360 degree no spill snack bowl

When my son was massively into his rice cakes and chucking stuff off his high chair this amazing looking 360 degree no spill snack bowl had not yet come out. It looked amazing, so when we were approaching weaning with my daughter I jumped at getting one for her. No more clearing rice cakes and crumbly things off the floor!

You put snacks in the middle and because the bowl is designed to gyrate then no matter what your child does and how much they move around carrying the snack bowl then the snacks don’t fall out. It even has a lid to keep the snacks in/fresh, maybe you could just pop the bowl into your bag to use later on. Here we are with our snacks yesterday.

Now I don’t know if I have a particularly heavy handed baby, but sadly this bowl was no match for her, much like the suction plates that are supposed to stop your baby being able to lift them off the high chair and chuck them on the floor. She immediately took the rice cakes out of the bowl and put them on her highchair. Although I can see that if she walked around with the bowl the snacks wouldn’t come out, when she chucked it on the floor it broke apart!

Nope, no match for her at all!

What we played with this week

I am posting this late, on Monday afternoon instead of Sunday night. Sadly half term together with a Sunday trip to Ikea seemed to beat me and I lost track of time last night. So this post relates to last week rather than this week.

This week has been half term so I have had R at home during the week as well. Usually he is just home after 4pm. He finishes school at 3 but we take so long to get up the hill from his building because he likes to stop to play in the playground, that we’re not home until nearly 4. R did have a couple of nights at his Grandmother’s house so C had a couple of days of her parents’ undivided attention.

Henry Vacuum Cleaner

C really likes this Henry Vacuum Cleaner at the moment. I have taken the hose off it for now so she doesn’t try to eat it. It was given to my son as a present a couple of years ago when he really enjoyed “helping” me around the house. He still likes it now, but prefers to help me push the real vacuum around rather than a play one. The vacuum here is great. It has a retractable cord, and tools, and even makes a whirring sound when it is turned on. At the moment C just likes to drag it along with her, and she has found the plug (it is just a flat plug shape so no concerns about sticking it in her eyes at all) and likes to try to plug the vacuum in on the door

Jumping Clay Dinosaur

I actually found these at the Hobbycraft show that I went to in the Autumn. They had 4 dinosaurs, and at the time R was still very keen on dinosaurs. Although his interest in dinosaurs has waned and largely been replaced by Mr Men, he still really enjoys making these dinosaurs. Jumping Clay is a form of air drying clay and the kit comes with all of the clay you need in sealed packaging, a tool for shaping and adding detail to the dinosaur and, which I think is quite brilliant and the reason these kits are so good, a skeleton model of the dinosaur that you stick the clay to.

The clay comes in primary colours which you mix to make the colour you need for the dinosaur and it is quite easy to mix. The instructions tell you how much of each colour you need each time, and they also tell you how to make other colours, it also smells nice. I don’t know about you but I do not like the smell of play dough at all, so this is much better. For older children it would be easy, and a great learning activity to mix the colours themselves (the kit is recommended for 5+) but my boy is 3 so he didn’t do the mixing himself. You put the clay on the skeleton and smooth it down and then use the enclosed plastic tool to shape and add detail to the dinosaur. Now, my boy just poked holes in the clay rather than add any real shaping to it, but again he is younger than children this kit is aimed at. Nevertheless, even though he was that much younger he did manage to do quite a bit by himself and produced (with help!) a good looking dinosaur, albeit that he insisted that this Jumping Clay brachiosaurus have 3 eyes! Jumping Clay do lots of other kits as well and I am sure we will get more of them now we have completed all 4 dinosaurs. If only they did Mr Men…..

ELC Magnetic Playcentre

R loves his letters and numbers. He loves recognising them and now he loves putting them in order and writing his name and Mr Men character names. This ELC Magnetic Playcentre is one of R’s toys at my mum’s house and one she has had for a while. R loves playing with it. He used to just like putting the letters into random patterns but more and more he is using it to order numbers and spell out words. It does keep him entertained for a while whenever we get it out.

VTech KidiZoom Camera

We took R to the art gallery because they were running sessions involving looking at rainbows, including kaleidoscopes, rainbow glasses and general colour mixing and making. I thought it sounded great, and as R loves drawing so much at the moment I want to foster his enjoyment of art and help him feel comfortable going to art galleries, museums, the theatre etc. I actually didn’t think much of the rainbow activities on offer, but R had insisted we bring along his VTech KidiZoomcamera and he spent the whole time going around and taking photographs of whatever he found interesting. There were attempts at photographing the paintings and sculptures, but mostly he took pictures of the floor, the wheels on C’s pushchair and his buggy board, and our feet. Sadly I couldn’t get the photos off his camera to include any here, but I shall work out how to do it one day. It’s quite a fascinating insight into how he sees the world!

The Playpen

Once again both children have loved playing with the playpen! It has been such a surprising hit with both of them. I am so pleased I got it, even though I think it will be a relatively short lived thing for them. C loves to pull herself up to stand on it, coast around the panels and open and close the gate to it, and R makes us play 3 Little Pigs using the playpen as the House Made of Bricks. I haven’t yet put bedsheets on top of the playpen to make a fort as he is enjoying this game so much!

Finally I shall end this blog post with a picture I love that I took at the soft play party we went to on Sunday for R. This is of C enjoying the dance floor while R was having lunch with his friends.

 

Watching my boy at a friend’s party

On Sunday my boy went to a party at Pizza Hut for one of his school friends. He and his friends made pizzas which were then cooked and returned to them as their lunch.

I must admit that I don’t think that it was the right place for a party for 3 and 4 year olds as they are just not good at staying still. And they were all a tad stir crazy at the end. It was, however, a really nice thing for them to do and had they been older it would have worked very well.

The party was a little chaotic. Given the age of the children when all of their pizzas came back none of them remembered which pizza belonged to them, and my boy got very upset because his pizza had been give away earlier on-he would not have spoke up when they shouted out his number, he only knew that he had made a pizza with just cheese on and the one placed in front of him had olives and other things on. We were not standing right by him when the pizza was given out because we had been encouraged and asked to move away from the children (just a little way to a seating area where, if all the parents had moved with us, we would have been able to see our children absolutely fine.) We had been asked to move back because parents were stood behind their children and chatting away while the staff were trying to explain what to do to the children. Some did move back when were asked, but other parents just would not move. So the poor staff had to fight against the noise of the parents batting away. They also had to deal with a bunch of 3 and 4 year olds who are not programmed to stay still and try to get them to concentrate on doing what they were supposed to be doing (I know my boy just stops concentrating if he finds something too hard to do, like rolling out pizza dough after about 30 seconds). There were about 15 extra children there who they were not expecting as well, they had not RSVPed. And children just kept arriving for about an hour (it was a 2 hour party.) All in all I think the staff did a great job and coped really well with what would have been a nightmare party. If the children had been 6 or older I think it would have been a great party.

There were some really lovely moments for me watching my boy while he was there. He is definitely one for following the rules. He stood where he was told and patiently waited for everyone to be ready. They dished up dough balls which were tucked into by the children and then while they were all waiting for their pizzas the children all did the colouring on the table in front of them. My boy chatted away to his pens while he was colouring. He got excited when the ice cream came around and he had to keep lifting the cup up to move it so he could look inside to see if there was any ice cream left for him to eat. He was the only one of all the children at the party who still had his hat and apron on. Everyone else had take at least one item off. He tried, at the end, to play with balloons with the other children, but it mostly consisted of trying to play with this one girl’s balloon with her. She was having none of it.

He is still so little. It is easy to forget as he is the big brother, but watching him and his attempts at playing with the other children, and joining in their games, it reminds me how little he is.

What we have played with this week

This week has been the last week of this half term for my boy. He was in school for 4 days, stayed overnight at his Grandma’s one night and went to a friend’s birthday party today. He has been learning to write letters for a while now, but this week it seems like something has clicked for him and his writing has come on no end. He is loving drawing as well. Not colouring in, he’s not too interested in that, but drawing. I was so impressed with the pictures he drew at his Grandma’s house!

My daughter this week has been pulling herself up on anything in sight and is getting more and more confident with standing. She can hold on with just one hand for longer periods and she even stood entirely unassisted for a second yesterday. She still loves a good rummage, and has recently taken to holding things up to show us what she has got. This includes both food and toys. She has started “dancing” too which is very cute to watch.

So, on to more specific things we have played with. R spent some time this afternoon playing with some play clay he got in his party bag. He has only recently started to enjoy actually shaping and moulding things like play clay and play dough himself. Previously we would get play dough put, but he would want to watch us and direct us as to what to make for him. Now he is doing it all for himself. Today he used thin strips of playclay to make a Mr Skinny, and then put some of the strips together to make a model of Mr Strong.

We have played quite a bit with the playpen this week. Both children seem to love it

For Christmas I bought C a wooden activity cube, the link to the one I bought made by Lewo is Here It does say that it is unsuitable for under 3s, but I thought what 3 year old would want to play with this? It turns out that my boy is the sort of 3 year old! There are lacing beads and shape sorting activities as well as xylophone on this activity cube. My daughter does love it but it is a bit too old for her as she has nearly trapped her ha d in it a few times! She sticks the xylophone beater in her mouth and I am not confident to leave her alone with it. I think she will be fine with it in about 6 months or so but for now she can only play with it if we are there with her. And her brother hasn’t got hold of it first.

I mentioned the pulling herself up on anything and everything? Well here she is having pulled herself up to have a look at the train set a little boy was playing with in our local branch of Foyles. I love this Foyles. It’s always clean and bright and, while it is not a big shop when we go in during the week there is always plenty of space to have a look around. They have had this Brio train set out for children to play with since opening a few years ago. I used to go in all the time when my son was at home and obsessed with trains. I must admit that we didn’t always buy something when we went in, but I have bought more books from Foyles than I otherwise would have done just because we were there with him and books caught my eye.

This week’s awful events in America

It does not seem right writing a blog post about sticking stuff together with glitter glue or about the toys we have played with, not on a week that 17 children lost their lives in a school shooting in America.

This week I have read some heart wrenching posts and articles detailing the text messages sent to parents by children stuck in that school, by parents talking about how they feel at the moment dropping their children off at school,by teachers talking about their lockdown procedures and the knowledge that this could happen in their school. One woman talked about her training and what would happen if a child knocked on the door of a classroom after they had already gone into lockdown.

I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to be a parent in America at the moment. What it must be like to drop your son or daughter off at school and hope that theirs won’t be the school that is targeted. How frustrated you would be that nothing seems to be being done about gun crime and school shootings. I simply cannot fathom how some commenters in the USA think that the answer to these mass shootings is to give more people guns, to have more guns in schools or on the streets.

I am so relieved that I live here in the UK and we drop our children off at school without worrying about these things. I have never seen a gun, except ones carried by police, outside of the TV. I never want to see one and I certainly never want my children, my precious, innocent, beautiful children, to need to practise lockdown drill.

Playpen

The playpen is here!

We didn’t get one for my son as it wasn’t really needed. I didn’t need to leave him in a room without me or another adult present, and there were never any toys that he could easily swallow in his reach. And if anything did fall into his reach someone was there to remove it immediately. As C has a 3 year old brother I do need to leave her to get on with things herself while I attend to her brother- a potty needs emptying, a snack needs fetching, he’s gone into another room and is calling me, we are doing something together that she is just not interested in or old enough to do. And as we have the one play room (what used to be our dining room) then both of their toys are out. Now she is on the move there have been a few times that I have turned my back for a second only to turn back and find she has something small in her mouth!

The playpen is great. We got it from eBay and it comes with lots of panels that can be slotted together. I can’t find the one we got, but a similar playpen to ours can be found here https://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/8-2-Panels-Plastic-Play-Pen-Mixed-Colors-Baby-Playpen-With-Education-Functions/142331862229?epid=720757643&hash=item2123a3dcd5:g:PeUAAOSw0exZ8FNc It can be larger or smaller depending on the size you need. For the moment we have only put 6 of the panels together to make a fairly small playpen as she only needs to be in it for short amounts of time. However if we take it outside in the garden we could give her a lot more room to roam around.

We have only had it a few days but have used it every day so far. Our toilet is upstairs and I now feel very confident when I have to take the potty upstairs to empty that I am not going to come downstairs to my daughter having got hold of something she really shouldn’t.

My son also seems to like it a lot. We played a great 3 little pigs game yesterday with Grandma. She was the Big Bad Wolf and the children and I were the 3 little pigs hiding in our house made of bricks (the playpen). I have promised him that at the weekend we will get the rest of the panels out along with some old bedsheets and make a fort out of it.

Early hours with the littlest

I was up with the littlest between about 12.30 and 3a.m. Each time I thought she was asleep enough to go down in her cot she woke up and squirmed about again. At nearly 2.30 a.m. I finally got her into her cot and snuck my way back into bed, avoiding the creaky floorboard, which I swear is noisiest at night. She woke up realising I had abandoned her!

I went over and picked her up again and was so irritated that I had to start over again, again! It had been hours. Why wouldn’t she just bloody well go to sleep? Then her arm dropped to her side and her little hand curled around my finger. It was beautiful and so well timed. All my frustration left me and I swayed her around the room, with her holding my hand, for another 20 minutes until she let go of my hand and I knew she was ready to go in her cot again. Beautiful moments I wouldn’t trade for all the sleep in the world. Most of the time anyway.

Lent

Lent starts next week and I have decided that I shall give up eating chocolate and cake for Lent. I eat far too much of them, especially chocolate, and I need to stop. While I am not a believer any more I was raised by a lapsed catholic and went to C of E school so we have always been very aware of Christian traditions and celebrations.

I have always found Lent to be a good thing. It is a very defined period with a chocolate based celebration at the end. It helps me to rebalance how much I eat. Reminds me that there are alternatives to reaching for chocolate and cake, and that I actually enjoy these alternatives. Of course I still have baby weight to lose, so it helps with that too. I also want to make sure the children have healthy food and don’t eat too much junk food, and I do think that starts with the example I set them.

I know I could have the same attitude about New Year, but that has never worked out. Maybe because it’s winter and cold and miserable outside. More likely it’s because I have lots of chocolate in the house from Christmas. I have no will power when it comes to chocolate at all! In any case, I shall be giving it all up. I may even have another go at doing the 30 day yoga challenge while I am at it, and will emerge at Easter having lost absolutely all the baby weight and as a much fitter person just in time for my daughter’s first birthday. Or something like that.

Is anyone else giving anything up for Lent?

Baby sleep 9 months

C is going through another challenging phase with sleep. No sooner do we get through the last challenging phase and she returns to sleeping well at night, then another one comes along.

She is once again only really happy to sleep in mummy’s arms. This is fine during the day but rather more tricky at night! I have resorted to ever more extreme ways of putting her down as there s phase continues. One night I danced around the room to The Moonlight Sonata until she was sleepy enough to go down. Another night I fell asleep sitting upright and woke up with such a sore neck a couple of hours later. (I am considering investing in a travel pillow.)

The last 2 nights, after a couple of attempts to put her down failed, I ended up standing on tip toes bended over the cot side and lowering her into the cot with my arms still around her and my face right next to hers to trick her into thinking I was still holding her. I then slowly moved my arms and then stood up, holding my breath in case she stirred. So far both nights that did the trick and I then got a good 3 or 4 hours before the next wake up. So undignified and funny-I was so pleased my husband was asleep and couldn’t see me!

Valentine’s sun catchers

On Sunday R and I got a bit crafty making Valentine’s themed sun catchers.

To make the sun catchers you need:

• contact paper
• tissue paper (we used tissue paper circles from Flying Tiger)
• glitter (again ours was from Flying Tiger, and it was left over from Christmas)
• safety scissors

First we cut out squares of contact paper, taking the backing off one piece of contact paper each and laying it on the floor sticky side up. Then we put tissue paper circles all over the contact paper square. R went for a rather scattered approach whereas I was a little more careful with the placing of my circles.

 

A square of contact paper was stuck over the top of the tissue circles so that they were held in place. We folded the squares in half and I drew half of a heart shape on the one half of the square (I am simply not good at drawing a consistently shaped heart freehand!) and R used the safety scissors to cut around the heart outline.

I placed more contact paper, sticky side up, on the floor and R stuck the hearts down on the new contact paper square. He then thoroughly enjoyed tipping glitter all over the heart (and I mean tipping, there was absolutely no glitter left in the tube and I will be vacuuming it up for days!)before another square of contact paper was placed over the top to seal in the glitter. As before I drew a heart for R to cut out using his safety scissors.

We now just have to make a little hole in the heart and string them up in the front room window, the lightest room in the house, and admire our handiwork.

 

This was a nice, easy to set up activity that R really liked. Clear up afterwards was quite quick as well, but I must admit it would have been a lot worse if I hadn’t put a sheet down to work on. R did keep pulling more and more tissue circles out of the bag and if I hadn’t caught him at it he probably would have dumped the whole of the bag out on the floor which would have taken ages to clean up.