A Rainy Day

For as long as I have been living in Sweden in the middle of September there has always been two consecutaive days of wind and rain - I remember this, because my birthday is in September and my very first birthday here in Sweden it was horizontal rain - and the following year and the year after that... then the rainy days have varied with 2-3 days either side of my birthday... this year though the two rainy days have been a week later than usual.

TODAY was the day instead!
We had planned on taking the children a little further to a new forest... but the weather made us change our minds... much better to make the most of the splashability of this weather and be close to "home" for when we all get too wet and cold. AND it was the right decision because soaked we got... and it was the cold sort of wet that comes with autumn.

But we had a whale of a time until then...

an ABSOLUTELY enormous puddle... perfect for running and splashing

and we got some really big splashes too

and I splashed a lot too... totally fascinated by the moment you could see the ground under the puddle for it to be swallowed by the muddy water again.

damming the water running down the slope with our feet and all the fallen pine needles

outside the underground station the was a whole load of mush... when I arrived in the morning there was the most enormous puddle at the entrance making it impossible to leave the station with dry feet... someone had put a stack of newspapers in the puddle to create a bridge... this had turned into mush... the kind that creates vacuums when you put your feet into it...

so when we were thoruoghly soaked we went inside and started to rip up some old newspapers (that I had been saving and waitinf for the right moment!!!)

I added warm water (we had had enough of cold water for the day... an hours of torrential downpour was quite enough cold wetness for one day!!)

after a while it started to get more mushy.... the children had not seen the tranformation outside, so for them it was quite tricky to understand that the gray mush had in fact been newspapers...

and then it became very mushy... and felt "soooo nice".... The mush we intend to use as papier maché later in the week... not entirely sure what for yet, but I the children will let us know...

in this mushy state it became perfect for role-play food making... buns, susages on a stick for the BBQ and also soup, to name a few of the dishes that were being served...