"He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."

This week Seth was star of the week at school, which he got for having great behavior. He seems to be well loved by his teachers and most of the children say hello to him in the morning when were dropping him into school. Were really proud of the way he is turning out, i know everyone praises their children but i genuinely think that Seth is a nice little chap. He's polite and friendly and everyone that meets him loves him.

Good behavior is ALWAYS rewarded in our house so i thought it would be a good excuse to add a new piece to Seth's imaginext collection. Ive added pictures of what he has had but i think that Seth wants to talk about it and a couple of other things he has had recently in depth on his next post so that should be interesting. He hasn't written a post for a while as he is always so tired when he gets back from school.

Anyway Seth well done on being star of the week and thank you for always being so entertaining and caring, were so proud of you and me and mommy love you very much xxx

"When we are well, we all have good advice for those who are ill."

I hate feeling ill, i know everybody feels the same about it but its not just the pain, uncomfortableness and general feeling sorry for myself but also the being pretty useless around the house. Mrs M has been great though sternly telling me to cuddle up with blanket on the sofa and relax. I have to do as I'm told or she will get very angry. The worst part of feeling poorly though is the not wanting to go out and do things as i feel really guilty on the boys.

I did manage to take Seth to Tae Kwon Do this morning though. By the time we had got home i felt ten times worse. Mrs M is not feeling great today either and Opeie is very snotty and not himself. Seth is fine though and i suspect this is all something he has brought home with him from school (dirty dirty children).

Well it was obviously going to be a relaxing day in the house for us today so i asked Seth what he wanted to do. Seth likes to search the internet for Lego manuals and then get me to rummage through his boxes of Lego to find the parts. Its certainly a great way to kill time especially on rainy days as it takes such a long time. Mrs M always says that she doesn't know how i have the patience but im fueled by a smiley face at the end of it.

Seth finally decided on a Jokers ice cream truck from the recent Lego Batman range and it was clear from pretty early on that it was going to be a pain as we were missing some of the important odd shaped pieces so in great Pauly style i decided to botch it and make my own version of it...

Seth really loves the time we spend sitting together playing Lego so i try and make sure we do it as much as possible, it's difficult sometimes with Opeie around as he loves to destroy everything (today he sat on the Funhouse and it took me a while to rebuild it). I'm looking forward to him being a little older so we can all sit down together and build.

I love the way it turned out and Seth was a very happy little boy. We have the hideout and we have the transport but sadly we don't have a Joker Minifigure so i guess I'm going to have to buy one soon as we've been through the Minifigure box today and sadly there's no parts to make a custom job.

Whenever we build something together its always the little extra's, the finishing touches that really add to the build and after we finished this one, Seth flipped the ice cream round and inserted a grapple hook that he had found as he said it looked like a grapple launcher. He's such a clever boy.

Well not only was it a fun way to spend an afternoon in the house but it also kept my mind of feeling so rough briefly which was great. We got all our custom Batman figures out and the caped crusader battled with various villain's before letting them escape in their new vehicle. Apparently our next builds will include Harley quinn's monster truck and the Batcopter so watch this space...

...Until next time.

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."

Today i decided that we should begin our Christmas shopping for the boys, were not going mad this year as the boys get so much throughout the year and to be fair i don't see the point in excessive spending for one day as many of the toys just get pushed into a corner for weeks. We also found that a lot of Seth's presents from the last 2 years have ended up on eBay as they didn't get the attention we expected.

We went to Smyths today and i brought a few things for Opeie and of course something for him to play with today (well it would have been rude not to). Id been looking at the Marvel Playskool heroes range for a while, their the Marvel equivalent to the imaginext. There is no where near the variety but after buying Opeie the Spider-man figure and plane today Ive got to say i think the quality is a lot better than the imaginext and cheaper in comparison to the batman range.

Although i love waffling on about the toy itself in my posts i know sometimes they might get a little...

... So after watching Opeie today and being reminded yet again how fascinating watching him play is i thought i would write this post about that. Seth didn't really get into action figures until he met me and Mrs M has always said that rather than play with things like that he prefered painting and play doh etc. Opeie does love to draw and always looks happy when he's sitting at the easel but when he's got toys/figures its so interesting to watch.

When Opeie gets a new toy he looks really intrigued and he investigates ever part of it, its lovely to watch. I remember being like that when i was a child although a few years older than Opeie. He really enjoys playing with anything where there is something you can put inside something else. Spider-man hasn't been able to make his mind up today whether he wants to be in or out of his plane.

Opeie would happily sit for some time with our box of Lego minifigures taking off the heads, legs and hats and changing them with other ones. He gets a little satisfied look on his face when he has re-built a figure its very cute.

The toy has gone down really well today, When Seth gets a new toy he loses interest pretty quick and moves on to something else but Opeie has had Spider-man in his hand from when we brought him around 2 this afternoon right up until he went bed, he's been on his high chair, in his weetabix, his mouth and in the bath but sadly he was shunned at bedtime and is now back in his plane. He has been very well played with which makes me very happy. We love Spider-man in this house he's like an extra member of the family!

"An adventure calls!"

Even when were just popping to the shops for a trivial thing I'm always on the look out for fun super hero items for the boys. Most days i come home disappointed but every now and again i'll find something interesting. We had to go and buy Seth some new trainers for school so we headed up to Sports Direct. Im not really a fan of sports shops but Sports direct sells some strange items amongst all the rubbish. Last year we got quite a few marvel tops for Seth, this year its all about Batman.

Batman takes up most of the boys time these days so these t-shirts were a great find, we also found matching batman t-shirts in mine and the boys sizes which i will write about when were all wearing them on the same day, plus we need to find Mrs M a fun Batgirl t-shirt so she doesn't feel left out.

I love dressing the boys as mini me's and they enjoy their super hero t-shirts too, these have definitely become Opeie's favourites at the moment and if he see's them in the clean laundry pile he will pull them out and hand them to us to put on him (very cute). I wonder what our next super hero find will be???

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography”

Just a very quick post today as something has come to my attention and it needed to be documented so that it can be used in the future as us parents definitely need ammo for when our children find the love of their lives. Yesterday we had loads of things to do around the house and we needed to keep Opeie as occupied as we could for short periods of time so i went rummaging through my crates of toys that Seth doesn't know about (yet) and found out the Batman toys.

Opeie according to his Nanny Roo is a lot more boyish than Seth was at his age. He is very boisterous. Today was no exception, with his playing anyway. Batman and the Joker were having a good old Scrap. What made today's action figure play time stand out from all the others though was that while he was bashing the characters together and making cute grunting and roaring noises he was donning Mrs M's peal necklace which he had refused to take off for about an hour.

Those who know me would probably say 'just like his dad' which i don't mind at all. I'd be the first to say I'm in touch with my feminine side and over the years Ive had a collection of questionable outfits, what can i say i thought i was something of a trend setter back in the day ,cutting edge in the world of fashion. My friend Chris recently told me i "dress weird". Again i am Ok with that. I'm proud of my boy and if he wants to swan around in a pearl necklace no matter what age he is he will have his dads backing.

"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

Seth's room will always be my favourite room in the house, it screams 'Me' and is the room i would have loved as a child. Back when i wrote my last post about Seth's room he didn't really spend a lot of time playing in there and the toys were transported backward and forward to the lounge, which can be quite monotonous when tidying up every evening plus as you can see from above the lounge became very cluttered.

There will come a time soon when Opeie will no longer be sleeping in our bedroom and will be in with Seth so with that in mind the obvious thing to do was to change the rooms around. Our home is all on one level due to Seth's medical needs and the Lounge is the largest room in the house so we decided last week to turn it into Seth's bedroom/Playroom/Daytime lounge which is great for the boys but also has the added bonus of leaving an adults lounge for me and Mrs M to relax in of an evening. Somewhere grown up and toy free (even though until it is sorted it has lightening Mcqueen carpet in, very relaxing).

The two days it took us to move everything about, the house looked like a bombsite and it was really stressing Mrs M out, even though our home is rammed with 'stuff' she hates clutter. It took the both of us about 2 hours to get our L-Shaped sofa out of one room and into the next which tried on our patience a fair bit but we got there in the end. There were books and toys EVERYWHERE, making the whole house not very safe for Opeie which was also a pain.

We really needed a large space for them to play but we also added a sofa to the room too so that they had somewhere to sit. We did debate putting a TV in there but both myself and Mrs M both agree that children of their age don't need one in their room. I never had one when i was that age its just unnecessary.

We finished the room late afternoon on the second day and the outcome is amazing, im jealous its not my room and it is my favourite room even more now. Its clean and tidy with loads of space for play and even a simple thing like added blinds really made the room.

It's great being able to display all of the boys imaginext toys together. and theres so much more room now to wrestle on the floor (I'm quite sure that's not what Mrs M was going for though). Mrs M is adamant that the pictures she took were much better than these and she described my photo's as "Awful", i disagree but being the nice chap that i am i have included Mrs M's photo's for you to decide. I really value her input when it comes to the blog but we cant agree all the time that would just make things boring.

Seth was so excited about his room and has wanted to be in there all the time but part of that might be because we have told him that his toys stay in there so that we can keep on top of the rest of the house. It makes it easier for us to make sure the house is free of any obstacles as both our boys can be a little uneasy on their feet.

Well were now moving on to our 'adult lounge' so expect a post about that very soon although i may avoid taking photos until we have removed Lightening Mcqueen and Mater from the floor.

"The smiles and cheer of little boys can be multiplied by wooden toys"

When we first found out that Mrs M was pregnant with Opeie my head was filled with idea's of all the toys that we would be playing with. When you have children if your anything like me you want them to be a scaled down version of yourself in a way. Obviously Opeie was going to get thrown into our world of super heroes and action figures it was inevitable.

Despite all of this the first toy that i brought him wasn't super hero related and it still surprises me to this day. Maybe it was the constant "your not introducing him to Marvel until he is at least 1"  from Mrs M. Or maybe it was actually common sense kicking in that young children need chunky safe toys with no small parts and cute faces as opposed to web shooting, shield throwing, steel clawed action figures (until he's at least 1 anyway).

 Ive always loved wooden toys, especially Seth's brio and Thomas trains. I had been in a shop buying Seth a John Crane train shed to go with his track when i spotted this toy and thought that it was very cute. i think we had only found out about the new addition that was on his way about a week before but when it comes to toys i needed to start early on.

To be fair Opeie hasn't played with it all that much but i think that's mainly down to the fact of the amount of super hero toys that his big brother has in his bedroom (oops). He always want's to be involved in whatever Seth is doing, whenever Seth gets a new toy it automatically becomes the must have item for Opeie.

Although it hasn't received the attention i had expected it will still be something nice for me to keep for him when he is older, although he may be a little more interested in the second toy i brought him (the Fantastic 4 and Super Skull which i will write about soon)this happened shortly after the purchase of the wooden toys when reality took over and i decided i needed to hoard as many action figures as i could.

"A picture is a poem without words."

I couldn't not write another post after seeing the pictures that Chris had taken at the park on saturday, who doesn't like seeing nice pictures of themselves. Obviously because hes a great friend but also because he has a gift, always managing to capture some lovely images. Enough of the waffling though, here's us...

 

To see more from that day click here...

"it's not easy being green"

Today is our friend Chris's (gingerjamphoto) birthday. After his guest post it was obvious that we would be hunting down one of the missing Muppet's for his collection which was great because i get a kick out of helping people out with their collections. It wasn't the figure i wanted to get but i had no luck with that one! but there's always Christmas. So Clifford it was...

We were invited over this weekend to celebrate this joyous event which was great because i got to see some great people who i haven't seen for many years and we also made some lovely new friends. The theme of the party (if you haven't already guessed) was 'The Muppet's' and a week prior to the event myself and Mrs M decided to set ourselves a little challenge.

We were going to make Muppet's outfits/masks using only things that we can find around the house. We asked Seth who he wanted to be and he decided on Gonzo, I chose Swedish Chef and Mrs M chose Fozzy bear. Opeie would never have kept anything on long enough although i was going to make a Rizzo rat costume for him. Anyway here's what we ended up with...

Ok so they were a little rough but to be fair we decided to do it a week before but only started making them two days before the party.I'd like to say that no cuddly toys were harmed in the making of these but that would be a lie. They were always going to be living in the shadow of Chris's fantastic and very flattering Kermit the frog costume. Sadly Chris wouldn't walk to the park wearing it no matter how much encouragement we all gave him.

Their house, the food and of course the birthday cake was all in keeping with the theme of the day thanks to the very loving preperation by Michelle and might i add the Fozzy cookies were lush!

Tasty food, fantastic company and great conversation made a perfect day which clearly Chris (and everyone else) thoroughly enjoyed, but..... there was something missing, the one reason Seth really came to Fradley...

                        

...ZIPWIRE!!!!

  

Down at the park Chris was snapping away so I'm quite sure there will be a second part to this post just for the pictures that he took, which is great because I'm hoping there is a picture in there of Chris's nephew Jenson who was dressed as the count and looked adorable (i didn't get a picture though). It was a great day and we had loads of fun.

And what sort of a Birthday party would it have been without one of Seth's amazingly drawn cards? Pure genius!

We feel very lucky to have such great friends and i can tell by Seth's "i want to go back and see Chis and Michelle" on the journey home that he feels the same. Thank you for the invite, the whole day couldn't have gone better. Happy Birthday matey xxxx