I'm bored!!!

I keep hearing this phrase, more often than not from Eden, so I keep giving him jobs to do whenever he uses the "b" word, the idea being that eventually he will realise he can play on his own without being supervised and entertain himself.  On this particular day his job was to prepare the strawberries for dessert.  As you can tell from his face, he looks absolutely thrilled.

I let them loose with the craft supplies on one of the days, which led to some interesting creations.

Most days the idea of baking feels me with horror, so on the days where I can't cope with mess, I've come up with a new strategy. Buy ready made fondant icing and cake and let them have free reign. It's much less stressful for me and enables the children to have fun and me to not have so much mess to clean up.  I think Ismay was using icing to cover squares of cake to make ghosts in this picture here.

I don't know if I'm the only one that this applies to, but my kids seem to behave much better when there are other children in the mix. My kids have been lucky enough to have some lovely friends to be able to play with so we have organised some play dates at ours.

In preparation for the impending child influx, I asked the children to make some dens outside so we could make the most of the dry weather.

Eden even built a campfire.

We then set up some indoor activites; ten pin bowling, with the children keeping scores (the smaller ones mark making, the older ones adding up)

The boys enjoyed building lego.

With some supervision, we made some paper windmills put of various thicknesses of paper to see which required the most energy to move.  

I got the children to help me make cheats sausage rolls using ready made puff pastry and sausages; it's amazing how much more my children will eat when they have prepared the food themselves!

I hope they sleep well tonight and I hope Eden will stop saying "I'm bored"!!!