When good Papier-Mâché goes bad…

For most working mothers the Easter break is not an unwelcome visitor, but definitely one with a tendency to outstay its welcome. This year we’ve got the addition of the Royal Wedding bank holiday, which means that we’ve basically got nearly the whole month off.

I had been feeling quite smug thinking that I was all prepared for Easter. The eggs were bought and hidden away, the egg hunt was planned and the weather was sort of behaving itself. Then the chocolate craving kicked in. The little voices whispering to me, reminding me where I’d hidden all the eggs and tempting with tales of offers and discounts, fooling me into thinking that I practically owed it to myself to eat the lot and have to replace them.

It was the same story with activities. We’ve been racking our brains to think of activities that don’t include sticking the kids in front of the digital babysitter for the whole day and that offer something for everyone. My cunning plan to advance order cinema tickets using my Tesco vouchers failed, so I’m left with a craft box full of random objects and three very bored children.

So what to do? This post was going to explain how to make a papier mache piggy bank; something that the children could use to store their pocket money in and then have to break open when it was full to recover their riches.

We started a week ago with our balloons and our wallpaper paste type concoction, dipping our strips of newspaper until they were laden with the gloppy goo and arranging them ‘artistically’ in a vaguely criss cross pattern over our balloon. The plan was that we make the ‘body’ of the pig first, then we model feet and a nose and stick them on at a later date.

After about 10 minutes the 4yo was bored, closely followed by the 6 and the 9yo. No problem I thought. This is meant to be a fun activity, we’ll break for today and come back to it tomorrow.

Five days later I remembered about the half-hearted papier mache pigs and checked them out. The balloons had shriveled and torn, leaving a misshapen newpaper bowl, good for pretty much nothing. It was at that point that I remembered that I “Don’t Do Papier Mache”.

So instead we’re making Easter hats and having an Easter egg hunt in the garden – what could be easier? Now, where are those instructions for making the Easter hat?
 

Wednesday, 13th April 2011

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