Sarah Crows and fairies

Springy has had a lovely week so far. Today I'm ill so she was spending much of this morning in her room playing away.

She loves some books called Rainbow Magic. They are all about fairies and a very clever marketing idea in that each set in the series is 7 books and there seem to be about 10 sets. We're lucky in that many of them seem to be in the library. Springy has arranged the books along her bed and when I was listening in to her playing earlier I realised, plus she also confirmed this, that she was using the book covers as characters in her games. She came in saying "Mummy, Pippi (Longstocking this is, which is another book we had from the library this week and which I need to do as a read aloud) took something so the fairies have put her in the dungeon." This was alongside the joke, "What do fairies travel in around the world when they've lost their wings?" "A fairy boat."

We've also had some lovely walks this week. The autumn leaves are always spectacular and we've been lucky to have some dry but cold weather. Springy also made a scarecrow. We had a hazel stick whittled down into a stake at one end, another stick as a crossbar - tied on with string onto the hazel stick and this represents the arms. Some material with a small hole cut into the centre of it so it drapes across the crossbar and hangs down like a dress. This we tied with raffia and then we found an apple to use as a head on the pointy bit (which is the neck). We added some cloves to make eyes and a smile and our apple already had a lumpy bit which became the nose. We also glued on some wool as hair.

This afternoon her daddy and she went out in the garden with the bantams and now they're out at the playground. Yesterday I had to bath our Serama bantam as she had sat in one of her unviable eggs and was covered in egg yolk which a) stank, and b) matted her feathers (I told her glazing with egg yolks is for glazing, not that she'll listen or even understand!). She's such an adorable little bird - she's our Zen hen with her placid nature. We're not sure if our other bantam won't turn out to be a he rather than a she.

I've got a horrid cold which makes me feel really sluggish. I've taken some echinacea tincture but need to do some steam inhalation later.