Park Crawling

Not a lot going on this week so I shall use the time to tell you about summer 2012.  We had lived in our current house for about three years at this time and my children had spent a large portion of local journeys saying 'can we go to that park some time' about probably every park in the local area.  I'd always said we could and then not got round to it, so I decided we would have a day for park crawling.

I spent some time on Google Maps locating exactly where the parks were and our best route, plus a pub with a play garden to stop for lunch.  We packed up some drinks and coats etc and set off about 10am with a plan of no more than 30 minutes per park and to be back before dark.

So we set off and, to be honest, not an awful lot more to the story, the kids played at a lot of parks, we liked some more than others.  The ones we didn't like so much only got 20 minutes and a decision to not bother to return to them, the ones we liked more we spent a bit more time at and remembered for future trips to the park.

By the end of the day it was getting dark, we were all so tired they were barely able to climb a slide any more and parks had ceased to be nearly so fun as they had been at the beginning of the day.  We didn't get home until 6 and take it from me, 8 hours is a long time to be in a constant state of playing in parks!

Also, if we ever do it again I shall take plasters - 8 hours of park crawling is pretty likely to include at least one bleeding knee!

Christmas Cards

Before I start, my blog is a little late this week because our family cat has died, which has thrown all our plans and made some things not happen quite as they should.

We'll miss you, Marie, even though you stole my dinner!

Anyway, before all that happened, I have been making Christmas cards with the children.  We do this every year, so last January (and the previous nine or ten) I cut out all the pictures and words from cards we had received ready to use to make them the following year.  By this point we have quite a collection:

These are all the words I have cut out from old Christmas cards

And these are the pictures

Then we get out glitter and googly eyes and scissors et, largely we treat it as an 'anything goes', and with some folded card we make all the children's cards for their friends at school.

Spot the one which was accidentally made the wrong way round ...

Coming soon:

More Christmas decorations

Curtains

Pillow cases and duvet covers

Christmas Decorations part 2

This week we have been making some more Christmas decorations.  These were really easy to do, and need very little to make them.

So, first step was to cut out some different length strips of card.  I can't tell you any measurements because mine were dependent on the width of the ruler I was using and the length of the card.  But anyway, you need two small, four medium and four long lengths of card:

It's also not necessary to keep your table as messy as this one, that's just me

 Next thing, I stuck them together so that each strip had a red side and a gold side.  The children did theirs differently, the colours don't matter just so long as both sides of each strip are pretty:

We found that paperclips held them pretty well and stopped them bending outwards while they dried a bit.  Don't leave them to dry completely as they will need to bend in one of the later steps

After that We made a whole in either end of each strip using that time-honoured Blue Peter style poke it with a sharp pencil with a blob of Blu-Tak or Play Doh underneath, until there is a hole in both ends of each strip.

Sharp pencil necessary, blurry photography optional

Hole in each end - don't make the mistake I made here of punching the holes through the paperclips, I REALLY regretted it when it came to taking the paperclips off again later

Once all the holes were punched the next thing was to attach them together - short one in the middle, longest on the outside - and tie them through the holes.  I found some shiny purple ribbony stuff which I thought would be great for this, turns out it's really hard to get through the holes, and the pipe cleaner I used for the one hole we ran out of ribbon for was amazing.  Pipe cleaners all the way!

I hope you're learning from my mistakes, people!!

Tied together

Then tie together the other end, bending the longer strips outwards.  As you see, this was the pipe cleaner end.  I really wish I'd thought of this before watching my children take 20 minutes poking ribbony stuff through a tiny hole with a pencil.

All three of them together - shiny shiny shiny