Baking Christmas Decs

This was such fun!

I found a recipe using baking soda and cornflour to make pure white decorations to cover in glitter beads and sequins! Everyone made at least one and my girls even made them as Christmas presents for their class teachers.

They even looked quite pretty on the tree!

Walking home from school

I always encourage little ones to get mobile as soon as they are able.

I teach them to hold onto the pram, my hand or one of the big kids. My oldest daughter loves helping and making the babies laugh! It's so wonderful to see little ones' confidence, steadiness and sense of humour develop as they learn how to negotiate pavements and watch the world as we go by. We have to take our time so I usually leave early to allow for walking time!

Giant pumpkins

What a perfect day to go and collect/ harvest our giant award winning pumpkins (silver medal at allotment Veg competition!) a beautiful sunny day on Halloween!

My husband had to help me lift them as they are soooo huge! The children are delighted that the biggest one looks like an enormous bottom!!

 We always do a joint effort to design and carve the Halloween pumpkin......what a glorious orange colour inside as well as out.

We chose one of the 'smaller' ones to carve....

We were quite pleased by how scary he looks.

Ps he has since been turned into soup for all the children to tuck into now that the weather has turned chillier.

Painting fun

 Never too young to do a bit of lovely messy painting and get creative. This little boy loves cars so we had to put a car in and do glueing and sticking too. Good  opportunity  to talk about wheels and practice saying car car car!!!

We talked about the weather too and decided to make it a nice sunny day!

Making pizzas

We recently bought a bread maker and the smell of freshly baking bread is divine, but the other advantage is that it's super easy to make pizzas. At this time of year I have an abundance of yummy home grown veg so my style is to give the children a whole heap of bowls full of different ingredients to chose from and they make their own. The rule is that as well as the tomato / pasata base they must have 3 other veggie toppings, I think we had garlic, onion, potato, sweetcorn, chard, peppers and courgette to pick from. 

We eat a lot of face- pizzas but this heart one turned out particularly well I think. Yummy!

Making pizza

Winning veg!

Here are my winning selection of cooked vegetables for the annual Allotment competition and bbq! It was such a fun day taking the time to look around everyone's plots and see what was being grown. As cooking and inventing with my produce is one of my passions I was delighted to get the chance to show off and although there were only a few entries I was still really pleased to be given gold. 

Shoes shoes shoes!

I love shoes!

When I became a mum and childminder I hadn't anticipated however the volume of pairs of shoes which would take over my house! I find it impossible to throw any crocs or sandals or boots or flip-flops away as they will always have a happy user when we go out into the garden or visit the allotments! I think I must own a pair for every sized child and the sight of them all piled up actually makes me very happy because they represent all the sweet little feet that I look after.

Butterflies hatching

One of the best projects we've done this year.

You send off for the caterpillers and when they arrive they are so tiny. Within a few days they had tripled in size and by the time they began to form into chrysalids they were huge big black hairy beasts!!! We then had to watch and wait and finally out came beautiful butterflies. Everyone who comes to the house was involved in watching progress until finally we released them into the garden on a lovely sunny day and watched them flutter away. Pure magic!