Sunday 6 March 2011

Flat Sprout!

Flat Stanley - the boy who got squashed flat and realised he could travel by post!

This month we're doing our first flat traveller swap. We've sent our 'Flat Sprout' (with Lego body, who'd have thought it?) ...



... complete with passport to Soldotna, Alaska, and we're eagerly awaiting the arrival of Bob in return. Sprout's hoping he gets here this week so that he can join us on our trip to Warwick Castle! He's also been looking on the Soldotna website and is most excited that 'Flat Sprout' is travelling somewhere that has bears and moose!

If you'd like any general info and ideas for flat travellers you could look here and here.

Happy 5th Birthday - It's all about the Lego!

Well, my intention to blog regularly this year is clearly not going fabulously, so I'll try and kick-start myself today with two posts!

First, Sprout set his heart on a Lego party for his 5th birthday, and I do love doing their birthday parties, so I thought I'd share with you what I did as I know I got a lot of inspiration from other blogs and sites such as Amy's at Living Locurto here.

Happy Birthday Banner

We printed off a googled picture of a Lego minifigure and one of a brick, and used them for templates to cut the shapes out of craft foam, along with some randomly shaped letters, and stuck the whole lot together with an industrial amount of hot glue!





Food

This was fun but took a good while - essentially all the food was lego brick shaped. Pretty self explanatory with sandwiches, wraps, pitta pizzas and salad, then the veggie sausages we cooked into the shape of little bricks and built them into a pyramid (seeing as Sprout's other current all-consuming interest is Ancient Egypt!), then my favourite of all, square eggs courtesy of this little gadget here. For the salad bowl I covered a round box (that Squidge's building blocks came in at Christmas) with yellow craft foam, and stuck on black paper in the shape of a minifigure face; the salad bowl itself then just sat inside. Juice boxes were covered in Lego brick-esque craft foam too...













Activities


We didn't do party games as I know they'd far rather just go off and play, but there was a paddling pool full of Megabloks for the littlies, and plenty of Lego around (as always!) for the others. Colouring sheets we had from here (scroll down to the bottom), here and here, and there were also minifigure masks we'd made in different designs (just yellow card with various faces copied from actual minifigures)

Cakes

The plan had been for Lego brick cakes in various colours, but Sprout decided the day before that he didn't want them icing, so in the end they had a somewhat rustic look! I also tried to do cake pops like these, but for some reason mine were too squidgy and wouldn't stay on the sticks even long enough to ice them, so any tips for the future appreciated as I'd love to try them again!

Party bags

Really simple, just yellow bags from here with a face glued on in paper. Inside were bubbles on which we'd put our own Lego 'thank you for coming' labels we designed, along with either these Lego brick sweets or homemade chocolate Lego bricks using a mould similar to this.


The party had the birthday boy's full seal of approval... and I now have a full two months to plan for the next one!