Rainy Day Fun

After watching the skies for any sign of moisture for the last few weeks (and seeing lots of grey, overcast days, but no rain), we woke up this morning to showers, which have settled into a nice steady rain throughout the day, which is doing a good job of filling our tanks, as you can see. Just in time too, because our automatic water switch pump switched us to mains water just yesterday. Of course, I went straight out and changed the level of the sensor so that we were still running on tank water. There were still 3 rungs of water left, which on our tank is around 2500L. That would have lasted us a few more weeks probably, although thankfully now we won't have to test that theory.

While it was filling our tanks, it was also backing up around the lower part of the house at the back. This is the view from the back door. Even the stepping stones were under water! Seems like we might have to do something about this area sooner rather than later.

It wasn't just our area that was flooded though, this was the roadside drain out our front gate. And it wasn't even raining that heavily! I think the problem is that when they dug under the road to connect our mains water, they didn't go deeply enough through this area, and it creates a bit of a blockage in the drain. It goes down just as quickly as it comes up though, and has never so far actually gone across our driveway.

DD didn't seem to mind though and was asking me all day "Can I go out and play in the rain?" I finally let her right before bath time, and she had a ball.

Luckily we had plenty to keep us occupied other than splashing in puddles all day. Last night we made the pilgrimage down to Ikea. I say pilgrimage because it is about 90 minutes each way, although we did break it up with a visit to my sister to ohh and ahh over her baby again. What was I talking about again? Oh yes, Ikea. Long trip. But well worth it. The very cobbled together picture above is DD's playroom. Lots of space, but very little storage space, so usually everything ends up all over the floor in very short order. We planned to do something about it. So after spending about $300 at Ikea, we piled our purchases into the car (I love having a hatchback!), and came home.

DD and I spent the morning putting together her new shelves and table. And of course, a fair bit of cleaning and sorting, with a little bit of shoving into boxes to sort tomorrow thrown in. Looks much better doesn't it? In fact, it almost looks like a room in someone else's house!

This is the area near the window, with a little table (that was actually a coffee table, but is exactly the size I wanted for her) for drawing and eventually schoolwork. The curtains are recycled from an old doona cover that I bought at a garage sale.

And, inspired by Playschool, DD drew these giant dinosaurs on the leftover Ikea packaging. The one on the left is an apatosaurus, and the one on the right is a tyrannosaurus. But he's a friendly tyrannosaurus, that's why he has a smile. It's hard to see unless you click on the picture to get the larger pic, but he actually has little hands complete with claws.

And as if that wasn't enough to do for one day, I got inspired to try dyeing some wool with food colouring. I had about 10 balls of cream wool that I posted about here. Cream is not my favourite colour, not to mention not being practical with a 4yo in the house, and it was really cheap, so I figured I'd give it a go. After searching around the web, I found some instructions here, and got to it. It was pretty simple really. Soak the wool in half vinegar half water for half an hour, dip it in diluted food colouring, then steam for 45 minutes.

Inspired by DD's beautiful rainbow puzzles, I did some in rainbow colours, and am really impressed with how the colours turned out. I think I'm going to use these to crochet a throw for DD's playroom.

Then I got a little creative, and tried some variegated colours. Very citrusy colours, I'm really enjoying these colours lately. Not sure what I'll use these for yet, but I'm sure I'll come up with something.

So that was my day. (And I'm really tired, which is why this last bit of the post is so dull and why I'm waffling so much.) Much better than a rainy day was in the shed, where we all felt wet and closed in. It's amazing how much more room there is in the house, and how much lighter everything feels, even when it's all wet outside.