I got this cute little gadget when I had a bento splurge recently at J List.
I get so bloody sick of making the same old boring sandwiches everyday. Sure, Missy 10 helps out when she can, but it’s nice to break up the monotony for the kids and I. All you do is press the cutter into a sandwich, and it cuts four bite-sized sandwiches with crusts removed. (The crust that was cut off was so thin, I was hardly wasting any at all)
I love that it’s probably easier than dragging a knife through the bread and ripping it. I love knowing that the kids are more likely to sit down for longer and actually eat what I’ve made them. Most of all, I love the smile it brings to their faces. Plus, it’s so much more fun to open your lunch box to something so cute.
PS – this isn’t a sponsored post, just something I bought myself and loved the idea of.
I was fortunate enough to receive the Rolls Royce of bikes. And prams. All in one. I’ve seen these tricycles before with the pram handle at the back, and always coveted them.
The model I’m reviewing is the Smart-Trike 3 in 1. There’s already been fights over it between Missy 2 and Mr 4. Luckily, it can be adapted to suit them both!
Some of you would already be familiar with the original Smart-Trike Deluxe. The Zoo 3 in 1 offers all those award winning features, with a unique design that kids love. (Of course, I love the design because it’s in the Hear Mum Roar colour scheme!)
You can use the Zoo 3 in 1 with babies from the age of 10 months, as a baby stroller. Missy 2 below is sitting in the bike, set up the way it would be used for a baby. It’s still very comfortable even for a two year old with this set-up. Set up for babies, you get a quality, padded, washable seat and padded seat belt. It also has padded arm rests. I’m a bit jealous, because it looks more comfy than our lounge…
The seat has long back support, and there are these little side foot rests for when your child might not feel like pedaling. These fold up and out of the way for older children. I love all the special little extras, too. It has a cup holder on the front of the handle bars. I couldn’t believe Smart-Trike even went to the effort of providing a toy mobile phone and a cute little place to clip it onto the back of the handle bars! And the toy phone actually lights up and makes sounds. I’ve made a short video showing the phone in action:
Too damned cute…
When your child is 15 months and older, you can easily remove the padded seat, seat belt and arm rests if you like. Once your child is 24 months and up, you can take the pram handle off, letting your child ride it around like a regular tricycle:
…But it’s much trendier than your average tricycle!
For mums and dads, the steering handle can be adjusted to suit your height (being a short-arse mum, I can’t tell you how grateful I am). It has telescopic, five-point steering and a built-in clutch.I love how when I’m steering the pram, I’m actually moving the handles on the child’s part of the bike, too. This gives your child an excellent sense of steering early on. I find the zip-up pouch on the handle useful for my spare change and keys.
This bike is extremely sturdy, exceeding all European Safety Standards. It has a sun shade which can be adjusted up and down at varying angles, and makes such a cute clicking noise. I took the Smart Trike for spin, walking to the shops and around the block.
Because it has anti-slip resistance and great road performance, I was able to push my daughter along grass, bumpy rocks and tree roots. I also could easily push the bike up our local shop’s steps with no hassles. There is a little brake at the back of the trike, similar to that of a pram.
What I love about the Smart-Trike is the fact that if I’m out shopping with my daughter, she can still have some gross motor exercise as we go. It keeps her busy, what with riding and talking on her little mobile phone. I love knowing that once she grows out of the stage where I push her in the bike, she can take her gross-motor skills and co-ordination to the next level. Also, Mr 4 can ride it as a bike, too.
Now, as some of you may know, we don’t celebrate Christmas. However, if you do, this is a present that would definitely last a child through to the next Christmas, possibly even the one after that, so you’re getting value for money.
Take a look at the Smart-Trike range in this online catalogue. You’ll be able to see that this bike comes in a range of colours.
So, where can you buy the Smart-Trike? You can find it at Toys ‘R’ Us, Target and Big W. The price ranges from $179-$189.
I have received the above product for free courtesy of Smart-Trike
I’d like to start out this post by stating that I didn’t receive any free product or payment for writing this. We’ve been desperate to try out Gelli Baff for a long time, and have only just gotten our mitts on a packet now.
Now, with my partner’s petrochemical allergy, it was pretty important to us to find out what is actually in this stuff. We read the packet and were none the wiser. The listed ingredients on the box are: sodium polyacrylate, sodium chloride, parfum CI 17200.
Whatever the heck that means. It doesn’t sound as though it contains petrochemicals, but we decided to let the kids have a try of it just for fun. My man just wouldn’t bathe in it. Some of the warnings and instructions didn’t sound all that great, either:
‘we recommend the use of a moisturiser after use’
‘avoid contact with eyes, if contact occurs, rinse with plenty of cold water for 10 minutes; seek medical advice if any problems persist.’
‘Not recommended for children under 5 years of age.’ What?? Of course, I didn’t see this one, and had Mr 4 and Missy 2 in it. But then it goes on: ‘unless supervised by an adult’. Phew. At their ages, I do anyway.
By now, I was a bit miffed as to what sort of chemicals are in this stuff! Anyway, I figured one try for curiosity’s sake won’t hurt anyone if we’re careful.
First, I had to fill the bath to 6cm high of water. I planned to put all three kids in at once, and after forking out nine bucks for a box of this stuff that only makes one bath worth, I thought, this better be good. In all fairness though, it did expand quite a bit. Although, I won’t be taking their friendly tip to ‘make every night a Gelli Baff night’.
Next, I had to sprinkle the coloured crystals over the water and leave it for five minutes.
After this, you stir it, and that’s when it thickens and becomes heavy. It wasn’t actually ‘goo’, as the box describes.
It was very granular, much like the gel crystals in disposable nappies (diapers, for our foreign counterparts).
It felt pretty heavy, and quite amazing. I loved the feeling. I don’t think I’d like to sit in it though, it’d be like getting sand in your bum crack at the beach. It smelt overpoweringly synthetic.
The children, (who, for obvious reasons, won’t be in any photos for this post) loved it. Loved it, loved it, loved it. It was great in terms of sensory exploration, and discussing matter. We talked about the concepts of liquids and solids. How much heavier it is than water.
It was pretty obvious that this stuff won’t wash your children clean. In fact, because my kids were covered with lumps of jelly crystals, it had to be washed off before they could get out! The upside is that the dyes didn’t mark their skin, or the bath, for that matter.
Anyway, then I sprinkled the sachet to turn it back into water. This, my friends, as part of the nine bucks, one-time bath treat, was common salt! Mmm hmm…
You’re meant to mix it in well until the goo ‘magically turns back into water!’ My poor kids mixed and mixed, thankfully they had fun doing it, because although the substance did turn more liquid, we never quite got rid of the granular crud all over their bodies. It was all through the water, right until we finished up. The box says you can top up the bath with water and add bubbles. Ok, I thought, maybe by then all the granular bits might have dissolved. Nope. No magic there.
The kids were devastated to have to get out of the bath, this was, after all, the most fun bath they’d ever had in their lives. As my fiance dried off the two little ones, I set about cleaning the bath. Now, like I said, it didn’t stain. But we had those crystals smeared from here to kingdom come! I nearly broke my neck slipping on the crystal coated floor, and it was a bugger of a thing trying to rinse away all traces of this stuff.
So, my verdict? The most fun my kids have ever had in a bath, bar none. Even Mr 4 who is known to be a mess-a-phobe was thrilled with it. I love the whole concept of this stuff. The reality though? Not so much. I think it’s a rip-off, and the sound of the ingredients (with all the warnings, but no real explanation of what it is) really concerned me. Not that I think it did my kids any harm at all to try it out once.
I think the advertising and description on the box was very misleading as well. I would probably get it again, but not very often, and use it more for the kids to just dip their hands in, I think. All in all, my kids felt it lived up to the hype, I didn’t.
Have you tried Gelli Baff? What’s your opinion on it?
If you have a child who loves to paint, but is looking for something a bit different to simply using a paintbrush, they will love this. It’s the weekend here, and Missy 2 was once again begging to paint. Missy 10′s been away at school when the little ones have been painting, so it was nice for her to get the chance to join in.
So, how did we paint with balls? I got a big plastic box, and Blu-tacked some paper to the bottom of the inside.
I sat each ball in a different bowl or container for separate colours. Then, the kids just picked up a slippery ball, dropped it onto their paper, and moved the box to make the balls roll.
Kids have so much fun with this activity and learn a lot without realising it. They get to:
- work their fine motor muscles, trying extra hard to pick up those slippery balls
- experiment with gravity and physics, tipping the box this way and that to make the ball go where they want it to on the page
- challenge their eye-hand co-ordination in a more intense way than usual. It’s one thing to try to watch something, and get your hands to work together with your vision, but imagine trying to do that when the ball has a mind of its own!
- learn about colours mixing together, as one coloured ball rolls over previous stripes painted by other colours.
- apply trial and error to see what happens if they use smaller balls, such as marbles (for the over 3′s, of course we have to be vigilant about choking risks), tennis balls, or even basketballs.
- learn about cause and effect: what happens if we use a four-sided container? What about a round container? The child will observe one is more likely to give stripes and criss-crossing lines, the other will give more rounded, spiral shapes.
One thing I’ve never gotten around to trying though, when doing this activity is painting with a football! If anyone’s child ever gives that go, let me know how it went.
Today was much like a hot summer day in the middle of spring! We took our spray bottles out the back, hung a sheet over the fence and Missy 2 and Mr 4 sprayed the heck out of it. Last time we played with spray bottles, we did it flat on the ground on paper, but hanging a large sheet of paper or cloth allows the children to be more free with it.
Daisy, as always, was faithfully hanging around the kids, you can see by how muddy Missy 2 was, that Daisy was happy to see her! The poor thing got knocked over in the mud. Not to be deterred, her and Mr 4 got on with the important business of playing.
Mr 4 instigated lots of experimental play with these spray bottles. He believed that if he sprayed lots of colour onto flowers that he could make them grow faster…
He was deeply dissappointed that they didn’t grow before his eyes! So, he turned his attention to our irises (some of which were taller than him) and painted them blue.
…Now that’s what I call art!
Also, you’ve probably noticed by now Hear Mum Roar’s new look. I have the wonderfully talented Violet Le Beaux to thank for designing the new graphic art, so thank you!!
We did this activity last weekend, and I’ve been too flat out to show you until now! I filled four water spray bottles with water and food colouring to make a pretty water colour for the kids.
We took it outside to spray on paper on the ground. This is even more fun if you can hang gigantic pieces of paper over the fence, but we didn’t want to get our front fence stained, and going out the back to do it on an old fence isn’t an option at the moment. Never mind.
Mr 4 and Missy 2 had a ball squirting away with their bottles. Here’s Missy 2 using both hands to squeeze the trigger and watching the mist shoot over the page. Spray painting is:
- cheap
- open-ended
- strengthening for the fine motor muscles (hands)
- requires eye-hand co-ordination as the child watches the direction of the spray and tries to manipulate it where they want it to go.
- great for teaching children about colours
- gives the child a chance to use trial and error
We tried spraying over ourselves:
Then we turned to nature:
And we learnt what happens when part of the page is covered then painted!
One day we’ll do this with the paper upright against the fence, and I’ll show how much fun that is, too. Are you all having a lovely weekend? I hope so!
Edited to add: we did this again later down the track with a sheet hung over the back gate.
Written on September 2nd, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in Uncategorized
Missy 2 and Mr 4 had fun in the Spring weather making amazing chalk drawings. Missy 2 is obsessed with drawing, and she does it often. It’s good to let them experience different ways of doing things they love.
This activity held Mr 4′s attention for a long amount of time. His drawings are becoming more detailed, and he is putting more mental planning into his art as he gets older.
Drawing is an important part of childrens’ play. It gives them an opportunity to be creative. It’s a great fine motor activity, yet it’s also highly cognitive.
I added water to the chalk bucket to let the colours really ‘pop’. This is also a good thing to do if anyone involved has asthma, it can reduce the amount of chalk dust floating around somewhat. Although, as Missy 2 soon learnt, we still end up wearing the results of our work!
Daisy, our lovely puppy, insisted on being right in the thick of all the proceedings, of course. Once the children tired of drawing, they had a nice run with the dog. What a fun start to Spring.
Missy 9 made this beautiful butterfly. Playdough appeals to all ages.
Home playdough is special. There’s no denying it. Sure, it’s fun for kids to play with the store-bought stuff, but there’s nothing like the smell of freshly cooked playdough to bring back fond childhood memories. When I smell it, I remember our old Playgroup hall and I can hear the noisy feet of my peers echoing on the floorboards. I hear table legs screeching as mums drag them away from the walls and set them up for us to play happily at.
What I love about making playdough yourself is that you get so much more to play with than what you’d buy in a lousy, plastic playdough can. It’s also great that it costs next to nothing to make. Playdough brings many benefits to the child, apart from being messy, good fun.
Playdough helps children to:
- strengthen and develop fine motor skills (use of hands)
- engage in creative play
- play dramatically, as they make up stories about what they’re making. It’s common to hear children making up pretend voices of their creations’ characters.
- develop their cognitive skills. Children use trial and error, cause and effect and basic experimentation to manipulate the dough into what they want it to do. They learn to problem solve.
- further develop their language. Children love to talk about what they are doing with their sculptures, and this in turn allows them to socialise with other children or adults.
- experiment with different tools and learn about how they work.
- watch how colours change when they are mixed together
How to cook playdough
You will need:
4 cups of water
4 tablespoons of cooking oil
4 cups of plain flour
8 tablespoons of cream of tartar powder
2 cups of salt
Dump all the ingredients into a large saucepan or frypan. I like this gigantic non stick electric frypan, because it’s less likely to spill over. Before you turn the heat on, mix it well. It should look like this:
Turn the heat on to medium-low (my frypan heats up very rapidly, so I have to watch this. You don’t want it to burn or develop a crust along the bottom). It will start to thicken and look lumpy. This is normal.
Now, just stir constantly until it is a lovely, firm playdough consistency. Put it aside to cool before adding any goodies to it.
Once it’s cool, there’s so many things you can add to your playdough. Kool Aid can be used to colour it, or food colouring. You can even try beetroot or spinach juice if you and your kids are feeling experimental!
But don’t feel that you have to stop at colour. Sight is just one of our senses. Why not appeal to your child’s sense of touch, with some glitter shaken in, or some coloured rice? To colour the rice before adding it, shake some rice and food colouring together in a jar and spread it out to dry before adding it. It looks best if the playdough colour is a contrast to the colour of the rice. Below is red and yellow food colouring added to rice.
It looks pretty, but children enjoy the granular sensation, and they notice a difference when flattening it with a rolling pin, or cutting it with a knife or a cookie cutter. This in turn often leads to much discussion! Why not throw some hundreds and thousands in for a mighty crunch? Then the children can watch the colours blend.
And what of our sense of smell? I’ve already mentioned how pleasurable the smell of playdough can be for a child (or adult. Ahem), so play around with that, if you will. You could make coffee playdough, mint scented playdough, just look around your kitchen and garden to see what you have.
The batch in the picture below has been mixed with Kool Aid and coffee, to encourage the children to experiment with different smells. We have cherry flavour, grape, tamarindo, lime, and raspberry. This cooked playdough recipe makes a large amount, so it’s excellent if you want a large variety of playdough types, or have a lot of kids using it either at home, playgroup or daycare.
Uncooked playdough
Sometimes, you might just want playdough quickly, and couldn’t be bothered cooking it, waiting for it to cool, yadda yadda, yadda… Or your kids might be keen to help you make it. Or, you might be at Playgroup and want to quickly make some for the kids, and not have time to cool it down before using it. My uncooked playdough recipe is handy for those times.
You will need:
3 cups of plain flour
1/3 cup of salt
1 and 1/4 cups of water
Plain flour for dusting
Colouring of your choice
Mix the first three ingredients together with your hands. Then turn it out onto a bench dusted with flour, and knead it until you are happy with its consistency. It should be just like bread dough.
Separate into the desired amount you’d like for each colour, then knead the food colouring through. Or you can use some of the suggestions mentioned in the cooked playdough recipe.
One thing that’s lovely about uncooked playdough, is that if children make it, they can give it to friends or family as a nice little homemade gift. We kneaded a little glitter through part of the batch for a little extra sparkle.
Fun ways to play with it.
The ideas here are endless, but I’m going to give you some good ones to get you all fired up.
- using bare hands only.
- rolled into ‘sausages’ and children encouraged to cut it into pieces with scissors. This is an excellent way to familiarise children with scissor use and strengthen their little muscles in preparation. It’s also much easier to cut playdough with scissors than paper when a child is starting to learn.
- provide an old garlic press and let the kids watch the playdough squish out like spaghetti. Again, this is great for fine motor strength.
- raid your useful box for straws, lids, cupcake cases etc for your children to add to their play.
- give your children rolling pins and cookie cutters to play with. We’ve not unpacked our rolling pin since the move yet, so I improvised and gave the kids this empty tissue cylinder.
Make sure to store your playdough in some cling wrap or a sealed plastic container. It’s great to encourage the kids to help pack up, too!
Mr 4′s caterpillar. He became deeply engrossed in this activity.
Now, to make life a little bit easier for anyone who likes to make their own playdough or fingerpaint, not only can you find the recipes at Hear Mum Roar, you can also download them in a handy printable format to keep in the kitchen. Click here to download.
I’d love to hear what your kids like to do with their playdough.
Edited to add: Here’s where Aussies can source Kool Aid (not sponsored links, just adding on request):
Sometimes, when my fiance goes out shopping or anywhere else, he likes to take one or two of our kids with him and leave me behind with just one child. At these times, I make the most of some rare one-on-one time with the child who stays with me.
Today, Mr 4 stayed at home with me, and we had lots of snuggles. Then, he turned around and asked me to take photos of him. Like many mums, I like to take the child’s lead with their play whenever I can. So, I grabbed the camera, and he, being a little bit precious about the whole thing, moved a chair in front of the fridge, because he felt that was where he wanted to pose.
And so we snapped up one picture after another. He tried to make each face a little bit more ridiculous than the last, and checked how he looked on the digital camera’s display screen. It’s weird, he’s the only boy living with two sisters, and yet he’s the most vain of the three kids!
The great thing about this game was that Mr 4 was given the opportunity to be creative and also engage in some dramatic play with the only prop being a camera. I think it is also a nice thing to do for a child’s self esteem, as they enjoy having the undivided attention of a parent, and being able to make mummy laugh. I know he felt really good about himself after playing this game. He also enjoyed the process of looking at the photos on the computer, and he’s learning a little bit about technology along the way.
My favourite part of the whole experience? The laughter. He thought he was brilliant, and we were both in hysterics.
I hope you’re all having a great weekend. I’ve been relaxing and enjoying my new computer that I won from Miscellaneous Mum, isn’t this the cutest laptop you’ve ever seen??
We’ve been wearing the kids out with lots of bubble play…
This is Missy 2 in a dress I recently made in advance for Spring. You might remember the fabric.
The odd thing is, it’s still supposed to be Winter here, but even after all the flooding we’ve had, today is playing out like the perfect Spring day.
Look at what lovely things I found blossoming ahead of time.
I’ll be buggered if I know what this tree is called, but it’s an Aussie native and so pretty.
Then these bulbs that have been something of a mystery, have blossomed into what I think look like daffodils? Well, they smell beautiful anyway.
My posting has been somewhat erratic of late, you’ll have to bear with me. I’ve had the flu, and it’s looking like I might have fibroids, so I’ve been forced into quite a lot of bed rest lately. But enough about me! How have you been spending your weekend?
