish off this post, I have another learning exercise that we've been enjoying. Ever since I read this excellent post about sorting on wecandoallthings.blogspot.co.uk I've wanted to try some sorting games with Audrey.
We started her with some pasta and marbles (a recent charity shop score - two bags for a quid) mixed in a big container, and two smaller containers to sort them into. I used clear tupperware so she could more easily see what she was doing.
Please ignore the state of my floor!
I put some of the pasta in one dish and marbles in the other, to get her started. I modeled doing it one at a time, and said the names of each thing: "pasta - pasta goes here!" and so on. As a side benefit, she ended up saying pasta and marble by the end of the game - two new words.
We practiced lots of other cool vocab as well: in, drop, put, pick up, sorting.
We had to tell her one or two times that the marbles and pasta were NOT for eating, just for playing. Definitely a high supervision activity. But she got the sorting down within seconds and seemed to really enjoy herself. She much preferred the marbles to the pasta. When she was done she emptied everything out and filled the big tray with her wooden blocks, all neatly arranged. She's so, so, so awesome.
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