Ladybird, ladybug, coccinelle

In all its glory with apologies for not fully wiping the plate for this picture

Well, I must say that I was quite pleased with the loveliness of this ladybird cake and it was pretty delicious too. I felt the licorice legs I had planned might contaminate too much cake for those who do not like it so I left them out. Six spots for my six-year-old Z1. Hurrah. I have also included a gratuitous shot of how happy Z2 was to bash the piñata. Enjoy!

The party spread (before arrival of pizza)

A VERY happy piñata bashing boy -he had been waiting DAYS for this moment

When you think you're ahead of the game but it turns out your're just about hanging in there

Last year, I had hearts of rage even though I generally have a reasonable affection for Valentine's day (but must admit to never having seen the relics of the venerable saint in my town of birth).

This year, I was all prepared with ideas in my head and a saved template on my computer. However, I had the wind taken from my sails by a post on Z1's class blog with the class list and an assurance that writing out each name would be a great writing exercise for the children. My schemes had mainly avoided Z1 having to write out much as I felt it would be tedious. Also, the bookmarks I had planned, glittery hearts with her name on them stuck to a lollipop stick - ta dah - a bookmark - were not conducive to having names written on them. We overcame the latter problem by putting the bookmarks in envelopes and, as for the tediousness, it turns out I had underestimated her tolerance for writing and she completed the task as well as decorating the envelopes with each classmate's favourite colour accompanied by frequent declarations about how awesome it all was.

Z2 helped a bit with glitter painting his hearts but I did most of the work. As for the beautiful bag you see in the righthand panel of the picture, Z1 decorated it but it was chiefly my effort as bedtime was nigh by the time we got 'round to it. Sadly, I was not paying attention to detail and the other side of the bag has an upside down heart. However, on a positive note, it did not fall apart when we were carrying it to school despite the fact that I ran out of sticky tape (Z1 gets through miles of the stuff for her various projects) and had to use a glue stick to put on the ribbon handles and seal up the bottom. Furthermore, it turns out there was a book fair at Z1's school this week making the bookmarks so very appropriate and on theme. I win after all.

The Remarkable Passage Tomb known as Newgrange and our Gingerbread House (unnamed this year)

I am posting this on the winter solstice, the 21st of December, which is marked on my Canadian calendar as "First Day of Winter". Now, Canadians, I know you know a thing or two about winter but considering the inches of snow and the temperatures that have fallen well below freezing in the past few weeks, I respectfully suggest that winter starts well before the 21st of December. Also, after the 21st of December, the days start getting longer again - it's midwinter, ok?

Note the light passes
right through the windows above
the door just like Newgrange...
sort of

The reason I am posting this on the 21st of December is the remarkable feat of engineering I unintentionally pulled off in my building of this year's gingerbread house from scratch ( for previous year's efforts, from kits, see here). This feat of engineering clearly reflects that of the ancient builders of Newgrange, where on this winter solstice day, as the sun rises at the passage tomb , it shines through a window above the entrance to the tomb and down a narrow passage right into the central chamber. As I built this year's house, my deep Celtic roots took over and, when I took the "before" photo, I saw that I had aligned the front and back windows. I am sure that if I lined it up this morning, on my kitchen table, the sun would have shone through our front door peephole, through the windows and onto the kitchen wall where a rainbow would have been projected. However, it was Saturday today so I didn't get up to check.

Bubbly, spicy, beautifully
fragrant gingerbread mix.

Due to the fact that the gingerbread in the kits I used before was barely worth eating, I decided to bake my own gingerbread this year. I have some experience of this though I had never attempted a building project before. I used this recipe after a spot of googling. What I really liked about this recipe was that I got to mix up sugar and molasses and spices in a boiling, bubbling, fragrant pot. It also meant that the dough was warm when I was kneading it and rolling it out*. The recipe says it makes 3 fair sized gingerbread houses at some point - that is rubbish, I didn't even have enough to cut out roof pieces to allow for big overhanging eaves for mine. However, I suppose "fair sized" is subjective.

Z1's side

Z1's side

Well, readers, I was rather delighted with the outcome. I was a nervous builder having read and seen pictures of gingerbread houses disastrously and tragically collapsing due to the icing glue being insufficiently gluey or too slow to dry. I warned Z2 to stay away while I was attempting construction but it was a simple, painless and successful process. We passed happy moments decorating with a system whereby I squirted on the glue (royal icing - this one, as it didn't require cream of tartar which I don't have ) and the Zeds stuck on the sweeties. I foolishly bought Tic-Tacs which don't look so well but, in my defence, I thought they would be orange, not white. I rather like the marshmallow tower that Z2 built.

Sofa cushion fort

After a while, Z2 tired of his task and went to relax in his fort. Z1

Back of the house
by Z1

stuck with it and decorated the back most magnificently as well as being responsible for the beautiful and welcoming front. The completed house is now in the process of having bits broken off for Z1's lunch box and Z2's breakfast and for me whenever I get the urge. It does taste very good and has the added bonus of making the kitchen smell nice...or at least the area around the kitchen table. A true triumph, really.

After

Before

* A drawback is that it seems to dry out quite quickly so it's really for immediate use.

Opting out

Festive coffee filter garland

Lazy weekends are somewhat harder to actually have at all relax and enjoy when you have delightful, enthusiastic and energetic young children. I had grand plans, one Saturday evening, to bring the Zeds swimming AND ice skating while Husband was off playing badminton. On Sunday morning, my weather app said -8C and Z1's earnest, wholesome and easy suggestion of a scoot to the nearby graveyard (it's lovely, honestly, it is- trees and peace) followed by Christmas crafts seemed like a lot of effort.

Snowflake 1

Magnificent snowflake number 2

Attempt one at crafts on this day was snowflakes from coffee filters which we made with some success last year despite being out in a café. I had even practiced two this year and was pleased with the first one until I made the magnificent second one. However, Z1 got frustrated very easily and my attempt to follow a template without actually marking it out on the coffee filter was less than impressive. Even Z1, who is usually quite kind and enthusiastic about my efforts was not inspired.

We stopped for lunch and, afterwards, I suggested painting the coffee filters. I rarely get out the paints but I figured I could just supervise while drinking tea so it seemed like a good plan. It was. They sloshed paint about on the filters, I have a wipe clean tablecloth and they didn't fight. The stroke of genius, on my part, was deciding to string them up as a garland as it meant I didn't have to leave them on the table to dry or risk the wrath of the Zeds by putting them into the recycling (at least, not yet).



 

 We did not go out scooting to the graveyard. 

From Recycling Bin to Train: A Sunday Story



A very happy looking train

An indicator that you may have let your daughter watch too much television on a lazy Sunday is that she starts squirming and looking for something else to do. At some point, you may realise that telling her to sit still and watch the movie is probably not the best parenting. Crafts are an appealing indoor alternative that, one can hope, will not involve having to move too far from the very comfortable sofa.

In fact, the initial material-gathering steps didn't require me to move at all. Z1, under my instruction, salvaged the egg carton (writing this post stirred up my carton vs. box internal debate once more and I had to read here to see what I'd settled on last year) from the recycling bin. I did assure her that the bin wasn't too yukky. She also got the scissors and Husband was intercepted on his way down the stairs with some items for the recycling bin, to see if he had any useful materials.

At this point, I moved from the sofa and, under direction from Z1:

1. got more cardboard (cereal box...cereal not quite finished so rolled up the bag and shoved it into the other open cereal box)
2. brought her a toonie and a quarter, so she could choose which size would be more suitable for train wheels (oh yes, she had decided to make a train by this point, forgot that important detail)
3. found the tape, which we keep on top of the microwave (of course we do, where else would one keep the tape?).



Side view

Her planning started well as she counted the dents on the top of the egg carton to see how many people she would need to fill them. However, once she started cutting out their bodies (rectangles of cereal box cardboard), she forgot how many she needed and just kept cutting until she tired of that task. I was drawing around the toonie and cutting out the circles which were to be wheels and people's heads.


She then instructed me to cut out the arms she had drawn. I pointed out that, as she had just drawn lines to be arms, I couldn't really cut them out. I was being a little belligerent at this point, truth be known. However, Z1 had a well of patience for me and my lack of initiative and cooperation. She calmly explained and demonstrated how to turn the lines into rectangles which could then be cut out to use as arms. Meanwhile, she was going through yards* of sticky tape to ensure the box would stay closed. I tried to just let her be but did remind her that wasting materials was not good craft practice.


T-shirts and trousers were then drawn and decorated by her, cut out by me and the assembling began. The once nude rectangles of cereal box had heads stuck on and t-shirts and trousers applied. She didn't bother with the arms I'd painstakingly drawn and cut. Pah. The chimney at the front was from Husband's old aftershave bottle and, if you look closely at the side view, you'll notice that one of the wheels had been destined to be a head to begin with.

Z2 asked where the driver was. Z1 told him the guy at the front was the driver. Everyone in the household is suitable pleased and impressed with Z1's train from recyclable materials. I trust you, dear readers, are too.

*I originally wrote "metres" here as I am a metric person but yards sounds better. Just thought you'd like to know.



Conquering Canadian Camping

Me and Zeds

I consider myself something of a veteran camper. Not a hardcore, out-in-the-woods-with-nothing-but-my-tent, camper but a civilized-campsite-with-toilets-and-showers camper.

Throughout my childhood and up to my teens, I went camping in France on family holidays. I have innumerable happy memories of these trips - hot sticky car memories, Vivaldi's Four Seasons while feeling slightly carsick, early morning zip sounds, discovering unexpected playgrounds, smelling other people's dinners in the evenings, earning a franc for finding a forgotten tent peg, the joy of parents coming into the water to splash, speaking Irish to confuse small Dutch children who spoke good English, walking up to the campsite shop in pyjamas to buy bread in the mornings, terrifying and exciting thunderstorms in a rattly tent...  With all this and the addition of living in Canada where camping and campfires seem almost obligatory, it is no wonder I was keen to bring the Zeds camping.


Preparation really started last year when I bookmarked a tent so that I'd be emailed if it was about to become a bargain. I read the reviews and ignored the bad ones. I am quite good at that. As it was our first family camping trip and, as I only realised after booking the site and buying the tent, Husband's first camping trip ever, we picked somewhere close to home. We did a test run of the tent in the garden and the Zeds slept in their sleeping bags for the week before we were due to go.  I was more proud of getting the tent back into its carry case after putting it up than I was of putting it up all on my own (with a little help from Z1).

I packed up the car , thinking of my dad all the time as I tried to do it as efficiently as possible - squeezing squishy things into tight spots and making maximum use of the space. I had lists stuck up in the kitchen and ticked them off as I got things done. I was the queen of camping organisation. Z2 had just graduated from nappies meaning less bulk to pack but also leaving me wondering a little anxiously how far away the toilets would be from our tent.


The Zeds on site

Our site? Oh, our site was glorious - large, shaded, secluded, backing onto the little river, not too far from the toilet but not so close we could smell it. Glorious and wonderful. Never mind the noisy, radio-playing neighbours across the river. Husband hadn't really expected neighbours, let alone noisy ones.

We put up the tent with careful attention to which way the door should face and started pumping up the mattresses. I was very impressed with the luxury of the air mattresses - a far cry from the canvas and rubber lilos that I was used to. I was, in fact, rather excited to try out our grand queen size air mattress but that fell through when I unfolded it to find that the stopper was not attached. I valiantly attempted to keep the air in by leaving the pump attached and sealing with bubble gum but, in the end, the Zeds top-and-tailed on one single mattress and me and Husband shared the other. Thankfully, we are somewhat of a miniature family and it was reasonably comfortable.

For the Zeds, a lot of the focus of the camping trip was on marshmallows and s'mores. I had bought a fancy extendable toasting fork, Husband set the fire and the Zeds were assured that after the hot dogs and burgers, they could toast marshmallows. Our fire was very smoky indeed. In fact, I think it contributed to my worst-headache-in-the-world-ever ™ (with apologies to those who suffer truly debilitating migraines - that phrase kept echoing in my head all night as I tried to sleep). However, we had deliciously smoky burgers and delectably charred hot dogs. Turns out the Zeds don't really like (smoky) toasted marshmallows.



Not the weather when we woke
after our first night but later on

We woke up in the morning, ready for Nutella on bread for breakfast only to find that we had committed the rookie mistake of leaving our cooler bag in the open. There were no bears to worry about but a pesky raccoon stole all our bread, marshmallows and chocolate biscuits. This was not a great start to a rainy camping morning but, luckily for us, it turned out that some campers in another part of the site were putting on a free-for-all pancake breakfast so all was well.

Despite smoke, headache and no double mattress, despite rain and stolen food, despite noisy camping neighbours and more trips to the toilet with Z2 than were really necessary (not 'cause he has just toilet-trained, though, turns out there was a bridge on the way to the toilets and he kept saying he needed to go so that we could play Poohsticks on the way back), I loved it. I have already been researching other sites which are radio-free and further away. I had memories triggered from unexpected sources  (notably the blast of warmth and smell of toothpaste intermingled with toilets in the wash block) at every turn and I welcomed them all.

You may also be interested to know:
On our return, when packing up the queen mattress to be returned for a refund due to the lack of a stopper, I found the stopper. Perhaps I was not the queen of camping organisation after all.

A Cake, for no other reason but F*** (with linguistic explanations)

A friend of my brother's in university was very fond of some of the expressions she encountered in Ireland. On of these was "For f***'s sake" which she misremembered as "For no other reason but f***" which seemed appropriate for this blog about a cake I made just because it looked pretty and not really because anyone in the house wanted to eat it.

Z1 wanted to make fairycakes (as I like to call them, being Irish and resisting the American invasion of "cupcake". In the interest of full disclosure, she was, in fact, asking to make cupcakes) on a Sunday afternoon. For some reason, I took against the idea of fairycakes and insisted it would be biscuits (ah, more linguistic divides between Europe and North America - by "biscuits", I mean what are generally referred to as "cookies" on this side of the Atlantic). I even hardened my heart to tears in favour of fairycakes and tried to distract her with the wondrous look of the Zebra-striped cake. I succeeded. Hurrah!



After baking

before baking

Our cake mix was thicker than I expected but the dolloping and waiting for it to spread worked pretty well. I felt our pre-baking cake looked reasonably like the Pinterest picture.

As I dolloped, a niggly part of my brain kept telling me that this cake would not be eaten and it was a terrible waste of ingredients. The Husband is not a big cake eater and the Zeds generally lose interest pretty quickly. This didn't stop me from being very excited to cut the cake and see how it turned out. I had to restrain myself from slicing it before it had cooled and before it was iced.


The final product - iced and sliced

It turned out magnificently in my not-so-humble opinion.  As it happened, the Zeds did eat several slices. So did I. Husband had none and by the time I realised I should have given some to the neighbours, it was a little old so I didn't feel I could. I am half-proud of not having just wolfed it all down myself like a glutton but also rather ashamed at the waste of good ingredients.


You may also be interested to know:

• although I generally avoid posting updates about the same thing on multipe social media platforms, I was so excited and proud of this one that I think I did the triple whammy of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
• people on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram asked for the recipe - I haven't posted it here as I just used a Victoria sponge recipe that I found on the BBC recipe  website. I think it was probably Delia Smith's. I added cocoa to half the mix in place of some of the flour. I also got the buttercream recipe from the BBC and added cocoa in place of one of the ounces of icing sugar.

Good and bad things resulting from Sunday's gingerbread

 As I mentioned before, we made gingerbread on Sunday afternoon. I got a couple of comments and, in replying to them, I realised I hadn't mentioned some significant parts of our gingerbread experience. I have divided them into good and bad things.

Good thing: The baking gingerbread made our house smell lovely.

Bad thing: We really needed a nice smell to cover up the smoky smell that had been caused by me putting the butter in the preheating oven to soften it and then forgetting it. Dripping butter in a hot oven causes a lot of smoke.

Good thing: Our smoke alarm wasn't in the kitchen when the butter incident happened (don't worry, it's back where it belongs now) so didn't add to the smokey stress.

Bad thing: The oven handle came off while the oven was preheating which meant I had to fix it with a screwdriver while wearing oven gloves. This was a little perilous and quite annoying.

Good thing: I managed to fix it without swearing (audibly) and without burning myself or the Zeds.


Good thing: The gingerbread really is rather tasty and we have some  leftover dough still in the fridge to make more.


So, overall, the good outweighed the bad.

Sunday gingerbread (this time with ginger)

Stacked gingerbread

I decided to bake rather late on a Sunday afternoon as there was an hour or so before dinnertime and I didn't want to turn on the television or break up endless battles over plastic figurines, which seemed to be the other option on this particular day.  We had been reading The Gingerbread Baby so Z1 thought gingerbread would be a good idea. It was, as the book says, cold outside and warm inside.

Cooling gingerbread
(notice fingerprints on the middle one)

In hindsight, baking when feeling slightly exasperated and desperate isn't the best idea. However, in a way we did better than last time as we did have ginger this time. I didn't have golden syrup but the fancy molasses was fine.

Z1's decorated and
beheaded gingerbread man

Z2's decorative effort

It turns out, gingerbread was an excellent pre-dinner snack as Z1 ate all her dinner even after the brutal beheading and devouring that you see pictured (in part).

Not pancakes (but possibly even better)

Pancakes seemed like a good idea on a cold, snowy, February, nearly-pancake-Tuesday-anyway day. However, we had only a piddly amount of flour left. Very piddly - not much more than 50g. I hadn't checked before announcing the plan to Z1. (Clearly I did not learn my lesson from the not-gingerbread fiasco)  Things were looking grim.

I Googled "what can I make with 100g of flour" (in my wish for more flour than we had, I misread the scales) while Z1 stood disconsolately on the chair beside me, gazing at the flour that was not going to be a pancake in the bowl. She also kept putting her hand in it which I found somewhat irritating but flour does feel kind of silky. Google did not solve my problem.

I turned to Pinterest, recalling a single serving chocolate chip cookie recipe but came across these three ingredient Nutella brownies before I found the cookie recipe. Only ten tablespoons of flour were required. With trepidation, I got my measuring spoons and spooned out my flour - just about enough. Hurrah! I told Z1 we would make brownies instead. It was all good. We'd even just bought a new jar of Nutella. It was then that pure wonderful began. I remembered we had a jar of non-Nutella, non-hazelnut chocolate spread. It was bought when I was alerted to the fact Nutella wasn't allowed in school 'cause of the nuts. It wasn't very nice and nobody ate it...until now.
The brownies began to smell very lovely in a short space of time and then we ate them warm from the oven with the chocolate chips still melty. Z1 gave them 58 marks out of 10. (I really must work on her grasp of numbers, fractions and rating scales.) They were also rather delicious, possibly even more so, after they had cooled. 

The satisfaction of using the jar of sweet brown not-Nutella and the tiny bit of flour is immense.


Credit where credit is due: My recipe can be downloaded from here but I adapted it from Schoochmaroo's recipe at Instructables here.

Not-Gingerbread biscuits

I made a couple of errors in preparing for our baking today:
1. I assumed we had some ground ginger
2. I let my desire to buy "fancy molasses" cloud my judgement and override the fact that, according to Google, Wikipedia and the sensible bit of my brain, it is not the same as golden syrup

Top left shows that not all our
cookie cutters produced
recognisable Christmas shapes

Still, neither of these errors detracted in any way from the enjoyment Z1 got from helping me mix or from her joy while cutting and decorating the biscuits (cookies to you, North Americans). Z2 joined in too, though I did have to tell him to stop poking quite a few times.

Z1 with her rice and sprinkles and
two of the cookies she lovingly
decorated (the one on the left
looked like a snowflake when unbaked,
the right was a gingerbread man)

It was a bit hectic trying to get dinner sorted at the same time as baking batches of biscuits and keeping an eye on the sprinkling activities. This meant that when Z1 asked if she could put some sprinkles in her rice, I just sighed and said it was fine. The coloured rice doesn't show up so well in the photo - probably 'cause she had eaten most of the food-dye-stained grains by the time she asked me to take the picture.

Downloadable from here

Of course, after the rice and sprinkles, it was time for the Zeds to try their baking. They each took one bite and discarded their respective biscuits. I like them though (the Zeds and the biscuits, just to be clear).

Credit where credit is due: My starting point for these cookies was this recipe on the BBC recipe website

Pyssla-ed off again

 Someone found my blog by googling "Christmas Pyssla", this is for them, though they are probably long gone, departing disappointed in the lack of Christmassy Pyssla-craft to be found here.

Z1 asked to get the beads out this morning as she wanted to make a snowflake shape but then decided she didn't know how and once  more took on a directorial role.

 I was working happily enough until I picked the darn thing up to go and iron it and spilled the beads off. My slave master made me do it again and, to be honest, I quite like the finished product. Hurrah.





Important Note: This may be a BONUS POST as we have other things planned today. Isn't Friday grand?!

Important follow-up note: We didn't do any other crafts today after all but Friday is still grand, right?

The joy of jingly bells

The wreath did not start well.
The coat hanger I was planning to use had been commandeered as a poker for a hair-blocked drain.
My brave trip to Dollarama for some materials after a day full of ballet, Advent calendar creation, Spiderman birthday party and overtired bedtime for the Zeds ended in failure when I discovered our local Dollarama closes two hours earlier on Saturdays than it does during the week.
The pair of pliers I employed for shaping a fresh coat hanger into a wreath shape was an unfit tool for the job*
Z1 seemed a lot  more interested in Garfield on the telly and Z2 was very tired.

However, I bribed the Zeds to think persuaded the Zeds that making a wreath would be a lot of lovely fun. Well, actually, I got Z2 to nap to cure his terrible twos and only had to bribe Z1.

Complete wreath

Z1's decoration materials

Our wreath is made of a coat hanger, tinsel, jingly bells, pipe cleaners and pine cones. It is adorning our porch and I am delighted. It did not capture Z1's attention at all, though, despite the sparkly tinsel. She liked the jingle bells and, while I was out in the damp air hanging the wreath, she gathered the materials you see here to make her own decoration.

In progress              Complete      

It's a Christmassy wind chime and is now prominently displayed alongside the wreath. I declare Conquering Christmas, day 2 a success.

*or perhaps I am not very good at using pliers and/or shaping coat hangers

Buying gingerbread real estate

Last year's house
in case you missed it
in the previous post

In my first post here, I proudly showcased the decorated gingerbread house from last year. With Z1 a whole year older, wiser and more dextrous, this year's is bound to be even better...but first I had to find it.

Last year I picked it up with glee and anticipation on a bit of a whim from the Shoppers Drug Mart (rather like Boots, UK readers) that is mere yards from my office. This year, I watched the Christmas stock arrive with dismay as no gingerbread houses appeared on the shelves. I began to hunt elsewhere (and by "elsewhere", I mean the internet, of course).

I found some on Amazon but encountered the bothersome bother that one can often encounter with Amazon.com when you are not in the US (or, with Amazon.co.uk, if you are not in the UK): these items could not be shipped to me here in Canada.

I found others which looked perfect until I saw that, for the prices they were asking, I would want something rather more substantial than a whimsical bit of edible nonsense. I did think I was prepared to spend a bit more than last year to have one that was truly tasty (Last year's one, if the truth be told, was one of those things that I would take a chunk of in the evening if I had exhausted all other sweet options in the house) but I thought wrong. While the $73.64 price tag I saw on one kit is clearly ludicrous (even if it is pre-assembled), when push came to shove, even the $30 for one from here, which would be guaranteed to be delicious and comes in a lovely tin, proved too much for me and I was left wondering if, this year, I'd be gingerbreadhouseless. As you can imagine, particularly in light of my paper house metropolis that never was,  this was sorely disappointing to me (It would appear that I love me some miniature house action - this blogging lark is teaching me a lot about myself).



The kit - boxed up and ready to go

However, my dear readers, my spirits were lifted, my urge to acquire miniature properties appeased, when, on the same day I shook my head sadly at the lack of gingerbread house availability, I found myself in Shoppers Drug Mart stocking up on body lotion and sundries and saw that the gingerbread house kits had arrived. Hurrah!



Credit where credit is due: the kit is made by Create a Treat and cost me $9.99 (CA). I saw the same one on Amazon.com for $25.94. So there.

Also possibly of interest:

•  Gingerbread house construction and decoration is currently planned for the 9th of December, blogging will occur soon after. (The numbers in the list there in the right hand sidebar correspond to dates in December, clever, eh?)
• You can buy a pre-assembled, pre-decorated gingerbread mansion for $368.50
• Though tempted, I avoided saying in this post that I'd want a real house for some of the prices they were charging for the gingerbread ones 'cause, while nearly $75 does seem expensive for a house of confectionery, it would be extremely cheap for a real dwelling place. Clearly. Even the massively extravagant $368.50 would be a pathetic sum with which to attempt to buy a real house.
• If you're in Toronto, Sweet Flour Bake Shop (of the $30 kits) is well worth going to - you can pick your cookie dough and what you want in it (chocolate chips, obviously, but they have other options) and they bake it there for you on the spot. Really delicious. I came across it by chance while at the Ukrainian festival along that part of Bloor in September.

Think of the children

My plans for this blog were mostly about me. It is only in the last week I started to wonder whether the Zeds would be as enthused as I am about doing lots of crafts.

Today, we spotted some fairy lights and Z1 asked if we would decorate for Christmas and when.

(As an aside, don't be surprised if I talk more about Z1 than Z2, it's not that she's my favourite, that varies on a day-to-day and sometimes hour-to-hour basis*, it's just that she talks more and talks more articulately that Z2 what with being 4 and a half rather than 2 and a bit.)

I waffled a bit about waiting 'til December and that she has a day off school one day and we might decorate after that** but - and here is where I get to the point - we might make some decorations before that. To my great delight, she got very excited and said "Oh, we can we make chains like we did last year and hang them in all the doors, I loved doing that!". She remembered! And she liked it! Maybe I have stumbled upon a rather good idea. (She also told me she remembers making snowman cookies. Which we never did.)

*Joking. I don't have a favourite child. Mostly.
** 8th of December in case you're interested. Partly 'cause I got a Groupon-style deal for a professional cleaner who is coming on the 7th, so that weekend my house will be all shiny and clean AND, when we're done, Christmassy. Hurrah. 

Pyssla-ed off

For Z1's 4th birthday we got her these Pyssla beads from IKEA. To be honest, I am not too sure why  - she had done a shape with them in her pre-school the previous year and we were in IKEA a few weeks or days before her birthday and I had decided we should get something for her there so we got these.

For those of you mercifully unfamiliar with Pyssla, you put these little beads onto the shapes you see to the right (sold separately) which have little spikes to hold the beads. You then iron over it with some greaseproof paper stuff and the beads melt a bit and stick together and you have plastic shape. "Excellent," I hear you cry, "I really need more plastic shapes."

                                                     
Z1 decided she wanted to do this the day after Pumpkin Day. It's only the second time she has wanted to to them at all and I may have instigated the first time. I wasn't too keen this time - it's fiddly and with the potential for those tiny beads to spill and go everywhere. However, Z2 was asleep (again) and it was cold and wet outside so we hunkered down on the floor in our sitting room and started the fiddly business of Pyssla-ing.

She gave me the circle and I told her I was going to try to do a snowflake. She then decided she wanted the circle so I got the square (we may have lost the heart somewhere). I attempted a snowflake but, decided it was a bit crap so I didn't iron it into a snowflake-attempt to keep and treasure forever. (Apologies, no photos of my snowflake attempt, I didn't realise I was going to blog it)

While I did this, Z1 got next to nothing done. She didn't seem interested and yet wouldn't let me put it away. I feared Z2 would awake and come down and spill beads and eat beads and knock things over so I was keen to finish or put away. With some thought, she then decided on a rainbow. However, she initially had trouble with putting one bead on the peg/spike beside the previous one without knocking that one over. This was getting less enjoyable by the second as she got frustrated. The fun started (well, not quite fun but at least quiet co-operation and no cross crankiness on either side) when we hit on the plan of her doing every second spike and me filling in the gaps. She did need me to tell her to come on, Z1 or we're putting this away, your brother will wake and ruin it some gentle encouragement to stay on track at times but together we did it. She was also getting a lot more dextrous at it by the end of the exercise so we may have improved her fine motor skills. She was pretty pleased with it too and showed it to my parents on Skype.

My favourite bit was when I suggested it could be a coaster for her dad's tea and she insisted that we test it with a cup before approving it for such use...and then took it back from him as she had really decided she liked it as a decoration on her play kitchen. Her dad (R) took it ok and got rather enthused when I suggested we could do one another day with Spiderman colours. It might be his turn to help that day.

If you want to get Pyssla-ed off too, the beads and shapes are in the toy section of IKEA. The shapes and beads were sold separately but came to under $10 (Canadian dollars, before tax)