Kicking it DIY

Right from the start my girl has been a second hand rose, so much of our things we given to us by fantastic family members and friends. Even now one of my favourite sites is a local buy and sell site. All this reuse is a great way to teach Matilda about recycling but it got me thinking - what about reusing items within our own home?

When my friends little girl Mia was only little we had made her a shaker using rice and a drink bottle. Mia found it the other day when visiting and asked why we hadn't made one for Matilda - good point, why hadn't we?

After that we went off to our 'Pre-toddler' mothers group at the baby health clinic and discovered the fun of the simple box.

As an aside, we are so lucky to have this service! Seriously its fantastic - they run three lots of Mothers Groups - an early one when the bubs are only a few weeks old, then one when they are about four months old and then another at eight-ish months old. The first one goes for about six weeks, the second for four and the last one is just a once off. How great is that? On top of that they have a great drop in service once a week, plus a breastfeeding drop in service and an immunisation clinic. And its all free.

Anyway, the clinic had a whole bunch of boxes of all different sizes out for the kids to play with. The boxes were covered in various pictures of babies, artwork with hands and feet etc. The kids loved them, they spent all morning climbing over them, banging on them and building with them.

Well that's how Matilda and I have got a little lost in DIY toys - so far we have made shakers with coloured rice and recycled drink bottles and boxes covered in paintings done by little Mia.

We took photos so we could share them with you :)

This is our first attempt at colouring rice - its pretty simple, just a drop or two of food colouring into a small bowl with a little rice in it then spread it out onto some baking paper to dry:

Then all you have to do is add it to your chosen bottle. We were clearly not going to be happy with just one so we asked Matilda's Aunty to bring over some other food colours - she did one better, check out her coloured rice stash!

Turns out Matilda's Aunty had been using colured rice to make flags in her classroom - score for us as this was the left overs ;)

Matilda had so much fun, even if Daddy is still vacuuming orange rice out of the carpet...

 So now we have plenty of shakers, of all sizes and colours - we even have multicoloured ones

We then moved onto the covered boxes - so far we only have two complete as we gave all the big ones away to a friend moving house, but we will add to the collection as we come across more boxes. The first one is extra special as Matilda's little friend Mia painted the picture especially for this task and even supplied the box. Too sweet xoxo