Ice, ice baby!

I went back to work this week after almost 3 weeks off - my dad had taken ill suddenly & died within a week. Getting back to school was important to me but I also knew I needed to take time to make sure I was in the right place when I returned. Luckily working with 3 & 4 year olds is the best possible tonic for helping anyone get over a sad event.

The past few weeks we have lots of snow & because it was so cold most of it lay around for a few weeks. It was amazing to see the mud kitchen transformed by snow & ice - I was informed it was no longer a mud kitchen but an Elsa kitchen - the power of Disney!

The safety surface (I have talked before about the irony of it's name) is also so slippy & icy in very cold weather but this week it was coated in a thick layer of ice, so in parts where it is in the shade it reseembled an ice rink. It never ceases to amaze me how small children can run & jump on icy surfaces that most adults creep along on!
One of the tyre tops had come off & got frozen solid onto the ground in the snow, eventually after a week when it thawed out enough to lift it a perfect ice circle was left underneath.

Every tyre held a hidden treasure of ice & the children had such fun trying to get the shapes out as intact as possible & all the various containers around the playground had ice in them & as a lot of them were circles there were lots of ice pizzas on offer in the Mud Elsa kitchen.

Some of the children could have stayed outside for hours playing with the ice & water, it is always incredible how some never seem to feel the cold.
Because it was cold but dry we were able to go out again after lunch when it was a little warmer. (if it's wet it is not worth putting a second set of rain gear on the children for that 30 minute playtime).

The children has so much fun finding 'treasure' in the ice - cutlery, sticks, leaves, pieces of chalk, beech nuts, gumballs & hickory nuts. 

The biggest casualty in the icy weather is the Bottle Babies & many of them froze up then cracked but even these provided lots of fun as the children discovered if they stood on a cracked Bottle baby they could create a little spray of water.

I know I'm not meant to ever complain about the weather or have a favourite type but if I'm honest I love it when it's cold & dry!