School holidays are nearing an end. I didn't think I'd make it this far without holiday club (school during the holidays) or babysitting, but I have. We have. We've done days out, adventures, sleepovers, play dates, painting, slime-making, finger-painting, gardening, swinging and sliding, swimming, crafting and baking.

Oh, the baking.

We've baked everything - bread, this apple cake using our own apples, cakes in various guises, brownies, these cheese scones (a lot), and these chocolate biscuits. It's Nigella's recipe for Granny Boyd's Biscuits. It's available in various places online, but I got mine out of a very well-used copy of How to be a Domestic Goddess. 

They're delicious. Properly yummy melt-in-the-mouth ala chocolate shortbread delicious. The only way that you could improve this recipe would be to add chopped hazelnuts. Finnlay loved these so much that he carried around the airtight container everywhere he went, shaking them with an insistent chant of mama to get my attention so that I might just possibly open up the tub and give him one or two. They didn't last long at all!

Granny Boyd's Biscuits

Ingredients:

300g Self-Raising Flour
30g Cocoa Powder
250g Unsalted Butter (room temperature)
125g Caster Sugar

Method:

• Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C.
• Sieve Flour and Cocoa Powder and set it aside.
• Cream butter and sugar till light and pale in colour.
• Mix in flour mixture, it might look like it needs liquid, but keep working the ingredients in and it will form a dough. [Just keep going. Don't give in to the temptation to add something. It's going to work out, I promise.]
• Roll into walnut-sized balls and arrange these on the baking sheets.
• Flatten these balls with the back of a fork.
• Bake for 5mins at 170 degrees C and then turn the temperature down to 150 degrees C for a further 10-15mins.
• The biscuits should feel firm on top although not hard. Remove from the oven and transfer to cool on wire rack, before storing in air-tight container. [or eat straight away. I won't judge you.]

• make slime
• bake biscuits
• painting
• playdoh pizzas
• painting
• go to the aquarium
• stickers
• painting

Clearly she has her priorities straight. We did try out some slime (I'll post about that later) but it has since been acquired by her younger brother and she wants some more. Blue, mama. Blue is my favourite colour. Five minutes ago her favourite colour was pink,

The folks from Education.com got in touch and asked if I'd be interested in trying out one of their kids' activities during the holidays so I figured why not? It's a fun crafty activity looking at alphabet letters which is just up Isla's street.



She's started singing her very favourite song, The ABC Song as she calls it, and I can't stop laughing when she gets to the end. Instead of "now I know my ABCs, next time won't you sing with me?" she has her own version. It goes like this: ... x y z, Now I know my ABCs, d e f g h i ... ". It's a loop, she misses out the "next time won't you sing with me" and launches straight back into another recitation of the alphabet. It can go on for about fifteen minutes before she realises what she's done. It is probably the best thing ever.

This is what crafting during the school holidays is supposed to look like. Credit to Education.com for sending me this pic as guidance for our Z is for Zebra Activity.

So back to "Z" is for Zebra! You can download the activity here if you want to try it out too. Here's what they say:

Don't let alphabet practice turn into catching zzz's. Paint up a zany Z zebra and inject a little excitement into learning letters. Little kids love the hands-on fun of painting, and it's great exercise for small hand muscles, helping to strengthen them for writing. Paint up a stripy zebra and let the alphabet fun begin.

What You Need:

• Books containing photographs or illustrations of zebras
• White construction paper
• Black tempera paint
• Thin paint brush
• Scissors
• Clear drying, non-toxic glue or glue stick

What You Do:

1. Begin by researching zebras. Look at the photos or illustrations of zebras in the books with your child and talk about what they see. Encourage them to describe the zebra's shape, size, and appearance to you.
2. Place the construction paper in front of them. Help them cut out large shapes to form a zebra. Ask them to choose shapes for the head, neck, body, legs, and tail. Cut out ears and facial feature shapes as well.
3. Glue the shapes onto a new sheet of construction paper. Encourage them to assemble the shapes into the form of a zebra first before adding any glue. Putting the zebra together is kind of like a puzzle!
4. Once the zebra's body is glued down, paint on the stripes. Squeeze out a little black tempera paint and have him paint stripes on the zebra's body.
5. While they paint, talk about the letter Z. What sound does Z make? Look at the zebras in the books again. Do they see how the stripes zigzag across the zebra's body similar to the letter Z?
6. After they paint all the stripes, help them paint a large letter Z at the top of the page.
7. Set the painting aside to dry.
8. Hang the zany zebra on the wall to keep them company as they learn the other letters of the alphabet.

This made me chuckle a bit. It's a lovely activity, but can you imagine doing this kind of focused - and neat - painting activity with an I-know-better-than-you-mum almost-three-year-old?  No. We changed it a little, and used a colouring-in zebra (this one here) and crayons instead.

It's very nearly the end of the school year here in the UK. I'm still trying to get my head around it; in South Africa, our school term was January - December. The end of the year meant the end of the school year, and you had a jolly long holiday over Christmas (and the summer holidays).  

It's only just gone June and I'm already thinking about teacher gifts and thank you cards. It's our very first proper school year as Isla moves up from little miss muffets class to humpty dumpty class. She'll say good bye to the saints who look after the "baby class" and will wave hello to her new teachers and a new toilet regime. Thank goodness for successful potty training these past few weeks.


And so, teacher cards. I'm by no means a card maker, but I thought I'd give these a bash as I couldn't find anything I liked all that much in the shops.

Because I tend to think in puns and silliness, I wanted something fun that Isla would appreciate too. We pootled through my stamp stash and each chose something we liked. Nee-norns ("unicorns" to you and I) are on the top of her love list so she chose those. And vegetables. Because you can never, ever have too many radishes and carrots with kawaii faces. 

Thank you for believing in me! A magical unicorn (colours chosen by Isla, of course) and all glittered up because nee-norns sparkle, mama. I used Avery Elle's Be a Unicorn and Tonic Nuvo Aqua Shimmer, with stamps I made myself for the punny wordage.


Thank you for helping me grow. Layered stamping with Lawn Fawn's Rooting for You, plenty of Tonic Nuvo Aqua Shimmer and wordage my own again. I love these banners. I cut up strips of kraft card, cut ribbon ends with a scissors, and folded them over for height. Double sided tape and foam squares are magic. MAGIC.

I use Papermania Kraftstax Brown Card for absolutely everything around here. It's recycled, and makes brilliant business cards, labels, tags, it prints surprisingly well given that it is super strong and stiff - and now, I've discovered that it makes good cards and silly banners too! Huzzah! Slowly slowly making my way through the ridiculously large pile of brown card that mysteriously piled up on my craft desk. All by itself. Honest.

In other news, we've just done our last big event for Bean & Boy Soap for a few weeks. It was Village Green (#VG17), an enormous music festival in Southend-on-Sea with about 4 music stages, comedy tents, farmer's market, handmade maker market (that's where we were exhibiting), a car boot rally, a million activities, and around 20,000 visitors.

Set up was at 8am, even though it only opened at 11am. It felt like one of the longest days of the year. Hot, hot, hot and lots of standing up and chatting to people about wonderful, wonderful soap. It was fantastic and exhausting. Fantastically exhausting, too. It was great, but I could do with a few weeks off. Which is handy as we have been invited to children's parties every weekend for the next four weeks, and school holidays means that I get both children all day every day for six glorious weeks. Six loooooooong weeks. I've already had to promise Isla that we'll be making slime (glitter slime mama, otherwise it is gross) and our own playdough (mama, we need more playdough for pizzas) and yes of course darling we will have the paddling pool out every single day. Phew.