Crawling and commenting

Froglet didn't express any interest in crawling at all until he was nine months. I think it was due to our tiled floors - not good for gripping with your sleepsuit-clad knees. As soon as we got a rug he was off like a shot. So I wasn't sure if Nutmeg would wait that long or not. And she hasn't. Today she crawled her own length (falling over once or twice and complaining vigorously all the way through). Then she looked at me and started to cry as if to say "look I've got this far, can't you just carry me the rest?" So I did. I'm so proud of my baby!

Meanwhile Froglet is developing a great sense of humour. At the weekend we went out with some friends, and as he walked along behind me with their small daughter I could hear him commenting on my clothes: "R, do you like Mummy's skirt? And her black boots? And her new socks - they come right up to here." On recounting this to The Engineer later I remarked that I felt like a fashion model, upon which Froglet immediately turned round and said matter-of-factly: "Well, you're not."

His father creased himself laughing.

OEA - paper mosaics/collage

Last weeks Open ended Art topic was paper. You can see what everyone else did by clicking on the button (which I forgot to include in last weeks post, oops):

We started off by playing a bit with a tangram.

Froglet wasn't quite sure what to do with it but we had fun making a goose together and then putting its head in different positions. Next I gave him some tangram shapes and some circles (in case he wanted to do a vehicle of some sort) and let him loose with the sticky backed plastic.

The top one is actually upside down. He told me he was doing a road (while he was doing it - the bit that actually looks like a mosaic), but afterwards he said it was all nothing.

As you can probably see, we covered it with cling-film afterwards. This turned out to be fun too as owing to Mummy's lack of skill, there were lots of air bubbles which were great to pop, like bubble wrap.

This weeks theme is going to be beans.

MTM - Apples

This week's theme is apples. Michelle at Her Cup Overfloweth did a really imaginative tin - with a super-cute apple tree - and I'm sure the other ladies did great ones too although I haven't had chance to check them out yet. But you can find them all at the link above.

Ours was not so imaginative.

Green tins for apples. Cheese 'A's, PB apple volcano, apple cupcake, apple-and-cranberry pancakes.

To make the pancakes, I subsituted 1/4 cup of apple sauce per egg. And the volcano is a hot baked apple with peanut butter lava and bits of dried apricot for rocks. (Should have been raisins but we didn't have any). We baked the PB in the apple but it would probably be better to just bake the apple on its own, then hollow out some space in the middle and put the PB in so it can melt and overflow without trying to burn.

Apple and PB is a great combination - surprisingly - but Froglet wasn't very keen so I'll just do those for me in future. :-)

Next week's tin is a Childrens Lit one and I am very excited about it - we are doing Star Seeker.

Muffin Tin Swap Package

I meant to post this nearly two weeks ago - the 28th - but didn't get round to uploading the photos and then forgot about it! Oops!

We were very excited to receive our Swap Package from Heather on Tuesday. Heather and her two lovely girls put a lot of thought into it and Froglet was thrilled with all the little individual parcels - I wish I had thought of doing that with ours! Thank you so much Heather!

Everything was wrapped in red or blue tissue paper - Froglets favourite colours. He insisted on taking everything out of its box or packaging so he "could feel" the paper cases, pinwheels (from our wishlist, yay!) and picks. Seemed like a strange request to me, but maybe he's more tactile than I'd thought. He enjoyed arranging the picks in a little wooden pot my sister got us from Romania, and stacking all the different shapes of muffin tin. We now have enough muffin tins to last a lifetime! His favourite bit was the muffin-puzzle-cake set, which he wanted to use immediately but I managed to convince him to just have a Muffin Tin lunch instead (see below). I love the puzzle cake idea too and am looking forward to trying it out. Other than that, my favourite item is the pack of cute swirly-shaped picks that can hold a label:

The size of the package made me realise just how much more expensive things are over here (or cheaper in the States if you prefer). Just the one star-shaped silicon tin would have used up our whole budget, I've only seen that type in the specialist shop in Luzern. Switzerland doesn't do budget shops, or at least our bit of it doesn't. I think the French-speaking part is perhaps more that way inclined. Next time we're involved in a swap I shall definitely arrange a special trip to the UK to visit all the pound shops over there instead!

Check out all the other cool swap packages here.

Open Ended Art - pebble mosaics

I've fallen behind on posting these even though we have been doing them diligently.

First off, this months theme over at Teaching My Little Bookworm is mosaics. And this weeks material was pebbles.

For some reason pebbles seem to be in short supply over here. Maybe I just don't know where to look - beaches are sandy and river beds are inaccessible. So Froglet and I made our own pebbles. We used white clay, various small items to print with, sand, dried herbs and marker pens to colour them in. This was our first time using real clay and we had a great time! Froglet's pebbles ended up relatively flat (not very pebble-like) but that was all part of the fun.

Then when they had been baked, cooled and coloured, we made mosaics using playdough as a background. I know this only barely qualifies as Art, as it's not permanent, but I thought we might enjoy doing it again on a future occasion. And besides, I'm running out of storage space to keep permanent sculptures!


Froglet tells me that his mosaics are dinosaurs mouths with lots of teeth. He also discovered that the pebbles leave a nice pattern in the dough when they are removed.

I have more OEA photos to post from previous occasions but not time to do it in right now so it will have to be another post.

Jógvan in Switzerland - day 2

The following day we stayed close to home and wandered around the old town in Stans, which is the capital of Nidwalden canton. It's a town of some 15'ooo people. This is Froglet's favourite fountain, on the wall of someone's house. He splashed about in it a bit as he always does, and Jógvan sensibly kept clear while he was doing it!

Jógvan really wanted to have his photo taken in front of this old wall and plaque because he thought it looked pretty. The plaque's inscription reads:

Ave civis bottmingensis. Hic versi capillus anno MMIX.

The online translator assures me that this means:

Ave citizen bottmingensis. This to whirl hair yearly produce MMIX.

Which seems unlikely. Armed with the knowledge that Bottmingen is a town elsewhere in Switzerland, would anyone like to translate for me?

Finally, we tried to take a picture of Jógvan with the church spire. Unfortunately it was very big and rather far away and he was very small and close. So we couldn't get both. But Jógvan agreed with us that the details on the church spire were more interesting than him, just for this once.

And that's all I have time for now. Coming soon: Jógvan's new item of clothing and his trip up a mountain.

Jógvan in Switzerland - day 1

The cute bear in the picture above has been staying with us for the past few days. He's on a world tour before he ends up with a very brave young lady suffering from cancer in Australia. He started off in the Faroe Islands with Hans and Shinta, then stopped over with Henny in Finland before making his way on to America via Switzerland. If you'd like to show him your home town and pray for his future owner too, drop Shinta a line to see if he still has space in his schedule.

Here's what Jógvan did here in Switz.

Knowing how fond he is of boats, we took Jógvan to Lucern, where we walked along the lake front and watched the sailing boats, ferries, mountains and Froglet leaping on rocks. The mountain in the background is Mt Pilatus. Legend has it that Pontius Pilate came here in his old age and is buried there, hence the name. Legend also has it that Pilate's ghost, disturbed because of his role in Christ's death, causes storms on the lake, and that dragons live on the mountain.

At the end of our walk we took a ferry back to Lucern. We had hoped for the paddle steamer but timed it wrong so it was just a normal little ferry. Jógvan enjoyed the view anyway.