A Teddy Bears Breakfast

If you come down to the table this morning

You're in for a big surprise!
If you come down to the table this morning

You won't believe your eyes!
There's beans and egg and Pitta too

There's lots to eat for me and you

This mornings the morning the teddy bears have their breakfast!

But enough of that! Here it is:

Just pitta bread, beans and an egg, very simple with some teddy cutters and an egg ring but produced a very very happy Boy.

Printing and Painting with Bubble Wrap

Bubble Wrap, Pop and Paint

I invested in quite a large roll of bubble wrap recently, I had an idea for my hallway I'll go into another time, but the upshot of it all was lots and lots and lots of leftover bubblewrap, so we set about putting it to work making things. The first things we made are these bubblewrap rainbow prints. Boy loved them, loved popping the bubbles painting the wrap and himself, lots of smushy sensory play covering it with paint and some fantastic looking art at the end.

We started out with the best of intentions otherwise known as a paint brush

But soon the inevitable happened!

We also added some sequins that Boy spied at the top of our art box

I think the wrap after printing is in itself a lovely work of art,
would make a wonderful suncatcher hanging from a window

Some of the finished pieces

I love how they came out!

Make your own lava lamps with things you find around the house!

DIY Lava Lamps From Household Objects

A great preschool science craft that can be used as often as you like, in fact they sit on top of my kitchen cupboard waiting for curious children to ask about them so they can be brought down and marvelled at all over again. We used this activity to talk about density, the reactions taking place inside the 'lamp' and cause and effect. Plus it was a lot of fun!

Forgot to remove the label! 

There you go and we have the Alka-Seltzer there waiting to be sprinkled

Ingredients are:

Water Bottle
-Food Coloring
-Vegetable Oil
-Water
-Alka Seltzer

Method:

Fill each bottle up to the 3/4 point with vegetable oil.  Top up with water being careful to leave about an inch at the top free or it will overflow. Break your Alka Seltzer into tiny pieces and drop them in one piece at a time.

Boy had to be constrained somewhat with his Alka-Seltzer Sprinkling, he loved sprinkling it in and watching the bubbles form.

Many thanks to Juggling With Kids for the idea, these have become a firm favourite with my budding mad scientist. We are also going to try adding some glow sticks inside for a dramatic nighttime lava lamp.

Hungry Caterpillar Lunch

With a hungry hungry child to feed we gave this lunch a flutter

Made using cucumber, tomatoes, olives, salad leave, cheese and butterfly toasts, some topped with thinly sliced cured ham.

Rainy Day Lunch

Rainy day lunch for when we're hiding inside

There is only so much jumping in puddles, sitting in puddles, smacking puddles with sticks and generally ensuring that you, your mother and your dog are soaked to the skin until you start to think of your stomach. So we tried bringing the rain inside with us and seeing what it looked like on a plate.

The sun is made of cheddar, we have raisan rain, babybel cheese, a tree of toast and an egg that is also a car. The grass below is avocado and the garden is salad, tomato and sweet pepper flowers.

There ain't no party like an Octonaut Party

Sound the Octoalert!

Out last major project was Boy's Octonauts Party which involved a great deal of pillaging from Pinterest, the overuse of my printer, a house at glitter saturation point and time well spent curled up in front of the show for research purposes of course ;)

Here are some of the things we made, we'll start with the food:

These cheese sandwiches look a bit fishy!

Crab Croissants

Pepper and hummus octopus dip
Inspiration here

Clam biscuits with yoghurt covered strawberry pearls
Inspiration here

'Edible aquarium' served in a goldfish bowl

Hot dog octopi
Inspiration here

Octonauts cups were blue paper ones decorated with the Octoalert button:

And the birthday Boy's favourite, the birthday cake: 

This is made using a sandcastle cake mould available here
and decorated with digestive biscuit (or Graham Crackers for US visitors) sand as seen here

The cake recipe is a simple sponge cake recipe like this one however as with a complicated mould like one I knew I wouldn't be able to add buttercream and so to enhance the flavour a bit I used what I had at hand: Valencian Orange Extract, Orange Zest and Sprinkles to make a fruity and colourful sponge cake.

Party games:

Pin the eye patch on Kwazii game inspired by a ready made game
you can buy on etsy my homemade version used blue tack on the back
of the patches so even small children could play

Fishing game

Colouring and Craft table

The craft table featured printables available from the Octonauts website as well as an activity I devised inspired by an episode about decorator crabs. Decorator crabs use items found from their environment to hide from and warn off predators so here the children could use craft bits, stickers and pieces or card to decorate their own decorator crabs! Boy and I also spent some time learning about them whilst getting party stuff ready, watching youtube videos and getting a book from the library to learn about marine life. In fact the whole week prior to the party became an 'underwater week' doing lots of learning as we went about the various creatures we made for the party.

As the weather was nice and the beach was on our doorstep we also took all those buckets and spades and went to the beach! Which was wonderful, the other outside game was a big jumbo pack of bubble blowers and solution which the children loved going bubble mad in the sun.

Party Decorations:

Paper plate jellyfish using crepe paper and ribbon

Paper plate fish and seahorses we had a lot of fun making

More jellyfish! My kitchen was at one point nothing more than
a jellyfish drying station making them!

Finally the good bags to take home, a take on Peso's medical bag and they looked fantastic:

Inspiration here

My Octonauts themed gift to the birthday boy was done using this tutorial here using only a 'talking tin' and a bit of foam and was one of the biggest hits of the party! In fact Boy still sets it off a little too regularly, I am a little Octonauted out!

That's it for the Octonauts Party, I shall upload the party we did last year with a Lego theme soon :) Please let me know what you think in the comments I'd love to hear from you about my first post!

And so it begins

Having ruminated on starting a blog for some time and changed my mind several times over about it I've decided to take the plunge! This blog will mainly be about my life with Boy and the things we do and make together.

I'm fairly new to the world of crafts and feel very new to the world of parenting though he keeps getting older when I'm not looking. So this blog will hopefully chronicle our steep learning curves in exploring the world creatively and finding new knowledge in as many places we can along the way. I will probably do some making stuff for me and the home too and will certainly ramble on about all manner of things given half the chance. We also do a lot of playing with our foods so there will be food posts!

As for my life outside of parenting I am doing a degree from home in international development,  and have an interest in the political and sociological spheres. I have a penchant for geek crafts, creativity on a budget and an addiction to Pinterest that keeps me up at night (Pinners welcome on this Blog!). The Pinterest addiction comes from a love of themes, give me a theme and I am a happy woman as you will see, I love to try and pull projects together around a focal point and storyboards fill my reveries in a way that makes me sound a bit odd! I'm an avid reader, going through a long sci fi phase at the moment but a fan of all well written fiction, and took up and fell deeply in love with cookery a few years ago.