Wild Tuesday at Coombes Valley

I've been promising one of the youngest members of my family that I'd take him pond dipping at Coombes Valley for a while and today was the day!

I took him along to Wild Tuesday and paid for him to do everything, knowing full well he wouldn't want to do a lot! I hoped pond dipping would keep us busy for a while but after five minutes he'd had enough. He just wanted to go and "build the sticks".

I convinced him to make a bird feeder first. He doesn't normally like anything that involves getting his hands dirty but didn't take much persuading once he saw me making one!

After that we sat and ate an ice cream and had a look in the little pond by the visitor centre.

Then we spent a good two hours on the play trail. We borrowed an existing den, built a campfire and toasted marhsmallows (buttercups on sticks!) over it.

We put our feet up for five minutes in a den and had a drink... 

We looked for fairies in the fairy village,

balanced on the trails,

sent natural treasure to each other using the bucket pulley thing...

had many goes on the 'wobbly bridge'

and spent quite a while practising being Spiderman.

Walking back to the car, we made music with sticks.

We also spotted butterflies and ate a few ripe blackberries as we walked :)

I'd promised, whilst we were pretend toasting marshmallows, that we could call at a shop on the way back to my house buy some marshmallows and toast them on a real fire in the garden.

He had a brilliant day and when I asked what his favourite thing about the day was he replied "everything". I enjoyed it too. It's pretty good hanging out with a 4 year old, playing in the woods and forgetting real life for while!  I will try to take him to another Wild Tuesday before we go back to school, or some other similar event nearby, as he does love to play outdoors but doesn't get a lot of opportunity for this kind of play, but at the moment I seem to have many people making demands on my time on top of everything I have to do at the house. I don't feel like I've had a single day off yet this summer!