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Dinotastic holidays

The second week of the summer holidays is over and I’m exhausted! I don’t remember how I coped when Nicholas was at home full-time!

To prepare for the holidays I made a list of activities. Both Carole (Carole Finds Her Wings) and Pinterest gave me lots of ideas for activities to do both at home and going out. I thought I’d have a theme each week (which is probably the teacher in me coming out) and dinosaurs came to mind immediately. In fact we’ve continued out dinosaur activities for two weeks now and I still have plenty other dino-related ones left on my list.

To start with, a couple of dinosaur meals.

Dinosaur mummies sitting on their tomato ‘eggs’:

dino mummies

Stegosaurus toast, which got a great reaction from Nicholas!:

stegosaurus toast

I bought a dinosaur activity book with lots of lovely stickers, and we made salt dough which we used to make foot imprints of Nicholas’ various dinosaurs. He also liked covering his dinosaurs in salt dough which meant they then all needed a bath!

We made dinosaur feet (perfect for stomping) although Nicholas prefers wearing them as claws!

dino feet

And I decided very late one night to try making a bath bomb with a surprise inside as Nicholas is a new fan of bath bombs. Not the easiest thing to do late at night, especially when I didn’t have any small dinosaurs to use, but it was lots of fun the next day.

What on earth could be inside?!

What on earth could be inside?!

Dinosaur bath bombWhen I did buy some small dinosaurs, I put some in an empty ice cream container, covered them in water and froze them. The next day we excavated them. I’m not sure what Nicholas was more excited about – discovering dinosaurs in the ice or getting to use the heavy meat tenderiser to bash them out!

dino ice excavation

Do you have any suggestions for other dino-related activities to keep us busy over the holidays?

 

The end of summer

We’ve just returned from our (late) summer holidays, hence my lack of posting for the last weeks. Before we left I did have the thought of posting while we were away, but now am very glad the Internet connection wasn’t great and I had a break from technology. It’s amazing how much it can take over our lives (or should I say, how much we let it), posting and uploading and commenting on our lives rather than enjoying life’s wonderful moments to the fullest as they happen.

We had an amazing two weeks in Marsa Alam, Egypt. The resort we stayed in had less than 10% occupancy which was great for us but terrible for the people trying to earn a living there. In fact our resort was one of only a few that was still open in the area.

Marsa Alam

I couldn’t keep my two beach boys out of the water and, once again, I was astounded by Nicholas’ tan which appeared on our second day and got darker and darker despite me constantly slathering him in high protection zinc cream!

Marsa Alam

Our holidays weren’t completely void of cooking. Nicholas and I had great fun making sands cakes and coral pasta, ‘cooking’ them on the boogie board one of the towel guys gave us :). And, of course, there was lots of eating including Nicholas’ first taste of crab (he especially enjoyed crunching on the claws) and lots of ice cream eating.

Marsa Alam

Even before he saw his papà go diving, Nicholas was so excited to see the divers and very quickly learnt how to say all the names of the equipment in English and Italian. His mantra for the holidays was ‘I want to go diving!’. When the lady at the passport control in London asked him what his favourite thing of the holidays was, he paused for a few seconds then exclaimed loudly, ‘Diving!’.

Marsa Alam