Aug 12, 2009

Indoor picnic

Don't you just love it when things just work out? We had a moment of that today, which made for a great game this afternoon. I was looking after my mate's three kids this afternoon, and when she came round to drop them off, her youngest had brought a picnic hamper with her to play with. Three of the kids wanted to play indoors with the Lego, but my three year old and her best mate wanted to have a pretend picnic on the grass with the baby dolls. I wasn't going to let the three year olds be outside on their own, and I wasn't going to let the other three kids be inside on their own either.


The fortuitous part of all this is that a couple of weeks ago, two mates of ours got married and as part of the reception decor they had these large preserved moss circle centerpieces on the tables, with cute little pretend trees holding the seating names. They brought them back and kindly asked us if we could use them for the kids to make something with. I said "yes please! I'm sure we'll find some things to do with them.", but I didn't really have a clue what at the time. I thought maybe I'd save them until Christmas and the kids could make cone shaped Christmas trees to decorate or something. They are dried, so it's not like I had to think of something to use them for right away.


Anyhoo, the moment was now, so I got the moss circles out of the garage and we laid them out to make a pretend park in the kitchen, and the kids set up the picnic there with the babies and some snack food and juice.






They decorated the place with some of the flowers I have from a broken dollar store lei. I should really get another one deliberately to break, because the flowers have been so useful in so many crafts!





Batgirl and her best friend played happily and a couple of the other kids came in from next door to check out the picnic (although the Lego pulled them back again after they had snacked)






I think these moss circles are going to be very useful for indoor picnicing when we have bad weather! I always wanted to make the outdoors indoors when the weather was bad. Back in uni one of the flats in our halls of residence in first year covered the floor of an entire room with sand in order to have a beach party in the winter. The moss was a lot easier to clean up than the sand!

Thank you Pat and Victoria for our indoor park :) I'll let you know what other weird things we use your stash of moss and tiddly trees for.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

that looks like a lovely picnic. love the moss.

felicificability said...

just wanted to let u know that i adore your blog and find it extremely inspiring (◕‿◕)

greetings from sunny cyprus

A Daft Scots Lass said...

What an awesome and pretty picnic...

Lessons from the Boys said...

What an awesome idea! Way to go!

MaryAnne said...

I love when things work out like this! Those moss circles look wonderful - I'm always trying to bring the outdoors in for bad weather too.

plinehan said...

Hey, awesome! I'm glad they were useful!

LiEr said...

Hello KM! Catching up on backlog of posts as usual. I love those moss circles. The girls are always asking to create something called Flowerland in our house. They'd kill for those moss circles. What a very cool picnic that must have been. Those little flowers!

pink and green mama MaryLea said...

Lovely!!! My girls would have a blast with those moss circles with our fairy house : ) Your girls are adorable and I love the PJ attire -- my girls would never change out of them if they didn't have to go to school!! : )

Valerie @ Frugal Family Fun Blog said...

That is just the cutest!! You're right. It's like the sun, moon, and stars were in proper alignment to produce such a moment where everything came together so nicely! Beautiful!!

Katherine Marie! said...

That looks like one precious picnic... sometimes I even secretly hope for bad weather so we can stay inside and play.

Karin said...

Wow, I too love the moss circles! What a great way to have a picnic. (Ours yesterday in the real outdoors was a little chilly!)