Happy New Year!

It is New Year’s Eve. I have had my traditional NYE morning of giving the house a bit of a tidy (not the playroom which still looks like a bomb has hit it. And despite having done a lot of clearing out before Christmas I still have no idea where half of the stuff will go to!), vacuuming, changing bedsheets and towels and putting washing away and more washing on. It always feels good to start the year this way- fresh pyjamas are out for everyone as well.

So now as my daughter is fast asleep in my arms, and my son and husband are playing next door my thoughts are turning to the year we have just had and the one ahead of us. It will be a big year as my baby girl, my youngest, should start school in September. I will hopefully start to find enough time to make a little money and turn what I do as a break from being a stay at home mum into a business. I think I found this blog’s aims and it’s voice over the last year- I found the direction I wanted it to take at the moment.

I aim to continue our Tuff Tray Tuesday activities, and if I get a little time later on today I may post a little round up of what we have done in the last 3 months.

Rolling out air drying clay on the Tuff Tray

Over Christmas one of the activities I really enjoyed with my boy was making gingerbread houses out of cardboard.

I want to do a cardboard project each month, starting with making a cardboard aquarium! We will only do one a month because i don’t want to leave a lot of cardboard lying around the house at the moment after we had a rather uninvited and unwelcome guest over Christmas!

I have some projects I want to do around the house as well. Over the next year I want to go through every room in the house and get rid of anything we don’t need or want any more. Then the year after, when C is at school, I plan on painting the whole house. It has needed a little redecoration since we moved in, and while we have done a few bits to the house- and are having quite a big project at the start of the year to replace all our back windows which have rotten wooden frames- I my husband and I just haven’t had the time to redecorate properly. I was pregnant when I moved in so we never stood a chance with the place!

I can see a big change in the relationship my children have with each other. My daughter is no longer just going up to whatever my son is doing and breaking it or messing it up. They occasionally play together, or next to each other doing different things. Each night they put the Hokey Cokey on and dance to it together while my husband and I obsessively clean the kitchen after tea (see the reference to an unwelcome visitor above…..) I love hearing them together. And while they still fight a lot, it is getting easier for them to be in the same room as each other without resorting to pushing or biting the other one.

I am quite excited about what the year will bring. I look forward to sharing it, and the activities I do with my little handed ones with you! x

Tuff Tray Tuesday – 4 December 2018

Today’s Tuff Tray Tuesday activity was painting and glittering Christmas stars.

This was something that R was given by school to decorate for a PTA competition. Of course C wanted to join in so I made her a couple of stars out of white card as well. R states that he wanted the biggest star, and even though I told him that I had used his star as a template so they would be the same size, he measured them and announced that his was bigger.

We started by painting the stars using some paint pens that we have in our cupboard. They are relatively low mess, although my 1 year old likes to touch the brush part and my 4 year old likes to squeeze them as hard as he can, so they are not mess free. We only did one side of the stars so it could dry, so have the second side of them both to do tomorrow night. (Once finished 2 stars will fit together and stand up.)

To be honest it was harder to do with the 2 children than many of the other projects we have done. I think because it was a project set by school, R wanted to do his nicely, and he was attempting a design where he used a different color for each of the points of the star and another one for the middle. Meanwhile C was just splodging some paint on her star and having a great time. Then she wanted to have a go with R’s. Then she wanted to just roll the pens around on the tuff tray, including all over his star. So it all became a little tricky.

Eventually I resorted to putting Peppa Pig on the TV to distract C from what R was up to, which worked until we got the glitter out.

Both children thoroughly enjoyed putting glitter on their stars. Some with their hands, some poured straight from the tube. They did not care. The world is much better with glitter as far as they are concerned and you cannot put too much on. The star was more glitter and glue than paint by the end! And I then spent the rest of the evening clearing it up. Well most of it. The rest I will find all over the house for weeks! And we get to do it all over again with the second side tomorrow night!