No Bot The Robot

Not too long ago, Sue Hendra the author/illustrator of No Bot and a few other books appeared in our local book shop.
She gave a reading of No Bot and then helped the children to create a cardboard robots of their own, using pipe cleaners, a little cardboard box and stickers. Nate being one of the youngest, if not the youngest, loved the reading but as always loves to stand up in the middle of the carpet to get the best view. He needed a lot of help creating his robot but he genuinely loves drawing and sticking things down and still plays with his robot even a couple of months after the event.

On to the book, No Bot is a book about a Robot who manages to lose his bottom. Nate loves this book and some days we have to read it over and over again. The illustration style is lovely and deceptively simple, we love the way the front inside cover pages contain circuit boards with the pictures of animals. Nate can identify the animals within the circuit board and really enjoys finding the animals 'hidden' in the circuitry. A big thumbs up from Nate for this book.

In The Night Garden

We don't watch much TV with Nate here but somehow we ended up on one of the Children's channels when In The Night Garden happened to be on. We soon found out that Nathaniel loved it, he has lots of conversations about the Tombliboos and Upsy Daisy. He can name all of the characters and can sing the songs.
His favourite being Upsy Daisy. He loves bouncing up and down singing Upsssy Daisey, Daisy Doo.
He is even more taken with the magazine, he loves the counting pages and can count confidently from 3 to 9, he doesn't like starting at one.
All after one accidental viewing, our bedtime routine got turned upside down to include In The Night Garden.

Quiet Book

I've been very quiet and for a few good reasons, Christmas and Crafting. I found mid way through last year something called quiet books which are an American idea where you make books out of fabric for young children to play with. I love crafting so I thought I'd have a go, finding felt at a reasonable price in the UK I have found isn't very easy especially at the sizes to make a book for little hands.

My favourite place to find ideas is Imagineourlife.com Stephanie makes the best patterns to follow and they are free and mostly step by step instructions. I have just finished making her dolls house quiet book for Nate and he seems to be enjoying it, mainly by putting the bath duck in the oven. Using Stephanie's pattern I also made a little boy doll by just adding a little brown hair just so he had both.

Above are my versions of the kitchen and bedroom page. The backyard page was the last I made and I still haven't had the chance to photo it. You'll find the patterns here. Have a look around her blog because there are a lot of great ideas. The book I'm currently working on uses the same dimensions as Stephanies but is based on Nate's dads illustrations which you can see here. 

Dr Who.

Nate's Dad is a very big Dr Who fan, and for those of you who don't know Dr Who starts again on Saturday 1st September. Unfortunately for Nate's dad we are busy that night, our wedding party, luckily for us we've already seen the episode thanks to the BFI preview. It'll be a very good episode and as we were asked not to spoil it by Stephen Moffat himself I'm not going to spoil it.

Back to the point of this post, on 31st August a new gadget will be released: the Sonic Screwdriver remote! Forbidden Planet had an event in which the makers of the remote were demonstrating it and you were able to buy for one day only. There was also a competition to win one if you came dressed as a character from Dr Who, neither of us were brave enough so we nominated Nate as the person to go dressed as the eleventh Dr.

Nate as the Eleventh Dr Who.

There were three other people who entered, which surprised us we expected a lot more people to enter. There was a David Tennant lookalike, a member from UNIT and a pirate Amy Pond, the judges handed it over to the crowd to decide and David Tennant came a close second to Nate.

Nate is the proud owner of a Sonic Screwdriver remote, and as he seems to have claimed my Sonic Screwdriver Wii remote I think I'll have to play with the new one. I'll post a review once I've had a chance to play around with it and I'm sure Nate will review is as well, in a few years time as it has a 12+ age rating and is rather heavy for him to properly manipulate.

A very quick review from me, it looks amazing and the functionality is very nice and if the novelty wears off it will look very good on your mantlepiece/bookshelf with it's morse code setting.

Travelling with gNappies

In April we flew to the Caribbean, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to test the gnappies. We took four outers and six waterproof liners. This was the perfect amount for us as we use disposables at night. The disposable inserts took up less room then the disposables we took for the same amount. They were perfect for our holiday, on the days we were out visiting sites or relatives a simple wipe of the liner before putting them in a bag kept it all under control. We had lots of comments about how smart he looked and stylish especially as he spent a lot of time in nothing but a nappy. We would definitely travel again with gnappies.

gTea in Brighton

One of my first purchases for Nathaniel was the new baby bundle of gDiapers (gNappies Facebook UK, gDiapers Facebook US) as I then knew them. I found them on an American forum and though how pretty they looked, plus they used a mixture of disposable inserts and reusable which I thought was a pretty good idea, as there are times when cloth could be too much of a juggling act. In the new baby bundle there are 12 tiny gPants, 6 small gPants and 80 disposable inserts. If I'm honest we didn't get much use out of the tiny's as he was such a long baby and people encouraged me to use disposables at first. I'd probably pack them in the hospital bag if we were to have another. Although they were really useful for popping over disposables to stop them leaking.

On to the point of this post. Yesterday Kim Graham Nye the co-founder of gDiapers was over here in Brighton, so we thought we'd pop along and have some tea and talk about gNappies as they are called over here. It was great fun to talk to Kim, who was happy to show other mums who haven't used g's before the beauty of them and talk them through the breathability of the pouch where one mum even attempted to breathe through the pouch, successfully I might add and a demo of the Sushi roll as a way of using g's overnight. There were samples of the gCloth, which I've never seen as I shied away from buying as I'd read bad reviews of it although seeing it in the flesh has made me regret this as Nathaniel seemed to love cuddling it.

It was great to see the UK team of gNappies and Kim, we hope there are many more gTea's over here.

Nathaniel in his Game Day gPant back in November.

Library Trips

Once a week, we like to visit the library; we started going due to the story time but we have since found they have an abundance of board books which are safe for Nate to play with as he likes to read with his mouth. 

The story time is great as there are a variety of books and unfortunately I never really know where to start with most children's book shops as there are so many books to choose from, at the moment I'm rather lucky as I'm limited to the board books as I quite like Nate being involved with the reading. We have a few book ideas for when we can finally trust him not to scrunch up the pages. One of my favourites so far is Billy Monster's Daymare, I'm not sure Nate enjoyed it as much as I did.

Nate enjoying his very own Library Card.