Scooping and Sorting

E has been playing with beans. :)

I've seen these sensory tubs all over blog-land and figured it was about time I put one together for E. Although I love all the themed ones that people come up with, I wanted to use what we already had at home and put it together in a short time. So, no theme for us this time. Our tub was filled with dried kidney beans, pom-poms of different sizes and colours, pipe-cleaners curled into spirals, a little fabric heart and bow, a plastic shot-glass, two silicone cupcake liners and two different sized scoops. In the picture, E is scooping beans into the little cup. You may have noticed one of her mo-men there, too. A couple of them got in on the action.

Later, we took the pom-poms from the tub and E did some transferring and sorting. Using kitchen tongs, she moved pom-poms between different bowls and sorted them by size and then by colour. She also got out a wooden spoon and mixed them around, pretending to make a cake (one of the 'bowls' was actually a cake pan). She poured the 'ingredients' into the pan and put it into the 'oven' (a cardboard box). Then she served the pieces back into the bowls. I love watching her imaginary play. :)

A couple of days later, we got out the beans again. This time I set it up as a 'spooning' and transferring activity. All the beans were in one bowl and I gave E the task of using a spoon to transfer them to a second bowl. She was very careful not to spill any, but the roasting tray was perfect for catching any spilled beans and really easy for her to carry, too. When she'd transferred all the beans, she picked up the bowl and poured them back into the original bowl and started again. I guess 'spooning' in the other direction seemed backwards.

-Polly

Garden Update

Here's some things that are going on in our little garden.

About a week ago, we bought a whole bunch of these stylidium plants from a local plant nursery. We finally gave our front garden a little love and got rid of a lot of weeds and moved some dirt around. We pulled out a couple of sad-looking grassy plants and planted the stylidium along the side of the driveway. It's a shrub native to our area, so hopefully it goes well without too much fuss. The last natives that I tried to grow all died because they were accidentally given the wrong fertiliser. We also added a cute little rosemary bush.

In the back garden, we've added a new lemon tree and lots of mulch. My husband planted a few petunias around the place to give a bit of extra colour and to hopefully attract a few good bugs. We've got these purple ones and some bright pink ones with the same white outline. The last lot of colourful flowers that we planted are still going well, seemingly getting bigger and brighter daily.

We have some veggies ready for picking, like this big kohlrabi. The last lot got made into fritters. Not sure what this one's destined to become.

I also picked a huge beetroot this morning and there's a bush full of (Japanese?) eggplants ready to be used before the grubs find them. Wandering around the garden, we still find little mushrooms popping up in shady places. Here's one taking a bow:

and an onion flower in the same pose:

Something else rather exciting is our first ripe nectarine. Doesn't it look so sweet and juicy? I'm itching to taste it... later, later...

So, obviously, we've been spending a bit of time in the garden over the last couple of weeks (while avoiding the hot sun in the middle of the day). How goes your garden?

-Polly

Mo-Men

November, or "Movember", is a time of year when some men grow extra facial hair to raise awareness for men's health issues. I've seen charity events and fundraisers under the "Movember" banner for issues such as prostate or testicular cancer and men's mental health. Neither E nor I are able to or willing to grow a moustache, but we had a little "mo" fun of our own.

Mo-Men

You will need:

• 5 empty toilet-paper rolls (or other cardboard tubes)
• 5 strips of coloured paper, about half the height of the tubes and long enough to go all the way around
• Coloured pencils
• This moustache template printed onto paper or thin card (or draw your own)
• School glue or any craft glue
• Some yarn, cut into 1-2cm long pieces (we used brown)
• 5 small pompoms (we used pink)
• 10 googly eyes

To make:
Using coloured pencils, draw and colour a clothing design onto each strip of coloured paper.
Wrap one strip around each cardboard roll, lining up the bottom edges, and glue in place.
Cut out the moustaches. Coat one side of a moustache with glue. Stick on lots of little pieces of yarn ('hair'). Do this for all 5 moustaches and leave to dry.
Once the glue is dry, stick moustaches into place on the cardboard rolls. Glue on pompom 'noses' and googly eyes.
You now have 5 little "Mo-men".

E began placing the yarn onto the templates one piece at a time, very carefully. She soon realised that it was much easier to pile on handfuls of the stuff. Once they were done, she spent a lot of time playing with her new dolls... they went for a walk along the table and said "hello, hello" a lot. They went for a drive in a shoebox 'car' and found a cardboard box 'house' to live in.

-Polly

Skinned Knees

E was so excited to go to the park to play some soccer with her new ball that she tripped and grazed her knees before she even got there. It didn't stop her from having a great time at the park. When she got home, we dealt with the skinned knees (and elbow and hands and chin).

Antiseptic cream, bandaids (including some Dora the Explorer ones), surgical tape and lots of shiny stickers. That should fix it. :)

Oh, and she also got some new shoes earlier in the week. Her "shiny shoes," as she calls them.

-Polly

Papercraft

E and I have both been busy with various crafts, many of which I won't be sharing because they were made as gifts that haven't been sent out yet. We don't want to spoil the surprise! Also, we recently bought some new woodworking tools. Yay, another new hobby for me. :)

Some crafts that I will share are some more of the paper toys that I've made. My favourite so far, and the most detailed that I've done, is the caterpillar from Constructing Wonderland by Alex McMenemy:

I've also made a Viking (found here)...

and I've made a rabbit from this set.

For a slightly different papercraft, I found this tutorial for an origami bow and made one as a cute embellishment on a wrapped gift.

-Polly

S is for Snake

The latest picture in our alphabet series is S for Snake. E still enjoys colouring these pictures and will remind me if we haven't done a new one in a while. On the day that we did our S for Snake picture, we did a lot of other snake themed activities, too.

Snakes are an easy shape to make, so anything could become a snake. Even our food was snakes. I saw this fruit snake online and wanted to try making one, but we had already eaten all of our strawberries. Here's our snake made from banana, peach and sultanas on a skewer and one that we made using a (soy) sausage with sauce and mustard:

I printed out the game sheet on this page and E played her first game of Snakes and Ladders. She hasn't really played any board games before. We played through once properly (E won) and after that E was more interested in experimenting with the counters (coins) and dice and tracing her finger up and down the snakes and ladders.

Another new activity for E was threading pasta 'beads'. I had previously coloured some left-over penne and left it to dry. We didn't have a large needle and the yarn we used was a little fuzzy, so E needed help threading the pasta. She did quite well for a first go and we turned her thread of pasta beads into a snake by gluing some googly eyes to one end of the 'snake'.

Having seen this super-easy origami snake online, I just had to make some. I ended up making three of them. I drew on some eyes with a blue marker and glued in little forked tongues. Originally only two of them had tongues, but E said that the tongue-less one wanted to be like his friends. E had great fun playing with these paper snakes and they're much hardier than some of the other paper toys that I've made.

The weather here is getting hotter and drier now, so maybe we'll see a real snake soon. Hopefully not hiding in all the straw mulch that we've just added to the garden.

-Polly

Ballerina E

No, we haven't enrolled E in ballet classes. She has a soft toy of the character "Angelina Ballerina". We don't watch the TV show, but she does like the toy and loves to point out that Angelina has a tutu and a crown. E will often wear her 'princess crown' that I made for her and dance around the house pretending to be Angelina Ballerina. We have a couple of Angelina board books that my husband found in an op-shop, one of which is called "Angelina Can...". It's a very simple book. "Angelina can... leap... spin... do an arabesque... etc." E loves to do "as Angelina can".

Today I made E a "no-sew tutu" using this short video tutorial. I had just enough tulle left over from another project and I already had the elastic on hand, too. I know this next photo is really blurry, but it shows E "doing an arabesque," her favourite ballet move.

E loves to dance around the house, which is great because it has been stormy here for the last few days and we haven't had much chance to run around outside. Her other favourite dance is "Gangnam Style". It's funny to watch her do that dance.

-Polly

Happy Halloween

So, yesterday was Halloween. We don't do trick-or-treating or anything like that, but we had our own little Halloween fun.

I sewed together some "bat wings" for E to wear around the house, following these instructions (found via Pinterest) and using an old t-shirt for the fabric. She certainly wore herself out 'flying' around like a bat. We read "Going Batty", by Charles Reasoner, which has been a favourite board book for quite some time. E loved to act like the bat in the book by saying "Boo!" too all her toys and going upside-down.

It was surprisingly difficult to find Halloween stickers in the stores this year. There were plenty of generic costumes and horrible-looking candies, though. So that E could do a Halloween collage, I printed off a page of cute Halloween drawings (and drew a few of my own) and cut them out. Then E, armed with a glue-stick, stuck them onto some paper and added some details with coloured markers. She made two of these collages, one A4 size, the other A3.

I've seen these little hand-print ghosts done various times before. Yesterday we had a go at making our own. E loves painting and making hand-prints. We simply used white paint on black paper. When they were dry, we added some googly-eyes and they were done. So simple, but so cute.

While we had the paints out, E did some other paintings as well. I gave her some more colours to use and she painted using a combination of brushwork and finger or hand painting. The white-on-black for the ghosts worked really well, so I gave her a piece of red card to paint on using the white and that turned out really well, too. She still wasn't done with painting, so she did some (more colourful ones) on standard white paper, too.

Li'l Death

Earlier in the week, I had cut out some bat shapes from felt, thinking I'd make some bat-bunting or something. I never got around to finishing it, but E used the shapes and other felt scraps to make pictures on an un-cut piece of craft felt. I did make some Halloween-y paper toys. I made a little coffin (from here) which E liked filling with all kinds of treasures from gum-nuts to crayons to socks. I also made the "Li'l Death" from urban threads. Unfortunately our printer doesn't print in black, so I made a white and greyish grim reaper.

We definitely went for the 'cute' side of Halloween this year. E was a bit worried by the little witch (a trick-or-treater, not much bigger than E) who came to our house, but she soon realised that the witch and her similarly spooky friends were friendly witches and such. E gave them a smile and a wave goodbye.

-Polly