A Matter of Choice

After a successful time playing with ice recently Leo has often asked to do it again so I thought I'd combine his new love of 'Jake and the Never land pirates' with it to make it a bit different. Luckily here in Cyprus our milk bottle tops are yellow and I have a collection of them just for times like this  (see, I knew I'd want them for something!) having used them as pirate treasure once before.  This time I froze them along with a selection of Leo's most 'piratey' toys so he could 'hunt for his gold doubloons' like they do in the program. Unlike last time where he was fascinated by the ice and asked tons of questions about it, ( how can it be water? how long did it take to make ice? when will it be water? Can I eat it? Why is it melting?  and so on!)  this time he dived straight into playing with it pretending to be Jake, and insisting Louka and I took  our usual roles as Izzie and Cubby. I must say I am loving the ice play, it...

I'm a big fan of pinterest and forever 'pinning' activites to do with the boys although it's a bit like the recipies I used to rip out of magazines to cook 'one day'.  As much as these ideas are great they so often involve some sort of craft skill, require patience or create mess and they get put off for another day! My biggest problem  excuse currently is Louka being too young, and his nap times being too short, and the fact that even simple activities are too old for him as everything would go straight in his mouth. I got round this problem this week though and the boys and I did our first proper activity together, it went down very well, was easy to set up, cheap and not messy - Yay! Using a selection of random toys and plastic boxes, I made several blocks of ice with hidden surprises inside. I told Leo we were going to play with ice and at first he was confused, I placed all the blocks into a big plastic box and took them outside. He thought it hila...

Following on from our recent playdough playtime I decided to create something else to blog about be a good mother and arrange a fun toddler activity. At a party last year the kids were provided with cornflour goo to play with, Leo was a bit young to be interested and was too busy colouring (one of his favourite things) to want to try it, but I thought now he'd have great fun with it. Looking slightly bemused! It's really easy to make, just cornflour, water and a drop of food colouring. What you end up with is a strange  gloopy thing that if you touch quickly feels like it's solid but if you stir or run your hands through slowly becomes a liquid - weird huh! I showed him what to do and he laughed as I plunged my hand in and let it run through my fingers, (whilst trying to take a photo and not drop my camera in it!) He didn't need much encouragement to get his hands in and laughed for a short while until he realised his hands were now dirty...... I forgot,...

When it comes to art and crafts activities (in other words messy) activities I must admit I'm not the most enthusiastic of mothers. I have very little patience and this does not sit well with short toddler attention spans and an very independent little man who doesn't like to be helped with anything! I'm trying to make much more of an effort with introducing new activities so when I saw a playdough recipe in this months Daxi Magazine (local lifestyle magazine here in Cyprus) I thought it would be a good place to start. I've only made playdough once and it didn't really go to plan, may have been the heat here but after just a few minutes of playing it turned into a big sticky mess, this recipie however was excellent and really easy to make. All you need is 2 cups Plain flour 1 cup fine sea salt 2tblsp Cream of tartar 2tblsp sunflower oil 5 drops lavender essential oil (I didn't have any so used vanilla for a nice fra...