Keeping Cool

It has been really hot here over the last week or so. Mostly we've been staying indoors where it's air-conditioned. E has lots of new toys to play with, or else she'll draw on her chalkboard or play the piano or watch Play School. On Christmas day it reached 40°C. We were lucky enough to spend some time with friends in their pool. Yesterday we got out of the house for a while and took E to Chipmunks (an indoor play centre). Here she is in the ball-pit:

Perhaps we're all overdoing the air-conditioning, as last night we had a blackout for a few hours. At least it was around sunset, not at the hottest part of the day. It still got hot in here, though. E cooled off with a candle-lit bubble bath.

How's the weather where you are?

-Polly

Happy Birthday, E

E is 2! As a big 2-year-old, there's some things that she just MUST do: like wearing pigtails and taking her own lid from her yoghurt tub.

To celebrate, we spent a whole day at Scitech. Then we came home and had a little party,

with blowing out candles:

...eating cake:

...opening presents:

...and playing with balloons:

She wore her new Dora the Explorer party dress, too.

Here's a clearer picture of the cake:

I made it using the instructions in the Women's Weekly "Kids' Party Cakes" book that my sister gave me. I used strawberry packet cake for the body and a chocolate cupcake (recipe from "The Joy of Vegan Baking") for the head. I changed the decorations a bit from the book and I think mine turned out cuter. I gave the ladybug lollipop antennae, malt sticks for legs, piped icing pupils and smile. I also used dark chocolate melts for the spots instead of the suggested 'freckles'.

I think we succeeded in making E's birthday extra special. Thankyou also to all the interstate family who sent gifts in the mail. ^_^

-Polly

Playdough

I made up a new batch of playdough recently. For the green, I added what I thought was a lot of peppermint essence to make it smell nice. It still just smells like playdough. Here it is with a picklebums duck puppet and some dried kidney beans:

E called the grey playdough, "moondough", because it looked like the moon when I rolled it into a ball and she does like all things 'space'. I added silver glitter to that one.

I also made blue and yellow. It keeps really well in zip-lock bags in the fridge.

-Polly

Alternatives to a Paintbrush

This week, E had a lot of fun painting with some new techniques.
First, I gave her some empty toilet-paper rolls and some kitchen-sponge paint pallets (ideas both from Mummy Musings & Mayhem). The cardboard rolls make neat circle prints on the paper.

After a while, E decided to get her hands into the paint, too. She even picked up the sponges and did some painting using those.

Another technique that I introduced was this idea from Making Boys Men. It's simply using a balled up plastic bag instead of a paintbrush.

This could also be interesting if you covered the ball with something even more textured like bubble-wrap. I think that all of these paintings would work well as home-made wrapping paper (particularly if we used thinner paper), but really we just did it as a fun activity for E.

-Polly

Paper-Plate Jellyfish

Last week E requested that we make a jellyfish. We'd previously done "J is for jellyfish". We did drawing and play-acting and saw some real jelly fish at the aquarium. This was the first time that we actually 'made' one. So here it is. How to make a jellyfish.

Materials (for one jellyfish):

• 1 paper plate
• scissors
• masking tape or double-sided tape
• paper streamers
• coloured markers
• (optional) string

Method:

Cut the paper plate in half. Stick a row of tape (sticky-side up) along the straight edge.

 Tear the streamer into pieces approximately the length you want the tentacles. Stick each piece to the tape. We made 10 tentacles for our jellyfish.

Put some more tape around the outside of the plate.

Stick the other half of the plate on top.

Colour and decorate your jellyfish however you wish.

All done!

You can then add a bit of string to the top if you would like to hang it up. 

E just had fun swirling it around and singing "Two Jellyfish" (we made two).

Happy crafting,

-Polly

Bugs

Here's some little visitors that we've found in our garden recently:

I'd love a macro lens for our camera. My phone doesn't do such a bad job, though, does it?

-Polly

Cherry Festival

We love to take drives "down south". This weekend we headed to the cherry festival in Manjimup. It was good fun, especially for E. Here she is on the bouncy castle:

We were lucky enough to get a turn while there were only a couple of other kids there, kids about her size, too.

Here she is in the petting zoo:

There were lots of stalls selling everything from handicrafts to live yabbies. We saw "Doopa dog" and the vintage cars and E even joined in a circus workshop. She also spent a lot of time on the playground.

We didn't see everything that there was to see, but it didn't matter. We had a good day. :)

-Polly

Icy Hearts

What do we do when it's 40 degrees C outside?

Stay indoors and play with ice. :)

Earlier in the week, we had a couple of really hot days and I thought it would be the perfect time to give E this activity. I coloured some water using food dyes and froze it in a heart-shaped muffin tray. That's it. I put them in a tub with a few ordinary ice cubes. They were a lot of fun to play with.

They were fun to stack.

Some rubber ducks got in on the fun.

When the ice started to melt, it made icky-looking green water. We added some dish-soap bubbles.

I actually refilled the muffin tray and we've done this activity a few times. One batch had glitter added. The glitter wasn't really noticeable until the ice melted. Then we had pretty, glittery water. :)

We also introduced a second tray for transferring the slippery ice to and a strainer-spoon and a few small containers for scooping and filling. Lots of fun for a hot day or two.

How have you been keeping cool?

-Polly