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The strangest wedding present ever?

Years ago, just after I finished my engineering course at college and before I started my university degree, I took a year out and moved to Italy. I lived in with a lovely family and my only job was to speak to the kids in English all of the time. Gaia was 10 and Andrea was 8. I loved my time there and it was quite sad to leave to take my place at uni.

We kept in touch over the years we managed to meet up a few times, the kids came to our wedding party in the UK and Gaia has been over here twice, the last time I got to meet her husband to be.

So, this weekend it was her wedding, I really wanted to go but lack of the old yen stopped us :o(

but we did make them an hmmm, original! present. Ebi-kun drew the picture first then I transferred it onto linen and embroidered it.

He gave the piece the title 'Monsters Of Love' and since Gaia and Luca love monsters I think it is quite apt.

The strangest wedding present that we received was a stunt kite from my uncle Simon, I still have no idea why! So, your turn to share, what was your oddest or most unusual wedding gift (if you are not married how about birthday gift?)

Knock, knock..

Who's there?

Early

Early who?

Early bird!

The BIG day has arrived! The doors are open for registration, as a loyal reader, you get the chance to grab the early bird special, it won't be up for long, so CLICK the button. 

How colouring mixing can teach patience...

I think we now live in a time where we expect instant results to everything, we expect instant replies to emails and text messages and we often choose quick fixes over working at something over a period of time. So when it come to doing craft and projects with Ebi-kun, I like to throw in some patience testing projects.

This one I totally stole from Chasing Cheerios and although it was a slow project, it was fun.

What you need:

6 glasses

Red, blue and yellow food colour (I used Wilton gel)

Water in a jug

Something to mix with

6 sheets of kitchen paper

Pour water into the 6 glasses, the three that will be plain water need less than the coloured water, took me a while to future that out!

Add colour to three of the glasses so you have a red, a yellow and a blue glass and mix well. Then place the glasses in a ring as shown below.

Fold the kitchen paper in half then half again to make a long strip. Link each glass with a strip of kitchen paper to make a ring.

Sit and watch. This was about an hour after we put it together in the morning....

This was dinner time, as you can see the colour hadn't moved much. That is when I realised that the plain water glasses should have less water in them, so I removed a bit of the water.

This was the following morning, Ebi-kun was the first downstairs, I could here him shouting 'it worked'. Not only had the colors travelled along the kitchen paper it had also mixed in the plain water glasses, so they were now purple, orange and green.

We wondered what to do with the kitchen paper, we decided to put it on a big sheet of paper to dry.

Which gave us even more beautiful results! Now I am wishing I had used a piece of fabric instead!

And the kitchen paper... we scrunched them up to make pretty roses....

Ebi-kun is now old enough to predict and deduce results but he was still surprised when he saw the secondary colours in the glasses, I must admit, I enjoyed doing this too!

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Using The Kitchen As A Place To Bond...

I am getting about a bit this week. Today you can find me over at Rhythm Of The Home with a guest post, where I talk about how cooking with kids is also a good time to bond with them, plus I share a favourite family recipe that even a 2 year old can make!

Click the button to be magically whisked off to the redesigned Rhythm Of The Home website. For those who don't know what Rhythm Of The Home is, it is a quarterly online magazine which focuses on Warmth, Play, Celebration and Connection.

What you are is...

SPECIAL

I have come up with some printable teaching ideas to help boost your kids confidence, they are over on the new blog... go check it out!

Ebi-kun is named...

As Maker Of The Month over at makedo!

Somewhat of a surprise, when I tweeted about his Starship, I had no idea there was such a thing! The sub is still in one piece and takes up half the living room! We were talking about it yesterday and thought it would be great fun to take a pile of card down to the park and invite friends round to make something massive. I'm not sure what the maker Of The Month prize is, but if it is more make do pieces we will have to try and organize it.

Taking a trip to Nigeria...

Alas, only a virtual trip but it was fun all the same. From the swaps we have done in the past we have collected a number of items from Africa, not all of them are from Nigeria but we got them out of the continent box anyway.

The reason we did Nigeria is that we have the most items from there, a while ago I did a swap and got a great package which included a handmade book about a child living in Nigeria and the story of her going to a family wedding, a really nice touch. The snack which was included in the pack made my Japanese speaking friends laugh because it was called chin-chin, which in Japanese is a word for 'boys bits'. Ebi-kun obviously though this was hysterical. It did lead onto a discussion of how words can have different meanings in different languages.

The swap pack also included this book, Bisi and the Golden Disc which was an interesting read and we also looked through Africa Is Not A Country to find the page about Nigeria. It is a great book and I highly recommend it for your Africa box.

We also got out my Mancala game. This set was given to me by a good friend who did a couple of years voluntary work in Nigeria, it is hand carved and used dried beans for the stones. We do have a commercial set too that is small and fits in the game drawer. It would be easy to make a set using an egg carton and marbles, the rules to play are here.

The other thing he did was the map of Africa, I bought these maps years ago so I'm not sure how correct they are now, I am sure a country or two has disappeared and a new one emerged! Whilst he was doing it he was asking me for a random fact about each country, hurrah for google is all I can say about that.

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The Boy In The Bubble...

It was back to school this morning for Ebi-kun although it is only a half day, I have to go and pick him up after the earthquake drill. So Saturday, we decided to go out since it was the last weekend of the holidays, we headed into Tokyo to go to the Science Museum. It is the first time we have been to this one. There are 5 floors and the 5th floor is great, loads of hands on stuff to do.

In fact, I would say it is worth going, just for the 5th floor, we definitely spent the most time up there. I was a bit disappointed that there was a general lack of explanation on most of the experiments, it was a good job both myself and hubby have a background in engineering!

This was cool, making a giant bubble you can stand in. There were also demonstrations on all the floors, run by the staff, they had a schedule of what was going on and some of them you needed to pay for.

Ebi-kun liked the 2nd floor where they had lots of cars and a motorbike to 'ride', hubby was into seeing the insides of cars and all that jazz, by this point I was getting bored, each to their own! If you do go, I recommend taking your own food, we ate at the canteen and although the food was edible, it wasn't great.

It was a fun day out, quite a trek for us to get there so I'm not sure if we will go back anytime soon. We did have an amusing incident on the train home. Ebi-kun and I were watching Bear Grylls clips on YouTube and the woman next to Ebi-kun was watching over his shoulder, I seriously thought she was going the throw up after watching the one where he eats live rhino larva! I can't imagine what she went home and told her family about the strange foreigner on the train!

I finally reveal my big secret....

If you are a long time reader on this blog you will know I have been beavering away, working hard in the background and not sharing very much with at all. Sorry about that! 

Now, finally I can reveal my big secret....

Click on the kids to check out my brand spanking new website....

....see you over there!