Rockets and Water! Our week outdoors

We've continued our attempts to spend some time playing outdoors everyday this week, although it's been a lot recently due to a lovely little heat wave!  So, the week has been rather wet, but not due to the rain this time, due to the amount of water play!

Monday 21st May - The nice weather hadn't kicked in just yet so jumpers were still on, but we were still able to make a den outdoors by sticking some blankets over the garden table.  Now it's a bit drier Little Dude is making outdoors too, but hasn't made it to this picture as he was sat on my lap!

Tuesday - Things really began to hot up weather wise, so we just took the toys outside and played there instead of inside.  Starting to get the hang of just taking the play outside. 

Wednesday - We had loads of fun today.  Whilst Champ went off for his swimming lesson with Hubby, Bud and I stayed home and did some experiments!  This time we tried out some rockets! 

I'd seen the idea of marshmallow shooters at Come Together Kids and had wanted to do it for a while, but never had cups etc to hand.  We tried our own version using a toilet roll made a little shorter, snipped off the bottom of a small balloon and stretched it over the bottom.  Then we launched a string of paperclips and it worked pretty well!  You pull the balloon knot back and ping out the contents of the tube (if you look near Bud's hat you can see the paperclip), grass worked really well and I'm sure pom poms would too.

Next up we tried out our catapult which we made from a cool 'Y' shaped stick and balloons, but Bud couldn't get the hang of firing it so he stuck paperclips and paper to it and called it his kite?!!?  Instead we moved on to our balloon launcher rocket!  Normally, this is a balloon attached to a straw which is threaded on string and stretched across a room, but to take it outside we used our washing line!  I rolled up a piece of paper around the washing line then stuck this to the balloon.  I blew up the balloon, but didn't knot it, then Bud released it, to make it more interesting we stuck up a picture of Angry Bird Pigs (a current fave!), the paper you can see on the balloon is part of an Angry Bird face.

Later on in the day I blew up the balloon properly and the boys used their water guns to shoot it along the washing line!

Thursday - Another brilliant day of sunshine so we tried out soapy fun following from a great post at The Imagination Tree.  I sprinkled in soap flakes to warm water and gave the boys whisks, the original post the used powder paints, but we didn't have any so ours wasn't nearly as pretty, but the boys had a lot of fun.

Then out came the water guns again (these were from Poundland).

Friday - Yet more water play!  This time the boys set up some target practise with Hubby.

Saturday - My cousins wedding!  The boys looked very smart in matching outfits and loved running around with their cousins and playing with busy bags in the Sun!  Couldn't resist a cute picture of Dude, he doesn't get in on the blogging action very often!

And a rare photo of me!  At the wedding with Champ who STILL managed to collect sticks!  It's like he has some special radar or something!

Sunday - We spent the afternoon at Granny and Granddads, playing tennis, pond dipping, playing in dens and generally having a lot of fun!