Happy heart art

Here's a lovely Valentine's themed activity for younger children. It starts with a high energy party game - a twist on the classic treasure hunt, and ends with lots of making and sticking to win prizes.

Treasure hunt for hearts

A little bit of preparation is needed before starting the game.

You will need to:

1) Collect scraps of decorative paper to make the hearts for the hunt - I stuck to a theme of gold and red, as pictured above. Include newspaper and wrapping paper if you like.

2) To make lots of different sized hearts quickly, cut the paper into squares of various sizes; you'll need at least 30. Put a few similarly sized squares together and fold in half. Then draw half a heart on one side - the centre of the heart towards the fold. Cut along the drawn heart outline and then separate the satisfyingly symmetrical heart shapes.

3) Now hide - well, put - the hearts all around your home (use sticky tac if you want them on vertical surfaces).

How to play:

1)Provide everyone with a basket or box and send them off to find and collect the hearts.

2) When all the hearts have been found, provide each player with a large piece of card. This could be covered in foil or plain wrapping paper, whatever you have to hand to make an attractive background.

Create heart art:

3) Now to count up those hearts. To do this, get them to stick their collected hearts over their background card. We used a glue stick rather than gloopy PVA to avoid too much mess.

4) They can do this just how they like, but the hearts should be arranged so that every heart can be seen and so counted. If they put a heart on top of another that's OK but it should be a smaller heart so both can be seen.

5) Lots of prizes can be given; for the most hearts collected, for finding a shiny heart, or a patterned heart etc.

We played this last year and my children - three and four at the time - really loved it. I knew they'd like the treasure hunt part, but it was great to see them so enthusiastic about selecting, comparing, counting and arranging their hearts before sticking them to the card.

We'll be playing it again tomorrow of course. Happy Valentine's Day.

Sweetheart biscuit baking

My five year old says, 'Valentine's Day is when you can love the people you love even more.'

Last Valentine's Day we made these scrumptious sweetheart jammie dodger biscuits; they certainly went down a treat, knocking spots off the shop-bought variety. And they were amusingly large due to the big cookie cutter that was randomly selected to make them.

To make these lovely sweetheart biscuits (based on Annabel Karmel's recipe)

You will need:

A batch of chilled basic biscuit dough, made with approx 300g plain flour

1/2 jar of jam

90g icing sugar

60g soft butter

1 tsp water

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

How to make them:

1) Heat the oven to 180c.

2) Roll dough to about 5mm thick.

3) Cut out circles with a 6cm cutter (or larger for giant biscuits) and arrange on a lined baking tray.

5) Cut hearts from half the biscuit circles. We made our cutter by folding a 6cm strip of card into a heart shape and fastening with sticky tape.

6) Cook the biscuits for about 12 minutes or until golden and then leave to cool.

7) Make the butter icing by beating together the remaining ingredients - except for the jam.

8) Spread the butter icing over just the whole (not the hole) biscuits.

9) Drop a dollop of jam on top of the icing and then place the heart biscuits on top.

10) Dust with icing sugar for a final flourish.

A delicious way to show the people you love just how much you love them - especially if, like us, you scale up those traditional dodger dimensions!

Just playing...

..from the moment they woke up until it was time to go to sleep.

It was Teddy Tommy's birthday apparently, so that meant playing shops (to buy his presents)...

Making him a birthday feast with home-made glittery play-dough...

And hosting a birthday tea party.

There was hard work at the car-wash (well, scooter and bicycle-wash)...

And help with essential bike maintenance before our ride...

...to the perfect spot for some rock hopping...

... and stick and stone collecting for mummy (why, thank you!)

There was bubble blowing...

Star Wars spacecraft design...

..and some galaxy-defending.

We had sticker-sticking whilst singing 'Somewhere over the rainbow'...

Drumming...

Playing spy and princess music on the keyboard...

...and, once they were in bed and should have been asleep, they told me what they planned to play tomorrow.

Happy times at home then. I cherish days like these.

Grey Paris, gay Londres

I've just had an I-can't-believe-I'm-that-old birthday and am in the grips of a mutating cold that's simply refusing to go. Our recent sans enfants trip to sub-zero temperature Paris was lovely but I felt so ill I certainly didn't make the most of it, and so returned feeling rather sorry for myself. Everything seemed so very old and so very grey.

What I needed was a good dose of my children to take me out of my sombre mood, but I also needed them to be calm and quiet so I could convalesce on the couch. And bless Daisy and Buddy, they really got that. Buddy mostly read and played with the Lego, and Daisy decided to play hairdressers.

She started with Daddy's hair. I was instantly cheered just by watching them both in the salon; her careful and fastidious brush work, her little hands smoothing Daddy's curls, and hearing her small voice instructing him to sit forwards or keep still or close his eyes while she sprayed water onto his head. He was a good customer too. He tolerated the avant-garde style she'd given him - not quite as outrageous as the picture currently on the Paris Metro Map below - and looked appreciatively in the mirror with barely a giggle.

Then it was my turn. And since I'd decided to take a bath, Daisy the hairdresser said she would wash my hair for me. I should point out that by this time she'd dressed up for the part - she was now in a rainbow-ribbon skirt and had fashioned an Alice-band into a headdress loaded with multicoloured feathers.

And so it was this colourful vision of a girl who shampooed and conditioned my hair with all the patter of a professional, who then brushed, styled and clipped it up to her heart's content with her favourite sparkly accessories. She even found my hairspray to fix the whole look. *cough, splutter*

And, at last, I began to cheer up. Not in gay Paris - but at home in Daisy's Beauty Salon with her crazy hair-dos and rainbow-coloured clothes. How could I not?

A winning formula for reading

Buddy is still pale, lack-lustre and sofa-bound. I'm thankful he's got the attention span for a feature film or two, and that he's old enough to enjoy a board game without tears, or too much of me fixing the outcome in his favour.

In particular we've been enjoying playing Grand Prix, pictured above, which Buddy got for his last birthday. I remember he wasn't particularly keen on learning to read at the time, but this dice game tapped into his obsession with all things Formula One. And brilliantly, it kick-started his desire to try reading non-book text independently. It's a lovely twist on classic snakes and ladder game-play with hazards like oil leak, miss a turn and engine full out, move to 57.

I remember being so encouraged by this that I made him his very own Formula One Bingo game, pictured below.

I used a mixture of high frequency words, phonetic spellings and specialist racing terminology to get him practising a range of reading strategies within a fun bingo game context; you have to complete the chequered flag to win!

Playing these games with Buddy again after a few months, even with him feeling unwell, I can see how his reading skills have come on in leaps and bounds. He is now an enthusiastic reader of everything, everywhere, and so I'll always be pleased we found a winning formula with Formula One.

We love lid-potatoes

Buddy has been off school all week with a terrible cold, earache and upset tummy. He's barely eaten for days - most unlike him - so today, to help him find his appetite again, we made one of his favourite meals: jacket potatoes.

He didn't really fancy eating anything to be honest; he certainly couldn't make a decision about the filling for his potato. It was then that I remembered good old Milly Molly Mandy. We often refer to our storybooks for inspiration about all kinds of play, craft and cooking, and the classics have a certain cosy appeal extremely suitable for poorly boys and girls. Jane Brocket writes brilliantly about this in one of my favourite books in the world ever, Ripping Things To Do.

So we read Chapter 6: Milly Molly Mandy Enjoys a Visit where she and little-friend-Susan eat yummy lid-potatoes. Buddy was immediately tempted to eat (and help make) a lid-potato, just like in the story.

As Joyce Lankester Brisley writes, 'First Mother took two well-baked potatoes out of the oven. Then she nearly cut the tops off them - but not quite. Then she scooped all the potato out of the skins and mashed it up with a little salt and a little pepper and a lot of butter. And then she pushed it back into the two potato-skins, and shut the tops like little lids.

Then Milly Molly Mandy and little-friend-Susan were given a mug of milk and a plate of bread-and-butter, and one of the nice warm lid-potatoes. And they opened the potato-lids and ate out of them with little spoons.

They did enjoy their suppers.'

And so, thank goodness, did Buddy.

Living room leap

The season of birthday parties is upon us; we went to two today. There was a bouncy castle at the first, and the second had a huge soft-play area with slides, ropes and a ball pit. You'd think with so much bouncing, climbing, sliding and let's not forget all that consuming of sugar, my children would have been totally wiped out by teatime. But they were not.

Surprisingly, they still needed to work off some excess energy; luckily Saturday television favourite Total Wipe-out inspired them. They spent an entire hour arranging our cushions, footstool, chairs, the sofa and pouffe into a living room obstacle course for their own show. They took it in turns to spectacularly leap and swim, climb and fall (in slow motion of course) just like the contestants on the TV programme.

I think they would have carried on playing this game until midnight - still on their party-high - but I could see they were totally shattered. The only way I could get them up upstairs in the vague direction of bed was by the promise of an award ceremony, just like on the show.

As trophies were presented, previously made thank goodness, I could see them winding down fast - crashing down really. Daisy told me as she flopped into bed that it had all been good practice for when she's going to be on Total Wipe-out when she's a grown up. And Buddy didn't say anything. I suspect he was already asleep. That's what I call a total wipe-out.