Things to do on a really hot day

We upped the excitement these school holidays by having a very special guest: my 15-year-old sister from South Africa. K loves playing games with her; R says she just likes to 'follow her around and see what she does'. It's not so easy to find activities that are appropriate and entertaining for ages 4-15, even more so when the weather is blisteringly hot. But since you can't play Mario Karts and watch movies all day (Superman was well received by all three viewers, although I'm pretty sure the youngest had no idea what was going on), here are some of the things we did in-between eating icy-poles:

Drawings in the style of Ed Emberley (we used Ed Emberley's Book of Faces). The two older ones copied them straight from the book; R asked me to draw circles, onto which she drew faces and bodies. We all had great fun doing these.

A waterfight using water pistols hastily purchased from a two dollar shop. Closely followed by...

A water balloon fight on the back deck, in which we parents scored quite a few hits. I was unable to photograph this, for obvious reasons. In fact, just stepping outside the back door was quite risky this afternoon. 

Eating all the sweets in the house - the leftovers from Halloween, Christmas and various party bags. They had been put away high up in a cupboard and I was sick of being asked when can we eat the sweets? So I told the kids they could eat as much as they liked after dinner, then throw out whatever was left over. Sticky, disgusting, ugh. But at least they're gone now - although I think K may still have a few stashed away somewhere, the sneaky little thing.

An evening walk around the neighbourhood at 8.30pm, when the temperature was a mere 38 degrees (down from 41 earlier in the day). The streets were so deserted, we pretended we were the only people alive on earth.

As I write this it's 10.41pm and it's still very hot - 36 degrees (that's just short of 97 degrees, for those of you who speak fahrenheit). My daughter, in her usual weird way, has insisted on taking a heat pack to bed. I have a fan on here in the kids' bedroom, but it's barely making a difference. In quarter of an hour there is a cool change coming, so hopefully we'll soon be flinging open the windows and doors. More hot days are forecast for next week, which means more icy poles, more water fights -  and Superman II.

Portraits

I agonised over what to get my stepfather for his 70th birthday. He's a very unmaterialistic person who neither wants nor needs much, apart from his books, but we wanted to give him something special. My husband came up with the idea of commissioning a pair of portraits from two local artists (a.k.a. our children). So I put them to work with a photograph of the birthday boy in front of them and asked them to look at his face, then draw him in whatever way they chose.

R went for the full-length portrait, dressed him in blue and yellow striped pants and depicted him holding presents in each hand:

K worked more directly from the photograph, adding wrinkles and colouring the skin pink ('because that's the closest to skin colour we have' - clearly I need to buy these children some skin-toned markers!):

The frame I got for them had spaces for three photos so we added a central picture with '70' outlined in large letters. Each child filled in a letter with patterns and K wrote a birthday message at the bottom.

I was so pleased with the end product that I'm sure we'll be doing this again for some special person. Brace yourselves, family members - you too may soon be immortalised in a pair of portraits!

Playgroup art and craft: Bubble wrap printing

Once again the plastic tubs came in handy. A few blobs of paint spread out with a bit of cardboard; some pieces of bubble-wrap cut into manageable sizes...

You lay the bubble wrap in the paint to coat it, then press it gently onto the paper. The result is a dotty, multicoloured pattern with colours that blend gently into each other.

After some painting, R did a drawing. This is the first time she has drawn a house in this  way, with a triangular roof, a chimney and a neat little pair of windows. Previously her houses have been vaguely rectangular but have been much more higgledy piggledy. I love it most when she draws things from observation or imagination, but I was impressed by her mastery of the convential 'house' form. In case you're wondering, the thing to the right of the door is 'where the ding-dong goes' - a very important feature of the house, as R loves ringing our doorbell (it must, of course, be rung repeatedly - much as the button at the traffic lights must be pressed at least twenty times). What is it about kids and buttons?

Show and tell

K's show and tell task this week was a lovely one: design a stamp for a country and explain it to the class. He chose China, and drew this fantastic picture to symbolise China's population. I love that not all the faces are smiley ones.

A present for B

A home-made present for a dear friend in Cape Town, who just let me know that it (finally!) arrived. Oilcloth coin purse made using this tutorial and some rubber stamps I made a while back but delayed sending because I couldn't find the right sized tin to put them in (I ended up just wrapping them). B, I'm glad the parcel made it, and that it cheered you up.

When I looked for my photos of the stamps and purse, I found a photo of this drawing by R taken on the same day. Apparently the girls are sad because they are caught in the flood (that's the one God sent to wipe out all the bad people - she's read about it in K's pop-up Noah's Ark book) and the boys are happy because they have a boat - or something like that. I remember she said they are all holding their cases (how do you pack for a flood, I wonder?). 

She must have been quite taken by the flood story as it's unusual for her to do a drawing without any princesses or evil queens. Speaking of which, it's interesting that the evil queens don't scare her like so many other things in her picture-books do. Lately she has insisted that several books be exiled to a cupboard in another room: We're Going on a Bear Hunt (scary bear), Ginger (allegedly scary kitten, although in truth it is not remotely scary), The Bear and the Trolls (scary bear, scary trolls) and Roland the Minstrel Pig (scary fox). Hopefully she won't notice the pair of grizzly bears in the Noah's Ark book...