We started with a splendiferous cello concert. Everyone played a solo from their own living room with everyone else on mute. It was surprisingly fun, and lovely to hear all the kids' playing and see everyone else's faces. Thea amused the masses by playing a early piece with great panache - the first repeat was played relatively straight with an accompaniment from Ian on the guitar, and then for the the repeat she donned shades and Ian cranked up the guitar and they played a rock version. Lots of fun!
Two whole pages of tiled cello concert attendees!
And I needn't have worried about the kids entertaining themselves. Within 2 hours of the holiday starting, they had retreated into a den in the corner of the room, so well insulated that it was a while before we realised that they were both in there listening to audio books!
The weather was warm, so like half of the UK, we put up a tent. We get a pretty cold wind across our garden, so we decided to make the most of having tent choice, and put up the nylon monster which would heat up really quickly. I'd hate to be in it in France, but it was perfect for April in the sun - got lovely and toasty!
The kids quickly decided it was too hot and played elsewhere, but slept in it for several nights.
Nathaniel spent a happy hour working his way through some Good Food Magazines and found himself some biscuits to make. He "ordered" the ingredients before the supermarket trip and then got to work, making cashew butter to start with!
The resulting biscuits are amazing - cashew, cranberry and chocolate cookies. They are far too sweet, but the cashew butter in the mix is inspired, so I can see us adapting the recipe to make something similar albeit less tongue tingly!
Our friend created an amazing game of zoom bingo for us and another family. We had to draw our own grid and then select from a variety of items on the table to populate it. There were then endlessly entertaining methods by which the items were selected until someone could cross off all the items in their grid. A very happy evening's activity.
Before this all started, I borrowed a massive box of Kapla (1000 pieces!) from the STEM Centre to take to a school. When we all got locked down, they kindly suggested that I just keep hold of it, so we are currently in possession of what seems like an endless supply of Kapla. Just the thing to entertain us for a morning.
Thea was the most ambitious and was intent on balancing things precariously.
Nathaniel made a series of star ships.
I needed something to balance my tea on.
And when it became hot the next day, we simply decamped outside and added a new audiobook (The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell - it's great!) to entertain us all day!
The good weather has inspired us to start our annual gardening. We are mostly just playing around, as we seem to lack the discipline to get very far, but the front allotment has been very nicely dug over and some good things planted.
Easter is a good time to eggs-periment with chocolate, so we had some ideas. We made some clay egg moulds by wrapping the clay around real and shaky eggs.
We then attempted to fill them with chocolate. Turns out that there is a reason why people buy plastic moulds! Our chocolate stuck to the mould, or if it was cling-film lined, it didn't make an egg shape. We've ended up with some odd, crinkly splodges. They should taste nice though!
The kids were inspired by some "easter bark" which was basically just melting chocolate and then sprinkling smashed mini eggs on top. But it wasn't as simple as we originally thought. Admittedly, we did up the ante a little by deciding to embed honeycomb in it. Our first attempt at that was a bit bendy and not at all suitable (though still tasty!). The first attempt at eggs into the bark ended up looking like reinforced concrete. Lesson - don't just pour the smashed eggs and candy "dust" onto it. A little more precision is needed. The final attempt was pretty good though!
More successful was the Easter Egg hunt. A friend and I put our heads together and combined efforts to make a treasure hunt that went around our local streets and park (appropriate for our daily exercise). What resulted was a 26-clue hunt that required you to solve problems to get to the next clue. At the end, you found your egg! It was a fine 90 minutes!
We only had two hitches. The clue that asked you to count the number of colours of tulips in a garden was thwarted by a sudden emergence of a multitude of previously unbudding tulips! Fortunately, the two different answers took you to a similar location, so we could get ourselves back on track with a little deduction. Some of my clues were deemed to be too impenetrable and I was forced to send improvements on to the others!
The bunny ears weren't an intrinsic part!
But we got there in the end.
Unfortunately we broke the other families - no-one else managed the whole thing (no stamina!!!). [Update - I forwarded it onto a couple of other families as well, and it is now reported that they enjoyed it, so maybe Family 2 and 3 were just having bad days.]
We attempted the crazy - a game of Mysterium over Zoom. We needed two fixed cameras, photos displayed on google drive (so that people could see the fine detail), and the ghost in a separate room, but we managed it and even though the psychics lost (they often do at the last minute!), we had lots of fun, and most importantly, proved it could work!
All in all, it's been a pretty good Easter. Easter Monday included a lovely walk in the sun and a Bond film (you can't have a bank holiday without a Bond film!), and that seems quite enough to keep us all happy!
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