Stopping to watch the woodlice

In the mornings, we have a short walk to the bus stop. Well, it should be short but we have a five year old and a nearly three year old so the walk that takes an adult nine minutes (according to googlemaps) can take up to half an hour with the Zeds.



I find myself enticing them to walk a bit quicker by saying "Come on, I think there are more woodlice across the road" and "ooh, let's see if there are any dead worms up there, near the wobbly wall". In winter, it tended to be more about finding a really good crunchy iced over puddle or a crystally icicle.



 


It's the preschooler/kindergardener equivalent to stopping to smell the flowers, you see,  and I try to encourage it in general but, you know, sometimes we really do need to hurry up and get on the damn bus. However, I do like to stop and smell photograph the flowers.

No children were harmed in the making of this craft

First you must cut out your fishies

No children were harmed, indeed, since no children were involved. Between Pinterest and this blog, I have moved on from merely saving cereal boxes for future use to sitting down at the table while Z2 napped and Z1 watched...erm...probably Gnomeo and Juliet, not too sure as I was busy...to do a crafty thing.



Then you must glue your silhouttes
to the background

Z2's bedroom is painted blue, glossy blue, walls and ceiling. It makes it rather dark but I have decided to go with it and I call it the pond room and he has some mirrors in the shape of frogs on the wall and also this rug which I do love quite a lot. I decided he needed a shark poster which gradually evolved into me making these fish silhouettes.


This craft was a nice mix of being prepared and just making do with whatever I had to hand. Preparation included printing out the fish silhouettes. Making do included using a black marker to colour in the watermark bits as the silhouettes were from a stock picture library type thing. I also had carried them around in my bag for a few days so had to choose the non-crumpled fish to use. The frames were ones that I found about the house and the blue backgrounds are a blue card and a blue envelope which I also found around the house.



Then you must display them with Z1's flower display
and a piece of her art in the background*

I am quite pleased with the finished results. Z1 was impressed and Z2 admired them. However, they are rather small for the expanse of bedroom wall so I may have to get my scissors out, find a few more frames and  do a few more. Or I might just buy the shark poster after all and hang these on either side.

*If you do not have any original Z1 artwork or flower displays to hand, you can improvise with art and flower displays created by yourself, your own child/dog/hamster or even shop-bought displays.

A book review - Survival of the Ginnest (with brief musings on internet friends)

Survival of the Ginnest ©

I shall be honest from the outset - I know Aimee Horton of Pass the Gin. She is an internet friend. Those of you who don't have internet friends may think that internet friends are not real or that it's a little sad and pathetic to have them but you are very, very wrong. Internet friends quite often know things about you that real life friends don't and you don't have to worry about them popping 'round for a cup of tea before you have managed to make some attempt at tidying up. (Not that my real-life friends would worry too much about the state of my house but I might.) So there you go, she's an internet friend and I offered to review her book but I hereby promise that, having been honest about my relationship with her, I will also be honest about the book.

Also, in the same week as I offered to review this, I was awaiting my copy of Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures by the very amusing Amber Dusick from crappypictures.com. I say this to show you that my standards are high for humorous, irreverent, honest parenting blogs and books. Amber makes me actually laugh out loud quite regularly as well as nodding along and inspiring my infographic posts.

Survival of the Ginnest is written entirely in Facebook status updates. This makes it very readable by a) those of us who like Twitter and Facebook and b) those of us with jobs/small children/too little time. I chuckled out loud to myself several times and silently many more while reading this on a rather dreary wintery day in spring. I think that alone should be enough to make you want to spend a small bit of your hard-earned cash on it but I shall continue. I love Aimee's affectionately grumpy nicknames for her children and I like how she writes "pooh" not "poo" - I feel it expresses the disgustingness rather well.  I thought that I would tire of the status update format but, in fact, it just kept me reading as there is always time to read just one more sentence, right? I will warn you that you are likely to end up craving alcohol or pizza or Haribo or possibly all three as you read. In fact, I had to interrupt my reading to go in seek of Haribo and was rather sad to have to make do with Maynards Sour Cherry Blasters. So yes, go out there and follow Aimee on Twitter but also, go and get her electronic book 'cause you won't regret it. You can buy it here - http://t.co/EQumosdlzx .

A twinkly tortoise

Sometimes, when Z1 is watching television, she gets jiggly and fidgety. My first guess is usually that she needs to go to the toilet but, in fact, it is more frequently an urge to go and make or draw something that she has just had an idea for but can't quite pull herself away from the screen to get the materials for.



Glitter glue tortoise

Destroyed glitter glue tortoise

On Saturday, she turned to me in the middle of Gnomeo and Juliet (the weather had changed from early summer back to winter and I was damned if I was going back outside after having dragged the three of us off to ballet in the morning) and she asked told me to draw a tortoise with glitter glue. Just like that - no warning or preamble or context. I think I rose to the challenge. Sadly, she ruined it. The carefully executed tortoiseshell has been destroyed.

She then went on to draw this. Despite appearances, she assures me it is not a clown.



Not a glitter glue clown

Waiting for Spring, too busy to make stuff

Sparkly pipe cleaner chain
and standing on one leg*

It seems that waiting for Spring to arrive has been taking up a lot of our time and not leaving much time for crafts organised by me. That is not to say that Z1 has not been busy - there have been more pipe cleaner creations (of course) such as this sparkly wonder on the right.

She also made a rather magnificent Play Doh lobster creature which, sadly, was tidied up before I got to take a photo. Small pieces of variously coloured pieces of him may still be on my kitchen floor, though. Damn flaky dry Play Doh.

There have been plastic jewels carefully stuck to bits of cardboard, tiaras from birthday present kits in an array of materials, templates of tiaras traced onto paper and carefully cut out for a teddy, a money box made from a shoe box, a string tied to a box to be a home for a cat and  many more. It would appear she doesn't really need me at all. However, this is not to say that there will not be more force-marched organised crafts to come.

* her serious face is because she is staring at a spot on the wall to help her keep her balance in this one-legged pose.

A small swarm of beetles

Beetle blueprint

 In part inspired by the marvellous Jo and her Woodcraft Folk group, the birthday party beetle craft was born. On the left, you can see my expert blueprints. The key idea in the plan was the paper fastener, allowing the beetles to open and close their wings.

As I began to plan the party, I envisioned a short talk about beetles complete with a poster to show the variety of beetles that can be found and their general coolness. I even added that poster to my ebay watch list, so excited was I.

Small swarm of beetles

However, I talked myself down from the beetle poster and concentrated on getting coloured paper plates, pipe cleaners, paper fasteners, googly eyes, stickers and a hole punch. It's just as well, really, as things at the party didn't quite go to plan. I showed them the prototype (guess which one in the photo on the right was mine) and offered help. Predictably enough, but not anticipated by me, the boys preferred to run around bashing balloons while the girls sat down to make beetles. I was a little over-stretched as the girls needed help with the hole punch but I like our little swarm of beetles.  It would have been larger but, delightfully, a couple of the girls took theirs home. Z1 was mostly happy to have our stash of pipe cleaners replenished.

And now a cake with purpose, meaning and significance

Unlike the previous cake (or, indeed, this gingerbread) , this cake was made for a reason. That reason was that Z1 was having a birthday party to celebrate reaching the grand old age of five. I rather pushed the beetle theme* and had been mentally planning this cake for quite a while. However, I am not one for trial runs of cakes so, when the day before her birthday party dawned, the pressure was on.

Chocolate Beetle Cake

The Husband took both Zeds out for the day and I had the house to myself which was very novel. The secret to this cake is mostly cocoa. The recipe I used specifically said to use hot chocolate powder, not cocoa, but I ignored that and just added in some extra sugar. I had hoped for green or blue sprinkles for the wings but the shop I was in offered up only orange. I also had to buy Sherbet Fountains in order to acquire the liquorice for his "twuntlers" (as Z1 likes to call them). Note also the broken up biscuits (cookies) around him to represent the soil with a few leftover-from-last-time green sprinkles to denote grass. My attention to detail is astounding.

Overall, I felt the children were not sufficiently impressed with my glorious chocolate beetle but they did eat him and I upped the enthusiasm by offering them slices of beetle's bottom. Show me a five year old who doesn't think bottoms are funny and I'll eat my hat**. He got mostly eaten and the parents came forward to have some too so a success overall, I feel.


* I am not really sure why I became committed to a beetle theme but there you go. I did mention it here and as far as I can fathom it mostly grew from my inspired idea about using paper fasteners on paper plates to make beetle wings (more to come on that one) and a general appreciation of beetles.
**terms and conditions apply