Travel Fun

A while back I envisaged the idea of making a compendium of travel games to keep the babes amused and engaged when we were traveling and visiting various people. The idea was to take our favourite games whilst unemcumbered by the weight and size of the orginals. I drew largely on Rashida's tutorial for the checkerboard and pouch whilst making a few significant changes.





Firstly, I made a sack in which to carry our games in. A simple enough drawstring bag with no whistles and bells.

The second difference was that as well as checkerboard pieces made out of fabric covered buttons I also made them into chess pieces by drawing on simple enough chess ideograms.











It seemed such a waste to let the reverse side go empty, so I decided to turn the back into a doubled-up board for snakes and ladders and Blokus.

The larger squares, comprising of four smaller squares, make one snakes and ladders square, whilst the smaller ones are used for the Blokus board.











The Blokus pieces themselves were constructed from felt sewn onto canvas after drawing around the original Blokus pieces that we already have. Yes it took absolutely forever.



And it turns out it might be a bit pointless. After all, travel games are only needed if you go traveling, and given the state of our finances and price of petrol the only places we'll be going to are the ones we can walk to!

But, if ever we do have a chance to fly the nest, we're ready.



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Coast to Coast

These last few weeks have been full of travel, literally and metaphorically. It's been an emotional, fraught, yet beautiful and loving few weeks spent with close family, first there then here.



We have been up and down the length of the land searching for equilibrium, sun and educational opportunities in equal measure (and possibly failing slightly in all realms, whilst making progress too).

















These last few weeks, like all times when we step out of our little zones, have taught me things I never knew about myself; confirmed other things, and turned yet other assumptions on their head. Silly things, big things, things which I had taken to be normal yet realise they're not. All in a good way.













On top of that, we've had a house guest and some celebrations this week too. All in all a very FULL few weeks in the very best sense.

And now we are back to 'normal' whatever that means. And I'm missing the intensity of the few weeks of family. And above all else I have realised that at my very core my family will always be the very centre of my being, and at the centre of family is a lot of forgiveness. A lot.





So, yeah. We're back.
How've you been?


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