On Thursday the weather was freeeeezing! Like October. Ridiculous. So I ditched my plans for an outing and made a quick trip to Sainsburys for some supplies – new toy microwave, play dough supplies and the Play Dough Sweet Shop kit – and headed home.

The microwave, bought for Lucian after much consideration and turns playing in the shop, and with one at nursery which he loves, was an immediate disappointment. The door wouldn’t open, it wouldn’t stop ‘microwaving’ and rotating the plastic chicken and Luci was completely frustrated and it buzzed all afternoon. It was like having tinnitus.

Luckily I had something to distract them with. We started with painting. This of course turned out to be a mistake, we should have started with play dough, then painting, then bath. As it is, we had to have two baths. But we had fun:

Tried to make my boys paint in pink and purple…

No thanks, we like red!!

…and green.

Despite my efforts to put more and more purple paint on the plate, Luci was determined to mix them all together to make brown. He then looked at the plate and said,

“Yum, dinner.” ???!!!!!

I really hope he just thought it looked chocolatey. Funnily enough, that’s not what I had planned for their tea.

So we focused on mark making. Finger painting…

Then painting with bottle-tops…

Then, the clear favourite – painting with cars. Lucian had been open to anything I suggested while Gabs just got on with his own masterpiece in the background, busy painting the letters of the alphabet. But suddenly, he wanted to join in with this. Lucian chose Holly from Cars 2 (finally, some purple!).

Then we trailed the paint into the bathroom and carried on playing in the bath. Gabs spelled out BINGO and NICK JR (his favourite TV channel) with foam letters and learned the word ‘abbreviation’. Now he wants to abbreviate everything (even “pig”! – to “pg”, before you ask).

Meanwhile, I discovered someone had left me the purple I’d been asking for.

Then it was Play Dough time. The sweet shop is brilliant. You can make croissants and pies and cakes and flowers and all sorts. To be honest, I could have happily killed an hour playing without the boys. But they wanted to have a go, quite rightly, with all the cutters. Although eventually, Gabs just resorted to mashing all the colours together into a big “cake”… and Luci sucked on some, whereby I discovered that play dough drying out is the least of my worries – when it gets wet, the bright colours bleed all over everything!

Cue bath number two.

Still, we had a wonderful time. And the microwave is still going round and round…