Feed the birds

A few days ago my children made these marvellous bird-feeders at our local Apple Day fete. The feeders are now hanging in our garden ready for action - there have been no takers yet, but it's very sweet how Buddy and Daisy have started creeping up to the window in the mornings, hoping to spot a breakfasting bird or two.

Here's how to make one:

1. Take a windfall apple and roughly core it with a sturdy screwdriver or apple corer.

2. Use a bamboo skewer or cocktail stick to make small holes all over the apple, randomly or in a pattern.

3. Push sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds halfway into the prepared holes.

4. Fasten a smallish stick - the perch for a bird - to a metre of thin string or garden twine; wrap it round a few times and secure with a knot.

5. Thread the other end of the string through the apple; it may need a little encouragement with the bamboo skewer.

6. Hang the bird-feeder as high as possible on a branch of a tree.

We attached ours to the handlebars of our bikes to get them home from Apple Day, and they looked fabulous.

I tried to find out who came up with the design of these brilliant bird-feeders, but no one seemed to know. However, I thought the idea was definitely worth sharing; after all there's an abundance of apples at the moment. And they were certainly fun to make. Now all we need are some hungry birds....

How much is that doggy in the window?

We're having a quiet weekend at home; I've got a cold, and am feeling quite ropey to be honest. Thank goodness Buddy and Daisy are being so lovely and understanding (most of the time) - they're warming my heart, and even bringing a smile to my face with their fabulous and funny playing.

A superb, epic game of Pet Shop is in full flight as I write. I'm really not needed at all, just fortunate to be within earshot of the story:

Buddy: If you buy the ring-tailed lemur, you get a rat for free!

Daisy: One of the rabbits, Mopsy, is not for sale; she does the cleaning round the shop - with a mop, of course - that is why she is so dirty.

Buddy's rabbit is allergic to lettuce, and needs medical attention.

They've made a bug house for the butterflies and creepy-crawlies.

Daisy: Everyone loves our pet shop 'cause it is so so famous.

Buddy: This guy's* nocturnal. (*the ring-tailed lemur)

Buddy: This is where the rats sleep. They are very good at balancing.

And now it's Christmas Eve in the Pet Shop. Letters to Father Christmas have been written and everyone's asleep.

This has been great medicine. But I'm just off to the kitchen; time for some actual medication. A cup of spiced mulled wine would do the trick but I know, I know - it's not actually Christmas time yet. Too bad; lemsip it is then.

Make it snappy

Last Saturday morning over breakfast, a rather raucous family game evolved; we took turns being wild animals while everyone else guessed what we were. Daisy's angry monkey, Buddy's vicious shark and daddy's sleepy sloth made us laugh so much that cereal nearly came out of our noses. When my turn came, I stretched my arms out like snappy jaws and everyone guessed straight away; a crocodile, of course - too easy.

Crocodiles featured again this week; Bud and Daisy watched Disney's Peter Pan - they love the crocodile-chasing-Hook-at-ludicrous-speed-across-the-sea sequence, and we've been enjoying our favourite crocodile books; Melrose and Croc and The Star-faced Crocodile, pictured below.

The crocodiles in both stories are so soft nurture it's easy to forget the nature of the real deal - until you meet SNAPPY-CROC (top picture) made by Buddy and Daisy with a little help from mummy.

Here's how we made him:

To make his eyes, nostrils and teeth, we glued pieces from two egg boxes onto thick, folded cardboard (ours was packaging from a new bed sheet).

Each tooth-triangle was folded about 5mm from its base and stuck to the perimeter of the card with a glue-stick. Later, I added a strip of masking tape to his whole dental region, just to secure the odd wobbly tooth.

We trimmed his back teeth to make them extra 'sharp' and to enable that long jaw to close.

Once dry, we painted him to the children's specification; red inside, green outside and he had to have yellow eyes. I mixed in a fair bit of PVA glue in the hope of preventing the paint peeling off (too reptilian).

Et voila!

SNAPPY-CROC has been a huge success. He's certainly seen a lot of action; he lost a tooth in a particularly violent tussle with Nan, and he's been the reason for much of the recent laughter, shrieking and running around in our house. Not bad going for a bit of old cardboard rescued from the recycling box.

Down to earth

Buddy and Daisy's school celebrated Harvest Festival yesterday; we sent in tins and packets of food for the The Salvation Army to distribute to the elderly, homeless and those in need in our local area. I couldn't attend the assembly myself but apparently Buddy's class sang a harvest song:

Push the trolley with the basket

Down between the rows of shelves.

See the tins and jars and packets

This is how we serve ourselves.

Not quite Keats then.

I asked whether the song went on explain the source of the tins and packets but he said he didn't think there were any other words. While I'm sure it must have gone on to cover the growing and harvesting of crops it got me thinking about how children living in an urban environment are often far removed from that aspect of Autumn. So in an attempt to get Buddy and Daisy thinking, I dug out these photos taken just over a month ago when they helped 'bring in the harvest' from my aunt's huge and bountiful allotment.

We discovered giant runner beans hiding in the beanstalks.

We searched the soft soil to reveal treasure of the potato kind.

And after picking sunshine yellow courgettes and crimson red tomatoes, we pulled onions out of the earth by their straggly stalks (as the top picture shows). These were tumbled into a bowl destined for the kitchen where all the vegetables were transformed into a rather delicious vegetable soup.

Tomorrow, I will try sharing Keats' poem To Autumn with Buddy and Daisy. After all, it is the quintessential description of those halcyon days of a rural harvest. You never know, it might even remind them of some other verses to that school song.

From John Keats' To Autumn:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Umbrella breakfasts & teatime treats

One rainy morning during the summer holidays Buddy came up with an excellent if ambitious idea for an indoor activity. I remember being very surprised at his plan; he was determined that we make our very own home-baked crumpets - from scratch.

Although we eat plenty of the shop-bought variety as pictured above (Buddy has arranged his into breakfast umbrellas here), I had never before thought of actually baking these bubbly wonders. I was delighted when Delia came up trumps with a simple recipe in her Complete Illustrated Cookery Course. Plus it required a very short list of ingredients - perfect.

We had to tweak the recipe slightly, due to our shortage of dried yeast and lack of egg rings - egg rings!? What the heck? as Daisy would say. But we still managed to successfully produce a batch of 10 delicious crumpets with our slightly reduced quantities of ingredients and improvised egg rings - metal cookie cutters. We have since tried making novelty crumpets using our dog and rabbit shaped cutters, but returned to simple circles after severing one too many peripheral crumpet-parts.

Ingredients

250 ml milk

50 ml water

1 teaspoon caster sugar

7g (1 sachet) dried yeast

200g plain flour

level teaspoon salt

butter, for greasing

Equipment

a non-stick frying pan

metal cookie cutters

Served warm with butter, cream cheese, jam or marmite, these home-made classics get the double thumbs-up from Bud - high praise indeed. They don't stay fresh as long as shop-bought crumpets, a maximum of three days in an air tight container, but they freeze pretty well. Ask a couple of friends over for a teatime treat and you may not need to store or freeze - it's quite possible to polish off the whole batch in one delicious sitting. Enjoy.

The summer collection

These delightful treasure boxes were decorated by my children at the beginning of the summer holidays. We used the technique of decoupage; lots of ripping and cutting and sticking of paper onto plain cardboard boxes. Then we covered everything in PVA glue to give a varnished hard-wearing exterior.

Over the holidays we filled the boxes with special things, items found when we were out and about. A wonderfully eclectic mix of treasure has accumulated, from shiny beads and broken crockery to finds straight from nature like acorns and crab apples (though these are looking rather wizened now).

Today, we investigated their boxes. Here's a display of some of their treasure - quite an insight into what a four and five year old consider worth collecting.

I am fascinated by the museological process of our summer's treasure box project, from the collecting itself to the storing, sorting and displaying of our finds - albeit in miniature form. And without any of a museum's responsibilities of long term storage and expensive care of artefacts, we were able to enjoy it in its most unhindered form. As Lola (of Lauren Child's Charlie and Lola) would have it, we've been collecting a collection, just for the fun of it.

Cooking club

Eeek! Has it really been over a month since my last post? Well, I'm back; my computer is fixed (finally) and essential software is being reinstalled (slowly).

I've missed being here.

The summer holidays are fast becoming a rosy blur of home adventures and days out, camping trips and family gatherings, but I will endeavour to report on a few of these before September is out.

Today I write about an activity Daisy initiated when just the two of us were at home. By the way, she has recently started using the word activity herself, for which read I don't want to play on my own now mummy. Let's make a mess/noise/thing together.

It began after watching the Cbeebies programme I Can Cook. I am quite a fan, despite its irritating use of canned children's laughter throughout. This particular show featured how to make fresh fruit flapjacks and as it finished Daisy's let's make them now request enabled us to immediately 'switch off the television set and go and do something less boring instead', Why Don't You style.

Daisy insisted that for our activity we play the I Can Cook game whereby I was the presenter Katy and she was one of the children in the TV cooking club. So we followed the format of the show; we washed our hands with 'slippy-dippy' soap, put on aprons, sang about what we were doing, 'tickled' the ingredients and tried to remember the song at the end. Daisy even washed up afterwards because 'you have to put things away, to use another day', or something.

The recipe needed a bit of tweaking - mainly due to our slightly large loaf tin - but all in all the results were very pleasing. Not a fresh fruit flapjack at all really; more a crumble slice. But delicious nonetheless. What I really liked about it was that we made just four crumble slices and the ingredients for this modest amount were easily manageable for Daisy to mix, tip and 'tickle'. It also meant that a few days later, when Nana visited and we needed a quick pudding, Daisy stepped up and happily made another mini batch which we served warm with custard and cream - well, it was Sunday lunch.

It made me realise that when I'm baking at home with the children I rarely give each of them a little set up of their own; their own bowl, their own ingredients and so on (with the exception of homemade pizza) and I plan to experiment with this more in the future.

While I'm a big fan of the communal cooking experience - just look at these gorgeous fairy cakes we made together for Amelia's birthday, for example - individual parallel cooking at home can provide a fabulously fun cooking club atmosphere. And without that awful TV canned laughter.