Scary I know.

Lani, Eli and Lilly wanted to surprise Sabi with her own “on her actual birthday” cake, even though her party will be at the end of November with Eli’s. I let them do the whole thing themselves, right down to finding the ingredients at the supermarket. It was so funny watching them try and find butter, they found the yogurts and cheeses but the butter was in an extra cold isle that wasn’t around the outside, Lilly desperately wanted to find it and stood staring at the cheese declaring with annoyance that “All this stuff comes out of a cow and butter does too so it should be here, why would you not put cow stuff with the other cow stuff.” Oh to be six and know everything again.

The cake is a T.A.R.D.I.S by the way and Sabi being the little Who fan, geek girl that she is was suitably impressed.

Sabi totally enjoyed the whole traditional birthday cake performance and has not stopped singing “happy birthcake to you” since.

Present time!!!!

When her Grandparents gave her the first present I told the other kids to stay back and let her open them herself to which she replied “No, Help me!” I think she likes being the baby.

She was a little confused when she started to open the present I made for her.

But she was overcome with bouncing excitement when she realized it was her very own Doctor Who.

Then finally some more dolls house furniture, she’s a huge fan of very small tables and chairs.

There was a moment of sadness when she realized her presents didn’t work brilliantly together but that was short lived when I promised to make a Doctor size chair. Cheeky little thing added “and de Doctor ahhh-dis too”  that’s “Can you please make a Tardis too mummy” for those who don’t speak Sabi.

We couldn’t stop laughing at how excited she was by her Doctor Who doll, she shook all over and couldn’t stop bouncing hence the blur. She talked to him, sang to him…..

…she made him a bed….

…and took him shopping….

…and found him a pet tiger she named Amy (I think I know what to make for Christmas).

But you really should have seen the ultimate excitement when Lani found a Doctor sized chair. I think it will be pretty hard to top this birthday, any more happiness and this kid would have exploded.

Our church has been laying new carpet. This means the biggest cardboard rolls we’ve ever gotten our hands on are just laying around the place and since we are studying the continent of South America, and looking closely at Brazil, when I saw them I immediately thought tree trunks.

This activity didn’t just serve as a huge visual reminder of our journey through the Amazon it presented numerous learning opportunities in itself.

The kids knew they needed brown but we had only the primary colours. I asked them if they could talk to each other and maybe do a few experiments to see if they could find brown, they had remembered the basic colour mixes but couldn’t think of two colours that made brown. Lani had a moment of inspiration when she remembered seeing brown when Sabi had gotten to their paint pallets and mixed all the colours together. So after a few trial runs that were too red they got the colour they were after.

It also turned out to be a fairly messy activity, like that’s a surprise.

This may not be top of your list of bonuses. However with one child who adores mess and will seek it planed or not and another who has been known to freak out over glue/paint/water touching his skin it proved to be a brilliant safe time to give in to obsessions and challenge phobias respectively.

Oh yeah and as the tubes were round and had to be held while painting them it was also good for all that bi-lateral, crossing the centre line, using two hands and both bits of your brain stuff….I should really listen better in class.

plus it was fun

Bet you can’t tell which child adores messy play. By the way bubbles are included in messy play in my world once you’ve seen what Sabi can do with a bottle of detergent, the kitchen and the time it takes Mummy to go to the toilet you would consider them a ticking time bomb too. But in the above photo she was being reminded (once again) that mess can be fun, but we do need to clean up after ourselves.

And then we learnt to fly.

Like an Amazon bird

or Amazon super hero?

before we all came back down to earth and made dinner.

…my six year old daughters latest art work, make of it what you will. (I home school so I’m kind of cheating and claiming their creations as they are in my space and I was the creative force behind the exercise) At first I was leaning towards a What happens in the craft room stays in the craft room approach to her art work but my curiosity got the better of me. Apparently its a ball and a sign post but the sign part fell off, why…what did you think it was???

As well as the um…free form art work we wrote our names in cuneiform

Made Sumerian seals, used in ancient Mesopotamia for leaving your mark when you made a bargain, you know putting your seal on it.

we made recycled paper (closest thing I could think of to papyrus) and wrote our names in Hieroglyphs

This is my own personal never ending project. I Had this brilliant idea that I would crotchet a baby blanket for Sabrina when she was born, she’s now two and I’m only just starting to join them together. I think I’ll have to add more squares and make it bed sized.

and this is the toy I still haven’t finished and should have sent off weeks ago for a swap. maybe now that the birthday month is over I’ll get things done. Maybe if I keep coming back to this meme I’ll feel guilted into actually getting something done. Maybe.

check out more Creative Spaces here

To help your little one make this cute little table centre piece you will need:

a foam cone

paint

green paper

sticky tape

glue stick

and a packet of decofoam pins

My kids weren’t happy with just one shade of green but I didn’t want the paintwork to be to busy and distract from the decorations. As a compromise I broke the green into three lightening it with a little white to give them three shades to play with.

Stick a small square of green paper onto a plate with sticky tape.

Then glue the foam cone onto the paper with glue stick. Clear tacky craft glue eats away at the foam so be careful.

Now that the tree is glued in place the kids can paint it with minimal touching. Yes mine did keep putting their fingers on the top but they could turn the tree around by twisting the plate and were generally fairly paint free by the end of the activity.

Sorry for the wonky photo, just had to show you how excited they all were to paint a cone green.

I emptied the packet of Decofoam Pins into a small plastic container. That way the kids could easily pick them up and I could store any left overs simply by putting the lid on.

Once the trees are dry put the pins on the table and let the kids go for it.

Cut the tree off the paper this leaves a nice green base to seal the bottom.

Alanah was quite taken by her tree. She decided to make a pattern with the pins and when she had finished she said it looked like a dalek.

EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE HO HO HO.

So this is us learning about how people in the past made their clothes colourful. We used instructions from the Scope website found here.

First we tore up strips of fabric.

We made a mordant to set the dye to the fabric.

To make the mordant mix half a cup of salt with 6 cups of water and a piece of test fabric.
Bring to the boil and allow to simmer for about an hour. Then leave the mixture to cool.

To make the dye you need to boil what ever plant material you have chosen for an hour. I chose to use a few plants that I knew would work and then let the kids have a guess at what other ones might dye the fabric. Pictured above is one of their guesses, carrot. You will need to strain the dye if there are any large fibres. The kids were super keen to see if it had worked at this stage and dipped tissues in so very quickly a rainbow of soggy wads of paper coated my bench.

our pots of dye ready for the fabric

After an hour of boiling the fabric in the dye we got to see if our experiments had worked. Lilly is holding up the result of our beetroot dye.

Eli is holding up the one boiled in raspberry dye.

Lillian’s sad face because her experiment with grass didn’t work.

The fabric just after it came out of the pots.

Drying on the line.

The yellow is Turmeric which worked brilliantly. The pink is Raspberry also worked well but a lot of the colour rinsed out. Next is Beetroot which worked but but after the first wash the bright red turned to pink which didn’t make Eli happy. Then carrot which, after looking so bright and orange when it was first dyed, sadly washed out completely in the first wash. The purple at the end of the line is Blueberry and this one held it’s colour well.

The kids then picked their favourite colour and dyed a plain white t-shirt. Grandma kindly sewed the test strips into a skirt so we had a whole outfit made colourful just like the people in the past used to do it. 

Just to make it a little more real I read Charlie needs a cloak

and The Goat in the Rug

to the kids both books take the reader through the clothes making process from shearing an animal to wearing the garment. Here is a link to a pretty cute animation of the book Charlie needs a cloak. 

This little guy is for our friends first ever little baby, I’m very excited. Glenn and I went to Uni with the Daddy (sorry didn’t check whether they minded their names being plastered all over the internet) so we have known them for a while and have been patiently wondering when they were going to produce a play mate for our horde.

I think he looks a little like an Eliphoctopus with legs like that. I like saying Eliphoctopuss because it makes Glenn think I’m saying a bad word and then he giggles, I’m probably going to get in trouble for writing that.

Their nursery seamed to be mostly red cream and green so the little elephant is wearing colours to match.  His ears are made out of crocheted circles. I’ve only ever made granny squares before look at me branching out. The eye are hand embroidery, in fact every stitch in him is done by hand as I still don’t have a sewing machine (do you sense the frustration??)

I know, enough of the elephant already but this was Glenn’s favourite photo. Apparently he likes looking up elephant noses. I liked another one better so to avoid conflict you get to see both.

All jokes aside I am so very thrilled to welcome a new baby to that ring of people that dwell close to the heart. I hope and pray that his new little owner has a wonderful life and that she grows to love and appreciate the beautiful family she has been born into.

Well it feels like winning isn’t this little guy just amazing! He was crocheted by the incredibly talented Kelly from Kelgell Creations He He He I can’t get over how cute he is. She even went to the bother of finding out a little about me before choosing what she was going to make, read the note it just made me feel so special.

This is the book I am reading at the moment and it is packed full of dragons. My good friend Jo got me reading this series and I just have to tell the world, because it is so amazingly cool, that her little boy Finn has just today been officially declared in remission for cancer!!!

The little dragon is also just the right size for cuddles

So a huge thankyou to Tab for organizing this swap if you would like to see what everyone else has created head over to her site Small Things and have a peek. Mine is still in the mail so I can’t show you what I made just yet.  And a huge thank you to Kelly this little dragon will be well loved here.                   ,

These are the kids wearing their finished Indigenous Australian inspired costumes that they designed and made themselves for a play. Lilly the sideways one is a Goanna called Googah, Eli with the sword is a crocodile called Kooria and Alanah is a kangaroo called Marloo. These costumes were for a play they were putting together that I wrote more about here.

On the morning of the play(two Fridays ago) I was very ill so poor Glenn was landed with driving them up the mountain to their Home Schooling group and directing a play that he hadn’t even seen rehearsed and one that I was planning to mostly adlib. Did I mention I love my husband.

According to Glenn they did really well and for shy kids who never put themselves forward to do anything last year at school I was just pleases they had the idea and saw it through to the end without a panic attack. However there was technical difficulties with videoing it, we only got the very end, so I might ask them to do it again for the Grandparents and film that production.

This is what Alanah wrote about her costume:

I designed a costume and the story is called ‘Marloo’s Great Leap’. My family is going to make it into a play. I am dressing up as Marloo, and Marloo is a Kangaroo. We copied the design from the book it is an Aboriginal x-ray painting of Marloo it has heaps of dots on it. The x-ray has a heart, lungs, intestines and muscles.

We are joining an interactive envelope window display, cool hey!

It’s another fun play along from Pip at Meet Me At Mikes my second crush in the blogging world.

What you do is decorate an envelope and send it to Pip who runs Meet Me At Mikes, a shop in Melbourne. The envelopes are to be filled with all sorts of left over, useful and pretty crafty stuff. Pip will display all of the envelopes in her shop window for 6 weeks then one envelope will be randomly drawn and all the other envelopes full of goodness will be sent to them. We have no real dilutions of winning but it’s kinda pleasant to reach out and send nice things to a stranger far away. Lani, my 8 year old is really getting into it, they’re her hands decorating the envelope in the photo.

If you would like to send an envelope to Pip CLICK HERE to read her post about it.

I also joined a softie swap that Tab from Small Things is graciously organizing. Only just as I started my sewing machine exploded, well sort off GGRRRRED then WHRRRRRED and then refused to go up and down so I am hand sewing my softie. As soon as I can get it finished my softie will be heading over to Talia at Life’s Visual Journal. I can’t show you what I am makeing because it’s a secret Shhhhhh!!!! but you should pop over and check out Talia’s rainbow cupcakes they look spectacular only my brain wont stop jumping off the walls just from viewing the image. If we do make them it’ll be a day when we can stay at home all day till the effects wear off

Alanah and Lillian are March babies the same as my sister and I, what can i say it’s just the best month ever. Also as you can imagine a very full one. The only blessing in all this March madness being that the girls love the idea of combined parties. Which is the reason I am still sane because I could not do this two weekends in a row.

This year the girls have requested a rainbow party, which doesn’t sound to hard till you sit down and work out how many little plastic garden pots need little wire handles. All this fiddly wire twisting is because, as all good fairy folk know, you can’t have a true magical rainbow without a pot of gold at its base.

Don’t worry I whinge in jest, I actually find repetitive monotonous craft preparation soothing, sort of.

Besides how many of you out there can say in all honesty that you have all your smarties in order.