Tiger

I have exciting news. I have ventured into the land of soft toy making. Okay, I know I've kind of been there before with the Dolls, but on the whole I stay away from soft toys. I like to make practical things that have long life and many learning outcomes. Soft toys don't always fit that criteria, I'm sad to say. But I've gone there now. Behold!

The Tiger.

For Sophie's birthday, we gave her the book "The Tiger Who Came to Tea" and took her to see the show at QPAC. She loved it. Ever since, every possible tiger related thing has been connected back to this. So, I made her a tiger.

I used the Racoon Tutorial from Ikat Bag as my base and adjusted it for a Tiger with reference to the other animals from the Menagerie Pattern. Pretty excited to finally use this pattern because even though I'm usually not a softie fan, all of these animals just look so cool.

She was pretty excited to see him. We got the fabric at Spotlight on Tuesday and I managed to sew him up Tuesday night. Since the moment she saw him Wednesday morning that Tiger has been everywhere with us.

It's been very hard to get good shots of him, because the girls just see him and want to give him cuddles. I've been pretty delighted with how the stripes lined up on the back there. I've never sewn with fuzzy animal fabric before, so maybe I should have read a tutorial, but I think I managed just fine. Now I'll have to make some soft cuddly animal friend for Rachel. Thankfully, it's a quick sew.

To prove my point about the girls just wanting to cuddle him, here is a photo of it in action.

Play Board

Over the Christmas holidays, Steve and I got a bit handy with the water play board we'd made in October last year. It's still not totally finished, but we are pretty happy with how it works right now. It's a little more permanent than the containers that were staple gunned on originally.

I'm hoping to add another pipe that runs down from the right side of the top pipe down to where Rachel is standing. The idea is that it will have small holes in it for water to trickle through to the big leaf catcher that's below, but still be able to feed balls to the pipe on the left.

Coincidently, that pipe on the left (in the middle) is actually completely level. We aren't exactly sure how it happened, but the momentum that the balls have going into it mean that they tend to roll down it just fine, so it's ok! Hooray!

Disbelief

I really can't believe I have only posted once this year. It's almost mid February already! Maybe it's a sign that my blogging goal for this year should be drastically decreased to one a month. Maybe.

I have been pretty busy with getting a solid routine for my Family Day Care work, and getting routines down. All kids sleeping right now - win! Must be doing something right. Now that Sophie is three I can actually do cool activities and crafts with her, but it's this really tricky balance of things, because the other kids can't do those things. In fact, the one year old's mostly just like to knock things over and chew them. There is a vast difference in their learning levels.

It's been a challenge but I'm ready for it. I've done a stack of risk assessments, so now I can go out of the house with the kids too. Oh, the freedom. Words can really not express how great it is.

Anyway, I was thinking about having not posted for a while and I realised I hadn't made a cool lunch for the girls in a while either. I've been slack and just making peanut butter sandwiches (cut into train shapes of course), but nothing special.

So this week, I've made lunches!

These were Sophie and Rachel's lunches for Wednesday. Yoghurt, boiled eggs (in car and fish shapes that didn't really work out so great), tomato, flower cut cucumber, olives, watermelon, grapes and star shaped jelly.

The little pick things are so cute! Right? It makes eating fun. 

Anyway, today's lunch was something similar. Yoghurt, grapes, watermelon and peach, boiled eggs (star and heart shapes today, much more successful than yesterday), cucumber (flowers and sticks), tomato and cream cheese sandwiches in little round bite size bits on toothpicks. 

Yesterday's lunches lasted morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea, but today's didn't make it past lunch because we were out at a park and I was running them around to make them tired, I mean, build their healthy appetites. Yes. Lunch was good today. I even made myself lunch too - an egg sandwich. Not cut in any fancy way at all, but delicious none the less.