woke up from a dreadful nightmare this morning (shouldn’t have listened to police sister’s tale of colleague’s woe last night) and came downstairs relatively early, determined to spend time with offspring and be patient, kind and loving.
Resolution lasted 6 hours before I was screaming at them 🙁
But first I sat down on the floor with Big and we set out to make things with her last Christmas present, a Paper FX Dream Weaver
. Have to say that I disagree with the negative reviews on Amazon, I think this is quite good, although there are some caveats. First of all, using recycled wrapping paper, while it might seem like a fabulous idea at this time of year, and it does give pretty end products, is not an ideal way forward as already crumpled paper doesn’t crease very well. The couple of sheets that we had that had barely been used (wrapped round a very large present) creased much better, so Big was able to fold them much more cleanly. Without the creasing she doesn’t stand any chance of folding herself, so the ppl on Amazon who think that you could do better paper stuff without it clearly have much more adept offspring that I do. (Which I find difficult to believe, tbh.) The weaver thing itself is very good, and does assist with the weaving motion.
The whole process takes hours though (I’d recommend preparing the torn strips ahead of time in future I think) and if you find, 75% of the way through that the pattern that you were following is wrong you can almost guarantee a woefully disappointed child. Or a swearing mummy fiddling the results and ending up with glue up to her elbows fixing the whole thing. It worked out though (pics below).
Small spent all this time bouncing around and making things out of pipe cleaners, which he then proceeded to play with. He was mainly self entertaining, but also very irritating, so after several hours of just about not yelling, I gave up and told them both that I was taking them outside, despite the rain, to use up some energy.
So I loaded them into the car and we went to Rother Valley, and had a fairly brisk walk/scoot/skate/run/carry skateboard session.
I particularly enjoyed the bits where Small ran off into the distance shouting ‘goodbye, goodbye, goodbye’ and then back again ‘hello, hello, hello’. 😀
Back home again, and it did seem to have improved moods all round for a short while, and Big assisted Small with building his last Christmas present, a rather excellent pirate island from elc. Can’t find it on their website though, don’t know whether it’s been discontinued. Shortly after I managed a photo of them though, Big and I had a major fall out over the fact that although it was Small’s toy, she had put herself firmly in charge of the game, and didn’t appear to be sharing at all. She ended up being sent upstairs with her dreamweaver, where she managed to create herself a credit card. Oh good.
Tea, bath and bed, and they are waiting upstairs for me to go up and kiss them goodnight.
I’m not making New Years resolutions (never get me anywhere), but I’m going to try to blog more fully with pictures. And descriptions of stuff we’ve actually done, and places we’ve been, things we’ve made, stuff we’ve used. Like I used to in fact.
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