Six on Sunday - Celebrating Jesus at Easter

Now that little J is able to at least partially understand what Easter is about, I've been trying to think of ways to celebrate and teach him about the meaning of Easter. I spent the week leading up to Easter scouring Pinterest for ideas and have come up with some real gems that I thought I'd share with you....

1. Passover Seder

I love the heart behind the Jewish Passover Seder - to teach the stories of God's goodness to future generations in a fun, visual and interactive way. A full on Jewish Passover Seder is a pretty big undertaking and probably beyond us for a good few years yet. We did however have a candlelight lamb dinner, drink grape juice and talk about God rescuing his people from Egypt and sending Jesus to rescue us. We also let little J stay up late to watch Prince of Egypt with us too. I really want for Easter to be a time that our kids see as special and exciting and there's nothing like getting to stay up past bedtime to get kids excited!

2. Easter baskets with meaning

Easter has become all about the chocolate eggs and kids have little or no idea what the meaning behind the eggs are. How about giving the kids an Easter basket filled with a variety of sugary treats that each clearly relate to part of the Easter story.  Here is a great example of an Easter basket with meaning.

3. Easter walk

When we were kids we would often go for a walk on a Sunday afternoon or on a Bank holiday. Why not take the kids on a walk and give them a scavenger hunt to do along the way with scripture verses as clues. For an example check out this site here. 

4. Resurrection Eggs

We have advent calendars to count down to Christmas so why not have some kind of countdown during Holy week? Resurrection eggs are just that. The idea is to fill plastic eggs with symbols that relate to part of the Easter story and each day you open an egg and read that part of the story. There are loads of possible variations on how to do them and you can easily tailor it to your kids ages. Here is one example and here is another that includes additional extension activities.

This year I didn't get organised in time to do a countdown to Easter so instead we adapted the idea to use as an egg hunt on Sunday afternoon. I cut up this Easter puzzle and hid the pieces inside plastic eggs along with some chocolate buttons. Little J had great fun hunting for them and when he was done we used the pictures to briefly tell the Easter story.

5. Resurrection rolls

This is a great easy recipe that I hope to introduce as a tradition for breakfast on Easter morning.

6. Easter story biscuits

This idea is pure genius and I'm gutted I didn't find it in time to try it this year. Every step of this recipe tells part of the Easter story and I know little J is gonna totally love seeing the result the next morning.

Hope you've found these ideas helpful. Happy Easter to you all!!

Josiah's diary - April 14th 2014

Daddy says mummy has a baby in her belly. I'm not sure how it got there and I thought he was just messing with me at first but then mummy's belly started getting bigger so it must be true. The other day we went to the hospital and saw a lady who poked mummy's belly and showed us some things on the TV. Daddy said it was baby on the TV but it didn't look like any baby I've ever seen - it was just a black fuzzy blob!

Grandma got me a book all about the house in mummy's belly to help me understand but I'm still not quite sure how it all works. I read that baby shares the food mummy eats. Can I share my food with baby too? Do you think it likes cheerios? Daddy says that even though I can't see baby I can still talk to it and give it kisses so every now and then I get mummy's belly out and give baby some kisses.

Mummy doesn't always like it when I get her belly out though. Like when I tried to get her belly out during daddy's citizenship ceremony the other day she told me to put it away cos the mayor doesn't want to see it. What is a mayor? And what is citizenship? All I know is daddy got a certificate for something but I don't know what he did.

Daddy says I used to be in mummy's belly. I wonder how I got out. And how long will baby be in there? There's still so much I don't quite understand.

Baby is not the only thing I don't understand right now - there's a lot of things in life I'm trying to work out. For example, I've been working on learning to throw but I'm struggling to work out the rules about throwing. If I throw some things I get a cheer and if I throw others I get shouted at. I've been trying to narrow down which are the right things to throw to get a cheer and it seemed that throwing balls is good and throwing toys is bad. But then the other day I found a ball that daddy called a pool ball and when I threw that I got told off so now I'm confused again.

Mummy says that throwing things 'at' people is mean and I shouldn't do it but sometimes she asks me to throw something 'to' her. What is the difference between throwing something 'at' someone and throwing something 'to' them? They both look the same to me!

Six on Sunday - rainy day ideas

Due to illness/teething/bad weather we've had a quite a few days indoors recently. When you have a very energetic little boy it can be hard to know how best to keep him occupied on those days.

1. Play dough 
As a kid I remember my mum making home made play dough for us and had been looking for an excuse to give it a try. The basic recipe is:

1 cup plain flour
1 cup warm water
half cup salt
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon cream of tartar
food colouring

Just mix it together over a low heat until it pulls away from the sides and clumps together. If it's still sticky cook it a bit longer. We didn't have any cream of tartar and didn't want to walk to the shop in the rain to get any so we made ours without and it still turned out ok. One thing I learned was make sure you mix the food colouring with the water before adding it instead of trying to add it after cooking - much less messy and better results too.

For some more exciting play dough recipes including scented, glittery or glow in the dark go to Nurture store for loads of great ideas.

2. Nursery rhyme puppets
Little J is just about old enough to handle basic arts and crafts so I decided to look for some age appropriate crafts to try. He loves singing songs so I was thrilled to stumble across some nursery rhyme themed crafts. He loves singing itsy bitsy spider so we decided to give that craft a go. I cut out all the pieces while he was having his nap so there would be no chance of him getting hold of the scissors. When nap time was over I handed him a bag of parts and we started to assemble our spiders together. He loved sticking on the googly eyes and enjoyed playing with the pipe cleaners too. I found it quite hard to judge where to put the finger holes and how big to make them part apart from that it was a very simple craft.

3. Building a den
After a particularly bad nights sleep due to teething, we were all tired and needed a low key indoor activity to keep us amused. Earlier in the week little J had been trying to use the clothes airer as a den so I figured why not give him chance to do it properly.  I took the clothes airer into the lounge along with plenty of cushions and sheets and we set up a den. I love this idea for making a den but for now the airer and sheets would do. I curled up with little J and read books for a while but it turned out he was still quite full of energy and soon wanted to get out and run around the house again. In the end hubby and I fell asleep in the den while little J headed to the kitchen and started making his own dinner!

4. Visiting the library
Little J has quite an impressive book collection and loves to read at every available opportunity. As a result he goes through phases where he gets bored of the same old books (not to mention how bored mummy and daddy get reading the same ones over and over again).  Luckily we live only 5 mins from the library so I've started taking little J for a visit every couple of weeks to read some new books and choose a couple to take home. It's a great way for him to regularly have new books in the house without me having to keep finding extra space for an ever growing collection. It's also a good way of teaching him about looking after things properly and how a library works.

5. Messy church
Last rainy weekend just happened to be Messy Church at a church near us.  A lot of churches seem to run these but we'd never been before. When we arrived there we several crafts set up around the room on the theme of Easter. We spent the first hour making chicks, decorating cookies, colouring pictures and planting a mini garden. When the crafts were done we all went into the main church area and sung some kids worship songs with actions and had a brief interactive talk about the meaning of Easter and Jesus being the best gift ever. After that we all had dinner together and got home just in time for pyjamas and bedtime. It was really good fun to go together as a family and also great to see little J interacting with kids of all ages and (mostly) having a great time (he got a bit frustrated that no one passed him the ball in football and couldn't understand that the other kids didn't know what his shouts of 'rah rah rah dah' meant, but other than that he loved it).

6. And finally....
Not entirely rainy day focused but still great for days when you're short of ideas - check out this great list of ideas for things to do every month of the year.

Another funny parenting tale

Well I've been very slack at blogging recently due to a mixture of a teething child and pregnancy kicking my butt slightly. I thought it was about time I shared another funny story with you all to make up for it.

Little J is growing so fast and learning so quickly that it's hard to keep up. Now he's this mobile, curious, bundle of energy that is in to everything. The other day we went to a friends house for lunch and took little J along. I hadn't realised ahead of time but it was the first time we had been to the home of a friend without children since little J had learnt to walk. I'd begun to take for granted the fact that at home I can just let him run around the house and know he's not gonna get into too much mischief (though he just learnt to open screw top bottles so I have a feeling that's all about to change!).

When we go to the houses of other friends with kids, they are like our home - toys everywhere, slightly beat up furniture and anything breakable or valuable hidden well out of reach! But not so at our child free friends house. They have a beautiful home full of all kinds of things for Josiah to break and/or ruin with grubby little finger prints. At first little J was polite and cautious but soon he was running around the house nosing through everything!

Little J is very helpful and already quite well house trained. He loves to help with laundry and even knows which buttons to press to put on a wash. This is fine at our house as the washing machine is always turned off at the wall but not so at our friends place so the little monkey kept turning the washing machine on and off.

Then there were musical instruments to play with, magazines to 'read', all kinds of things to look at in the kitchen and a bed to climb on.

I basically spent the entire time chasing him round the house and got very little chance to just sit and chat with the grown ups. At one point when I did finally sit down for a moment, little J wandered into the lounge with a bottle of lube he swiped from the bedroom when noone was looking!

Add to that the screaming over tired meltdown he had towards the end due to having missed his lunchtime nap and I think it's safe to say we probably wont be getting another invite any time soon!

But seriously though, it made me realise just how much has changed in our lives since having kids. It really is like we have entered a whole other world and there's no going back. We can't do things how we used to - we've had to adjust to find child friendly meals/outings/furniture/routines etc. Having said that, this new world is a fun roller coaster ride of a place to be - a world where I get to do arts and crafts and go to fun kids groups and play with toys when I take a bath!