P is for Picnic

What better way to celebrate the sun finally making an appearance than by having a picnic. And as luck should have it I had reached P in the alphabet challenge list. My friend Amz and her beautiful little girl Sienna were only too willing to spend an afternoon in the sun.

In my opinion for a picnic to succeed there must be three things: sun, good company, and sausage rolls. A picnic without sausage rolls is like Ant without Dec, or crackers without cheese - wrong! Luckily I was well prepared, and armed with a jumbo pack of sausage rolls and other yummy delights we set off.

Picking a shady spot under the tree (Amz is eight months pregnant and really suffering in the heat) we settled down. This is where I discovered little Sienna's immense love of crisps. And she is not alone! Now what is it with children and crisps?! Sienna, a strong willed two and a half year old, told me she loved ham sandwiches. So I lovingly prepared them for her, cutting them into little triangles, with the crusts cut off. This was fine until the pringles came out. The saying ‘once you pop you just can’t stop’ was certainly true for this toddler! To the extent that she was trying to cram in a whole fist full of crisps in one go - crumbs everywhere! Sandwiches were pushed to one side as she concentrated on the hard task of eating as many crisps as she could with one hand, and waving to the kids train that goes around the field with the other hand. Wash them down with a pink sugary cake, and lemonade and we had a hyper child on own hands!

The only logical thing to do was to pack up the picnic, and head for the playground, where Sienna could run off her energy. this was a great plan, as we set up camp in the sandpit, where Sienna made castles and got sand in her eye (on more than one occasion) and Amz and I pretended we were on a beach in the Caribbean. This was followed by an icecream, a perfect end to a lovely day!

O is for Origami!

Not being the most artistic person in the world I knew that origami would pose a few problems for me. I was the child at school who was praised in art class for her lovely drawing of a tree - which was all very well but it was actually a drawing of myself! Hopefully I don’t resemble a tree in real life, and I am just ‘artistically challenged’.

I knew origami was off to a great start when I told Faye that today was a very Chinese day, as we had just eaten Chinese and were now doing origami. With her usual look of pity directed at me she informed me that origami was in fact Japanese. What a great start!

The first animal attempted with my little band of origami friends (Faye, Jay and John) was an elephant. Not wanting to start with anything too difficult I picked a Primary School easy for kids pattern. However looking at the instructions on the laptop I found myself completely confused! As the other three whizzed through the list I struggled with the paper folds, which left my elephant resembling a scrunched up piece of paper. Luckily for me Faye was on hand to bail me out (story of my life really), and patiently refolded my paper, correcting my mistakes! The result was my lovely little elephant - who shall be known as Dora.

Triumphant after making an elephant (with some help) we moved onto a crane. Faye informed me that if you make 1,000 cranes you get to make a wish. I was very confused about this, and wondered how on earth you would make a crane out of paper. Surely it would be too technical. When the instructions started I was even more confused. Wings on a crane?! Head?! It was only after pondering this for a while that I realised my mistake - I had assumed we were making the type of crane that is found in a builders yard and used for heavy lifting. In fact it was the bird variety! Suddenly everything made sense - though Faye still had to help me with my creases!

 

The whole origami experiment left me with an elephant with a bent trunk, a crane that is a bird not a piece of machinery, and a paper cut. But it was fun. I think it will take me a long time to make the 999 cranes I need for a wish!