We’ve been thinking of buying Gabriel “normal” Lego (here’s already 3,5 years old and he has tried to built Lego this sommer and was quite interested by it) but there’s actually a lot one can do with Lego Duplo! Here are some ideas of animals one can very easily built. We used round stickers for the eyes. There’s another advantage to keep building with Duplo: they are safe for babies, which means both brothers can play together!
We have brought a souvenir for our friends from our last holidays in Bretagne, the local “caramel au beurre salé”, a caramel sauce with salted butter. I must say I really like this sweet treat, to spread on the bread or to eat a spoon of it (just one!)… The jars of caramel looked really sad, with their golden cover, so we decided to personalized them a bit. For each of the jars we made a tag with Bretagne’s flag on one side and a personalized message saying we’ve thought about our friends when we were out there on the other one (we used Inkscape to make them with Jenna Sue and fzm Embossed Label fonts to write). We cut both sides of the tag with a scalloped circle puncher, glued them together and made a hole with a hole puncher. We used a black and white dotted fabric for the cover which we cut in a circle and held with a white elastic band. To cover the elastic band we used a thin black ribbon which we passed through the tag hole.
It wasn’t a lot of work and we really like the personalized result!
before and after
This has also inspired us to look for a good caramel recipe (we like a quite viscous consistency and the one we had was too liquid). Here’s a recipe we have tested and like a lot, for a small glas of caramel (to make a bigger volume simply multiply the ingredients, but be aware that bigger amounts are harder to make, it’s preferable to make it several times…):
Ingredients:
Start by making the caramel by slowly melting the sugar (no water needed, just make it really slowly). Once you have the caramel done (more or less brown, depending on your taste), slowly add the cream you have previously made warm (if you add it directly from the fridge it will strongly boil!). Add the pinch of salt. Once all the cream is well mixed with the caramel take it out of the heat and pour it into a bowl. Now add the butter in pieces and mix well until you obtain a homogeneous mixture. Pour it into a jar and let it cool. Enjoy!
This year we decided to have easy going holidays together with the family in Portugal and in France. We met the French side of the family in Bretagne and were lucky to enjoy for one week the beautiful landscape of the Morbihan Golf.
We have gathered a lot of shells of different sorts and decided to make a sorting game out of them. We have selected 5 different sizes of the same sort of shell or conchs. The goal of the game is to sort them concerning their type but also their size, from the biggest to the smallest one. Gabriel has enjoyed the game and will be able to play it as many times as he wants because we have brought it home as souvenir! We made an origami Japanese box and cut a shell shape that we glued on its top. You can find the instructions to make one here. Use an A4 sheet and start by cutting a square. To make the bottom part of the box cut around 0,7 cm of each side of the square, to make it a bit smaller than the top part.
We love the idea of a souvenir-game and we try to make something similar in our future destinations!