30 Days Wild│Part 2

We’re still going strong with our 30 Days Wild challenge, which is run by The Wildlife Trusts. This post covers days 7-12, but you can find a little introduction to the initiative and our days 1-6 here. 

Day 7

Today was a bit of a quiet one. My daughter hid one of her painted rocks by a flower display in the town centre, we planted our sunflowers outside, and we watched a large group of starlings making a huge amount of noise on our neighbour’s roof.

Day 8

When we go for walks around our village more often than not we end up with a rubbish collection under the pushchair to take home with us. Today we took a couple of bags out with us (one for rubbish and one for recycling) and managed to fill both. Usually we find ourselves collecting rubbish dropped by the construction workers (the area is being developed) and school kids, but today we even picked up a whole cereal box that was just ditched at the side of the road. On the way home we popped into the community garden, had a play in the fairy garden, and checked out their bug houses. There’s not much going on in the bug houses at the moment but we saw plenty of bees on the flowers.

Day 9

The weather was lovely this Saturday so we decided to visit Waddesdon Manor  We’ve been meaning to visit for awhile, but somehow had never got arround to it. I’m glad we did, as it now sits up there as one of my favourite National Trust sites. On this occasion we didn’t look around the house itself, but we will do next time we visit. The children enjoyed the Wooden Playground, we hid yet another painted rock, watched the birds flitting around the aviary, and explored the Rose Garden. The roses were incredibly beautiful, and I’m definitely going to get a couple of shrubs for our garden. (I’ve selected one rose photo, which I’ve popped below, but you can find all the rose spam over on my Instagram.)

Day 10

We have never been Geocaching before but I downloaded the app this weekend and was surprised to see how many there are locally. I took my daughter for a short walk to see what we could find. Answer: nothing. We spent a lot of time standing around looking confused. When we came home “geocache discovery-less” my husband got his competitive head on and took her back out. He didn’t find anything either. I think a little more research might be needed on my part. We did, however, have a walk through the village. The grassy banks which flank the main road are covered in poppies, and we even saw the occasional lilac poppy sprouting up. 

Day 11

We had a rummage through the recycling and made a bird feeder out of a milk carton and some wooden bbq skewers. We just chopped some holes in the carton, pushed the skewers through it, rounded off the ends a little and hung it up with some string. We now need to find somewhere better to hang it, and invest in some bird seed.

Day 12

I had to trim some shrubs in our front garden, so when my daughter got home from preschool she collected some of the leaves to do some leaf rubbings. She decided one of the leaves was shaped like rabbit ears, so we snipped around those rubbings and made them into just that!