under the spreading chestnut tree….
is a really dangerous place to be in autumn without a hard hat! 
boy to those things hurt when they land on your head!
Yesterday we were worked very hard at Kung Fu, in fact I suspect this will be a common theme for the next few weeks as we have a Celebration coming up (it’s like a grading but it’s to celebrate what we can do not pick holes in what we can’t do so well apparently) Aprilia’s teacher has asked if I can help her practice a Form (it’s the same idea as Kata for those who have done karate but our particular style of Kung Fu doesn’t use oriental names for things) so she will be more confident with it when the time comes, funnily enough, it’s the same form I have to learn so we are working together on it! By the time we got home we were a bit limp so we decided to chill out and listen to the very lovely Stephen Fry reading HP1. Well, that was the plan, 2 hours later we both woke up again!
So we decided a bit of fresh air was required and headed into Delamere to be bombarded with chestnuts and to enjoy a bit of peace off the main track away from the Sunday Walkers and Cyclers who invade "our" forest! We came home with pockets full of bits and bobs for a collage Aprilia is doing for her Artist badge at Brownies or is it her Seasons badge, actually I think it may be both but hey ho!
Today we nipped up to the craft shop to get some black card to do her collage on (it’s a bonfire night scene so it sort of had to be black card really, you can’t hot glue sticks onto paper that’s been painted black, the paint peels off and all your collage ends up on the floor….) and grabbed a few other bits and bobs there too but totally failed to get decent watercolour brushes which I’ve been intending to grab for ages as Whiskers "killed" my big broad one 
We also calling in on Grandma (Duke’s mum) and ended up with armfuls of crafty bits as she overbought on Christmas card making bits and didn’t see any point in keeping it all til next year! Oh, and she found some knitting machine yarn too, we are having a bit of a fight with the knitting machine, it’s not as easy as it should be and she suggested that using the proper yarns may cure it. We shall see….
This afternoon we have both painted, I was very brave and shared my extra especially lovely proper watercolours with Aprilia, on pain of slow agonising death if she messed with them, and she produced some good work whilst I got adventurous and not only filled an entire sheet with one drawing rather than my usual tiddly little things but also did a landscape sunset which I was rather pleased with and something I’ve been threatening to have a go at for ages. Aprilia has asked to do art more often, and dug out the Drawing With Children book to back up the request. I guess I’d better clear the kitchen table then!
