A Very Eastery Good Friday

We managed to squeeze a lot of Eastery activities into our Good Friday this year, with egg painting in the morning and hot cross bun making in the afternoon. This was the first year the girls' decorated boiled eggs for Easter and they both loved it. Even Little was taken with it and didn't try to suck the paint brush once.

They both had lovely new egg cups from Grandma and Papa to sit their eggs in and let their creative side run wild. Poppet's design involved a lot of pink whereas Little went for a more multi-coloured approach.

I'm not sure how they will feel about flinging their eggs down a hill tomorrow; both are really fond of eggs and in particular of their painted ones. The whole practice may seem a bit twisted to them. Little especially, I am guessing, will not want to waste good food. 

In the afternoon, we tried our hand at some homemade hot cross buns for the first time. These were a big success and tasted amazing hot from the oven so we will definitely make them again in future years.

     

The dough was very sticky so Poppet only tolerated it for a short while before an extended hand washing session was called for. She loved grating the nutmeg in and rolling the lumps of dough (not sticky by this point) into balls. 

She was very excited to see "they got bigger!"after we left them to rise, and loved using the 'special pen' and 'special paint' to do the crosses (she needed some help holding the bag to squeeze it out). We did some hot 'A' buns, as well as some N, M, S, and D ones too. Tasted lovely!

Poppet: 3yrs 3mos

Little: 18mos

Cress Heads

My sister recently sent me a picture of some cress heads she found online so we rose to the challenge and attempted some ourselves;

I was a bit confused with the concept initially but my sister was very understanding and helpfully pointed me in the right direction.

So with our eggs hard boiled and the insides carefully scooped out (and used to make sandwiches - we'll call those the control group sandwiches), we were ready to start work on our cress heads. First Poppet very gently stuffed the empty eggshells with cotton wool. She was very gentle indeed. Then she had to make their faces. The first egg got goggly eyes but the other two she only wanted to use pen on. She carefully drew on eyes, a nose, a mouth, eyebrows and ears. She also requested "sparkly bits" (sequins) so one cress head got some extra embellishment.

Now her favourite part - water spraying. She sprayed the cotton wool to make it damp and sprinkled cress seeds on to it.

Then we left them on a sunny windowsill and she sprayed water on them everyday, waiting for 'their hair' to grow.

Poppet was very excited to see the shoots start to appear!

She obviously took the hair thing to heart as we found the cress like this one day ..................

After a week it was time to give them a haircut. By this point the goggly eyes had fallen off and Poppet's excuberant spraying had washed off their pen faces so they were just egg shells with cress growing in them. Next time we will use permanent markers!

Poppet was in charge of the cress cutting, Little was a surprisingly accomplished egg peeler.

Our egg and cress sandwiches went down a treat! Poppet polished off her whole plate, which was amazing considering she just nibbled at the 'control group' cressless sandwiches the week before. It goes to show you that when little ones have helped make something they are far more likely to eat it. Little however was not a fan of the cress. 

Poppet: 3 years 

Little: 1 year

Egg Box Daffodils

Poppet really likes daffodils. Whenever she sees them she exclaims "for your wedding mum!" and picks some for me (I am already married so I am not sure why she thinks I am due another wedding).

We have a big clump in the garden that she had been eagerly checking everyday, waiting for the first one to bloom. Now we have a beautiful little patch of yellow in the garden.

While we were waiting for them to bloom we made some very simple paper ones - first Poppet painted some egg box cups yellow. While they dried I made a flower template and cut out some flower shapes from yellow card (Poppet is very keen to help with any sort of cutting activity so to pacify her while I got on with it she got some scraps to cut up). I put a fold in each petal to make the flowers look more 3D.

Poppet glued an eggcup on to each flower.

Then we put the flower on a ball of blutak and carefully pushed a nail through the middle to make a hole. It felt very Blue Peter-esque. Poppet liked it.

Poppet carefully threaded a pipe cleaner through the hole to form the stem.

Our daffodils sit merrily in a vase, brightening up the room. My mum recently visited and took a few hours to realise they were not real.

Poppet: 3yrs 2mos

Little: 1yr 6 mos

PS We have found the pipe cleaners a little too bendy, I'd use straws next time.

Paper Christmas Wreath for Toddlers

Ever since we made a wreath for our front door Poppet has enjoyed spotting them when we are out and about, and she was very happy when she opened our picture Advent calendar and found a picture of a wreath one day! 

We decided to make a paper one that the girls' could have indoors. It was really easy and combined two of Poppet's loves - cutting things up with scissors and glueing!

I cut a circle out of the middle of a paper plate to form the base of our wreath, but you could also just cut a circle from an old cereal box.

I got out our red and green foam shapes and we roughly tried to cut them into leaf and berry shapes (really roughly!). Poppet is still getting used to using scissors; it takes her a lot of effort to open and close them so she is so pleased with herself whenever she does actually manage to cut the smallest bit off. I also added red pompoms, and lots of green tissue paper that we ripped up into small pieces.

Then Poppet just had to glue on green bits until the plate was covered. After a while she was asking me to help her because she had glue all over her fingertips and the tissue paper was sticking to her rather than the plate which was making her frustrated. Together we managed to glue all the green bits on, (using lots and lots of glue). Poor Little wanted to help so badly, she found some tissue on the floor and reached up to stick it on to the plate. But only this morning I found her eating Sudocreme out the pot so she just can't be trusted around art materials yet!

Can you spot Little desperately trying to join in?!

Poppet then stuck all of the 'berries' on, and it really looked like quite an effective wreath. We left it to dry and then I stuck it to her bedroom door. However when Poppet saw it she demanded that I move it to the window so that "Santa can see it". And so it begins!

Poppet: 2 yrs 11 mos

Little 1yr 2mos

Homemade Christmas Tree Decorations: Walnut Babies & Dried Orange Slices

Our Advent activity calendar yesterday instructed us to make some Christmas tree decorations and I have been wanting to have a go at making walnut babies ever since I first saw them on Red Ted Art.

I split a walnut into two halves by carefully inserting a knife into a weak point and wiggling it around a bit until it opened. We took a half each, and it was a lovely activity for us to do together side by side (as usual we do these kind of crafts while Little is sleeping, poor Little always missing out!). Poppet said she was making a cot for baby Jesus.

We cut some little bits of green ribbon and glued them into the shells, then left them to dry a little bit while we worked on making our babies. We didn't have any wooden beads to use as heads like the instructions specified but instead used cotton wool tightly packed into sheer beige material (leftover from Grandma's wedding outfit!) and tied with thread (we found out how to do that here). We secured a pipe cleaner in the head as well, that would form the body.

I trimmed the pipe cleaner and then wound them round Poppet's finger to curl them into a body shape.

Our babies

We cut tiny scraps of fabric and used one piece to make a little 'pillow' and one to make a little blanket. We glued the pillow into the walnut shell, then glued the baby in and finally covered the blanket in glue and tucked it around. It was quite fiddly so Poppet needed assistance but she was fascinated by it all.

With our babies all tucked up in their walnut cots all that was left was to draw a face on which Poppet was very keen to do. I did mine first while she watched eagerly then passed her the permanent marker.

She did a great job but always wanting to go one better, she decided to give her baby 'eyebrows' as well!

She is so proud of her little walnut baby hanging in the tree! They look so cute.

We also made some very quick and easy orange slice tree decorations. I had already dried some slices of orange, so all we had to do was push a skewer through to make a hole then thread a piece of ribbon through it to tie it up with. 

I love how they look in the tree. Obviously so did Little because she would make a beeline for the orange slices, pull them off the tree and take them away to chew on them. Poppet would retrieve them and hand it back to me complaining that her sister had "wet it". So we have hung them high up now out of Little's reach.

Poppet: 2yrs 10mos

Little: 1yr 2mos

Bird Cakes

I got the things out to make these but then was distracted by a phonecall and by the time I was done I found Poppet had already begun without me. I found her trying to use the lard as a glue to stick pieces of twine onto the yoghurt pots. So yeah there was quite a bit of lard smeared about the place and over Poppet so it wasn't the best start to the morning!

Poppet playing with the lard

Is lard meant to smell horrible -or had I left it out the fridge too long? Either way it was a really yucky thing to work with and I don't think I want to buy it again. The birds will just have to make do with shop bought birdcakes in the future -not that they are even going near the bird cakes we lovingly made!

We followed the instructions on the RSPB website. We basically just squelched together birdseed and lard, it was pretty easy. Poppet got really stuck in and didn't seem bothered by the disgusting smell.

We then packed it into yoghurt pots. We had pre-threaded these with twine - I made a hole in the bottom of the pots and then Poppet tried hard to thread the twine through, but it was pretty difficult so I fed the twine through until it was just poking out, and then she would grab hold of it and pull it through.

We put it into the fridge to chill until the next day and then went out into the garden to find places to hang them. Which was surprisingly difficult as our garden has no trees in it. We hung a few on an old bird table, and the rest on the washing line poles and shed.

I have yet to see a single bird eat from one of our cakes.

Poppet: 2yrs 10mos

Little: 1yr 1mos

Egg Box Bats!

I have well and truly missed the boat with this one! But I figure I already have the photos so I might as well do the post, if nothing else it will remind me to do them (better) next year! I found the idea on Happy Clippings via Pinterest, their bats are a million times better than our ones but ours still looked great hung around the playroom/dining room in the run up to Halloween. And Poppet really loved making them. She likes bats because of the one that features in the Julia Donaldson book 'Monkey Puzzle' so was excited to be making a bat. And she made them entirely herself apart from I cut the wings outs (despite her cries of "I do it mum!")

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 To make them you need:

• egg boxes
• ribbon (in halloween colours preferably so orange or black, I didn't have any so we used gold and lime green)
• black paint
• a skewer/pencil/something to make a hole
• goggly eyes 

However I stumbled into difficulties pretty early on in proceedings when I realised we didn't have any black paint so was debating bundling the girls into the pushchair to make an emergency dash to the shops (we have a lot of these type of 'emergencies'). This sounded really unappealing and somewhere in the depths of my mind I seemed to recall that you can make black paint but I have never been good at that colour mixing malarky, I can just about remember that blue and yellow makes green and that is it. So a quick check with my good friend Google revealed that indeed, you can make black paint by mixing equal quantities of blue, yellow and red.

So we did that and as if by magic, black appeared! Poppet was as impressed by this as I was. I cut the egg boxes into 3 cup sections, and trimmed them so they would sit flat on the table. Then I cut 'wing shapes' from the two outer cups (n.b. could do better). Poppet's job was then to cover them in black paint which she did happily. We should have done the inside of them too but didn't think of it at the time.

We had some black paint left over so to use it up Poppet did some black handprints to look like a spider. You have to paint your hand black but not the thumb, so your spider has 8 legs. She really liked doing this. We added goggly eyes to the finished spider and cut him out and hung him up on a ribbon as well but I didn't get a photo of this so you will need to take my word for it.

Once the bats are dry (or, if you are like us, still tacky but you are too impatient to wait any longer), stick on some eyes and then make a hole in the top to hang them from. Poppet insisted she make the holes so under my supervision she carefully pushed the skewer through the tops.

And then carefully threaded a piece of ribbon through it (all great for fine motor skills/hand eye coordination!). I knotted the end for her a few times to keep the ribbon from falling out and our bats were finished! We made three in all, and they have now been packed away for next Halloween but only this morning Poppet was asking "where my bats gone?". 

Poppet: 2yrs 9 mos

Little: 1yr 1 mos

Jam Jar Pumpkins!

As soon as I saw this idea on Red Ted Art I made a mental note to try it ourselves. It combines two of Poppet's loves - glue and candles - so I knew it would capture her interest.

To make your pumpkin lantern, you will need a clean jam jar, orange tissue paper, black paper, a tea light candle (real or battery powered), watered down PVA glue and a paintbrush to apply it.

They really could not be easier to make. Start off by painting a layer of glue all over the jam jar, then cover the entire area with scraps of orange tissue paper.

Once you have covered all the glass, paint on another layer of glue to smooth all the tissue paper down, and then stick on a second layer of tissue paper. Apply another coating of the glue (this is the third and last!) to seal it all in and smooth it all down.

Finally, stick the bits of black paper in position to form the face, and paint some glue over the top of them to seal.

The finished luminaries are so simple, but look so cool when lit. A great alternative to the traditional pumpkin with the added benefit that they can be reused year after year!

The girls have enjoyed having dinner by flickering candlelight the last couple of days!

Poppet: 2 yrs 9 mos

Little: 1yr 1mos