Uses for a Blackboard

We finally got around to making a blackboard recently and it's had a lot of use over the last couple of weeks. All we needed was a sturdy piece of MDF, some blackboard paint and some chalk. Actually, we've had all of that stuff in the garage since last Summer, but only just got around to using it.

Now that we have the blackboard, we are finding so many uses for it. The most obvious is simply drawing on it. We can lean it up against a wall to stand and draw, or we can lay it flat on the floor. One day I drew circles all over it in pink, green, blue and purple, while E coloured them in. I was saying "circle", for E's benefit, and she kept replying "round dot". I guess "circle" is a bit hard to say, although she did give it a good attempt when she was showing our picture to her Daddy later in the day.

Another use for our new blackboard is hopscotch. I drew squares and numbered them and wrote "HOME" at one end. I don't think E had ever played hopscotch before, but she soon got the hang of jumping from one number to the next. It's such a fun little game that we can now play indoors as well as out.

We have also used our blackboard as a train-track for little toy trains by simply drawing some tracks with a piece of chalk. This idea could be used for any kind of scenery. I'm thinking... draw a river for boats or ducks, or draw roads for little cars and buses. We could draw fences around little toy houses or to mark paddocks for farms or enclosures at a zoo.

We could use it to draw mazes to trace with a finger or for a toy to 'walk' through. I could write little reminders or inspirational quotes or verses or rhymes that we'd like to remember... Once E is a bit older, she can use it to work out math problems or practice writing, just like we did at school.

For now, we've left it out for E to draw on any way she pleases. She also enjoys using a water sprayer to clean it. :)

Does anyone else have unconventional uses for a blackboard?

-Polly

Books for E

I've mentioned before our obsession with books
From cookbooks to textbooks to stories of crooks
So today I will tell you of two recent buys
We bought them for E, as the title implies.

These books are well written, I do like the flow
They help E remember the things she should know
In my opinion, they're some of the best
These books teach her things, quite unlike the rest.

Stories and poems of nonsense and such
Are perfectly fun, but they don't teach you much
These two books are part of a new sort of set
For teaching kids things that they may not know yet.

You see, they're narrated by Cat-in-the-hat
The character who "knows a lot about that"
That cat-in-the-hat, while rhyming with style
Is educating all the while.

The first of the books, "There's No Place Like Space"
On a subject that fits in quite well in this place
For at night you can see little E and her Dad
Gazing up at the sky, both a little star-mad.

This book introduces our solar system
It talks about planets and what is in them
From Mercury all the way to Neptune
The Earth, the sun and even the moon.

The second book, E also enjoys
A book about dinosaurs (not just for boys)
"Oh say can you say" is the way it's presented
"Di-no-saur" is the way that it's ended.

'Though Theodor Geisel did not have a hand
In writing these books; please do understand
When I say they contain 'the Seussian Curse':
They cause you to think and to speak all in verse.


-Polly

Pink Day

Yesterday was "Pink Day" at our house. As the mother of a little girl, I find it difficult to think "Pink" without thinking of tacky, plastic "girl" toys, "Barbie" and "Disney Princess", yet, thankfully, we have none of these in our house (yet?). I'll refrain from going into a rant about pink overload and marketing to girls and instead go straight to a glimpse of what our "Pink Day" was really all about.

Here's E playing on the slide in her pink outfit:

The pink "piggly wiggly" hat is her favourite hat at the moment. It's crocheted and I bought it on etsy over a year ago. I was going to add a link to the shop, but it seems that either the seller is no longer making them, or is selling them elsewhere. The pants, top and jacket are all hand-me-downs from a friend. E has mostly hand-me-down clothes and a good chunk of them are pink. Evidently, she wears at least some pink most days. I have no problem with that. She's super cute no matter what she's wearing. ^_^. Comparatively, the only pink clothes in my wardrobe at the moment are my pajamas and some socks.

Aside from clothes, we have surprisingly few pink things around the house. We did manage to find a pink rubber duck, a pink tricycle and a giant pink teddy-bear. There are also a few pink blossoms in the garden.

For a pink themed craft, I cut out paper shapes (flowers, circles and 'petals') in different shades of pink. E had fun moving them around and making different patterns. After a while, I got out a glue stick for E to make a more permanent collage on a piece of cardboard.

Here's what she came up with:

As is E's style, a bit of extra colour was added with blue and green crayons and a bit of black pen. She's a mixed-media artist, didn't you know? I put it up on the wall and E still points to it and says "Flowers!". I guess she's proud of her work.

Unlike our blue cakes, our pink snack was quite healthy and free from added food colouring. We made berry smoothies with frozen raspberries, strawberry flavoured yoghurt and soy milk. I usually prefer my smoothies with more fruit and less yoghurt, but it was certainly more filling this way. E enjoyed it, even if she did pour half of it out onto a plate and try to eat it with a spoon. (It wasn't that thick). I guess she was just experimenting... There was a little bit left over, so I froze it in an ice-block mould along with some coconut ice-cream.

Part of the reason that I chose pink for our colour-themed day this week is that my new hair-dye finally arrived in the mail.
Here's me with my new, pink hair:

[Hey, Maple, you were right!]

My husband took a few days off of work this week, to be with us, and therefore had a couple of hours spare to colour my hair for me. :) E was a little mystified when she first saw it and kept saying, "Pink... Hair... Pink... Hair..." and wanted to touch it all the time. I found an episode of Lazytown for her to watch on tv to remind her that Stephanie has pink hair. (I didn't even have to point it out to her). She was okay with it after that. My hair is getting kind of long now, so I probably should have bought 2 bottles of dye. Mine certainly isn't as bright as Stephanie's (but hers is a wig - shh!).

-Polly

Good Weather for Ducks

It has been raining a lot this week. E loves ducks, but instead of taking a trip to the "duck park" (a local park that has a big pond where ducks like to swim) in the rain yesterday, we did some duck themed activities at home. I found some really cute, printable duck puppets on picklebums and printed them out for E to play with. E used her crayons to personalise them a little and I glued them onto some sturdy cardboard and cut them out. We used Kate's idea of play-dough to make them stand up.

These little puppets were great for telling duck stories and singing duck songs.

E really does love ducks, so she already has a collection of rubber ducks that she plays with in the shower. They are different sizes and different colours. She loves to sort them and to count them. She also has a few books about ducks, including one which actually quacks when you press a button (thanks Grandma!).

Of course, who can have a duck themed day without the duck song? E's auntie (my sister) introduced her to the duck song and she's loved it ever since. I swear one of her first words was "waddle-waddle".

Quack, quack!

-Polly

Trees and Treasures

Today is so clear and sunny, we just had to get out and go for a walk around the neighbourhood. Here's E at a local park, checking out the kangaroo paw in flower:

 and here she's found a dandelion flower and is pointing it out to her toy duck:

E gets excited by trees. As we were walking along the footpath, she noticed some gum trees in the park ahead. "Trees!" she said, and hurried in that direction. A number of the trees got hugs from E, but thankfully not all of them needed hugs today or we'd probably still be there hugging trees.

My little tree-hugger

Back at home, E shows off her new treasure: a big, white, shiny rock

Look what I found!

and a couple of smaller items are added to her treasure bowl.

I bought this little wooden bowl at an op-shop last week for $2. It makes a perfect little treasure bowl and looks lovely filled with E's little bits of nature. I love op-shop finds.

-Polly

Looking Up

My husband and E love to go outside at night to look at the stars. There has been a lot of cloud around this week, which isn't too good for stargazing, but it gives me something pretty to look at during the day. I love clouds and the way that they're ever-changing. I took all of these photos standing in our backyard.

Of course, when you spend a lot of time looking at the sky, you're bound to spot a few of these:

and these:

and occasionally, one of these:

Hopefully, after looking at these photos, you can forgive me for the blurry phone-pics in my last post.

Don't forget to look up.

-Polly

Lots of Baking

cornbread

A few years ago, a good friend of ours gave me a cookbook for Christmas called "The Joy of Vegan Baking". While it is an American book, it doesn't use any weird ingredients that we can't get here and any measurement or temperature conversions have already been done. I have made many versions of the Chocolate Chip Mint Cookies over the years and it is one of my go-to recipes for cookies. I made a big batch of caramel-choc-chip cookies the other day that were a variation on the Chocolate Chip Cookies from the same book. Next time I think I'll cut back on the sugar a little - they're very sweet. Whenever I flip through, I remember that I mean to try one (or both) of the soda bread recipes. I don't tend to keep that much flour on hand, as we'll get moths in the pantry again. I really should invest in some storage containers with better seals, I suppose. One recipe that I used to make a lot is the Cornbread. I made it again the other day (after finally remembering to pick up some polenta) and served it with a veggie soup that used a bunch of our home-grown veggies.

And, just to show that we're not all about sugary treats around here, here's an easy frittata (not vegan, obviously) that I made last week:

1 zucchini (grated)

2 carrots (grated)

1 onion (finely chopped)

5 eggs (whisked)

1 handful wild rocket (finely chopped)

2 Tbsp parsley (finely chopped)

1 Tbsp flour

Squeeze as much moisture as you can from the veggies.
Mix all ingredients together in a bowl.
Transfer to a greased and lined pan (20x20cm).
Bake at 180C for 30 mins.
Serve with cracked pepper and fresh lettuce.

Mmm, all the greens in this recipe were freshly picked from our garden. If only we had the space for some chickens.

-Polly

Inside, Outside, Inside, Outside

E will run to the window to watch the rain.

"Rain! Rain!"

She will run to the door when it's dry again.

"Outside!"

She will gaze out the window to see the stars

"Stars!"

And ask Daddy to take her to see the moon.

"Moon!"

Between showers of rain we head out to the garden, in gumboots and hats. We have recently harvested some turnips and some eggplants and are constantly pulling leaves from the silverbeet, spinach, lettuces, rocket and parsley, to add to our meals. We had fresh lettuce with our lunch today. A bowl of store-bought lettuce is boring, yet a bowl of home-grown, fresh-picked lettuce is a treat. A week or so ago, I made a yummy soup using a lot of the coriander which is abundant in our herb garden. There's still plenty more.

Am I really that weird to like turnips and eggplants? I seem to be the only one around here who ever wants to eat them, unless they're hidden in a soup or something. E likes to play with them, though:

Silly eggplant nose!

We've been doing some more chalk drawing on loose pavers. The constant rain showers keep cleaning them for us, so we always have something to draw on. I've also been doing some more drawings for our picture alphabet. E was in the mood for colouring this morning, so I got a lot of help with the 'G', at least until the sun came out.

G is for grapes. Gravity-defying grapes, in this instance. E loves to eat green grapes (she kept saying "Mmmm!" as we were drawing). We coloured these ones  like red wine grapes because purple is pretty. The scanned image never looks as good as the original, but you get the idea.

Although the ground is still wet, we actually have beautiful blue skies at the moment. Maybe we should go blow some bubbles like Maple and Molgaban. (Check out their gorgeous pictures!) We don't have fancy bubble blowers, but I'm sure I could find some dish-washing liquid and a wire coat-hanger.

Okay, I couldn't just sit here typing while there was a nice, clear, blue sky outside. I remembered that we received some bubble mix as a party favour a while ago, so I found it and we went back outside.

We get bubble fun, too!

-Polly

First Blossoms

Over the last few weeks, we have been watching our little nectarine tree grow it's first buds for the season, green shoots and, as of yesterday, blossoms. Each day it has grown a little more. It's woken up from it's Winter sleep, when it was nothing more than a stick in the ground.

I don't think I've ever enjoyed welcoming Spring as much as I am this year. Perhaps it's because I'm not getting swooped by magpies every morning as I walk to work (now my 'work' is right here at home) or maybe because I have a daughter to share little wonders with.

-Polly

Making Magic

Waking from a nap one day, E discovered that a fairy had come to visit and had left behind her magic wand. I assured her that the fairy had left it as a gift, so E spent the rest of the afternoon 'making magic'.
Of course, I had really spent E's nap-time constructing the wand for her from some craft felt, a bamboo dowel and some fluffy yarn, but where's the magic in that?

I bought this book some time ago and it's one of my favourites. It's called "Creative Play for your Toddler". As I often do, I read the whole book before I tried any of the projects. I believe the book is worth having even if I never got around to any of the projects, but I'm glad that I did. Here's the hobby horse that I made for E:

I don't have an 'action shot' of this one. E 'gallops' around the house on it, saying "Neigh! Neigh!" which is rather difficult to get a photo of. The horse was made from materials that I already had around the house, including holey socks and a cardboard poster tube. I didn't have a nice wooden broom-handle to use, but E doesn't mind and neither do I. She still gets handmade, mum-made toys.

-Polly

Discovering Spring

I love the light at dawn. It's as if the world is glowing. This morning I got up and opened all the blinds to let as much of that light in as possible. As I opened the blinds covering our back window, I was greeted with this:

Ah, I love rainbows.

It has been raining here for the last few days. We got a couple of hours of clear sky yesterday afternoon, so E and I took the opportunity to go for a walk around our neighbourhood. We discovered many signs of Spring, even though it's officially Winter for another 4 weeks. E loved finding flowers in our neighbours' front gardens, especially if they were purple flowers. We stopped at one flowering shrub for quite some time, simply to admire the flowers. E was quite happy to sit and admire these plants. She did pick some soursobs and a dandelion flower. I didn't mind, as they are both weeds here.


We stopped at a park and E, who always seems to have her head in the air,* called out, "Trees!" It wasn't a bad thing for her to be looking upwards in this instance. There were no walls or chairs or anything really for her to walk into.
"What's so special about these trees?" I thought. I looked up and noticed that these trees were looking particularly beautiful and were full of parrots and galahs. Fair enough, E. I'm happy that you get excited about trees. Perhaps we have a future conservationist on our hands.

E had fun playing on some of the playground equipment and finding treasures like rocks, leaves and seed pods. There were even some tiny flowers in the grass.

-Polly

*Like Hans Guck in die Luft, a story that I only recently heard, but was often read to my husband when he was a child. He heard a version where Hans drowned in the stream.