Collections Part I

One of our favourite things is to collect treasure. Kat and I are avid car-booters and we are now passing this habit on to our children.

When we go out on walks, on holidays or just exploring we love to collect things. You can also make collections at home with buttons, jewels and and sparkly bits you have lying around.

Spring flowers, shells, pretty glass found in the sand, leaves, dead starfish, feathers and plastic from the beach. Its a great way for you to get the kids to learn about their surroundings and also walk without too much moaning.

As they get older, when you get home you can give them a board, tray or plate and they can make the treasure they've collected into a display and photograph it themselves.

Its a lovely reminder of your day and great fun.

Happy hunting love Tess x

Rainy Day Muesli

As it was raining after school Zephy and I decided to make some muesli. A lovely afternoon was spent cutting, bashing, grinding, mixing and then tasting our wares.

To make muesli you can add whatever you fancy to oats. 

Our ingredients are as follows

a bag of jumbo rolled oats
a bag of porridge oats
a bag of dried apricots (expertly cut up by Zeph)
some sunflower,pumpkin and flax seeds (ground by Zeph)
some sultanas
soem almonds
some brazil nuts (bashed by zeph)

you could add
some toasted flakes
some goji berries
some cacoa nibs
some cashews
some dates

Zephy really enjoyed cutting the apricots, bashing the brazils and then mixing it all up and sinking his hands into the muesli and enjoying the feel of it slipping through his fingers.

We then decided we should probably try it so we had muesli for supper and both thought it was delicious....mmmmm.

Messy self-portrait painting

Zephy, Stevie and I were wondering what to do when they both decided they wanted to paint. So I decided to draw a big self portrait of Zeph so they could paint on his clothes. They had other ideas!

I can pretty much guarantee that this happens every time I get the paints out. Zephy always ends up painting himself and not really painting what we started out doing. 

So I always have a warm bubbly bucket bath ready for after so I can dunk them in it and quite often they stay in the bucket playing for ages. The day we did this it was pretty chilly too.

The self portrait didn't really happen. So just to say that it doesn't really matter at all if what you started out to do doesn't end up how it should as long as it was fun along the way.

Happy messy painting love Tx

Pancake Day Races

I have been doing Pancake races ever since I can remember. My mum used to organise them in the village where we lived, and they were always great fun, so now I do them for my kids. We started the day with pancakes this morning and the first thing Zephy did was go straight to the cupboard to retrieve his yellow frying pan so he could practice his flipping!

Off they went to school with the promise of pancake racing at the end of the day. We met a few friends and the races began....

Rita was a bit peckish by the end... lucky we had lots of pancakes! It was a huge success and fun was had by all!

Happy Pancake Day 

love T (& K) x

Potato Races

 

We have been getting ready for Pancake Day (March 4th) in our house. Only we don't practice with pancakes we do it with potatoes! The kids love it and it seems to keep them occupied for ages. They often ask to play it after school as it means they can run around and burn off some energy. We just play it outside our house on the street.

What you need -

some potatoes or onions or boiled eggs or what ever you have in the veggie cupboard
some chalk
some spoons - Zephy uses soup ladles and Elfin uses big silver spoons

What you do -

draw a start line and a finish line on the pavement with the chalk and then start the races - get them to run, hop, skip, scoot, flip the spuds, do all the previous in slow motion, time the races and then get them to think of their own variations.

Its actually like egg and spoon races but it feels like pancake practice as its nearly here....woop woop, cant wait ....pancake recipe coming soon.

Happy potato racing x

Bird Kite

Download the bird kite here

Once upon a time we wrote a book called The Happy Campers. We set out to inspire people to camp purely for the fun of it, encouraging folk to relax about needing the right equipment or the perfect tent for a force nine gale. We admitted to bailing if the weather got too bad and suggested games to play if you felt like sitting it out. We wrote about fun things to do and stars to spot and we filled it with photographs of our lives and our adventures. We weren't sure if people were going to get it. But they did and we were very happy campers.

After the book came promotion opportunities and offers of TV deals but it never really felt, well, us. 

But one bit of promotion we did at Camp Bestival at Lulworth Cove was a really memorable experience. We put a little sign up outside our marquee expecting one or two kids to turn up to our bird kite making workshop (page.166 in The Happy Campers) and this is what happened...

It was as you can see a runaway success! luckily we'd done a large print run of the kite page as we were planning on flyering them or else there would have been some very disappointed children. Kat just about held her nerve in front of such a big crowd and the kids were absolutely mesmerized. It made our day and set us up for our other planned workshops - pinata extravaganza, tipi painting sessions and crazy races.

So now we present our little bird kite for you to have a go yourself. Go here to our templates section and click on the picture for a larger version. Left click on the large image and save to your computer. Feel free to print it out as many times as you like but please don't sell our images.

We hope to bring you more fun cut out and make projects to do with your own children. Enjoy!