Making It Up

as we go along

Baker Ross

Mother's day flowers from Appleyard London

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I’m not a big gift flowers person. Don’t get me wrong, I love flowers themselves, but generally still attached to their parent plants.

But I was offered Mother’s Day flowers from Appleyard London to review and I decided that a treat sounded pretty good to me. I’m glad I went for it, as the flowers are absolutely gorgeous.

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I chose the Chantilly lace bouquet. It arrived last week, and the flowers are still going strong – the lilies are just opening, and they’re beautiful. We’ve got them on the kitchen table and they make a wonderful centerpiece at every mealtime – I hadn’t realised how much having something beautiful around brightens the day. I particularly loved this, as you may have seen on instagram.

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Mother’s day is approaching fast, and flower delivery is a fabulous option, particularly if, like me, you’re a last minute kind of person. Fortunately, Appleyard have a range of Next Day Flowers to choose from 😉

To make things even better, I’ve got a discount code for you – if you use BLOG40, you’ll get

40% off the range of luxury bouquets, although it does exclude the flowers by post range. So, if you’re stuck for ideas, I’ve hopefully just given you a bit of a helping hand.

Additional suggestions – Baker Ross have lots of their mother’s day crafts on sale, such as these Mum pop up cards. Shop the sale, you’ll save the cost of next day delivery and have things to keep the kids occupied and grandmothers thrilled with hand made goodies. (Particularly if the hand made goodies accompany lovely flowers from Appleyard 😉 ). (Chuck in a few Easter bits and you’ve really got a bargain!)

Perhaps you’d like a good book to go with the flowers? Or even better, how about an ereader, and you can stock it with £1 books? The Amazon Kindlerange starts at £49 – check it out.

Hopefully you’ve got a few ideas there, and you can get Mother’s Day under control, and if you yourself are a mother and any of these ideas appeal, do feel free to share the post as a subtle hint to your nearest and dearest 😉 and if you’re still stuck on which Mother’s day gift will suit your mum, why not try this fun quiz to help you choose from the people at My Voucher Codes?

Disclosure – the flowers were sent free of charge for review, and other gift idea links are affiliate links.

Following their interests (home education the lazy way)

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There is a technique sometimes referenced in home education circles called strewing, in which you casually leave educational resources round and about to sucker entice your children into educating themselves. I like to think of myself as an extreme strewer.

I’m not, of course. I’m just disastrously untidy 😉 But today it worked well in my favour.

First of all, Tigerboy found some pieces of a Baker Ross sewing kit, and brought them to me. “Teach me to knit” he said, as he handed me the needle. 😉

So I sat him on my knee and he sewed half way round the pieces of felt before losing interest. I was quite impressed with his manual dexterity to be honest, I don’t think any of the others could have managed that at this age.

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And then Smallest, who had wanted to do reading, and writing today, turned me down on pencil work, but demanded to write a blog post, so we loaded up her blog and she dictated. She also did some Reading Eggs and Mathseeds, but turned me down for any actual reading books.

Then the next thing I saw was her first chess lesson. Sat on Small’s knee, they were playing chess online.

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The first game rather predictably ended in tears. Then Small left her to it, and she spent the next hour or so taking pieces. I’m not sure what site they were using – it was pretty good though, as when you clicked on a piece it showed you all the possible moves, so she was learning lots about the pieces just by experimenting.

So, crafts, chess, reading and maths. Alongside the usual playing, eating, talking, stories and a bit of TV. Sounds like a pretty full day really.

Stepping up to the messy play plate.

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I don’t like sticky, messy things. I’m not even fond of kneading dough or mixing cake. And as a young child, Small was much the same.

It’s not fair though, to let that impact on the younger two. So since Christmas I’ve been making a real effort to get crafty and messy with them. We’ve been helped in that quest by our latest bundle from Baker Ross.

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This is the bundle I decided we’d use this week. Card, a large selection of different brushes and sponges and some acrylic paint.

First of all we made butterflies.

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Then I just let them loose with the paints.

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Turns out both my younger two subscribe to the more is more school of thought, your painting is only complete when the card can’t actually absorb any more paint.

I did a bit of colour mixing with Smallest, with Tigerboy I just marveled at how much he was enjoying it.

It made for two very happy children. Tomorrow we’re going to have a go at decorating the craft frames we were sent, and we might get a few googly eyes out as well.

What with craft, bubble blowing and book reading I’m almost beginning to feel like a real home educator again 😉

History with added flowers.

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It was history etc today. Slightly odd in that Big didn’t come with us, she was at a Kentwell friend’s birthday party. Shame the dates clashed as there were several extra participants in history she’d have loved to see, but that’s the way it goes.

There’s apparently something coming up about tulips in the chapters we should have read but haven’t, so I took some more Baker Ross flower crafts with me, which were very well received even if they weren’t actually tulips.

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Slightly annoyed that in the kerfuffle over a not lost at all ds (anyone spotting a theme? ) I seem to have forgotten Smallest’s fimo of St Basil’s and misplaced her Pabobo penguin but am hoping Chris can find them.

Linkage to be added tomorrow.