a scary experience

Having this beastie visit for 4 hours yesterday was not a pleasant experience I must say! I had got the patio door open as I was loading stuff into the car ready for camping this weekend when he snuck in. I had no idea what it was and it was so damn big, about 2"! I didn't want to get too close, the one of the drawbacks of living in a foreign land is not being familiar with the beasties and being clueless on what is dangerous and what's not. I think this was a giant asian hornet and by all accounts they are nasty pieces of work and very aggressive, they also attack black - guess what me and Ebi-kun were wearing, yup, it was straight upstairs to get changed. Apparently 40 people a year die from it's sting, NASTY. I couldn't lock it in a room since our downstairs is all open plan and I didn't want to go out and come back and not know where it was. I opened the windows and hoped that it would leave by itself (and that it's mates didn't turn up to visit too!). It did eventually make it to the curtains so I gave it a gentle push - using my long sewing ruler and off it went - phew. One house guest I will be happy never to see again.

Enough of the beasties, a couple of days ago Ebi-kun got the geometric solids out. He started off by building with them then I gave him these cards to match the shapes. We have already been round the house and found shapes that match so this time we took it outside.

I made a copy of one of the pages in my manual with all the shapes on it and we took that and the camera round the neighbourhood, he had to find the right shapes and take a photo by himself, he did really well, we found most of the shapes...

We are off camping tomorrow for a few days, I still have the comments on moderation but don't let that put you off posting a comment - I do love them so! If you email me I will get back to you once we are back and unpacked :o)

Happy Golden Week to you all!