I had forgotten my all time top frustration with hama beads (putting aside my crossness with the mini beads that fly off the peg board if you breathe too heavily or your cat runs across the room and swishes her tail near them!) which is that if the kids decide the finished creation is a ‘toy’ you are constantly re-ironing them to fix them together again – producing a squashed, square flat fat bead effect instead of the nice round firm chunky one. *This should by no means put anybody off the beads, they are a fab resource and can provide hours of educational creative fun, infact I am off to replenish our black, red and white supplies and perhaps try midi to see if my issues with Maxi and mini can be resolved 🙂 *
So there I am, ironing Dora’s leg back on for the 8th time this morning when I hear Scarlett utter the imortal words guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of anyone who has met her or heard about her:
Messy! Mummy, uh-oh!
In her room I dash to find she has climbed on the roof of her dolls house to reach the baby talc and liberally sprinkled it round the dolls house, the Father Christmas animatronic figure which seems to have ended up in her room, her oil filled radiator and the foot of her Christmas tree. Festive image of snow in her bedroom aside, she had made something of a mess, yes! Luckily talc incidents are amoung the easiest to manage – even Davies, model child in comparison, covered his bedroom with talc one night when we thought he’d gone to sleep – so a quick hoover dealt with that one -and I like the smell of new babies and cleanliness it creates too 🙂
Talking of which – last week when I held baby A (Rachel’s) in the evening I felt like I was full of milk, I forgot about it til I held her again yesterday and as I cuddled her I swear I felt the old let down reflex kick in. Clearly there is no milk there, but how odd! I was in the middle of saying to Rachel that if we had had a third child then she would have been planned to be the exact age A is – a two year age gap after Scarlett, and also she is the only baby other than my own I have ever held. So although I don’t necessarily *feel* anything for her, I guess my body reckons if it is holding a baby then it should be feeding it. Very odd…
Have done some more hama this morning. Davies copied my snowman from yesterday and with only a small amount of help seemed to grasp the concept of following it as a pattern. Scarlett wants me to make a Boots and a Backpack to go with Dora – Backpack is managable – we have loads of purple beads and I even had a quick go last night while they ate tea but it was more of a rectangle with eyes and a mouth than anything amazing so I didn’t iron it – Boots has too much detail to fit in maxi beads so she might have to wait for the midis.
Right, I have half an hour to sort the house out ready for Julie and the twins to arrive, decide what to make everyone for lunch and oh yes, get Scarlett dressed 🙂
The last time Hannah was in hospital, I started to re-lactate within about 12 hours, which was a very spooky experience. I’d half noticed I was getting really sore, and had a passing thought that all I needed was to start my period at that point, and Bob looked across the bed at me and asked what I’d spilled all down my front. So I think its not an unusual phenomena. It was the fisr time she’s been in hosptial as a non-breastfeeeder, and it was just like my body went “sick child alert” and started pumping out hormones.
If your maxi boards are see-through, you can just put them over the pictures in the book, to follow the pattern. Elijah could just about manage this last year, though you have to make sure they keep the board still, lol.
I did think of that, but we don’t actually have the book so I would have to draw something to put underneath for him to follow – which could work quite well. I didn’t get the books as I like to make up my own (like the christmas ones) and tbh the car and teddy boards have been less popular with the kids than just sitting making patterns on the square ones, but today I thought I’d do something to stretch the whole following a pattern / maths type area instead of the creative go wild with the beads one we usually focus on 🙂