Our Florida holiday 2014

We've just returned from a fantastic holiday, two weeks in Orlando followed by a week's cruise in the Caribbean. We've been lucky enough to enjoy holidays in Orlando before but of course they are all different!

This year we were in the US for Halloween, which was quite exciting because it's more of a major holiday over there than here (although it's getting that way!). Disney World was beautifully decorated for the season and we were lucky enough to attend Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween party which was brilliant. On Halloween night itself we didn't feel brave enough to go trick or treating around the houses (we've never trick or treated before at home) but we did go to a Halloween event at the Florida Mall which was excellent. Most of the shops were handing out sweets, and the dressed up children just had to flit from store to store filling up their treat bags. We gathered a phenomenal amount of candy!

It was also fun to see the changes to the Magic Kingdom Resort since our last visit. In particular, there have been several updates since the popularity of Frozen, with a few new attractions (including a Frozen singalong show and snow play area), characters to see (if you have several hours spare to wait) and of course plenty of merchandise. The new Festival of Fantasy parade was pretty spectacular too, it's definitely the best that we've seen.

We spent a few days at the Universal Studios Resort too. Ram and I visited Islands of Adventure a couple of years ago to see the new Harry Potter areas, and this time we saw the even newer Harry Potter areas at the Universal Studios park which were very cool, much more about them to follow! Ram does love his Butterbeer.

We also attended an NBA Basketball game, Orlando Magic against the Washington Wizards. There was a really fun atmosphere before the game started, with opportunities to have your photo taken and printed out for you, and plenty to eat or drink. For young children there was a huge soft play area and free face painting and balloon modelling. Some of the viewing areas weren't seated, so you could stand in a bar area with a drink watching the game.

We had press tickets so we were able to sit in the press box which was very exciting with an excellent view. It was a little removed from the atmosphere below though, so we spent some time downstairs too. It was the first home game of the season and unfortunately Orlando Magic lost the game that night, but we still had a fun evening out.

On our previous two family holidays we've missed a rocket launch each time due to illness and bad weather, so we were really hoping that the launch scheduled while we were out there this time would go ahead and it did! The launch was planned for soon after 1pm, so we arrived mid-morning and parked easily near Playalinda Beach in Canaveral National Seashore (entry costs $5). Then we walked about a mile along the beach to the security fence and waited there until the launch, luckily there was a boardwalk which provided some shelter from the sun.

We had a great view as the Atlas 5 rocket took off, and there were plenty of experts around to answer questions. It really was amazing, and I was really surprised by how slowly the rocket moved. If you are planning a visit to Florida you can check out a launch schedule here to see if your holiday co-incides with a launch, they take place a couple of times a month and as well as rocket launches you can also see deliveries taking off for the International Space Station.

After two tiring weeks (my phone told me that on some days I'd walked over 10km around the parks) we were all ready for our week's cruise on Royal Caribbean's Freedom of the Seas, following the Eastern Caribbean route. Unfortunately we had a few setbacks - bad weather meant that the first stop, Royal Caribbean's private island CocoCay, had to be cancelled and two hours out of port we had to go back as a passenger had been taken ill. We had to take a further detour due to the storm, and it was a lot rougher than I remember previous cruises, proper up and down motion rather than gentle swaying. We also discovered at check in that we were sharing our cruise with the 2014 High Seas Rally, which basically meant that our cruise was shared with 1800 bikers partying while raising money for charity. I'll be writing a detailed cruise review in the next couple of weeks.

We still had a great time though and we visited two beautiful beaches, Magens Bay on St. Thomas (US Virgin Islands) and St. Maarten. For the first time the children were confident enough to paddle and splash in the sea as it was so warm and calm, and we all really enjoyed it.

As always I ate far too much on holiday, so I'm trying to watch what I eat now. I read a statistic that suggested cruise passengers put on a pound for each day of their cruise, and I think that was certainly true for me! But how could I resist delicious treats like pizza cookies?

We did some shopping too, I always like to stock up on different coloured polo neck tops in the Gap Outlet. I made a couple of visits to some craft shops too, and I may have gone a little overboard on the patterned tape amongst other things! It was a brilliant holiday! We have so many happy memories of the holidays that we've taken, I really hope that we're able to get back to Orlando soon.

We had press tickets to the Orlando Magic game and Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party, but everything else on holiday we paid for ourselves!

Decorating a Hobbycraft wooden Advent Calendar

Recently I was eyeing up the blank wooden Advent calendars in my local Hobbycraft, and so it was perfect timing when Hobbycraft contacted me and asked if I'd like to receive some Advent calendar goodies to decorate and share with my readers!

Of course, I jumped at the challenge, and so here is my finished decorated wooden Advent calendar.

Hobbycraft sell several different designs of wooden Advent calendar to decorate along with the accessories to personalise them. You can see the full Hobbycraft Advent calendar range here. My calendar is the Christmas Wooden Advent Calendar Tree which retailed this year for £15. It's a large and stable design with nice large drawers, and comes ready to paint or otherwise decorate.

Here's how I decorated my Advent calendar:

Materials:

Plain wooden Advent Calendar
Acrylic paint in a variety of colours (I used green, white, gold, brown and blue)
Number stickers
Other decorations of your choice - green washi tape, stickers, glitter, glitter paint and so on

Instructions:

I painted the 24 boxes in five different shades of green which I mixed up myself. I was especially pleased with the different colours that were made when I added the gold acrylic paint. The paint covered really easily and dried to a smooth finish. I painted the outside of the trunk area brown, and I only painted the fronts of the individual boxes. The drawer knobs were painted in gold acrylic.

I covered the green painted sides of the tree in the Hobbycraft Confetti Glitter Glue which I loved, it's a much easier way to decorate with glitter and sequins than by sprinkling them onto wet glue separately and it looks really sparkly and festive!

When the individual boxes were dry I dug out the greenest washi tapes that I could find, as well as a couple of tapes with a Christmas design. I had six different rolls, originally I was going to make four boxes using each but some of the colours ended up too similar so I changed it up a bit, trying to spread out the different tape designs and widths evenly across the boxes.

I came up with a rough idea of how I wanted to position the drawers back into the tree, but when I started fitting them back in I found that they didn't all fit as smoothly as I would have liked. With hindsight I should have taken more care when removing the drawers to make sure that the same boxes went back into the same holes. I was able to sort it out by rearranging them a little and sanding down the sides of some of the stubborn ones, but that is something to remember for next time!

I tried to spread out the different colours of paint, washi tape designs and sticker shapes evenly. The number stickers come with a little foam sticker on the back which helps them to stand out a bit, and I used glue too so that they were attached securely. The wooden numbers are slightly too large to fit on the box with the knob in the middle so they need to overhang very slightly but this isn't a problem as there is a gap between the slots in the tree.

I'm so pleased with my finished Advent calendar! The paint covered really well, it looks nice and smooth, and I love all my different washi tapes. It was really quick to complete as well, in total it probably only took a few hours to do although spread over several days.

Now the next thing is to fill it! Fortunately I have lots of ideas, in fact I have an old but very popular blog post packed with ideas for ways to fill a wooden Advent Calendar. This year I think I'll be going with simple chocolates but maybe I'll pop a few little surprises in there too!

If you want to see more of my Advent Calendar, I filmed a quick chat about it as part of Vlogmas 2016:

I received a selection of items from Hobbycraft for this post - the items that you see in the photograph. I purchased the other materials myself as well as using things from my crafty stash.

Crafts using melted Hama beads

Recently I blogged about the perils of buying cheap Hama bead imitations. Due to my naivety and the purchase of some poor quality Hama bead substitutes, I had a box of beads which weren't good enough to use as intended on peg boards. The plastic is just too slippery which makes them fiddly to use, and when ironed they become brittle and break easily.

Since I started using Pinterest I've discovered so many different crafts and activities, and the following crafts with melted beads had all caught my eye. They were a great way of using up my stash of cheap beads, although of course you can use the branded Hama beads for these crafts too. We spent a really fun morning with the oven on trying these out. I've credited the place that I first saw the idea, although as they are all over Pinterest it's difficult to find the original source, if you know it then please do let me know so that I can credit accordingly!

By the way, I was a bit nervous about melting plastic in the oven so I had been putting off these crafts, but it was absolutely fine, no smell, no burning plastic, no flames and no ruined baking equipment!

Melted Hama bead bowl

This was one of the first crafts that I saw on Pinterest a long time ago, unfortunately the link is no longer available. You just need to grease an oven proof container, we used a muffin tray, then fill with a single layer of beads so that they press up along the sides. Then bake in the oven for about five minutes at 200C and leave to cool before popping out.

Melted Hama bead bracelet

I saw these on Wimke - pretty beads made by melting the Hama beads in the oven.

It's so easy to do, just spread the Hama beads out on a baking tray making sure that they don't touch. With hindsight I should have followed the original instructions a little more closely and used baking paper underneath, although they did pick off the tray some of them were very firmly stuck. These beads were baked for two to three minutes at 200C, you need to keep an eye on the centres to make sure that the hole doesn't get too small. Then thread the beads together on elastic to make the bracelet.

Melted Hama bead decorations or suncatchers

I first saw these on Simple Crafts, and these used up the rest of our cheap beads.

Again it was really easy, some cookie cutters placed on a greased baking tray (next time I'll grease the cutters too...) and fill them with the beads, either sorted or a mixture of colours. This was really fun for the little ones to help with. Make a single layer of beads and make sure that all the spaces are filled, it doesn't matter which way the beads are lying. Bake for four to five minutes at 200C then allow to cool before removing them from the cutters. I would think you can probably also leave them for longer so that they melt completely.

So thanks to Pinterest and other crafty people I've used up all my stock of cheap Hama beads, although I'm tempted to return to these crafts in the future as I think they all look really good!

Ladybird Tuesday - Great Civilisations - Crete

I've had Great Civilisations - Crete on my bookshelf for a little while now. My husband brought it back after a visit home once, at the time little did I realise it was just a hint of the wonders to be found in his Ladybird book collection.

The Ladybird book Great Civilisations - Crete is a part of series 561 - Adventures from History. There are a lot of books in this series, mainly focusing on historical figures but also featuring several other great civilisations including Greece and Rome. There are 50 books in the series in total and it is the biggest series that Ladybird produced between 1940 and 1981. I also have some of the older books in the series that still have their original dust covers. Great Civilisations - Crete was published in 1976.

There is a lot of detail in this little book. It begins with an introduction to the island of Crete, and how we can know about the people that lived in ancient Crete from two different sources - the old legends and the archaeological findings. The book begins with a look at some of the most famous Greek legends about Crete, including the well known stories of King Minos and the Minotaur, and Icarus who flew too close to the sun with his wax wings.

The Greeks remembered these stories and handed them down over the years as true events. They were passed down in the form of stories and songs. But even though a hundred years ago no-one believed these old stories, modern archaeologists have found evidence for some of the places referenced in the stories such as Troy. The book then turns to looking at actual archaeological finds which enable a more accurate history of ancient Crete and the people who lived there to be written, even though there is still plenty that we don't know.

I found this book a really fascinating read, once again Ladybird manage to produce a non-fiction book that reads beautifully and really brings history to life.

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

Brown and pink felt button tree picture

A little while back I made a framed felt and button tree picture for my study and I loved it so much I decided to make a second one. I wanted to make a picture that was similar to the original yet also different, so I kept to a similar design but changed the colours quite a bit.

For my first picture I used a cheap silver frame that I picked up in my local craft shop, and while I was there I also picked up a second frame, but this time in black. The fabric that I used for the background was part of a bundle that I received to review, and the fabric that I used for this picture has the same pattern as the first but in different colours.

I chose to go with a dark red background and a pink tree and pink button blossom. I made it in exactly the same way as the first picture, planning out the placement of the buttons in advance, using a small amount of fabric glue to hold the felt in place, and then sewing everything else together.

It didn't take long to make at all, and I'm really pleased with it! Now I just need to find somewhere to display it, as I'm not sure that they look quite right when placed next to each other. Luckily we have lots of wall space in our house! I have so many buttons now in a huge range of different colours that I'm always thinking of crafts that I can use them in.

Attractions in Orlando that aren't Disney

When you think about visiting Orlando for a holiday, most people are keen to visit the top three attractions - DisneyWorld, Universal Studios Resort and SeaWorld. If you are only visiting for a couple of weeks then that is definitely more than enough to keep you busy.

But if you are visiting for longer, making a return visit, or just want to try something different, there are loads of other brilliant attractions in the area. I'm in Orlando mood as we are visiting again very shortly, so I thought I'd round up some of the other places that we visited on our earlier trip. Click on the links to see my full detailed review of the attraction.

We had a great half day at Dinosaur World, and we would have stayed for longer if it hadn't been our first day as we were all a bit jet lagged. It's very compact so easy for little legs to handle, but there is so much to do. We loved walking around the swamp to see the dinosaur models, and my son still enjoy admiring the fossils that he found in the Fossil Dig area. Another big hit was the huge sandpit with dinosaur bones to uncover. It's a fantastic attraction.

Another great place for the children is Gatorland. You can see as many alligators close up as your heart desires, both in smaller enclosures and from a boardwalk around the Breeding Marsh. There are alligator shows, with some alligator wrestling and jumping, and plenty to explore.

Ripley's Believe it or Not! is another attraction that is fascinating for children, even the very little ones. You take a self-guided tour around a building that looks as though it is sinking into the ground, and is packed full of interesting and eclectic exhibits. There is a car covered in different musical instruments, a strange room where snooker balls run uphill, and a rotating tunnel to walk through.

Another place to visit that is brilliant for young children is the Orlando Science Center. We spent most of a day here and could have stayed for a lot longer, there is loads to do, including lots of activities and experiments that we've not seen in any other science museum that we've visited.

A short drive out of Orlando is the Kennedy Space Center. This is perhaps better suited to older children, although our little ones still enjoyed it. You can take a bus tour of the Kennedy Space Center complex which is very interesting, you can see the launchpads and the huge buildings where the spacecraft are assembled. There are also several audio visual presentations and plenty of space memorabilia to see.

The best thing about visiting some of these other attractions is that you don't have to deal with such huge crowds. You can park right outside and walk straight in and you don't have to plan your day in quite as much detail, making the whole visit much less stressful, especially if you are there with young children. So if you are planning a family trip to Orlando, I'd definitely recommended taking the time to explore some of the other attractions that Orlando has to offer.

Ladybird Tuesday - Hansel and Gretel

Hansel and Gretel is part of the Ladybird Well-Loved Tales series 606D. The series is graded in order of reading difficulty, and Hansel and Gretel is a Grade 2. It's one of the more modern editions of the book, with text on both sides of the page instead of the traditional Ladybird text on the left, picture on the right format. My copy has also had a bit of a bite taken out of it!

The illustrations in the book are also quite different to the traditional Ladybird pictures. They are very stylised and simplified, not at all the realistic drawings that are usually found in these books. I must admit that I don't really like this style of the book.

It is a good series though, and like all the books in the series the story of Hansel and Gretel is told in a way that makes it easy for newer readers. It still has the original gruesome ending where the witch is pushed into the oven, with the addition that afterwards Hansel and Gretel steal all her jewels before returning to their father! 

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