Festive Friday - personalised Christmas cards

Last week, being stuck in the house thanks to the heavy snowfall wasn't fun. The thing that I look forward to most every week is our trip to Twins Club on a Friday morning, and when that got cancelled because of the weather I was gutted. But along with the email cancelling the club, were the instructions for the messy play activity we were due to do that day - some handprint Christmas cards. Having been inspired by Christine's Festive Friday posts, I thought I could combine the two.

Without letting myself think too much about it, I pinged out an email to the rest of the club, offering to host Twins Club for anyone who could make it to mine. I immediately regretted this offer almost as soon as I sent it, as I was sent into a mad panic about having a (pretty small) house full of energetic twins.

On the day, however, we only hosted one other set of twins - our friends from down the road. We were determined to do our messy play, and here's what we created (finishing touches still to be added)...

Customize your own slideshow design

Sand play alternatives

Saw a tweet from the über-stylist Poppy Norton (the brains behind baby style file) today that got me thinking...

We used rice krispies instead of sand for a messy play activity at Twins Club the other week and I've been meaning to recreate it at home ever since. We used a cement mixing tray (available from most DIY stores), filled it with rice krispies and let the babies clamber in and out. They loved crunching the krispies, and the fact that they could eat them for a snack was an added bonus! 

Play and snack times combined at Twins Club!

I'm sure this could work with lots of different cereals – and I've definitely been inspired by Poppy to give uncooked rice a go as well.

Has anyone else got any easy, messy play activities to suggest?

The Messy Play by Huggies Wipes Challenge

I think that I'm too late to enter the Huggies Messy Play Challenge (the closing date is today - oops!), but I didn't want to miss the chance to share the pictures of Miss E and Mr A getting messy.

I took the plunge and got out the finger paints for Fathers' Day, so we could create some original artwork for Young Daddy. I was kind of prepared for the babies to get mucky, but didn't forsee the extent of the mess, and they were none-too-pleased to be cleaned up afterwards! But I did get some great shots of them 'creating'....

Here were the rules of the challenge (as laid out by Huggies):.

1. The messier your baby is in the photo the better. (The challenge is cleaning up!)
2. Post the photo to your blog with The Messy Play by Huggies Wipes challenge. (It can be an old photo or a previous post).
3. Send a link of your blog post featuring your Messy Play photo to @Huggies_UK on Twitter or online.team@Huggies.com to participate.
4. Check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/messyplaybyhuggieswipes/ to see all the blogger submissions and links to their blogs. Submissions will also be shouted out by @Huggies_UK on Twitter.
5. The top 3 messiest entries will receive Huggies® gift packs of Huggies merchandise.

COMPETITION CLOSES JULY 14TH