paintings, trees and treasure

Right well, today started off to Jamie and Alex getting creative with paint. It was quite interesting because it's the first time in ages that Jamies done any painting at home, she's done some at school but it's not all that creative at school, for example, she had paint a box grey to turn it into a castle and another time recently she had to paint an ice cream for a hungry caterpillar assembly, so yes it was painting, but she wasn't allowed to paint what she wanted, so this morning she kind of went back to basics, mixing different colours and experimenting and going mad! (for some reason it wont let me show Jamies paintings the right way round grrr)

 This is Alex's butterfly painting :) with the french flag in the corner(?)

It's been another hectic day with me trying to catch up on as many things that need doing while Jamie, Alex and Amelia play and mess around. Alex helped me plant a tree today, in fact, I planted 3 trees today, 1 victoria plum, 1 cox's orange pippen apple tree, and 1 royal gala apple tree, also 2 blueberry bushes and a raspberry bush! Alex and I found this when we were digging....

We were discussing whether its a bottle, or a tap (did you used to get glass taps? wouldn't a tap be solid glass?) or a salt shaker, but we figured it must've belonged to the first people who lived in our house, and our house is 100 years old, Alex thought it was real treasure.
I did a really horrible thing today, I accidently killed the frog that lives in our garden! I was really upset :( I haven't told Alex or Jamie, they'd be so sad, but what I've vowed to do is build a pond in the garden. I'll get Alex and Jamie to be involved and help build it, it should be really good.
My brother and his family came round this afternoon which was really nice as i haven't seen them for a while, my brother is an artist and he bought one of his paintings round for me. He has three children(well one of them is nearly and adult!) and it was really good to see everyone.
At bedtime, Jamie came down and told me she's finished reading Lewis carol's 'Alice's adventures in wonderland', it only took her a couple of hours, so I wanted to check to make sure she actually took it in, I asked her to tell what was different about the book to the film, and she mentioned the griffin, the mock turtle and Alice's sister. She said it was a weird book, and then was shocked to find out it was written 160 years ago! So then she wanted to find out who was king or queen at the time it was written, she found out it was queen Victoria. Then she went off to bed to write a review of the book.
Actually, she's just calling me to read me what she's written so far, I'd better go!