So a weekend with the boys. Activities for them are tricky because one is 8 (going on 15) and the other is 2 and a half (and into everything except having dirty hands!). I make them sound awful but actually they are lovely but it’s difficult to find one thing that they both can do.
Last weekend was Mothers Day and I wanted to do something with them for Laura, we could have cooked something and that would have worked with O, but it’s not something they can do together. Also other than food, often Mother’s Day crafts are rubbish and there is no point to the tat that poor mums get given on Mother’s Day.
So if we were going to do something it had to be quick-ish to deal with attention spans, easy for a toddler and interesting for an 8 year old and had to result in something useful!
Fortunately for me, Laura has a garden and she and O did some growing of things last year. Here come the flowerpots.
I bought the pots from Wilko, primed them with a spray primer and then encouraged O to hand print them. I did try with J but he really doesn’t like having yucky hands and just wiped his hands on the pot rather than printing. O wrote the names of the herbs on some of the pots and I did the others.
Once they had dried, Oli and I lined the pots with coffee filters and then filled them with compost and sowed the right seeds for the pots and put them on the windowsill covered with a clear bag. Grandma got the same set of pots and all the stuff she needed to sow them when she got home!
Like us, and the weekend, it was a little haphazard but it was fun and filled an hour. There are lots of options for this. You could use herbs from the supermarket and pot them up, paint in all sorts of ways, depending the age of the children, it can be more or less complicated.
Family time was good but I missed Friday at work so it feels like I’m going to spend all week catching up at home and at work…
I’m disturbed by the trend towards thinking that because we can’t celebrate something, no one should. Yes, we need to be mindful that we don’t cause pain but we also need to understand that no one sets out to cause pain. We all need to work to being inclusive and thoughtful and thicker skinned.
Now it’s something else, it’s a minute to reflect on my day, to think about how I’m going to approach it, to track the progress of the week.
I’ve been thinking about preparation, Lent is a time carved out of the year to prepare. We’re preparing for Easter, for the joy of Palm Sunday and the heartbreak of watching it all fall apart by Good Friday. For the feeling of abandonment and hopelessness of Easter Saturday and the triumph of Easter Sunday.
Ma filled up the bird feeders and I contemplated the only active growing bed that isn’t very active.
and this tweet
Nic Dempsey 