The day we climbed Mount Everest!

We went on a little walk/hike the other day in the woods by our house. The scenery was beautiful, for the first half of the hike we were walking along a large hillside so we could see quite a bit of the surrounding countryside. I didn't take the camera with us because I had Stella in the carrier strapped to my back and didn't think I would be agile enough to be hiking with her and taking pictures at the same time. England is such a beautiful and scenic place and we love getting the chance to admire it! While we walked along Arthur was asking about the biggest mountain you could climb, and if it was anything like the hill we were currently hiking. So I started telling him about Mount Everest and what it takes to climb it. We were studying China that week in Kindergarten so when we got home we found Mount Everest on our map and talked about it some more. The next day Arthur wanted to hear more about Mount Everest so we watched a documentary online about a team of climbers going up Everest. After that we spent the rest of the day pretending to be mountain climbers and even recreated Mount Everest in our house! Luckily we have two steep flights of stairs so it wasn't too hard to get the effect of going up!

Here is Arthur and Stella dressed up in their climbing gear, ready to head to base camp!

 

The first staircase was our climb to base camp.

We made it! We climbed into our tent and hunkered down to wait out the storm and rest a bit before pressing on further up the mountain.

The final ascent! 

We trudged through the 'snow' and with the help of a sturdy climbing rope we made it safely to the peak!

Here is Stella bringing up the rear. 

In some of the pictures we looked at of Mount Everest you could see the prayer and country flags staked up at the top of the mountain. We talked about what those were and then Arthur thought about what flag or marker he would want to put on top of Everest to represent him. This is what he came up with-

We 'staked' it on our map right on top of Mount Everest!

Stella also wanted to leave behind her own marker, so she found her favorite book and proudly carried it to the top!

After a long hard day of climbing we headed back to base camp for a well deserved snack. 

We were re-reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar the other week and decided to make our own caterpillars, Eric Carle style!

Of course you can't have hungry caterpillars without beautiful butterflies! 

Here is Stella signing butterfly.

 

Chris was quite a lego fanatic as a kid and his parents still had all of his old Legos, boxes and boxes full, stored in their attic.So we have rescued them all and washed off the dust and now Arthur and Chris spend many happy hours recreating Chris' childhood building with Legos! 

 

Some of their recent Lego masterpieces!

We went to a fair the other day at the park by our house and Arthur had his face painted with a very cool dinosaur!

Daddy's breakfast helper! Stella is just the right height when she stands on this stool and now she loves to cook and clean in the kitchen with us!