Wood for the Trees

I decided this year that now my youngest is getting to the age where she can cope with simple games that a nice family tradition to start would be to buy a Christmas board game that we could all enjoy. This year following reviews from Let Toys Be Toys we bought the cooperative game Dinosaur Escape. The synopsis is that you are helping 3 dinosaurs to escape the mainland to dinosaur island before the volcano erupts. You need to turn over a token with a matching dinosaur to the one in the same quadrant to move to the island. You each take it in turns to roll the dice, move a dinosaur and turn over a token (or add a piece of volcano if you roll a volcano picture). As a cooperative game it helps children to learn sharing and teamwork by suggesting which dinosaur to move and helping each other to remember what the flipped over tokens are. It says 4+ on the box but comes with instructions for younger players (you leave the tokens over so don't need to remember them) and with a b...

A few years ago I watched a programme called Hugh's War on Waste. It highlighted the crazy amount of food that gets wasted each year and has really made me think. The stats day that; UK households threw away 7.3 million tonnes of wasted food in 2015.  And before it even gets to our houses farmers are wasting enough fruit and veg to feed 2-4 million people , that's enough to feed  6 UK cities their 5 a day for a year. If you look at those stats alongside the Trussel Trust's mid-year report on foodbank use that " 586,907 three day emergency food supplies [were] given to people in crisis in first half of this year, a 13% increase on the same period last year – 208,956 to children" We are wasting a staggering amount of food, yet we have the situation that lots of people cannot afford to feed themselves or their families. It really is quite sickening. My children are quite fussy eaters (well mainly the older one, the younger one just copies her). People used to as...

My 5yo loves to watch YouTube. (Very heavily monitored, only as a treat but still...) What she most loves to watch is people unwrapping things and people playing with toys and demonstrating them. Judging by the amount of views and by talking to other parents this seems to be all the rage for 5 year olds. At the moment she likes to watch LOL dolls. This has of course led to 'mummy can I have an LOL doll?'. If you have not had the misfortune to know what this is, let me describe some of the video to you. First it is covered in packaging layered round it and so you must remove some disposable plastic wrapping, then a bit more disposable plastic wrapping, then a bit more. This then leaves you with a round plastic ball. It has different sections which you can open. You open the first section and inside is some plastic packaging, which you open and there are some small plastic glasses. Then you open another section, more plastic packaging, inside some shoes. You continue to do t...

So to try and tackle the mounting amount of paper clutter around the house I recruited the four year old. She is the source of most paper clutter around the house and takes pride in her artwork, even the stuff that comes home from school that looks like she spent all of 2 seconds on it. "Look at this mummy!" "Erm, it's a line on a blank piece of paper?" "Can we put it on the fridge?" "Must we?" She once caught me putting some of her artwork in the recycling and put me on orange for the rest of the day. So to avoid this I made her make the decisions. I gathered all the loose paper from around the house and told her to put it in one of three piles. Keep, recycling or take a photo then recycling. I thought most would end up in the keep pile. I was wrong. She was able to make decisions about which ones to keep and was happy for a lot of them to be photographed then discarded. Although we are left with a bigger keep pile than I would hav...

Where ever there is a box to empty, where ever there is paper to rip and eat, where ever there is a tissue to tear into the tiniest of pieces and spread around the house, there she will be. My arch-nemesis in the fight to maintain a tidy (ish) house - Destructo-Baby! As fast as a speeding bullet, as sneaky as a hundred ninjas, a master of mess..... I think even if we lived in a cave on the remotest mountain with only the clothes on our back she would find a way to cause mess and destruction. It's just the way she is and I love her and wouldn't change it for anything. Some battles aren't meant to be won.