Frazzy Dazzles

The Golden Child is due to be a part of the school production towards the middle of the year. He has been in one of these productions already and it was a wonderful experience for him.

I am a bit excited about him taking part again. This time he is a little older and wiser and I think that he will get a lot more out of the experience. He is to be a ‘Tap Dog’. He will be dressed as a builder all rough and rugged and will be stomping his heart out in a pair of boots on the stage with all those in his class. Very blokey! I think it will be great….

…but that is not what this is about. While at a meeting for the production helpers the other day The Golden Child’s teacher approached me. He asked if I could do a bit of sewing for him. Could I make some of these…

These are the shells of juggling ‘balls’. The school circus group (there was NEVER a circus group when I was at school!) needs to be supplied with juggling ‘balls’. I agreed that yes I would run a few up for him…how many?

A dozen?…no…two dozen?

I agreed and backed away quickly before they became three dozen! Ha!

So last night I set about cutting, sewing and filling with rice these little bags until I was finished and had these little delights laying in front of me.

There are more than are shown here but at the time that I took the photo…my husband was ‘quality testing’ a selection of them!

The Golden Child went off to school this morning with a bag full of treasures to present to his teacher. I hope that it starts his day off well and sets the tone for a great day to follow!

Now I just have to make some more for his father, his sister and of course The Golden Child. One thing just leads to another doesn’t it?

I have been looking at some of the lovely blogs out there at the moment. In particular I have been loving the things that I have seen here at Hillary’s . She seems to be finding her way through the maze of what to do with a little girls hair just like I am.

The Little Bush Princess is the possessor of beautiful hair. She has honey blonde curls that love to hang across her face if they are not tamed or restrained in some way. But store bought clips on their own don’t stay in her hair. Her hair is too fine and the clips continually slip out.

But what if there was a little felt between her clip and her hair…maybe that might keep them in place. So together, The Little Bush Princess and I set about rummaging through my felt, thread and button stashes until we came up with a few colour combinations that we liked and here are the results…

The flowers have a little identical sister to make a pair but the heart and the carrot are one offs with no partner. They are a little too big to be joined by another on such a little head. We made the carrot to wear at Easter…but The Little Bush Princess could not wait and it made its maiden voyage off to Pre-School yesterday…what must the other mothers have thought? Ha!

In every refridgerator there are things that are just your basic essentials. You will always find milk, butter, cheese and tomatos in our refridgerator. You will also usually find cooked chipolatas on a plate ready for the kids to snack on when they get a little hungry.

Likewise you will also usually find a stock of homemade play dough wrapped up in cling wrap on one of the lower…children’s reach friendly shelves. We usually have all the colours of the rainbow and two kinds of green (the children’s favourite colour).

Every now and then these little parcels become immune to my attempts to revive them with a little more water or a splash of extra oil. This was the case today. At that point there is no denying the need to make a fresh batch.

Now I am sure that everyone out there has a recipe for homemade play dough…but this is ours.

You will need:

2 cups of plain flour

4 tablespoons of cream of tartar

2 tablespoons of oil

1 cup of salt

2 cups of boiling water

food colouring

We put our flour and cream of tartar into a large mixing bowl. While in another we mix the salt with the boiling water and oil. By mixing the salt and the boiling water at this point you improve the consistency of the final dough as it disolves a large proportion of the salt before it is mixed with the flour.

If you only wish to make your dough one colour then you can add your food colouring to the water/salt/oil mix. This will give you the evenest colour with the least amount of effort.

Combine all of your ingredients in the bowl that holds the flour and stir until it is all combined. Basically that is it. All that is left is to turn it out and knead the dough.

the beginnings…

coming together nicely

out on the board

a pea green beauty

If you prefer (as we often do) to make many colours from your batch then do not add your dye to the salt mix and instead seperate the final dough mix into smaller bundles and add the dye to the finished dough. Now knead it until your little bundle is evenly coloured.

This can be quite a lovely thing to do. The dough is warm and plyable and you can feel it as it becomes more and more silky. All part of the wonderful and simple chemistry that is play dough creation.

The only thing left to do is to set up an irresistable game…

and enjoy the fun to follow

birdies…a big favourite around here!

simple things and simple fun makes the best memories…

There is something about our little house. There is always a game afoot somewhere. As you walk around you will find little groupings of things. Our daughter is very ‘into’ families. There has to be a Mumma, a bubba and a Dad. Sometimes a brother gets a look in, depending on how many ‘like’ objects she can find. It can be a gaggle of rubber ducks on the bathroom cabinet. A collection of ‘like’ shells on the craft table or in this instance a Mumma dog and her little puppies….

I found this happy little family set up in her brothers room after she had left for her first day of pre-school. My heart just melted and I had to just leave them as they were. Who am I to get in the way of a nursing mother? I should point out that I never brought myself to break them up. They just naturally moved on to different games with the children.

….and besides I was feeling a little bit delicate that day. The day that my baby left me to go to pre-school was a huge one for me. I did nothing but walk around the house picking things up and putting them back down again in different places, pacing the house like a mother tigress just waiting until her cubs were back in their den. So you see, I couldn’t break up this little family above. I just couldn’t!

Her brother is less about families and more about make believe. At the moment Harry Potter is his thing. It has been for a while now. He is listening to all of the talking books read by Mr Stephen Fry. He is loving them and they only seem to fuel his Harry Potter play.

The other night he came running around the corner and plunged his hand into the ‘Harry Potter drawer’ of his toy baskets and pulled out his invisibility cloak. Then he haired off around the corner and out of sight. After a few minutes I followed him and found him under the cloak listening to Harry Potter. Obviously Harry Potter had been using his invisibility cloak and our little man needed a prop. And he has any number of Harry Potter props…he robes that he is wearing below were part of his 5th birthday gifts and it has more than paid for itself in the hours of play it has been part of!

I chuckled and left him to it. I love the innocence of imaginative play. It is such a powerful tool in the hands of a child. I still smile thinking about him under that invisibility cloak…I love it. I love them!

…… oh and I love this…..

This is the magic wand that my little man made me for my birthday. Doesn’t it just look like it could do some serious magic???

If only I could figure a way to wave it over my thighs and reap some real magic rewards!

On a Saturday morning we all get out of bed early and organise ourselves to get out the door by 8.30. We are getting better at it…it wasn’t always so though!

We go out so early so that the kids can go to swimming lessons at a local indoor swimming pool. We do this all year round. In the winter it is HARD for us and the children…but it means when the warmer months come the children are ready to use the skills that they have learned at the indoor pool in the outdoors. It gives them exercise in the months when getting out can be a bit difficult and it means that we start our Saturday early instead of languishing in bed. Although I think that some days that is exactly what we all want to do!

After swimming we go around the corner to a little bakery and buy the children a warm bread roll to boost them up after all their efforts. The trip home often turns into a bit of a drive where we chat and nut out what we are going to do for the weekend and just enjoy some time together. This week my husband took us to a small village about 15 minutes drive from ours. It is a ‘weekend’ town. It has lots of cute shops but they mostly only open on the weekend. I love it there because there is a great fabric shop. The kids and my husband like it because next door is a rockin’ little lolly shop with jar after jar of sweet goodness.

This weekend I ducked into the fabric store while my family went in search of sugar. And this is what The Little Bush Princess came out with….

Sweet sugar coated kittens dressed in bright little frocks complete with hair bows, gathered little skirts and a pocket. I loved their sorbet colours, the fine little pieces of sugar that drifted off them and how well each one was formed!

I should point out at this point that although my daughter loves the lolly shop….I don’t know if she is so excited about eating their wares. These little kittens remain just that. Perfect little kittens. I don’t think that she has eaten one! Maybe it is all just about the thrill of the chase and seeing what she could get! The Golden Child came out with a bag of chocolate frogs. And in true form he has shared them around to everyone each time he has dipped his hand in the bag. He makes me so proud!