Welcome to Polvere Nera!

For those of you in the dark, this is the Gunpowder Italian restaurant that M and I spent part of the day creating.

As with most things here, it centred on Playmobil. Mainly pirates, knights and romans, with the main emphasis on goodies and baddies.
Hence the italian restaurant that he wanted to create was constantly in danger from baddies attacking it, until I suggested that maybe the baddies could just come to the restaurant to eat as, after all, baddies have to eat too.
So I translated Gunpowder to italian and we made a sign for the restaurant, M colouring in the letters, and built a restaurant complete with terrace from the playmobil castle.

M then decided on the food (pizza, salad and pasta), drink (apple juice, rum(!) and water) and dessert (donuts and ice cream) and we made a menu. He wanted to try to spell the words out and managed donut and rum. I was pleasantly surprised, particularly with the words that he got wrong, as he made a good phonetic attempt. Will have to look into the Montessori stuff I was reading the other day about reading and writing.

We have also played lots of shops, with me as the shopkeeper and M as the customer, leading to lots of 'maths', with M having to decide what coins to give me and whether to give me too much money and get change, or to make the amount up with more than one coin.

Obviously he has played a few games from the playmobil website, spent 5 minutes in the sandput on the balcony, and watched a bit of CBeebies.

Thankfully he let me make a batch of ratatouille and an apricot cake without too many disruptions. The weather is just too hot for arguments, although when the needle is pushing 30 degrees, arguments are never too far from the surface.

I really need to blog about the weekend too, as we went camping for the first time this summer in our new tent, spending Friday and Saturday night in Enney, near Gruyeres castle, which was holding a fete de St Jean including medieval re-enactment type stuff (a bit like Kentwell, I guess)