Angel picture - again, inspired by Usbourne and for "Adelola's (Mati's pronunciation) project".



I use the same template to make cards – but unfortunately, I didn’t get a photo of these this time.


Similar pattern – but changing hair colour and style, dresses, whether they carry flowers or wands, the direction they are flying in.

These are good for Christmas and other cards.

This Christmas seemed to be an important one in establishing our family’s Christmas tradition, finding a way of integrating Finnish and British customs. Food with different flavours and smells is what I remember very well from my own childhood and is what I want to pass on to Noa. Noa’s absolute favourite baking turned out to be joulupiparit (similar to gingerbread, but slightly less gingery). Noa and I found it hard not to eat the dough before it was baked.

Eilir is going through an intense drawing phase.  He is constantly scribbling something, but his favourite subject at the moment is 'Moshi Monster' characters.  A number of his best friends are similarly obsessed with these and other characters, so we thought we might make Christmas cards for them that featured their favourite characters in Christmas scenes.  My input in this was minimal, really.  I made the cards themselves - by papering over odd leftover cards from previous years (with Eilir doing the gluing) and prompting Eilir regarding spellings etc.  He started by drawing some 'Pokemon' balls for Joel, and put them in a snow scene.  He then suggested that Eve likes 'Odi' (a Moshi Monster), so again Odi was put in the snow (there's a theme developing....).  Eilir was particularly proud of his stylized snowflakes, which ended up appearing on each card.  For Iago he drew 'Iggy' and told me that he always bounces, so he drew snow being dislodged where he'd 'knocked it out of the way' jumping.  Eilir's greetings inside demonstrated his tendency to code-switch/code-mix at the moment, so some started 'To' but ended 'oddi wrth', others opened 'I' and concluded with 'from'.

Rohan is a king/wise man in his Cylch Meithrin Nativity play. Drawing, cutting, measuring, tracing, gluing, taping, neatening and more measuring. He started to cry when we started gluing gold paper to Logaan’s crown. He said: “don’t do Logaan’s Mummy, do mine.”

They were really good at cutting, taping and gluing and gave the tracing outline a good go! (Lots of practice with that using feet, hands and soft toys as templates). Rohan also said that it was a bit tight. It’s okay when his hair goes through the top.

Wanted to take a picture of him in his costume with the gold crown we made. Logaan is wearing his and completing a 100piece dinosaur jigsaw. Rohan refused, preferring instead to run around in a vest and nappies. His little hands and feet are freezing to the touch.

G did a set of water colours with goggly eyes and they were so cheery they had to make it into the days of Christmas. We are big rock-pool pokers, fossil finders and crab botherers. If you can get a clear day at this time of year you can discover more than in the warmer weather sometimes, starfish are our absolute favourite find, but G loves Green crabs , particularly the one she named Peter Tolla (?) only she knows why. Heck, we've never forgotten the dogfish we found at Ogmore, although he was far from alive. I got to do some of the backgrounds, I was told to do it carefully and we discussed the importance of the right sized brush for the fiddly bits and letting it dry properly in-between. I did my best. The goggly eyes were a stroke of genius on G's part....