Eat something different for breakfast every day for a week

I've never been very adventurous when it comes to breakfast. For most of my life it's been toast and Marmite. I had a brief dalliance with Special K a few years ago, but since then it's pretty much been the toast that I've stuck with. So as part of my Day Zero Project, I challenged myself to eat something different for breakfast every day.

It might sound simple, but it wasn't as easy as it sounds. I had to plan in advance to make sure that I had everything I needed, and I had to plan according to what I was doing that day. Every other morning I go to the gym first thing, so it needed to be something that I could make and eat with unoccupied small children around. On the other mornings I eat at the same time as the children, meaning I am constantly up and down from my seat to tend to their various needs and demands.

Here's what I came up with:

Monday - A bread roll with cheese and juice
Tuesday - Overnight oats, using a recipe from My Darlings and Me
Wednesday - Granola cereal with Greek yoghurt
Thursday - Scrambled egg on toast
Friday - Pain au chocolat
Saturday - A cheese omelette
Sunday - Pancakes with syrup

Some of these rather indulgent breakfasts might not have done my waistline much good, but it was really fun to try out some new things. In particular, I was really proud of my omelette and my scrambled eggs, as to my shame I had never made either before. They turned out perfectly and are definitely something I'll be making again!

Next I'm going to try eating something different for lunch every day for a week. Goodbye, cheese sandwich!

Meeting alligators and crocodiles at Gatorland, Orlando, Florida

On our recent holiday to Florida we had a fantastic day out at Gatorland, Orlando with our four year old and nearly two year old. When you first enter Gatorland you come face to face with a big lake teeming with alligators. You walk around on a boardwalk raised slightly above them, and although they kept pretty still they were still very menacing! We had a good look around this area while we waited for the first show to start - the Gator Jumparoo Show. It was a bit cheesy, with chicken hung up above the water to encourage the alligators to jump for it. After the Disney queues, it was refreshing to be able to find a good viewing position just a few minutes before the show started, and there was a nice low glassed window area for children (it's not the best idea to lift them up above the railings!)

Then we headed out onto the boardwalk around the Breeding Marsh. Although the boardwalk is very safe, it is right down at the same level as the alligators and you can get very close! Mainly they were just lying there enjoying the sunshine, and there were plenty of information boards to tell you more about them. There are a couple of observation towers that you can climb for a better view, although the main path is fully pushchair and wheelchair accessible. We also had a good view of the brave souls flying across the swamp on a zip line!

There are plenty of other animals to see as well as alligators - we chatted with some parrots, learned about some of the local Florida snakes (thankfully only seen by us in enclosures on this holiday) and marvelled at some majestic white alligators. Then we headed up to the station for a ride on the Gatorland Express for a journey around the crocodiles and Breeding Marsh which the children loved. The train ride costs an additional $2 per person.

Then it was time for the Gator Wrestlin' Show which we enjoyed very much, the alligators weren't very large but they could certainly do a lot of damage if they wanted to! We had brought our own sandwiches but we topped up afterwards with some nachos and chips from Pearl's Patio Smokehouse - in future best avoided just after the show as there was quite a queue! The food was quite reasonably priced although not the best selection for us veggies, it hit the spot though.

The skies were starting to darken, but we made our way to the far end of the park for a closer look at the Saltwater Crocodiles and the Nile Crocodiles before heading out towards the Swamp Walk - a self-guided tour around a boardwalk through a native Cypress Swamp. It's all completely natural and what the area would have been like before it was developed, which is fascinating. Unfortunately the weather was against us, and it came on to rain quite heavily. There were plenty of small shelters, but a poor, sodden employee was closing the walk and so we had to return to the main part of the park.

We joined other visitors sheltering in one of the many covered areas, trying to decide how long to wait out the storm. We're not used to such dramatic weather conditions, and it really was pelting down! In the end we decided that it was time to make a move. I've never seen rain like it, by the time we had run the very short distance to the car and got everyone strapped in, we were all completely soaked through! It was a bit of a shame, but fortunately we felt that we'd had a good look around and seen everything that we wanted to. It did mean that we missed out on the Children's Playground and Splash Park, which would have been a welcome relief earlier in the day but wasn't needed at the time we went past!

We had a great day out at Gatorland, I would definitely recommend a visit. If you want to enjoy one of the experiences there like feeding the alligators, having a photo taken with them or braving the zip line then do check in advance as there are additional charges and you may need to book in advance. It's definitely suitable for young children, there are all the facilities that you need, and not too much walking for little legs.

Disclaimer - We were guests of Gatorland for the purpose of this review. An adult (over 13) ticket currently costs $21.99 and a child ticket (ages 3 - 12) currently costs $13.99. The train ride is $2 per person. Do check locally for discount coupons on admission, and also on the Gatorland website. 

Ladybird Tuesday - Dinosaurs

I've been on a bit of a roll with Ladybird book acquisition this week. I don't often get the chance to browse charity shops, but a shopping session with my Mum (and also having her on board with the hunt) led to a few purchases. It seems to be difficult to get hold of the really vintage Ladybird books now, but there are plenty of the newer Ladybird books around and they are usually quite reasonably priced. More about those over the next few weeks, but today's Ladybird Tuesday post is about a book that I picked up for Harry a little while ago - Dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs is a book in series 737 - Ladybird Leaders. According to the back of this copy there are ten books in the series which span quite a range of interests - Water, Man and his Car and Castles among other things. This copy was published in 1974. The book follows chronologically from a desolate world with no plants, animals or people and then details how life began in the sea, moving on to the first amphibians and reptiles before reaching the age of the dinosaurs. The timeline also continues on past dinosaurs to include horses, the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, so in fact it's really a very potted history of early life on earth.

There's a lot to take in from this book and it is a bit difficult to get a sense of the huge timescales involved. As an introduction to the subject it's very good though, and the illustrations are as excellent as ever. The final page has some outline images of some of the animals covered in the book with a human figure for size comparison, which fascinated my son. There's also a brief mention of how the first dinosaur bones were discovered.

If you love Ladybird books, do pop over and visit Ladybird Tuesday, where Being Mrs C is assembling a really comprehensive catalogue of Ladybird books and reviews.

Below you can find links to all my Ladybird Tuesday book posts.

Snow White and Rose Red
Hansel and Gretel
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
The Three Little Pigs
The Old Woman and her Pig
Little Red Riding Hood
The Ugly Duckling
The Railway Children
A Little Princess
A First book of Aesop's Fables

A Ladybird Book about Knitting
More Things to Make - For Special Occasions
Easy to Make Puppets
Learning to Sew
Stamp Collecting
Tricks and Magic

Prehistoric Animals and Fossils
Dinosaurs
Stone Age Man in Britain
Great Civilisations - Crete
Charles Dickens
Nelson
Lives of the Great Composers Book 1
Lives of the Great Composers Book 2
The Story of Music

Plants and How They Grow
The Ladybird Book of the Night Sky
Sea and Air Mammals
The Farm

The Story of Nuclear Power
The Motor Car
How it Works - The Computer
How it Works - The Rocket
The Story of Ships
The Postman and the Postal Service
People at Work - The Nurse

Understanding Numbers
Talkabout Clothes
Going to School
Teaching Reading

Stories of Special Days and Customs
Christmas Customs

Girls and Boys - A Ladybird Book of Childhood

How to cook pizza on the barbecue

Last year, at the beginning of 'summer', we bought a fancy new barbecue. We used it once, and then it rained for two months. We shivered around it a couple more times later in the year, and then it was back to the garage for the winter. So now that we are basking in the hottest and longest summer that I can remember, we are certainly making up for it and we've been barbecuing almost every night. Which is great, except that with a vegetarian husband, and a fussy one at that, it's rather difficult to come up with many variations on veggie burgers and sausages.

So when I was invited to take part in The Charcoal Challenge by MoneySupermarket I decided that it was a chance to try something a bit different on the barbecue. We were given £50 to see how creative we could be, and I blew a large part of the budget on a pizza stone, something that we had been eyeing up for a while but not yet been brave enough to try.


To use a pizza stone on a barbecue, you need a barbecue with a lid. First you need to get the barbecue nice and hot, then place the stone on it for about ten minutes to heat it up. Our pizza stone has a removable baking tray, so you can prepare the pizza while you wait for the barbecue to heat up.

I use a simple and tasty recipe for pizza dough which came with my Kenwood Chef - 225g strong white bread flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon dried yeast, 150ml tepid water and 1 tablespoon olive oil. Just mix it all up together and knead for five minutes, roll out and leave to rise for about an hour before you add the toppings.

Make the pizza up on the baking tray, then when the stone is hot place the baking tray on top of the pizza stone and replace the lid. The instructions said that it would take about four minutes to cook the pizza, but we found that it took nearer to ten minutes.

We were so pleased with how well our pizza turned out. We know our pizza, and this was delicious. The base was crispy but not at all burned and the toppings were cooked to perfection. Lovely! Buoyed by our success, we also used the pizza stone to cook a pre-made garlic bread, all washed down with a small glass or two of sparkling wine.

Browsing through the instruction booklet as we ate, I noticed that you could also use the pizza stone to bake things, in particular cookies! So I knocked up a batch of cookie dough using my favourite cookie recipe and with bated breath we placed the balls of dough onto some baking paper as instructed and popped them inside the barbecue. Next time I wouldn't bother with the baking paper, but apart from the papery residue stuck to the bottom the cookies were also delicious - with a chewy caramelised base and distinctive smoky flavour.

So here's to trying new things, and adding a new barbecue meal to our repertoire!

How we spent the money:

Barbecue Pizza Stone - £35

Small bottle of sparkly wine - £3.50

Garlic bread - £1.20

Pizza topping - £1
Strong white bread flour - £1
Dried yeast - 65p
Pepper - 58p
Onion - 20p
Cherry tomatoes - 20p
Mozzarella - £1
Mushroom - 20p

Caster sugar - 99p
Golden syrup - £1.89
Butter - £1.30
Self-raising flour - 65p
Minstrels - £1

We already had a few bits in the store cupboard. This comes to £50.36, although of course we didn't use up everything that we had bought so there is plenty left over for next time!

I was given £50 by MoneySupermarket to spend to show how creative I could be on a budget when hosting a barbecue.

Making chocolates with small children

I've been intending to make chocolates for some time. After hunting everywhere over here for chocolate moulds I finally picked some up on our holiday to the US last November, then came back and found the same identical ones in Hobbycraft. That isn't the only time this has happened. Of course by 'making chocolates' I don't mean anything nearly as complicated as making chocolate from scratch (although we did try some more advanced chocolate making techniques at a chocolate making workshop), I mean melting down pre-purchased chocolate and pouring it into moulds.

If you are just having fun playing with the chocolate then you can get away with the very cheap supermarket value chocolate bars, which actually don't taste too bad. If you are making the chocolates as gifts then it's nicer to buy a slightly more expensive brand as they will taste better.

The moulds that I used are from the Wilton range and I can fully recommend them. I have the Wilton Stars Candy Mold and Wilton Seashells Confectionary Mould (affiliate links) as you can see now easily available and very reasonably priced. You can also buy silicone chocolate moulds in all sorts of different designs which are easier to remove the chocolates from once set.

These chocolates were made as gifts so I bought decent chocolate - packets of milk, white and dark chocolate for a variety of colours. I melted them down into separate bowls and gave each child a bowl and a spoon to put into the moulds. Mia couldn't quite believe her luck when she saw that I had given her a bowl of melted chocolate and proceeded to eat it as fast as she could, even coming out with a brand new phrase 'tastes nice!'

Harry took the whole affair much more seriously, carefully spooning in the different colours of chocolate and using a cocktail stick to stir together the layers together. Then we put them in the fridge for a couple of hours to set before popping them out and displaying them in various home crafted boxes.

They were so successful that we went on to make another batch for my Mum's birthday! Another time I might step it up a bit and make a chocolate plaque like this one over at Smiles and Trials. Watch out, sweet-toothed relatives!

Review - Twinkl Teaching Resources

Twinkl Teaching Resources is home to thousands of free and unique printable teaching resources. They aren't just aimed at teachers, they are also great for parents, nurseries and childminders. The resources cover the Early Years Foundation Stage, KS1 and KS2. While many of the resources are free, a premium subscription gives you access to a further 10,000 resources at an additional cost of £29.99 per year. I was given a free premium subscription so that I could try out some of the resources and share them with you.

I've not really done a lot so far to teach Harry his letters and numbers. He starts school this September, and while he can write his name and Mia's name, he can't reliably recognise or write all the letters. I'm starting to think now that he is quite capable of learning them, and in fact it wouldn't do any harm to start stretching him a little ready for school. It's also good practice for him to get into the habit of sitting down and concentrating on something for a little while.

I headed straight for the Parents section of the Twinkl website, and a huge range of resources caught my eye - not just for formal teaching but also downloads like reward charts, chore timetables and household routine printables. Here I found some excellent colouring sheets which are all to do with starting school. Harry is getting really good at colouring and it was a good opportunity for us to sit down together and have a chat about starting school while he was colouring (not that he is anxious in any way about it at all - that's just me!)

I also wanted to find some resources to concentrate in particular on letter recognition and first writing. First I printed out a set of letter formation posters, which were really helpful to refer to when looking at letters and will probably find their way onto the walls of his bedroom. Many of the resources are themed, and there is a lovely unit which is themed around Under the Sea. In this unit I found some Pencil Control Worksheets (Twinkl subscriber resource) which were perfect for Harry's stage of writing. They broke down each different shape that is used to make up a letter - zig zags, curves, circles and so on, and then the child can trace over them. We used this in conjunction with the letter posters and Harry really enjoyed doing this.

I also wanted to do a bit of work with numbers and counting, and I found some number worksheets which were very simple and just the right level for Harry. He had to count up the sea creatures and write the number in a circle at the end of the row. Then we moved on to some very simple addition worksheets. He really enjoyed doing these worksheets, and I could almost see the little cogs in his head going around as he worked them out!

Having access to these resources inspired me to think of ways that I could develop them myself and other ways in which I could use them. For example, you could laminate the letter formation posters and use a wipeable pen to go over the shape, use play dough sausages to fill out the letter shapes, or bury them in a shallow salt or sand tray and use a finger to trace out the letters.

The obvious thing to remember about the Twinkl resources is that you do need access to a printer to print them. In a school or childcare setting there will be a budget for this, but as a parent you do need to consider the cost of the printing. I did find though that although it was nice to print in colour, black and white was perfectly adequate.

I think that premium service is excellent value. While there is plenty available on the website for free, there is so much more that is available to premium users.

I received a Twinkl premium subscription to review, but I'd really recommend checking out the website as there are plenty of free resources to download!

Ladybird Tuesday - A Little Princess

I found this Ladybird book - A Little Princess, from series 740 - Ladybird Children's Classics - in a charity shop the other day and I knew that I had to buy it. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett is one of my very favourite books. In this edition the story has been retold by Joan Collins to make it suitable for very young readers. It has plenty of gorgeous illustrations by Shirley Tourret to keep even the youngest readers interested.

The story tells the tale of Sara Crewe, sent away from her father in India to school in England. When he dies she is forced to work as a poor servant in the school, but her lively imagination keeps her going and through her kindness to others she is able to find happiness again.

I'm quite familiar with the original book and this is a very faithful retelling. Although aimed at younger readers, the language is advanced and in keeping with the period in which the book is set. It's a lovely story, and it always brings a tear to my eye at the end. I'm looking forward to reading it with Harry one day and hopefully inspiring him to read the original version when he is older.

If you love Ladybird books, do pop over and visit Ladybird Tuesday, where Being Mrs C is assembling a really comprehensive catalogue of Ladybird books and reviews.

Below you can find links to all my Ladybird Tuesday book posts.

Snow White and Rose Red
Hansel and Gretel
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
The Three Little Pigs
The Old Woman and her Pig
Little Red Riding Hood
The Ugly Duckling
The Railway Children
A Little Princess
A First book of Aesop's Fables

A Ladybird Book about Knitting
More Things to Make - For Special Occasions
Easy to Make Puppets
Learning to Sew
Stamp Collecting
Tricks and Magic

Prehistoric Animals and Fossils
Dinosaurs
Stone Age Man in Britain
Great Civilisations - Crete
Charles Dickens
Nelson
Lives of the Great Composers Book 1
Lives of the Great Composers Book 2
The Story of Music

Plants and How They Grow
The Ladybird Book of the Night Sky
Sea and Air Mammals
The Farm

The Story of Nuclear Power
The Motor Car
How it Works - The Computer
How it Works - The Rocket
The Story of Ships
The Postman and the Postal Service
People at Work - The Nurse

Understanding Numbers
Talkabout Clothes
Going to School
Teaching Reading

Stories of Special Days and Customs
Christmas Customs

Girls and Boys - A Ladybird Book of Childhood