A to Z year : March 12th-25th : the letter F

This fortnight was always going to be a tricky one.

We are only together as a family unit at the weekends, as Reece is with his mum in the week, and Jay and I are at work all week and in separate towns. So we usually do all our alphabet related activities on Saturdays and Sundays – giving us four days per letter.

The trouble is, we were Reece-less on the first weekend of the letter F, and so we didn’t want to go out doing loads of fun stuff without him (that just wouldn’t be fair) – and also, it was handy to have a whole weekend with only one kiddie to entertain, as that gave me the chance to tackle a looooong overdue project – the grand craft room tidy-up (see blog post last week).

Sadly that had nothing at all to do with the letter F (apart from furniture assembly --> and the fact that the clear out generated a big box of stuff to give away on Freecycle) , and it took me near enough the whole weekend , and most of the following week, to complete. So I felt like we were horribly behind on the whole letter F thing, and wondered whether to give up on this fortnight altogether and just class it as F for Fail.

But hey, you should never give up, right?

And we did manage to have some fun during the tidy up weekend, and I reckon that counts :) We went to the local swimming pool where they have an ace wave machine and some flume-style slides. And Connor managed to overcome his fear of going down said slides for the first time, which was ace! Love to see his confidence increasing every day :)

Also during week one, I wasted a lot of time in the evenings playing with some amazing online art games/experiments - my favourite was the fluid painter, but there are loads of other equally mesmerising distractions under the "experiments" part of that site - the flame one is good too - try them, I guarantee you'll be fascinated

Oh, and I booked my flights for our trip to Dublin in June to see the mighty Pearl Jam, so I guess I didn't do too badly after all with week one of F, even if a lot of my Fs were kind of accidental.

In week two, we actually made a bit more of an alphabetical effort :)

On the Saturday, our pals came round and we made (utterly flippin' delicious) chocolate fudge and flapjacks. They were soooo goood :)



It was mainly us grown ups doing the cooking, although the kids did come and have a token stir of the flapjacks later (mainly because they wanted spoon licking priveleges I suspect :))

One word of warning for anyone who fancies whipping up a batch of fudge - it's blinking hard work to stir it, and it kills your forks.

In fact, for the purposes of F fortnight, I think we can safely say that this fork is f**ked :)

And this glass is full:


While we were baking away downstairs, the kids were mainly filming upstairs, or so they said, I’m yet to see the fruits of their movie-making endeavours. We sent Jay up to get photographic evidence of the future Oscar winners doing their thing, but this is all we got (if you look very very carefully you’ll see the little Flip video camera in Lauren’s hand, but they mainly seem to just be lying around chatting and avoiding being asked to do any washing up, to me)



Later that day, the boys made beads and pendants out of Fimo to make necklaces for their respective mums. they turned out really well:


We haven't strung them yet as the spray varnish I used on them is point blank refusing to dry - I think I might have to wash/sand it all off :| Hopefully they can be salvaged though.

For our last big push on F, on the Sunday we went for a fun day out with friends (12 of us altogether, we really tried to grab a couple more people along to make it fourteen, but sadly they were busy) to our favourite family theme park - Chessington World of Adventures.

Connor was keen to have his first go on the Dragon's Fury roller coaster, which just happened to be right by the Ferris Wheel, so I could get a quick pic on my phone of both at once:


And of course, we had to go on the Dragon's Falls log flume :)


(Connor did enjoy it, honest :) )

My last adventure with the letter F was my etching experiment using Ferric Chloride (see last blog post)

And that just about finishes another fortnightly blog post :)

See you in a couple of weeks for G