Baby and toddler Halloween party!

Today I hosted a little Halloween party for the two Aj's, we had spooky themed food and games, and also some music courtesy of a Halloween themed internet radio station.  Food wise we had phantom pizza, where I tried to shape the cheese like ghosts using a cookie cutter, but it didn't seem to work very well.  Some pumpkin oranges and ghost bananas, and petrifying pasta, using raisins, dyed pasta, grated carrot and cucumber pumpkin faces.   Arthur and I also made traditional Soul cakes which made him happy as he always likes to 'mix mix'.

Games wise we had feed the bats, a bat cave, I sewed some decorative bats into the pop up tent,  some hidden eyeball lollies and a witches cauldron, which is basically a tub filled with shredded tissue paper and little themed bits and bobs like rubber spiders, rats etc for the children to rummage into and   We also had a play dough table which seemed to be the most popular activity, leaving me with multi-coloured blobs of creativity!

Petrifying pasta!

Phantom pizza

Soul cakes

Feed the bat

The best picture of the two of them!!

The bat cave

Ghost bananas

Spiced Pumpkin muffins

After daddy kindly saved the pumpkin insides during their carving session yesterday, today's activity revolved around picking out the seeds and then turning the mush left over into something tasty.

I try my hardest not to waste things if I can, so our first task was to remove the seeds, these will be used for a mixture of planting, eating and possibly maybe even a little art project, I am yet to decide on that.  It was a great thing for Arthur to do working on his fine motor skills and pincer grip, however there we just so many that he soon got bored and I had to help him out a bit.

Once that was done I put the rest of the insides into a food processor to make them nice and smooth to mix into the muffin mixture, the recipe I used was given to me by a friend, it's a basic recipe that can be used to make any flavour muffin, sweet or savoury, her particular favourite are cheese and bacon!

225g self raising flour
2tsp baking powder
75g melted butter
175ml semi skimmed milk
1 egg

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C, Mix all ingredients together, careful not to over mix, bake for 20-25 mins.

For the pumpkin muffins I added the puree, no amount i'm afraid, I just did it till it looked nice and balanced between muffin mix and pumpkin, and some mixed spice, again I would love to tell you how much mixed spice but i'm afraid it was a toddlers choice amount, he just kept adding and adding till I took it away!  I also added 100g of caster sugar to sweeten the mix up a bit.

Picking out the seeds

Weighing the flour

Mixing

Scooping into cases

MMMMMMMMMMMMM!!

Pumpkin carving with daddy!

I don't really have much to write about this activity as I was a work and it was done with daddy! But Daddy kindly took some pictures of them having fun for me. He also kept all the insides for me to use with them throughout the week.

What's in here??

Scooping

Choosing a design for daddy!

All finished!

Spooky!!

Super quick Wizard outfit fun!

I thought I would get Arthur doing some gluing to practice picking up small objects, to work on his pincer grip, and get use to the idea of sticking objects in the same place as the glue.  So I cut up a paper plate, and a piece of black paper the same shape, and folded them round into a conical shape with the paper on top of the plate, and stapled together to form a basic pointed hat shape.  I then quickly cut some diamond shaped from glittery card and found some other scraps from previous crafts.

Once Arthur had finished I got his cape I made using these simple instructions, all you need is an old tshirt!  Arthur then started running around the room saying he was superman and getting me to 'fall' off the sofa so he could save me, so the wizard had magically transformed into a superhero instead, but I didn't mind as he was having fun and using his imagination 'flying' around the front room.

Basic shape

Gluing stars

Finished hat

Wizard outfit ( just need to add some stars maybe?)

Five little Pumpkins!

This morning whilst breakfast was being eaten by the two Aj’s I used the Pumpkin cookie cutter and drew some Pumpkin shapes onto orange paper, cut them out and drew faces on them, I then stuck them onto little sticks and sang Five little Pumpkins to the two Aj’s animating the cut outs to go with the voices.  I then let Arthur and Alyssa play with them for a little bit as we continued to sing the song over and over; it’s such a simple and easy song to remember that Arthur soon started to repeat bits and bobs back to me. Alyssa enjoyed bobbing along and waving the pumpkins, before trying to eat one!

I then thought, as we had people coming over later in the afternoon, and Arthur was in a particular was in a meddlesome mood, that I would distract him from causing chaos by getting him to bake biscuits with me.  That itself soon ended in disaster, with  Arthur eating far to much of the mixture than can surely be healthy, causing more mayhem than normal and making more mess than normal.  I did manage to distract Arthur for a short while with the kneading (or squashing in his case!) and rolling and cutting, however the recipe we used produced ridiculously bland, rather nasty biscuits, even though it contained golden syrup and ginger! But Arthur enjoyed making them and cutting out the Halloween shapes, so I guess that is all that matters! I just need to remember to mark the page in that children’s cook book with a big ‘do not make!'

 

Five little Pumpkins!

"Rolled out of sight!"

Mix mix!

Squashing, I mean kneading!

Rolling!

Halloween shaker and spooky bath time fun!

I wanted to continue the Halloween theme with Alyssa's play today whilst Arthur was at nursery, so after a bit of thought I remembered that in the Halloween craft box I had some table confetti, that I bought really cheap in the sale after Halloween last year.  I mixed some of this with some dry red lentils in a little pot for Alyssa to shake and look at.  Alyssa really enjoyed shaking it but some how she managed to open the tub so I soon had to take it off her, lentils and confetti everywhere!

Once we picked Arthur up from Nursery we headed to the field for our usual tunnel house Tuesday, where we replanted strawberry plants from runners.  It's amazing what you learn that you never would even think of having to learn when you have children.  I never realised that strawberry plants grow from leaves of other strawberry plants planted into the ground, having never attempted to grow them before.  I am also aware that I am started to learn facts that I would never have thought about using or knowing before as well as more nursery rhymes than I knew existed.  I also feel it won't be long before I become a fountain of knowledge on different dinosaurs like some mums I know, or makes of tractors or something.

Once we were home and dinner was finished with it was time for bath time, with Arthur and Alyssa both having eczema we have really boring baths with no bubbles as they bathe in special bath lotions, whilst running the bath I was thinking of this, and thought about how I could make their bath times a little bit more fun occasionally.  I have seen Gelli baff advertised on television before, and thought it would be great, but again the skin issues have put me off.  So I thought I would just try and create a spooky bath time theme, to tonight's bath.  I scattered the confetti into the water, and added the eyes and the spiders from the Home made slime play as well as a stretchy frog.  Alyssa reached straight for the giant eye that she favoured the other day, and Arthur wanted me to take the spiders out of the bath straight away, but liked the frog.  He also enjoyed fishing for pumkins as the confetti had all sunk to the bottom of the bath, we also talked about what the other bits of confetti were, little skulls and bats.
I just need to try and think of some other ways to make bath time a bit more interesting and fun now! 

The shaker

The only vaguely still picture I got of Alyssa playing!

The spooky bath!

Home made Slime!!

Following our Halloween theme, today I decided a bit of mess was in order as we tried out a recipe from 'The Folder" which I found last year. 

It's a really simple recipe that uses:
2 cups of water
1/2 cup cornflour
food colouring
Glitter if you want

Boil the water in the saucepan, add in the cornflour and colouring stirring continuously and allow to cool to solidify.  I would add it's probably a good idea to sieve the cornflour as I didn't and ended up with lumps of un-mixed corn flour, although I did seem to add to the sensory fun. 

Once it had cooled I added some googly eyes, some plastic spider from our Halloween decoration box, and some little bones. 

Alyssa jumped straight in and grabbed the large eye, Arthur was a little hesitant and kept asking me to pick things out for him, but eventually reached in to grab bits and bobs.  Arthur's favourite bits were the bones, he kept pretending to be a dog.  Alyssa just kept diving back in over and over again searching for new things.

Cooking away

All ready

Alyssa diving in!

Arthur finds a bone!

Shadow puppets

Making the most of the darker mornings this morning I made some Halloween shadow puppets, inspired by a blog by One perfect day, which also has a free downloadable template.  I used some cookie cutters to draw around for mine, and attached them to lollipop sticks.

Arthur had a great time waving the puppets in front of the torch, and talking about them, building his vocabulary.  He isn't old enough to start creating stories so I as such, so I tried starting him off a bit saying things like "the witch was stirring her cauldron."  When Alyssa woke up she also enjoyed looking at the puppets, we then moved onto making hand puppets using Instructions from the internet, which I actual found harder than they looked, so will have to practice ready for next time.  Arthur then grabbed his toy pirate and toy dinosaur and we had fun making then bigger and smaller in the torch light and making the dinosaur do silly things like eat Arthur's hair.

The puppets

Playing with the pumkin

OOOH scary ghost

Alyssa enjoying them too

Watching her big brother!

Giant Dinosaur AAAAAHHH!

Sorry for the rubbish pictures, but couldn't figure out how to turn the flash off!

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Spiderweb window art

With all the Halloween posts around recently my brain is a blur with wonderful themed ideas to do with Arthur and Alyssa, I recently came across a Sticky paper window art blog from Fun at home with the kids.  I have used this technique before and found that Arthur really enjoyed the opportunity to be creative, and I enjoyed not having to worry about cleaning up the mess!  A definite hit for me especially on a work day, as I don't want to have to worry about cleaning up bathing children etc as well as getting myself ready for work!

So I quickly cut out a couple of (really bad!!) looking spider's and gave Arthur some wool for the web and off he went!  It was a very quick activity both to set up and to complete, if I had put more time into it I would have done better spiders, maybe some flies and a couple of branches or something too, the possibilities for pictures are endless really and can be as simple or in depth as you want.

(Please ignore the dirty windows!)

More web needed in this corner!!

Spooky spider picture!

Sequin bats!

In preparation for Halloween, I rummaged through my Halloween box, yes I have a box of crafts and bits specifically for Halloween!  I found a lovely simple craft kit that I bought from a supermarket in the sale after Halloween last year, I love rummaging around the supermarkets for things in the days after a holiday and stowing them away till for the following year. 

The craft uses foam bat shapes, although i'm sure paper ones would work just as well, and sequins and glitter glue.  The kit also included pipe cleaners to make them into finger puppets, but I didn't do this as I have another plan for them. 

The glue in the kit was quite hard to squeeze out, even I struggled, so I worked on Arthur's communication and got him to tell me where he wanted the glue, so he could then stick things down.  I was very surprised that Arthur put his eyes in the correct places, I was half expecting them to be all over the place.  He had great fun sticking them down and being creative, and Alyssa had great fun playing with her teether and an up decorated bat. 

Before

Alyssa playing

Sticking sequins

Glitter!!

TADAH! All ready for Halloween!

The dress up boxes!

Saturday was a bit of a wasted day play wise, we were dismantling a wardrobe in the play room and organising and downsizing, with either the two Aj's under our feet, runing around pretending to hammer like daddy, or ashamed to say, watching the telly in the room to keep them still and out the way!! It is hard to think it took nearly a whole day, and that was nearly a whole day of our distracted atention, but the final out come was very worth it I believe!  Arthur now has easier access to a lot of his toys, and they are more organised.  He has a lot more freedom to see something he wants to play with and grab it!  I also have access to my clothes in my wardrobe as well so may actually start varying what I wear!  We also moved Alyssa's cot so the light fro the hallway doesn't shine in her face when you open the door and wake her up!! When we finally finished and let the children back in after a final hoover, Arthur was very happy and running around playing with this and that, finally he settled on the dress up boxes, which before have been higher up so he's not really rummaged through before.  We had great fun being dragons, robots, fireman and any number of things.  My boxes are filled with all sorts of bits and bobs collected from fancy dress party's over the years, or old clothes that I think may be used for something else.  A little imagination goes a long way, and it is sometimes not necessary to buy specially made dress up out fits! Arthur wrapped his duvet around him at one point and told me he was a lady, as well as mixing and matching bits to make up his own characters!  Before I throw out any old clothes I look at them and think, can this be a dress up outfit, or can I use the material for something, part of my hoarders charm I guess! 

New reading corner

A lot more spacious

Cowboy Arthur

Lady Arthur

Fireman Shepard??

Dragon

"The sun 'll come out tomarra!"

Ganster baby

Robot Arthur