Easter - how do you do yours?

So we are now on the 3rd of April and hopefully most people have recovered from their chocolate hangovers.

Easter is an interesting one for me, we are aren't religious, we aren't traditional, we aren't the kind to go OTT I don't think. There were a mixture of posts on Social Media about how people do Easter, which leads me to the question - 'How do you do yours?' Are you the kind of person to roll an egg down a hill? Only buy your child one egg? Buy your child 20? Or go full out and buy them presents and eggs and have Easter as a second Christmas?

In previous years I have been lucky enough to win our Easter eggs but that didn't happen this year! I was going to have to put my hands in my pockets and buy the boy an egg.

Jake is very much a fan of Nerf guns and having battles with his Dad but the ones we own are a bit cumbersome and hard for him to use alone so when I spotted Nerf Eggs at £4 in Tesco I decided one of those would be perfect for him as the toy would be fab and it wasn't too much chocolate.

Whilst in Tesco I also spotted the new Orchard Games mini games. These were £4 each or 2 for £7 and look great. The price of some Easter Eggs can easily be £7 so I decided to get him Build a Beetle and Little Bug Bingo. I love Orchard Toys games anyway, they are perfect for working on turn taking, learning to follow instructions, speech and understanding.

On the Saturday morning we visited our local Smyths toy store and they were running an egg hunt. Jake was given a little rabbit ears headband to wear and we walked around following clues. Luckily they were mapped out in the order of the store and it was more me solving them whilst Jake asked for everything but at the end of the hunt he received 2 Easter Eggs and a small bag of Lego.

My Dad dropped off some Easter treats for Jake and I have to say he chose the two things from M&S I would have chosen too. I love this little dinosaur egg cup. It's cute, practical and will hopefully encourage Jake to try boiled eggs - if not I think his Dad has plans to use it for his breakfast haha. The Thomas egg is brilliant for Thomas fans, it's a perfect replica of the childhood hero, all made from delicious milk and white chocolate.

All the Easter fun had hyped Jake up and he hadn't even eaten any chocolate yet! It meant he was up at 2:15am though asking if the Easter Bunny had been? He hadn't. Due to him not going back to sleep I didn't get chance to hide the little plastic eggs around the house so I told Jake that the EB couldn't hide the eggs as he had been awake and he couldn't risk being seen so there would be no egg hunt. Around 10am I got the chance to sneak into the garden and hide our brightly coloured plastic eggs and then I went back inside and pretended to received a call from the Easter Bunny who told me that as he couldn't hide the eggs in the house he had hidden them in the garden instead. Jake donned his bunny ears and basket - both £1 from Asda and headed off to find his rewards. Once he'd found them all he spent ages hiding them again and recollecting them. Over. and. Over. and Over.

In the afternoon we did some crafts painting some eggs and making these super cute finger puppets. The kit was £1 from Asda and simple enough for Jake to do with a little help from Mama.

So that's how we did our Easter.

Dani x

Trying something new... Diamond Painting

If you follow me on facebook at all you will know that I love to craft. I've tried my hand at many crafts over the years from card making, sewing, painting, jewellery making and I've even dabbled at making things from resin in the past too. I guess I just like to be creative and enjoy being able to move from different craft styles to suit my mood. I was recently looking for cross stitch kits and as I had Amazon vouchers started looking on there when I came across something called Diamond Painting. All the kits I could find come from China but I decided to give it a punt and for £4.59 I'm really pleased with the result. 

Inside the packaging was: 

8 packs of gems - each pack was a different colour and numbered to match the chart

A bead tray

A beading tool 

a small square of adhesive 

The printed picture. 

The picture is a mixture of printed area that doesn't get the gems glued to it and an area marked out to have gems glued on. The pattern for gluing the gems is colour and number coded so you can see that all colour 1 go in one place, all colour 2 in another etc. The area for sticking gems on is pre-glued and very sticky! It's covered in cellophane to protect it so it's really worth while having a pair of scissors to hand to trim the cellophane back and do small sections at a time.

The small square of adhesive is like a jelly substance, you just need to put a little amount on the end of your beading tool to help you pick the gems up. 

 I also found it worth having more than one tray for beads so you can do a few colours at a time. The tray that comes with the kit has lines grooved in so a gentle shake of the tray lines the gems up correct way up. I only had the one tray so I used some tub lids that I had. 

 

Once all your gems are stuck on you need to put something weighted such as books on top to press them down and make sure they are all stuck well. Here is the end result, you can probably tell I like butterflies haha so the choice of picture suits me down to a tee. I'm really pleased with it and looking forward to getting it framed and hung.