Playing with shells

While at the grandparents' earlier today, my mum brought a collection of shells out to play with. Eden loved lining them up and creating patterns and shapes with them. 

Cabbages, worms and pumpkin beer

We nipped down the allotment this morning to pick some veg for the week. First time this year that it's felt bitingly cold outside, just as well we'd wrapped up warm although I need to find our gloves! 

The row of cabbages look brilliant, we've taken the netting off now. We picked the biggest one to eat this week. I also picked some kale. 

Luke dug up some more potatoes - some of our main crop potatoes are satisfying big. 

Eden found two worms - her latest outdoor fascination - love it!

Asher toddled around, saying hello to the next-door plot's chickens 

I harvested the sweetcorn, despite them not looking ready but I didn't think they'd ripen anymore now - disappointingly none were good enough to eat, we'll try again next year. The growing season this year was very slow to get started, at one point in the spring it was said the UK was a month behind what was normal, due to the prolonged cold and rain we had then. I think this is perhaps why our sweetcorn didn't do well, and also our winter squash and tomatoes. 

This year Luke's started some home-brewing. We have potato wine fermenting, sloe gin, and the first batch of pumpkin beer (there will be more considering we have so much pumpkin!) The pumpkin beer has been bubbling away rather ferociously in our dining room for the last 10 days, and is now ready to transfer into bottles for the secondary fermentation to begin. We took the lid off just now and it smells amazing! Just as you'd expect - a strong pumpkin smell, along with a strong beer smell. We'll leave it another 10 days now and then we can try it! Can't wait! Here's a pic I took of it just now:

Pumpkin lapbook

We've completed our very first lapbook! I wanted to give lapbooks a try with Eden, who is developing more of an interest in reading and writing, and I thought creating our own topical way of nurturing this interest would be fun! 

I started by looking on Pinterest for ideas of what others had done, but found that the pumpkin lapbooks on there were from a few years ago, so most of the links were outdated unfortunately. So a google search, and looking on free resource websites that I use already came up trumps for creating our own. After we'd completed each activity we added it to create our portfolio :) 

Probably my proudest moment was Eden correctly placing the correct letters in order to spell out 'pumpkin'. 

Here's a pic of the finished lapbook: 

Toddler and preschool pumpkin play

This morning we used another of our pumpkins to explore what's inside, and for an excuse for a bit of messy play outside in the tuff spot on a drizzley day.

First Eden and I put some seeds from last week into a ziplock bag to dye them - the results looked very pretty in the bag, but I then went and burnt them in the oven ooops! I'm sure we'll still find something to do with the crispy brown seeds that resulted! 

We then picked our smallest pumpkin to explore what's inside. Eden gave it a wash, then I used a sharp knife to take the top off. I love the kids' reactions when they looked inside! 

Eden had seen this before with Luke last week, but I don't think Asher had been involved in that, so this was a new experience for him:

The kids had a turn at scooping out the seeds and gunk side, then we took that outside to the tuff spot for the kids to have a play, with spoons and bowls. 

It wasn't long before we were pottering in the garden - earlier this week we spent an hour or so pulling up the massively overgrown nasturtiums that had taken over all of our borders, dropping their seeds everywhere in the process - problems next year anticipated! After reclaiming the soil in our 5 'Olympic ring' tyres from the nasturtiums, today we moved two roses into their new positions. The kids both wanted to help dig too which was lovely as a family activity, putting the roses into their new homes

Eden found a worm! She asked me if she could hold it!! I must admit I was a little surprised, but seized the moment of her enthusiasm! She held it gently, named it 'caterpillar worm', showed Asher, and remained focused on it for quite a few minutes, bless her :) 

All in all, a fabulous morning was had! 

Pumpkins!

A couple of weeks ago we harvested our pumpkins from the allotment. When we planted them, we added a special growing ingredient in an effort to be the winners of our family pumpkin growing competition - well that ingredient certainly did the trick! We had 8 pumpkins altogether, the largest weighed 4 stone! The two smallest were a stone each! 

Here's Asher proudly perched, on the day of harvesting them:

Last week, Luke carved the largest into a fairy house for Eden, and Eden had a go at carving too

We had A LOT of pumpkin to eat just from carving this one pumpkin! So far we've made pumpkin risotto, pumpkin bread, pumpkin and carrot soup, and pumpkin and apple soup, plus freezing some pumpkin purée for future. Next on the list is pumpkin curry, which we'll have later this week.

Oh and if you're interested in what the special ingredient was that we added at the growing stage......

Pigeon poo! 

Squash Painting

We have a glut of winter squash which sadly didn't ripen on our allotment this year. I'm not quite sure why, maybe we got them in the ground too late, or we didn't have a long enough period of warm weather. They're all white, when the should have turned green, and on tasting they're very bitter sadly. On the plus side, their colour lends itself very well to being painted! Yesterday we sat down with the kids and had a fun squash painting session. Even Asher, who normally is too occupied with climbing or his cars to sit still to paint, wanted a go! He picked his own squash from those freshly washed, brought it over to his chair, and used the pointy end of a paintbrush to make his own squash masterpiece. I'm a very proud mummy that he showed such an interest! Here's the results! The colours are so vibrant!

This one's mine!

Fairy Butterfly House

Eden's favourite things this summer are fairies and butterflies. Last year we bought 4 butterfly houses in the sale, 3 of them were painted with butterflies and given as Christmas presents to cousins. The forth one was put away in the workshop last winter, and we kind of forgot about it. This week Eden remembered and asked if we could make it into a fairy house. 

First I created some fairy stencils, using a Stanley knife. 

Then we taped them to the Butterfly house and used our easy painters (like Bingo Dobbers) to paint, using a 'dotting' motion particularly around the edges, as my stencils were just made from ordinary printer paper so weren't the most robust, but did the job! 

Eden was able to have a go too after I'd shown her how to 'dot' rather than brush.

Next we looked up some fairy phrases and Eden 'wrote' some of her own fairy messages on the back.

It needs a layer of varnish to make the colours pop, and Eden then wants to keep it in her room to house her fairies. Next year we'll hang it in the garden for the butterflies to enjoy.

A play day in the rain

Today we got very wet at a local park play day. But these 2 still had great fun, particularly on the mini road that had been set up, complete with a selection of Ride Ons, stop signs, zebra crossing and traffic lights (no pic as my phone was in the car at that point with it being so wet!) 

Julia Donaldson exhibition

Woke up this morning with nothing in the diary, so to avoid a very long day at home, I made a last minute decision to take the kids into Birmingham. The fact that I wanted to visit the Rag Market may have helped sway the decision too! 

It's been a lovely day, we also got to have lunch with Daddy, and see his office which was a bonus for the kids. Eden especially liked waving to him at hisoffice window   from Victoria Square.

The exhibition itself was perhaps a little pricey to get in, but worth every penny if you have toddlers (free) and preschoolers . There's loads of activities geared at preschoolers, and the whole exhibition is very interactive and fun. We spent nearly 3 hours there (just in the exhibition, we didn't go to the rest if the museum today), and if it hadn't been planned so last minute and I'd been more prepared I think we would've stayed longer. Eden loved the 'Squash and a squeeze' house, and Asher liked all the colourful displays, and the boulders to build with from cave babies. 

Here's just a few of the many photos I took today: 

Petal Perfume

Eden loves the 'Princess Poppy' book series at the moment, and over the last few weeks she's been playing at making petal perfume (a reference from one of the books). So I thought she'd love it if we made our own petal perfume, using flowers from the garden and a kettle of very hot water. 

First we picked our petals:

We collected them in a jar:

When we had nearly a full jar, I poured some hot water in, and we stirred it, and left for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally

Then we used a sieve to strain off the petals, leaving the fragranced water in a clean jar below

Having a smell afterwards

We decorated the jar to finish

Then Eden very sweetly said she wanted it to be a present for Daddy