Salt Dough Nature Printing

Today we ventured outside into the woods to take prints of the pine trees and other natural materials we could find to go along with our topic of ‘Touch’. After looking around, we decided (or the eldest did) that the trees were a good place to start as the bark looked ‘all bumpy’. It seemed easy at first but when we tried to push the dough into the bark, we found that it cracked around the bark and that could prove detrimental to the state of the dough after baking, especially in it weakest places. We persevered and found a printing that we liked.

The youngest child chose to print with a pine cone, that left a much more clear impression in the dough. After our printing adventure, we boxed them up for safety and played around the trees for a bit, picking up sticks and pine cones for our fire back home. This provided an opportunity to talk about the activity. As before, the eldest mentioned that the trees were bumpy and they looked very old. I mentioned that a lot of big trees probably are very old as it takes a long time for them to get as big as they are. These trees are around 80 years old. We had picked up more pine cones and planned on taking them home with us. We talked about how they felt and what the printing looked like. I told them that in a few months, the cones will have opened and won’t look like they do now and we hope to come back then and take more printings to see the difference.

Tree printing

Here is the eldest pressing her dough into the tree she chose. I thought that it wouldn’t turn out all that well once baked, but thought we should give it a chance.

Making fossils.

Here is my daughter using a pine cone to press into her dough. The impression seemed to come out well, I hoped that it would be just as good after its time in the oven.

Pre cooked pine cone fossil

The pine cone before it went in for baking. The one from the tree doesn’t look too spectacular but we shall continue with it to see how it turns out.

What a pair!

The modern fossils. We had lots of fun during this activity, despite it being cold. The children ran in between the trees and chose their own materials for printing. Below is the baked article. Unfortunately the other one didn’t survive due to the cracks making the middle so thin. I was happy with the way the pine cone turned out and I am now unsure as to whether we should paint it or leave it natural. It makes a good addition to the treasure basket and has sparked up future plans to visit again and improve our technique.

We are thinking we may leave nature looking natural instead of covering it in paint – it will lose its natural beauty under layers of paint.

18 month sleep…development thingy

It seems mountains aren’t the way in which to fix an 18 month sleep regression either. Up again in the middle of the night, matchsticks burning both ends whilst stuck in my eyelids.

(Remind me I haven’t yet done a blog about the mountain, I haven’t been able to avoid the sleep monsters to make time to write it!)

So many words of advice. Don’t talk to toddler, feed toddler, don’t feed toddler, take clothes off, put clothes on toddler, play music, cry it out (not in my house) don’t watch telly, put telly on…nothing works and I’ve tried most of those. Even fixing naps for a different time of day, made shorter, longer, no naps… hasn’t helped in any way, she’s up at the same time and for just as long. I’ve just read a post (frantic witching hour googling) that says there is no way to fix it, just many ways to survive it so here are my tips so far. Just to add, these are not going to work for everyone:

Tea. Make a cup of tea (I like hot and milky) and savour every moment of it. If toddler is staring at you while you drink it, close your eyes.

Make plans for the next day. If your only plan is to spend the day cooped up, you’ll go round the bend. At this very moment I have made plans to go to the beach with my kindle and a flask of hot chocolate and enjoy a (short?!) nap time on a bench and a small hope that playtime in the sand will help this evenings sleep (but not getting my hopes up)

Stick to or introduce a bedtime routine. We go upstairs at 6, have a bath, play with sensory toys, read stories and Red gets a massage. She always goes off to sleep really well, fingers crossed it continues.

Set up a blog. Writing this blog at this time of day is the only time I have to write it while toddler is attempting to go back to sleep or playing on the floor happily as I steam my eyes open with short fused matches.

Quiet toys only. Puzzles and books are much more preferable to your neighbours as they will be to you and they should assist in the ‘going back to bed’ routine in even just a small way as they shouldn’t stimulate toddler too much and you might get them back in bed before 6am.

Don’t try and talk your toddler back to bed with shushing noises and sneaking around outside the door (husband is doing this as I type, it doesn’t work and I can hear Red laughing over the monitor)

Share as much as you can with your loving other halves. If you are doing this alone then I take my hat off to you because I’m a mess, in real life, if you saw me, you’d probably shoot me for my own good. Parents doing this alone need more than medals, but that’s an understatement and another blog. Anyway, if you are like me and have a stumbling around, half asleep, half useful husband or partner, there’s no point in your partner falling asleep at the wheel the next day but similarly, if you face a long day with an overtired toddler and your hardworking tree surgeon husband CAN catch 10 minutes in the day somewhere for a nap, he should think himself bloody lucky.

In preparation of the sleep monster attacking in the night ahead, prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner the night before for the next overtired day. When you are stuck in the middle of a game of ‘make me Air Tea and Pretend Sandwiches’ and you can’t be arsed to make a real lunch for toddler, you’ll be pleased you thought ahead and sorted things. That’s if you aren’t asleep yourself by 6pm and buttering sandwiches is just as hard to bear as eating Pretend Sandwiches.

Don’t feel guilty for taking an easy way out. If you choose to hand hold, make shushing noises, take toddler into your own bed, watch midnight tv, feed to sleep or any other Rod for Your Own Back beauties, it’s no one else’s business but yours. Do what works for you at the time as like I said before, there is no fixing it, apparently. I read somewhere that you just have to ‘survive the regression (developmental stage)’ and if these things work for you and your sanity then please do them. All of them. This too will pass and toddler will be only too pleased to get back to normal as they’ve found these last few weeks hard going. Going to toddler groups and making Pretend Tea and Sandwiches can really take it out of a kid 😉

Just remember, this is a development thing so your very alert 3am party toddler is going to be very intelligent as they are processing all the information they have gained in the day, and it’s a lot to take in. Remember this when toddler is 18 and on their way to becoming a groundbreaking scientist. Remember those long nights and know they were worth it.

Red is on her way downstairs, after a week of husband telling me he refuses to allow her out of her bedroom as it will cause too many habits 😉

Good morning, signing off.

Almost prepared for Snowdon

Well, it’s only 3 more days until we leave for Snowdon – we are staying in cute and cozy camping pods in Gwynedd. The new sling arrived yesterday and having had a practice walk about in it, we seem to be set for about 8 hours of walking. We spent a fortune at the weekend getting jumpers and walking socks. Even Red has a beautiful new pair of snow boots and socks. Praying for good weather.

Slinging up Snowdon

I would just like to take the opportunity to mention here about our charity walk to the top of Snowdon in a couple of weeks. We will be taking it in turns to carry Red in the sling, no buggies but it won’t be easy. I’ll update further as we get closer to the date.

I will post the link as soon as I can this evening, I am currently having problems with making it visible here.

Seeing as I’m up…

So I’ve been thinking about this for a while – writing a blog. I read many blogs these days and with Facebook, its easier to read them as they frequently pop up on my news feed. Here’s another one going on about the same things you’ve probably already read about but you haven’t yet heard it from me. I’m Haley, I’m a play at home mum, I used to be a nursery nurse, nanny and childminder (not all at once – over 13 years) and I’m sat here after another very early morning wake up from our (time to introduce my husband and proud father, Chris) delightful (I truly, madly deeply mean this) 18 month old daughter. (We call her Red, so can you) Red came home to us as a bouncy 6 month old last September (one of our dogs were upset to find out – he ended up going to a new home, he’s much happier and so is our remaining dog now that he gets all the furry cuddles) Since then we have found life to be easier than we thought in some respects and then, when we weren’t expecting it, things got harder. Don’t get me wrong, all those things they told us in the prep group and whilst on home study, we did get very lucky and Red’s situation was easier to handle than others we know on their journeys and most of the issues we have faced have been baby related as opposed to adoption related – we have that to come, I assure you.

So this is my first blog post, I have started many blogs and diaries before but life does seem to take over and updating them always seems like the last thing I want to do, despite enjoying writing. Put that down to extreme tiredness that I wasn’t expecting, even though I was told about it, read about it, warned about it. (I didn’t need warning about it, I knew everything already because I have worked with kids, remember) and I had the magic touch. The ins and outs quickly, no need for separate blog posts that bore you to death about how we got here. Chris and I have been together for  13 years. We got married in 2007 and wanted babies straight away, standard for most couples. It didn’t work, we tried the turkey baster bit (not literally, the fertility centre took care of that) That didn’t work and we decided adoption was the way to go. Fast forward through prep group, home study, adoption and matching panels, the choosing part (the hardest bit) and introductions, we finally have Red home. (Red is currently reading herself a book as we have been up since 3 – she would like to take this opportunity to wave a sleepy yet determined to stay awake hand) So we never thought parenting, let alone parenting an adopted child would be easy but dodging wildebeest on the plains of Africa would have been more straightforward. And it isn’t really the sleepless nights that have been hard, or the tantrums Red started having at 10 months that bother me. The extreme tiredness for the endless need for attention, the obliteration of my day time nap (even though she gets a pucka 2 hours after lunch, I sit with matchsticks in my eyes as I cannot switch off) and the constant worry of what she will do next that might cause the sky to fall down. I found myself in a web of post adoption depression (where did that come from, I didn’t waited hundreds of years to become a parent to spend my days crying on the sofa, I should have been deliriously happy??) and the dread that people were watching me to see that I was failing even though ‘I should know better’ (the words I used on my useless CBT course (it doesn’t work for every one) Red pushed all of my buttons yet my ‘inexperienced’ laid back husband was getting through fine and he had to be the strong one, take over night feeds, and come home to a dribbling, snotty mess most days (me, not Red) Skip forward many (happy, deliriously happy, I promise) days out, a Christmas, Mother’s Day, birthdays, a summer etc etc, to now – 18 months old, a walking and talking, hilarious little girl, our rainbow.

The nickname Red was borne out of the fact that most of her clothing was red, although she does tend to wear the most colourful clothing, her stand alone colour that suits her most is definitely red. She is an angel one minute, a demon the next (appropriate for her age, what child of under 2 isn’t?) despite not really enjoying cuddles in the beginning, she loves sitting with her muzzy and Eeyore for a chat and a bit of affection in front of the telly (don’t tell the social workers) or a good book. An adopted child doesn’t have to be different from other children from natural families – to look at us we look every bit related, Red tends to have my attitude, Chris’s looks and her own mind to do what she wants, when she wants (most of the time) We waited a long time ON red but we finally got what we were waiting for after waiting FOR Red and what we waited for may not have been what we expected but it was worth waiting for. Time for a cuppa, I’ve been up since 3 and Red is back in bed and Chris has gone to work so it might just be time to watch Masters of Sex too – the only time I get for it 😉 6.30am…