Reflections

Just a quick post today, as there are still lots of posts to catch up with, including the posts from our visit to my parents back in November! However, i though that i would post this up today, as we have been having a lot of windy weather recently. In amongst all this wind there have been a few quite days and as a result the loch has looked stunning, with almost glass like surface. Here are a few pictures i took the other day.

Hope you enjoyed them.

Kenitic Sand

My sister brought the kids some "kinetic" sand for Christmas. It wasn't actually kinetic sand, it was another make, but I cant remember the name and they are all pretty much the same thing and you all know what I mean when I say kinetic sand, so I'll stick to that. 

The sand was a big hit with the kids, who loved playing with it, but what I think was the best bit about the present was the moulds that came with the set. In the past we have a few sets, that came with a few different moulds, such a sea creatures and also cars, but this set came with castle moulds. They ranged in size from small scale moulds, with wall and towers to much larger walls and also a pyramid and tower complete with stairs. 

The little man spend most of the time building towers from the bigger sets, naming them Towers of Doom for some reason, this was almost immediately copied by the young lady, who started building her own Towers of Doom. 

Tower of Doom

Tower of Doom MkX

This was one of the young ladies towers.

Building these towers kept the kids occupied for quite some time over a number of days, repeating the cycle of building and destroying and rebuilding again. The little man has got quite good at keeping the sand on the try, however, the young lady has not quite mastered this yet and a fair portion of the sand ends up on the floor! Luckily, its simple to pick the sand up again and put it back in with the rest. Granted over time the sand wonders off and your suddenly left with not enough sand to build even the smallest building. Christmas gave us plenty of refills though, as we had several packs given to us and we have kept some back to top up as we get low. 

While there are lots of different types of Kinetic sand out there, the original Kinetic sand still seems to be the best, although the last lot we got, with the castle building seems pretty good, I think that its Motion Sand, either way its pretty good stuff. We have had Cra-Z-Sand in the past and I don't think that this is as good, that's not to say it's rubbish, but it's quite different and more sand like, so it doesn't seem to hold as well and makes a lot more mess, that's a lot harder to clean up. The moulds that came with the cra-z-sand however are pretty good and have little tabs on the top to help you hold them, which is very useful.

I have to say that it's not just the kids that enjoyed playing with the sand either, i had a great time building a castle with all the various bits and pieces.

Castle Burden overview

Front view

A close-up of the main castle

Birds eye view of the castle, I'm sure there are various names for certain parts of a castle, but i cant remember any and I'm not interested enough to go searching for them! 

Slight accident while building.

It was fun building the castle and i managed to use up every price of sand! I literally had to scratch around to gather the last bits of sand to finish the last mould and finish off the walls but i think it was worth it. Granted, i should have been doing some house work instead of playing with the sand, but hey, everybody needs a little break. The bairns though it was great, and did play with it for a few minutes. Unfortunately the little man's idea of play tends to be build it and then break it, so you can imagine what came next!

3

2

1

And destroyed! Yep, it took me about 10 minutes to build the castle and took the pair of them about 30 second to destroy it! They were giggling and making crashing sounds the whole time they were destroying the castle, so i don't mind at all, as they were having fun and i wasn't really expecting anything less. Next time the kids have the sand out again, i may well try and build another castle, just because i can.

Snowy lakes

Again were still stuck in Christmas, don't worry we'll get back to the new year soon enough! After we had Christmas up at ours, we went down to the lakes to see the in-laws for new years. It was good to get away, although the trip ended on a bit of a low with the Great Grandmother falling ill and unfortunately passing away not long after the new year. 

While we were down though, we did get to spend some time with the greater family, catching up with the brothers and sister in-law and hearing all the latest family news. Including the fact that the 18 year old brother in law is buying a house! Best of luck to him, hopefully he's going to be setting himself up well for the rest of his life, I remember how much of a struggle it was getting my first flat.

I think most of these facts passed the kids by as at the do with young children, they were far more interested in seeing grandma and going to the soft play, not to mention getting quite excited over the now on top of the hills around the lakes. 

Not a bad view from the house.

As always, I took full advantage of the time away to catch up on my sleep and grab a Costa Mocha or two. I do find that these trips south to the in-laws a great way to relax for a bit and recharge, leaving all the childcare to them, well, mostly grandma anyway. Grandad, as great as he is at playing with the kids, something I think he enjoys greatly as well, its grandma who seems to be the star of the show when were down. I think its mostly because she lets them get away with all sorts of things and always has lots of goodies around the house, not to mention every time they come home after being out with grandma and granddad they seem to come back with a new toy and full of naughty snacks. Not that we mind, after all, that's what grand parents are for, although I would get annoyed if they lived just a round the corner and did it, although I suspect that they wouldn't if they did.

It could be a while before we get back to the grandparents again, as trips south are more difficult now the little man is at school. We cant just join the wife on her trips south anymore, which is a shame, but the kids are getting older all the time and life changes. Maybe one day I'll be able to join her again and leave the kids at home by themselves!

living on an island

While this is Christmas related, its not really about Christmas, its more about the Christmas weather. I'm sure that I have posted about this before, and I was going to like it here, but I cant seem to find it right now. I think I need to get my labels sorted to make finding things a little easier for everyone, including me!

Anyway, living on an island is great. There are some many advantages to living in a small community, one that actually has a proper community feel to it as well. However, there are certain disadvantages, the main one being that you are so far from everyone else and its expensive and time consuming to get anywhere on the main land. There is also another distinct disadvantage of living on an island, when the weather is bad, shopping become a problem!

Fruit anyone?

I should have taken a picture of the bread as well, because that was in a similar state, as was the vegetables on the other side of the fruit, you can just about make it out, as if you look carefully, you can actually see though the shelves on the bottom picture, there is a couple walking in the isle you can see by the melons in the bottom left.

It wasn't all bad though, there was still some fruit and veg, mostly the expensive organic stuff and some frozen and the in-store bakery was still producing loves of bread, at equally expensive prices! For us, it doesn't really matter, it was only for a few days and we had enough in the house to survive, thank god for freezers! Still, I'll take this minor inconvenience and live on an island. As far as I'm concerned its 1000 times better living here than in London where I grew up!

xmas calenders

Ok, so were well in to February now and i'm posting about Christmas. Its been a bit of a rocky start to the year, but hopefully things are looking up. This does mean that I am quite a way behind on posting up here and there are lots of draft posts, sitting half finished. I will try and get these up as soon as I can, so there may well be a bit of a spurt of posts over the next couple of weeks as I get caught up. This seem to be getting to be a habit, not posting for a while and them posting up lots over a short period of time. I need to get better at concentrating on this blog, as I do have a habit of prioritising my other hobby blog over this one. The young lady is now at nursery a couple of days a week however and we are coming back in to summer, which means that I should have some more time to blog in the future and try and drive this blog forward, as I've neglected it recently and viewing figures, although never huge, have dropped off quite a bit.

Anyway, on to the content of this post, and a step back in time, only about 3 months though, so nothing to extreme.

The wife decided that this year we would do something different for the kids Christmas advent calendars. It all stemmed from last year when my mother won a raffle prize of a set of 25 books, all wrapped up, to be used as an advent calendar. We used this with the little man and he loved it, getting really excited every night to be getting a new story book. So we decided to replicate it slightly, although we modified it by including some small toys and chocolates ( well it is Christmas after all ).

The calendars.

We did one for each of the kids and although the books were age appropriate, we filled the rest of the calendar with matching items, mostly to save on the arguments. The little toys were pretty basic, toy cars, squidgy frog/fish thing that pokes its tongue out when you squeezer it, googly eye toy, that sort of thing. There were 12 books in total including a special one for Christmas eve, 4 chocolate bars and the rest were toys, a nice little selection of items. It wasn't as though they didn't get enough chocolate over the advent period either!

7 chocolate advents

Yes, we really did have 7 chocolate advents and I don't like them! The wife ended up with two, as did the young lady. The little man however ended up with 3! As you can see, there wasn't a lot of variety either! It was a bit of a mission to keep everything in order though, as with so many the same, there were the inevitable arguments over whose was whose. I did solve this after several arguments by drawing big letters on the back to mark out who owned which one, but even then it got very confusing at times! 

I do love the fact of how excited the kids get about all the Christmas stuff, but i'm not so sure that having 3 advent chocolate for breakfast each morning is particularly healthy!