Twenty five minutes until Peppa Pig’s Surprise is due to start and my two year old is lying on the floor in the front room having a meltdown because she has to wear shoes. ‘We’re going to see Peppa.’ I tell her. ‘You love Peppa!’ And she does love Peppa, she’s wearing her Peppa tshirt, has watched Peppa that morning and she’s now lying on the floor screaming and I start to panic that things, to put it politely, are not looking good.
Family Things
My Best Tips for Travelling with Kids in the Car
My kids hate going on road trips. Actually, since my second child was born I’ve actively avoided going anywhere further than an hour away, it was just to stressful, too unpleasant. She wanted to scream and fight her way out of the car and I figured I’d rather stay at home. But then fate (or crazy ideas that I have on a Saturday night) threw a bit of a spanner in the works and suddenly we were forced into making long road trips with the kids. Lots of long road trips with them. See, we decided to sell our place here in Essex and move to the other side of the country to Cornwall, which is great and fun and exciting and oh my days that is one looong journey. So we had to take the kids on a six hour journey to see the place before we moved there. And we have to view properties. And actually move. And then come back from the west coast to the east because all our family still live back here and there’s no flights and the nearest train station is 25 miles away so that isn’t going to work either. So these are my very best tips for travelling with kids in the car, because this is something that I’ve really had to work on and if you have any tips I’d really appreciate it if you could pop them in the comments section below!
10 Fun Ways to Visually Stimulate Your Baby
Babies. Sometimes it feels like they don’t do very much, sometimes it feels like they never stop doing things! The world is an exciting (and sometimes scary) place for babies and as a parent I know that I always wanted to find interesting things for my babies to safely explore. Today I’m sharing some of my favourite ways to visually stimulate your baby along with a really cool tool that helps you see what your baby can see!
10 Ways to visually stimulate your baby
Bubbles: I have yet to ever meet a child that doesn’t love bubbles
Mobiles: many people buy mobiles for their babies cots but you can also make simple ones yourself and hang things like ribbons, pompoms and feathers from them.
Books: you can never have too many books for your kids! Babies love ones with simple black and white pictures or pictures of other babies faces.
Mirrors: sit your baby in front of a mirror and see how they respond to seeing themselves in it.
Make a colourful sensory bin: Sensory bins can often be full of things like rice or pasta but they don’t need to be, this rainbow themed sensory bin contains loads of bright colours to visually stimulate your baby, takes a minute to set up and is totally safe for them to play with
Make a tag blanket: tag blankets are great for babies to play with, but by making your own following a tutorial like this you can use bold materials that will visually interest your child too.
Play peek-a-boo
Create a sensory bottle: when my youngest was a baby she loved looking at this sensory bottle, just make sure that the lid is safely glued to before giving it to your baby to explore
Make a family book: Put together pictures of people in your family that your baby can play with and look at
Take them to a pet shop with an aquarium: this is such a cheap way to keep babies entertained, mine used to love watching the fish!
What can your baby see?
Vision Express have launched a fun new online tool which helps you see what your baby can see. Designed by their leading opticians the baby sight tool shows how normal eye sight develops over the first year. You can try out the baby site tool here, all you need to do is input your child’s age and the tool will give you some idea of what your baby’s field of vision, depth perception and colour awareness might be like. As you move the slider, you’ll notice colours and objects become sharper. For instance a newborn will see only black and white while a two-month old will see only bright primary shades. I found it really interesting to play with too as there’s such a difference from month to month! What can your baby see right now?
Baby and mobile image and baby on a mat image via Shutterstock
Post in association with Vision Express
Mothers Day Biscuits Kids Can Make
With Mother’s Day on the horizon I thought it would be fun to try and get the kids baking and we came up with these sweet Mothers day biscuits that kids can make. I was asked by Debenhams if we would like to try out some of their gorgeous cookware range to create a Mother’s Day afternoon tea and my children were more than up for the challenge. In the way that some parents don’t like their kids painting in their houses or getting the glitter out, I must admit that I am often a little reluctant to bake. After all, with a two year old and a five year old along for the ride things can get a little messy to put it nicely. However the kids were both super excited at the thought of our special tea and the Mothers Day biscuits were so simple to make that actually it was a really enjoyable experience.
Healthy Disney Inspired Food for Kids
Are your kids healthy eaters? Mine are better than they used to be (woohoo!) but they’re still not as big fans of healthy food as I’d like them to be (boo!). I was challenged by Disney and BritMums to come up with some fun Disney inspired food to get my kids to eat a healthy breakfast and a vegetable snack so we took inspiration from their favourite Disney films, Frozen and The Lion King to make some food that I thought they’d try out! You can watch the video below to see how well it went and check out my instructions for these fun ideas in the post below!
…