Birthday present inspiration

What to get for a two year old little girl?  It might sound easy... but she has an elder brother and between them they have all the toys.  I thought I'd done well with a tea set made from recycled plastic for Christmas, but the next time I visited it turned out they have about three tea sets.  The only things they don't have so much of are the "girly" things (which she's really in to) such as handbags and purses, dolls and dolly things.  Thing is, I'm not so much in to the girly thing.  Especially since it's all pretty much pink.


So I decided to get creative.  It's also so much nicer when you know that  you're giving a gift which they definitely won't already have and which can't be bought anywhere.


I searched for "wooden box" on Amazon and bought this one: 
I then printed out some flower borders and some butterflies from the internet and made some lettering using WordArt.  I cut these bits out and stuck them on to the box using PVA glue, and then added some details and also some swirly patterns with glitter glue.  Mine were from Tesco and cost £1



The finished result looks like this:

(you can see the recipient looks well unimpressed - oh well!)

Where have I been?

Where have I been?  Good question actually.  A long weekend in a proper moated Norman castle with nephews, nieces, sisters and mum (more in another post later).  And since then I've just been running around chasing my tail trying to keep up with the normal, mundane, day to day type stuff.  Until today.  

Today for the first time in well over two years (since I was pregnant with Little C) I went on my bike.  Now that Little Sis is 6 months she is big enough to wear the smallest sized splash suit that you can get, and big enough (just) to buy a cycle helmet and to sit in a bike seat.

So off we drove to cycle a bit of track we've been lusting after.  It goes from Glen Ogle down to Lochearnhead and is an old railway track hugging the hillside and with splendiferous views.  Being an old railway track means no cars, so the Waggy-tailed-one could race along at our sides.  For Little Sister's first time we kept things short, but even then we had to sit down on a mossy rock for a feed.  Little C didn't mind, we had a stash of chocolate buttons for him.

So yippee!  Now that she's 6 months, we can be an outdoor family!  Next stop - a camping trip in Wester Ross (more on that in a future post too!).

Bed time letters

Little C loves his letters.  He knows at least half of them (capitals) and some lower case.  At bed time we usually go through the numbers to 10 and read a counting poem from a wall chart in his bedroom and do some counting, so I thought maybe he'd like to look at some letters at bed time as well.  

I roughly measured the slats in the bunk bed above him, and cut up a cereal box to make card the right size to slot into the gaps.  

Then I wrote on some alphabet letters.  

I ran out of card so will finish the alphabet when we finish another box of cereal.  
Last night while we were having a cuddle we played a game where he gave me a letter to find, and then I gave him a letter to find and so on.

On reflection...

How to entertain an almost 6  month old?

Spend half an hour in front of the mirror...

A stormy sky

This was a bit of an experiment really.

It didn't quite work out as I hoped.  I thought that the paint wouldn't go on where there was wax crayon, but it did.  Anyway, here's the plan:

Take a normal white piece of paper.

Use wax crayons to draw a land or city scape.  If your children can do this themselves, so much the better, but for younger toddlers, do this bit yourself.  I used orange and green wax crayons to create heather, gorse and fern covered hillsides like those we can see out of the window.

Provide a small dish with a small amount of black and white paint and show your toddler how to finger paint the clouds.

Words of advice

Don't get washing powder in your eye.

I know, it sounds obvious doesn't it.  You'll be amazed how easily a granule of powder can flick up as you're hurrying to pour it into the drawer.  
It's a painful mistake to make.  
As I am neither permanently blinded nor in hospital you can tell that thankfully in my case the error wasn't too serious.  
Just serious enough to temporarily blind me as my eyes streamed and I tried very hard not to rub the offended one as that made things much more painful.  The thought ran through my head that if I couldn't fix it I would need to run next door to ask the neighbour to help / run me to hospital.  Thankfully the little ones were entertaining one another on the sitting room floor.  I was able to grope my way to the bathroom sink and throw lots of cold water at my face, which allowed me to see out of the other eye, so I could find the eye lotion and bathe the painful one.  In turn the bathing soothed and washed out the eye enough that I could examine it and find and wash out the remaining stubborn granule from under the lower lid.  
After that I was fine.  Eye bright red and watering for another hour, which led to concerned looks and cuddles from Little C, but fine.

I can't say I'll take more care next time - how do you take more care loading a washing machine?  Besides, when you wash at least one load every day what with food, poo, paint, sick, dribble, cloth nappies, towels, bedding and so on, you quite often shove it in without much thought.  Still, I will try not to get any more in my eyes.

Aims for the Week

Work through the lethargy - get stuff done!

I want to get a few of the jobs that have been sitting on my "to-do" list for a very long time done and out of the way.  The longer the job has been sitting on that list the better I feel when I finally tick it off.

Best pics from July

Little C teaches Little Sis how to use the baby gym 

chilling in the outdoors

Happy Birthday bike

just sucking my thumb

what a gorgeous poser

Little C's sunflowers

are we painting the box or the legs?

our latest garden inhabitant - driving the waggy-tailed-one bonkers!

Book Review - "The Wild Places"

"The Wild Places" by Robert Macfarlane

This is another travel-type book.  This time the author sets off on journeys around the UK, searching for "wildness" to travel and sleep in.  To begin with he aims for places far from the beaten track, searching for remoteness and hardship as his definition of wildness.  He aims for remote islands, beaches and mountains, including a very lonely and cold night up Ben Hope in the very north of mainland Scotland in winter.  Gradually, as he travels to river valleys, sand-spits, lost roadways and tors, sleeping out in varying weathers and seasons, and describing it all with eloquent poetic prose, he discovers that wildness isn't necessarily to be found only in remote places, but can also be lush unfettered growth and foliage, even in a very small place, like the crack in a limestone pavement, or the hedgerows around his home of Peterborough.


There are some heavier bits, and the prose, while eloquent and beautiful, can be a bit slow-going at times, but for a peaceful trundle around beautiful parts of our island, this is a good book.

Another little gift doll

Just a quick one, but here is my latest successful completion:


This is Lauren, a first birthday present for my little niece:

I've previously made these on here for Little C and my other niece, and at some point will start making for Little Sister.