Back from Blighty!

Well, we're what, nearly three weeks into 2012 now and I'm only just saying happy new year? It took us a while to reset after getting back from the UK, dashing up to Tahoe for a mate's wedding immediately, and then back home to get over the jet lag and start school again. I think we're back on an even keel now though, so, Happy New Year!

It was so so good to see friends and family back in Wales and England over the holidays. It hurts my heart that we can't be nearer to them more often. Everyone got to meet Delyth for the first time, which was great because she's such a happy little camper, and at six months old she adored the attension. Plus she is sitting up, crawling backwards and saying some darn cute babbly baby nonsense too, which the two bigger filth wizards think is great fun.

Just look how spoiled she was by our families!
My Mum.

My dad and sister.

Paul's folks.

Paul with the girls and their cousin.

I don't have a craft project to post for you right this minute, but I did want to share with you some pics from our trip. If you've been to Wales or live there then you'll understand my love for the place. If you've never visited then definitely put North Wales on the list! Really, no matter what time of year we go, whatever the weather, the beauty of the place shines through like nowhere else I've experienced.

From Rhosgadfan at sunrise,

to Portmeirion just before sun set.

to Llanberris Pass in the rain and fog

We also got to have a very personal guided tour of the Blue John Caverns in Castleton (Derbyshire) because it was off season, it was just our family and my best mate that were taken 300ft underground into the caverns by Ben, who is one of the two miners that works there. The kids were really great down there and Delyth slept in the sling for most of it too, so we could really take it all in and find out about the history of the place and what mining there involves. I felt really lucky to have had that kind of tour of the place, because Ben said that in the summer they can have groups of sixty or more going down there at once. One of the coolest parts for me was seeing the fossils of ocean creatures so far underground.



People have asked me a lot about the journey itself and how we've managed long haul flying year after year with the kids at various ages. I'm not really sure I have any advice on the subject because honestly I'm not sure that we've even got it figured out ourselves. There are just so many variables. We manage it and we have a sense of humour about it, but you just never know how it's going to go. As evidence I present Carys's journal entry for the day we flew San francisco to London, which takes about eleven hours... Poor Ffion. The other three flights were better thankfully!

We were reminded also how good our freinds are to us. We stayed with some friends in Manchester for a few days when we landed and dealt with the eight hours worth of jet lag and they were fantastic to us and even stayed up into the wee hours catching up, which meant they had to go to work with very little sleep! When we got home we were picked up from the airport by another friend, who's wife had put fresh milk and fruit in our fridge for us because they knew we were only home for a few hours before driving up to Tahoe and these friends have a two week old baby! Awesome friends are awesome! Actually, as I type this, Paul is off picking up these friends because their car has just broken down on the way to school. In the words of Bill and Ted, "Be excellent to each other!".

Just as a crafty tid bit to leave you with though, Kami over at "Get Your Mess On" and "Austin Tinkering School" let me know about a great instructables tutorial on making Unicorn poop cookies last week. We made some over the weekend for my daughter's friend's birthday party and the kids decorated the bakery box too. Here's the link to the tutorial. The kids had a blast making these, and we made more with friends on Monday too. The friend we gave them to called them "fantasy forrest fertilizer". Well worth making! Not least because the kids get to spend quite a while making not that many cookies, so the mess and sugar consumption to entertainment ratio is very agreeable.

I'll be back soon with more Filth Wizardry antics, but until then, party on dudes and have a most excellent start to 2012!

Gingerbread house photo cards

Hello my festive little wizards! We're over the pond at the moment. Just beat the jet lag and there have only been three major barfing incidents since we landed, and that, believe it or not is an improvement on last year.

Just popping in to let you know that I've written a post over at Alpha Mom along with printable templates showing how to make these little gingerbread house cards that stand up and have little snap closing doors with photos inside for the holidays, so if you want to print them out and have a go (makes a good grandma and grandpa gift from the kids) then here's the link over to the tutorial.

The other nice thing about this project is that other than the print outs, it uses only a couple of things that you've likely got in your recycling bin, so very easy to pull together. Plus you can equally go freestyle with it if you don't have a printer, or your kids are more into drawing their own thing than colouring.

I hope you all have a lovely winter break with lots of happy family vibes and plenty of custard cream biscuits (Oh, wait, the custard cream biscuit thing is just us, because we haven't had any in over a year and now I need to eat all of them, plus Wensleydale cheese, sausage rolls from Edward's in Conwy and as much fish and chips as is humanly possible)

Fa la la la laaaaaaa, la la la laaaaaaaa! Burp.

Festive bits and bobs

We're off tomorrow to visit the family back in the UK! Whooo! Can't say I'm looking forward to the long haul flights with more kids than grown ups, but at least these days Carys and Ffion are carrying their own bags, rather than me and Paul carrying both them and the luggage :) Looks like the kids get to leave their shoes on going through security this year too, so that's at least a small change in the pleasant direction. Last year when we did this trip Delyth was inutero and flying whilst pregnant turns the morning sickness dial up to eleven for me, so I'm hoping I'll find this flight a lot easier having her on the outside as well. Anyhoo, besides the blerch of flying,we're really looking forward to seeing friends and family that we haven't seen for a year and introducing them to the wee one. While we're gone though, here's a little run down of links to some of the festive crafts we've done on Filth Wizardry over the years in case a few take your fancy...

From 2010.

• Massive amounts of morning sickness and no blogging!

From 2009.

• Christmas printable scene for hole punch and Lego.
• Home made wrapping paper printing with laser felt.
• Christmas countdown calendar for slackers.
• a few home made tree decorations.
• No icing candy cane cookies.

From 2008.

• Paper plate angels.
• Cardboard Christmas trees.
• Salt dough ornaments.
• Recycling wreaths.
• Condiment cup advent calendars
• Old tights snowmen

For any readers I might have that live in the SF Bay Area, I want to give a shout out about RSV Chrismas Tree Farm. We went there a couple of weekends ago and it was the best place ever! It's a family owned place and all the people that work there are the family and good freinds of the owners and it's just a delightfully chilled out place to be with your family. We'd never gone there before and only made the trip because we'd heard about the swings that they have there. OH MY GOODNESS, the swings are AWESOME! The kids had the best afternoon at this place, eating toasted marshmallows and trying out all the swings hidden around the farm, including a not so hidden utterly enormous swing that puts all other swings on the planet to shame. There are hammocks dotted around the farm and picnic tables and giant xylophones. Really lovely place to be and really lovely people running it too.

These people didn't pay me or give me anything to write about them, I just wanted to share because it was so much fun that I thought my kids faces were going to break from all the grinning! Well worth a trip if you're anywhere near, plus it's right next to Ano Nuevo State Beach, where you can go on a docent led tour of the Elephant Seal breeding grounds. We do that every year and will be going when we get back in the new year because the baby seals will have been born by then.

I'll have another Holiday craft appearing over on Alpha Mom before Christmas, so when that's up I'll let you know. Hope you all have a fabaroo winter break (or summer break if you're on the other side of the sphere) I can't wait to see the kids running up to Grandma and Grandpa's front door and to see the look on mum's face when she finally gets to cuddle Del. Happy Holidays!!!

Laminated Autumn leaf magnets

There are a couple of ways of preserving fall leaves that I keep seeing popping up on the blogs this time of year. One is painting them with Mod Podge, like Jean does with her daughter over at The Artful Parent, the other is dipping the leaves in wax of some kind (soy/beeswax etc) like here on Autumn Comfort Candles. I was wondering about doing one of these options with the girls, but I was chatting with my oldest daughter's teacher a couple of days ago and she suggested laminating autumn leaves and I started thinking this might make a more useable item for the kids rather than a purely decorative one.

Obviously sealing leaves inside plastic isn't going to give results as natural looking or eco-freindly as the other preservation methods, but I hope that these will last through a good few years of play. My kids would turn leaves made in the other methods into fall coloured dust in no time at all. The other thing about this approach that suits us is that our fridge-freezer is ancient and ugly as sin. Our landlord obviously looked at it's rusty ass and said to himself "no-one's going to want this in their kitchen, but it still works, so I'm not getting rid of it". His unconventional solution was to paint it with the same paint that he used to paint the walls.The result scores a negative eight on the Marthastewartometer. We need pretty things to cover this lumpy magnolia matt emulsion and rust speckled monolith with! Fall leaf magnets to the rescue!

We pressed our leaves in a book for a couple of days, then sent them through the little laminator we have and then cut them out and taped a bit of flexible magnet to the back. You can buy rolls of magnetic tape from craft stores, but we just cut up free magnets that businesses hand out like the Round Table pizza ones that come through the door with tear off coupons attached.

They work like a charm and the kids have been sorting them and making patterns with them. We deliberately walked home along a different road from school this afternoon to see if we could find some yellow leaves to add. Have any of you laminated leaves before? I'm wondering how long I can expect the colours to last before we get photodegredation. They aren't in direct sunlight where they are, so I guess that helps. We'll have to press some flowers in the spring to do this with too!

Thanksgiving turkey craft over at Alpha Mom

Another crafty thingumyproject for you that I've written up over at Alpha Mom. It's an easy peasy lemon squeezy thanksgiving craft that should help keep the littlies busy at the dinner table and there's a print out template that I made for it too, so pop on over to the post here to see how they are put together (they are made using things that you probably have at home already).

Something that I didn't put in the post over there, but thought that my readers over here would get a giggle out of is the "thankful feather" that Paul drew before he went off to work this morning. Yeah, geek dad is geeky. That's a false colour representation of the cosmic microwave background radiation (including the microwave contribution of the Milky Way, which is the central red part). And Ffion thought it was pretty, so copied it. Definitely keeping those!

Being British rather than American, I've always leaned towards doing generic Autumn type activities around this time of year, rather than specific thanksgiving themed projects, but I was still surprised to find that after eight years of living in the US, this is the first thanksgiving themed craft I've posted about!

We've taken to celebrating thanksgiving by taking a packed lunch to a local forrest. It's turned into a nice tradition for us and one that I look forward to (yeah, it's also nice that I don't have to cook a proper thanksgiving feast. I just have to make sandwiches!) I just looked through some of our old photos from thanksgivings gone by and got all nostalgic. These little people grow so fast!

Hope you have some lovely times planned for next week, even if you aren't from the US and don't have the thanksgiving tradition.

P.S. The turkeys survived most of the day here, even after we had ten kids marauding about the house after school, but around dinner time I found some unfortunate turkey roadkill splatted on the kitchen table.