Friday 8 November 2013

Ten minute tea time

Let's face it, sometimes, it's so damn irksome being around loud, challenging toddlers that you just want to run and hide for ten minutes, maybe even drink a few mouthfuls of lovely hot tea. In a desperate bid to get that peace and quiet, I started a sticker book for Daughter.

It's just a 50p notebook, and the stickers come from a variety of places - the dentist, the offcuts of our 'beam-benders' from the trips to Europe, that bubble tea place in Cambridge that I'm addicted to... To buy though, interesting stickers can be pretty expensive. Of course there are cheap ones available, but they tend to be a bit boring... like Wilkinson's 400 circles for 55p. Tiny dots... hardly going to entertain long enough to get the kettle on, let alone savour a hot drink.

So one day, in a rare moment of genius, I drew 5 coloured dots around a yellow dot and told Daughter to stick corresponding circles on. She absolutely loved the fact that what started as nothing, suddenly became a flower.

Job done, for about two days. That's right... every time I put the kettle on for two blissful days, I got to sit and enjoy a hot cup of tea! But the flowers started to lose their wonderous, hypnotic effect. I needed to come up with something else because once you go back to hot tea, cold just isn't an option any more.

A wibbly line makes a caterpillar whislt a semcircle can be cajoled into a rainbow. You can draw a face and leave out the features... alternate between all of these things and maybe, just maybe, you can get one hot cuppa in a day!

And before you start feeling guilty, it's good for fine motor skills, colour recognition, and shapes. It's also a nice craft which involces no mess or cleaning up. Win!

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