Christmas!

I know its a bit late, but I realised today that I haven't shared with you any of our Christmas.  And since its been a bit quiet around these parts for the last few days I thought I'd show a picture or two.  So here's Freya in her new Rudolph dress up costume:

And Riley with his toolbox:

To be honest, I'm getting a bit cross at the moment - I can't seem to get any good photos.  Even our Christmas day ones were rubbish.  Grrrrr.  I'm blaming it on the horrible, grey, cloudy weather we've had for weeks.

Christmas Sensory Play

Uh-oh.  Our 12 Days of Christmas Arts and Crafts isn't going as planned - Riley is in a funk and doesn't want to do any of it (he can get a bit like this towards the end of term).  Today I decided to change tack.  If art is out, we'll do some sensory play.  It didn't work.  He took one look at it and walked off without a word.  Never mind - Freya and I had a lovely time!

I got a couple of 50p packs of angel hair from Tesco (I absolutely hate it on Christmas trees, but its lovely to play with!) and added a few mini paper chains seeing as she was so fascinated with them yesterday, and that was it!

Its so twinkly and fluttery!  As you can see, she was impressed.

Paper Chains

To be honest, these weren't really part of my plans for the '12 Days of Christmas Art and Crafts' that we're doing, but when I was in Ryman's yesterday they had kits for 49p which is cheaper than getting the paper and cutting it out yourself, so I thought we'd give it a go.  (To be honest, I can't believe they make kits, but hey ho!)  In some respects, I should have gone with my original plan - Riley could not have cared less!  With a whole lot of help and encouragement he managed to string 5 or 6 loops together, then tutted at me and wandered off.

Freya on the other hand loved them.  Obviously she's not at the stage where she was making them herself, but I gave her 3 looped together to play with and she was fascinated! 

She fiddled for ages, wearing them as bracelets and just working out how they looped together.  So it wasn't quite the disaster it could have been.  I'll have to store the rest of the strips for next year and let Freya go at it again then!

Christmas Tree Cakes

So here's the '12 Days of Christmas Arts and Crafts' Day 2!  Sadly the wreath still isn't finished - when I asked Riley if he wanted to do art this afternoon he looked at me like I was crazy and just said 'no'.  Oh well.  But he did want to bake, so we made Christmas tree cakes.  They're a great alternative to Christmas Cookies - I knew Riley wouldn't have the patience to cut out dozens of fancy shapes carefully.  They're really simple.

We made a basic sponge cake mix (4oz sugar, 4oz marg, 4oz s/r flour, 2 eggs) and baked it in a square cake pan, traybake style.  Then when it was cool, I cut it into 3 strips, then cut each strip into triangles and let Riley loose with some thick, bright green glace icing (just the icing sugar, a tiny bit of water and some green food colouring) and some silver balls.  He thought it was great!

The recipe that I got the idea from (Practical Parenting and Pregnancy, Jan '11 - though I did tweak it slightly) said to stick marshmallows on the base of the triangles for trunks, but our cake wasn't deep enough, so unless you're in the know, they just look like weird green triangles!!!!  I was really pleased with how well they came out - Riley did a really good job with them (and Freya did a very good job of eating all the offcuts!!!!)  Here's his finished plateful.....

12 Days of Christmas Arts and Crafts - Day 1

So here is our 1st Christmas art project from our '12 Days of Christmas Arts and Crafts' thing we're doing.  Its sadly unfinished as Riley wasn't that keen on doing art today so he gave up pretty quickly.  Fortunately its a fairly quick project. 

Its a paper wreath.

I simply cut a ring out of sticky-backed plastic (using two different sized plates as a guide) and masking taped it down, then I gave Riley paper triangles (for that pointy 'fir' looks) in as many different green papers as I could find.  There's 2 different shades of green printer paper, 2 different tissue papers, some green foil sweetie wrappers and bits of a plastic nappy packet!  I wished I'd had some green fabric too, but my stash is lacking in the green department.  He stuck them down randomly - I just told him to cover the sticky!

After he gave up I added a few extra triangles to fill in the gaps (I'm sure he won't mind!) and stuck the whole thing to a matching cardboard ring cut from a cereal packet to give it some rigidity.  Hopefully tomorrow we'll stick a few red sequins on for 'berries' and then its going on our living room door.  Watch this space for the finished pics!

Paper Plate Pumpkins

Its hardly groundbreaking, but it was a simple Halloween project we could do while Freya was asleep this morning.  We actually did it in two stages - we painted the backs of some paper plates bright orange yesterday, so today was making faces out of black paper shapes. 

He got a bit carried away with one so it has extra bits on it, and another looks like a wierd earless cat(!), but he had fun and thats what counts.  I try to let it be about process as much as possible, but he likes to have a finished product he can relate to, so some gentle steering is required every now and then!  (You can tell which one I 'steered' on!!!)  The final touch was to stick a green paper stalk to the back of each of them and then we hung them up on our living room door.  A lovely decoration for Halloween!