Penultimate day of holidays

Today has been the penultimate day of the summer holiday.
We went to Wildwood again. This time without clipboards or any agenda. Just passing the time. But the kids are brainwashed and immediately, as we pulled into the car park, Honor announced that we had parked diagonally and as we walked to the entrance she was busy identifying right angles, obtuse angles and acute angles. NO KIDDING! There was absolutely no prompting from me. And Henry was attempting to read all the signs on the way round too.

Probably, one of the most interesting exhibits there are the adders. However it is usually quite hard to see them in their enclosure as they are well camouflaged and prefer to hide themselves under the logs. Today it was lovely and warm and we were lucky enough to see all five of them. Little Hope loves looking at the snakes and making the hissing noises. Poor Henry had a bit of an accident though. He tends to race around alot and not watch where he is going so he soon ended up flat on his face and covered in dirt. He completely freaks out when he sees blood and unfortunately he sustained a bit of a cut on his knee. I didn't have any plasters with me, just some baby wipes (I got him to keep the offending wound covered with one of those for a bit) and some tea tree oil.

After Wildwood, we stopped for a walk along the seafront at Whitstable. I was hoping to get some seafood there like we had at Blakeney Quay, Norfolk , on our holiday. In Norfolk there was no shortage of little seafood stands selling reasonably priced portions of shellfish. I still often think of the delicious crab sandwich I had when we got off the boat from the seal trip. It just cost about £2. At Whitstable, there are loads of eateries but I couldn't find any modestly priced snack food. I ended up buying a small tub of crab meat with the intention of making my own sandwich at home, but that set me back £4.65 and a small bottle of dandelion and burdock put the price up to over £6. Whitstable is a lovely place but a bit of a rip off, in my humble opinion.
The weather was lovely (and free!) for sitting on the beach while the kids paddled and joined in with some other children who were crabbing.

Stop waste, save money.

Tonight Hubby is going to cook some veggie enchiladas using this big courgette from our garden. He usually cooks for me on a Saturday night.
A few days ago we watched a programme on TV called something like 'The Great British Waste Menu'. A couple of chefs were challenged to cook up a banquet using food that is thrown away for celebs, politicians etc to highlight the fact that so much perfectly good food in this country is simply thrown away for a variety of reasons. Take my courgette, for example. If this, like so many other courgettes, was grown by a supplier for the supermarkets it would be thrown away for being the wrong shape and size. We watched suppliers showing us the boxes full of tomatoes, fruit, even eggs that were just a bit too small all being thrown away. The chefs took some of this food away with them, for free, to use in their menus. Perfectly good, delicious produce dumped for not meeting specific retail criteria.

Anyway. Here. at 'Little House', we are guilty of wasting too much food also. I am trying to make more of what we have and save money in the long run. I suppose a chest freezer would help. I mentioned the other day that I bought a red cabbage to go with our roast pork. It was reduced in the supermarket to 40p, but it looked as though it had a lot of life still left in it. After washing and slicing it, I divided it into 3 portions and put 2 of them in the freezer in bags. So they are all prepared and ready to use. Last night, on Gardeners World, Alys Fowler showed us that you can actually freeze courgettes. I think she grated them first, but better check the info on the BBC website for details. If I am going to do all this, then I think I'll need a bigger freezer.

Another way that I try to be organised in my shopping and save money is to do one big monthly on-line shop. By spending over £100, I get free delivery. But then I need to think about food that will last and not end up getting thrown away. Again, I was buying a lot of frozen food, but I just don't have enough space in the freezer. So now I am buying more tinned food. Especially things like fish and pulses. The kids have always like tinned sardines. I like them too. Fresh ones are very nice but with the tinned variety you can eat the bones. For their tea tonight, the kids had a small tin of sardines in sunflower oil, fried with some borlotti beans (also tinned) and some stale granary baguette. If I was going to have this, I would add some tomato and garlic. Yum. Nice, fast, convenient food that is quite good for you!

For dessert, they had tinned peaches and squirty cream (just a little bit for fun!). I often put chopped nuts on top but didn't have any today.

If anyone out there has some good recipes/ideas using tinned food they would like to share, I'd be delighted to see them in the comments.

Making soap.

Today I got to make the soap I had been waiting to do for some time now.

I bought all the ingredients from a website called 'soap basics' for my daughters' 'Little House on the Prairie' party back in May. The stuff didn't arrive in time. So I waited for her friends to come over so we could try it out together. What I have here, on the table, are:

soap base (translucent and opaque)

3 colours

4 fragrances (inc vanilla and lemongrass)

dried flowers (rosebuds, lavender, orange and lemon verbena)

After melting the base in the microwave and dividing it into the bowls for the children, they added the colours, perfume and petals of their choice and stirred the mixture.

You have to be fairly quick with this process because the mixture soon starts to set.

Then the mixture was poured into moulds.

The soaps did not take very long to set and our visitors were able to take theirs home.

We really enjoyed doing this and will definitely make more for presents.

I think this could easily be done more cheaply by saving old bits of soap and melting down to add whatever ingredients one can get. I wanted to get colours and perfume that are designed for skin contact but I think some essential oils could be used (please check instructions) and flowers like lavender could be found in the garden.

Bye-Bye Big Brother

and Davina McCall.
I have just put the Big Brother final on tv tonight. I remember when it all first started. I watched the first few runs but then it lost its appeal for me. (Davina hasn't though, she's fun. So were the celebrity versions.) This series has had a lot of build up 'cos it is the last one - EVER! I saw the contestants going in ages ago. So I'm just a bit curious to see how it ends - even though I don't know who anyone is.

Down to Margate.

The school holidays are drawing to a close. At about this time I feel desperate to cram in as much with the kids as I possibly can. For some, the school hols are too long. I can understand this. Childcare issues, expense, trying to keep them entertained. For my family, the holidays are a chance to get to know each other again. To live life at a different pace for a while. We get up later, get dressed later. I intended to invite some of the kids school friends over, but somehow, so far, we haven't. Honor has spent the last five weeks mostly playing with her younger brother and sister. I'm sure their relationship with each other has benefited. Yes, there have been plenty of squabbles, but 2 days ago we were driving along in the car. Honor was chatting to me and casually referred to Henry as her best friend.

Today, I didn't really plan what we were going to do. I just bundled them in the car with a bag full of food and drink and headed down to Margate. Henry and Honor had a little bit of pocket money saved and so I thought we'd start at Primark. They enjoyed doing their own shopping there. HM bought herself a t-shirt and Henry was going to buy a packet of pants. Well, he had picked up a packet aged 9-10 yrs (he is 5!) so I showed him how to select the right size. But there were none in his size so he left without anything. (Thank goodness- he really doesn't need any more pants!)

After shopping, we spent an hour on the beach. Little Hope loved the sand and the seagulls. Then we got back in the car and drove further up the seafront. On passing a lovely play area with a Viking longboat (we had been there before) the kids wanted to stop and play there for a while. After that, they wanted to do more shopping (!) so I headed for a nearby shopping centre. On the way, the kids saw a sign for Manston and asked to go to the museum there. "Of course!" said I. So we had another look around there before doing more shopping.

We were all a bit tired by the time we got to the shopping centre. We had a bit of fun in The Body Shop, trying on make-up and perfume. And we bought some Dr Who books in Waterstones. But it was definitely time to go home. Luckily, for me, Hubby had already started on the dinner, roast pork. I made some apple sauce and some red cabbage in cream with some chinese 5 spice. Nobody liked that except me. It had a lovely anniseed taste. Oh well.

Small Successes.

1.) I want to dedicate the first success to my mother-in-law who made my son, Henry's lion outfit for a party (see previous post). Thank you! It's brilliant. I shall put it away for a school 'book week'.

2.) I thought up some games on the spot for our friends' Wizard of Oz party this afternoon. I especially liked the 'Oz has got talent' activity.

3.) I redecorated my dresser using paint and wallpaper and am very pleased with the results.

Wizard of Oz party.

Today I took the children to their friends' Wizard of Oz party. We had to rustle up costumes at fairly short notice. Witches outfits were already available in our dressing up box but Henry wanted to go as the cowardly lion. So his Nana very kindly burned the midnight oil last night to make him this wonderful costume from a brown hooded top.

The ears have cardboard in to make them stand up,

and the fur came from a wig she had!

At the party, the props came from a drama set for a Wizard of Oz theatre production, donated by a friend.

There were a few 'Dorothy' outfits. They were ready made ones. I think Rosie's (in picture) was bought on Ebay. One boy came dressed in a brilliant tin-man costume, though it didn't take him long to pull it to pieces - what a shame. And there were a good mix of good witches, bad witches, munchkins, scarecrows and lions. I didn't find any flying monkey outfits but I found a bat costume in Mothercare which was only £3.99 for my little baby boo!

When I got there, I was asked to help think up some games for the guests to play. We came up with a kind of musical statues game except when the music stopped, the children had to pose as a sleeping lion, a rusted up tin man or a scarecrow. My daughter, Honor, was a bit shy to start with as she did not know many of the children there. So we divided the kids into 4 teams to do an 'Oz has got talent' activity. The groups had to work together to perform a short scene and song for the rest of us to watch. This was a great ice-breaker. The little shows were very good and by the time they had finished, the kids knew each other better. After the food, I had to come up with another game. As my kids love it when I hide snakes in the garden for them to find (this activity originated on St Patrick's Day) I got the birthday girl to collect up as many toy dogs as she could find in the house. She had a lot of them! Then while the guests waited in the living room, I hid the dogs around the garden. The children then played 'hunt the Toto'!!! They seemed to really enjoy that one and wanted to play it several times.