Summer holiday goings on

Continuing with my activities for the summer holidays here is a run down of what we are up to today...

Lots more playing in the garden, it's supposed to be raining tomorrow so we need to make the most of the sun.

Baking! This is less stressful for me that crafty messy play because at the end of it you at least get to eat something yummy!

While I am at it I shall try and share my tips for making it as stress free as possible.

1.  Unless your child is old enough to help work the scales measure out everything in advance so that the activity is more one of pouring and mixing

2.  Adjust how you do things a little.  For example, I wouldn't normally use a pastry brush to butter my dish but N can understand the concept of "painting" the dish so it's not so messy (I got this idea from watching Katy's "I can cook" on cbeebies.

3.  Avoid your child getting frustrated by recognising the things they CAN do.  N is really good a cracking eggs so we do it in a dish first in case we get bits of shell escaping in but she is always proud of herself when she achieves it

4.  Make sure they are working at a sensible height.  I let N stand on a chair so she can reach the work surface, you can buy special things but this does the job as long as I stay close so she is safe.

5. Enjoy your spoils! (in this case with some cbeebies)

Today we made baked oatmeal, ideal because it is a shove-everything-in-and-mix type of recipe

Ingredients:

3 cups oatmeal
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup soft butter
2 eggs
2 cups milk
2 teaspoons baking powder
A handful of sultanas

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celcius

Mix all ingredients together and pour into 13 x 9 inch buttered pan.

Bake at 190 degrees for 25 minutes. (so said the recipe but my oven is rubbish and it took an extra 10!)

M is now having a nap so I let N finish her toadstool picture from yesterday

and the finished article (well, once the glue is dry)

We have a friend coming round to play this afternoon so that will just take care of itself!  How are you occupying your little people today?

I have a confession

I am not a fan of the summer holidays.  I know I am not alone in feeling like this but I am also aware it can sound a bit like "I don't like having my children around".  The reality is I LOVE having my kids around but I often feel a little overwhelmed by the idea of occupying them with stimulating, not overly expensive activities for 6 or 7 weeks.  Pile on top of that the fact that I am growing another one (I'm now more than 22 weeks) and that my kids are too young to put to a lot of the summer activities like sports, church clubs or play schemes and I have a lot of time to fill up and limited energy with which to do it!

With this in mind I have decided to make sure we do one "fun" thing (for my eldest this means messy) every day but am ok with the fact that at 3 she can come up with some things to do for herself as long as I can provide a few toys, her little sister loves to join in too, and also for sunny days we have an amazing garden for the kids to play in.

I thought I would share with you the "things" I come up with so if, like me, you are feeling a little overwhelmed I might be able to inspire you to do one or two things.

Today we started the day with our sand and water table, it is the first time we have had it out all summer so the first activity was actually cleaning it ready to be used but the kids enjoyed the basin of bubbly water almost as much as they enjoyed the actual sand and water when it came!

I am also trying to do something with my eldest every afternoon while the little one naps, today we have taken inspiration from this blog and are making some footprint toadstools (although we don't have any paper plates so I cut some shapes out of an empty cereal box instead).  Currently, while I write this blog, the three year old is learning a lesson in patience as we wait for the paint to dry,  It's definitely a lesson in progress.

Holidays!

Is it really a week since I posted, I knew it wasn't yesterday but I didn't think it was that long!

Oh well, I am excited, for it is only 4 sleeps (if Naomi sleeps through, which she is currently doing every second night!!) till we go on holiday!  We will be taking the long drive to the frozen North to visit our families in and around Aberdeen.

Travelling with a small child has it share of stresses and complicating factors though!  There is, of course, the sheer amount of "stuff" they need.  I went through all the stuff we took last time and started trying to think of things we could take out so that we could avoid taking the roof box (I can't think what those things do to your fuel economy but I would really rather not do the 800 mile round trip with that attached to the top of my already quite brick-like family car!).  At one point I started telling my husband we could manage with only two dummies rather than six, he quite rightly pointed out that although this was true, it was unlikely to make much difference to the overall capacity of our car!  I likened the process to editing an essay at university, where what you needed to do was take out a whole paragraph, but being unable to decide which one, you would instead go through taking out some "the"s and maybe hyphenating a few words here and there.  In the end I am not sure I downsized the equipment at all, though I did promise to pack less outfits and sleep attire for the child! (Though I also swapped the bouncy chair we took last time for a bumbo, that definitely takes up more space!).  I fear that in a few days, when push comes to shove (quite literally) we will just admit defeat and put the roofbox (or sail) on top of our already quite big car!

The next problem is one of distance.  It is clearly unreasonable to expect Naomi at 6 months old, to sit in her car seat for 8 hours like her Dad and I used to do before she was around (well, we didn't sit in her car seat, we wouldn't fit!) so you have to start thinking about how to break up the journey and you start thinking of various relatives you haven't spoken to in years and phoning them up to ask if you can stop in for a cup of coffee or even to stay the night so the child can chill out for a bit.  Last time we travelled Naomi was only on breastmilk, getting food into her that way didn't take all that long and wasn't all that messy, this time we will need to think about how and when and where we can shovel some mush into her every few hours too!

The car has another issue too, if Naomi starts to cry on the motorway (which is inevitible, she hates the car and we spend a lot of time on the motorway) there is nothing you can do, you can't pick her up, you can't shove my boob in her mouth (I wish I could find a way) and if you have bravely sat in the front you can't even get into the back to tell her it will all be okay.  I feel like motorways are places of stress for me, I am examining every sign to see how far it is to the next service station and then you have to decide whether to gamble on her making it to the next one or do you stop now, thus lengthening the journey even further!

I am very excited for my holiday, it will be great to see family and friends again, but please won't someone invent a teleportation device, I find myself dreading the thought of the drive!

I don't like the school holidays

I don't.  It's true.  The thing is, with only a baby at home, it makes no difference to me whether the schools are in or out.  I cannot afford holidays at the moment (well, not real ones, we're going to stay with our families for a bit) and so the price of holidays doesn't make any difference to me.

I hate the holidays because the baby groups that keep me so sane in a normal week get cancelled.  Especially for those groups run by volunteers I do understand that people need a break (because I used to volunteer with a baby group, pre-child) and I get that many of the volunteers have older children who they can't take along to the baby group and so school being out makes it difficult.  However, I need those groups!

Those groups are the things that mean at the end of a day I can have spoken words out loud that weren't necessarily about poo "isn't that a big one?!" or about the noise a cow/dog/monkey/giraffe makes (what noise does a giraffe make?)

Those groups are also places where I can feel I am making sure my (currently) only-child is getting some socialisation and having an opportunity to learn to share and not to hit other babies on the head!

Naomi also gets lots of opportunities to do things like painting or playing with other messy things that I could do with her at home but I actually find quite stressful, she has many opportunities with these groups that I could provide at home but I find much easier to do in a church hall!

Tomorrow is the first weekday of the school holidays where I live.  Instead of going to the baby and toddler group I will stay at home, I thought about taking Naomi swimming but the pool timetable has changed yet no-one has updated the website timetable and so tomorrow I will concentrate on finding out what times I can take her on other weeks!  I might do painting with her, but I'll probably stress out too much about the carpet in my rented house!