As a parent I know I need to teach my children various life skills to equip them for their later lives. Of course I have to ensure that they are capable of them before letting them loose! The purchase of a flat pack guinea pig run on Saturday was a great opportunity for my daughter to hone her assembling and screw driving skills:
First of all following the instructions and putting things in the right place:
At this point she pointed out that I had omitted to screw the first panel on to the triangles and she set to screwing them together:
The reward for her labours? A mug of soup in the cold garden whilst watching the guinea pigs have their first experience of grass:
As for her little brother who is a little young for flat pack furniture he was getting in some valuable practice at washing up:
What essential life skills are you teaching your children for independent living when they grow up?
I'm a parent who really knows how to show her kids a great time in the school holidays... Today I loaded mine up in the car for an hour plus journey down the M6 to the joys of Ikea in Warrington. My daughter couldn't remember her last trip when we went to the Lightwater branch and my son was just a baby so it must have been a long time ago...
Before we left Kendal I made sure that they were sufficiently fed and watered to keep them happy on the drive down. I gave my 8 year old the road atlas and instructions on telling me to get off at junction 22. There was a slight issue that the page for junction 22 didn't have the start of our journey on it but it made her feel important to have the map. My 5 year old had the job of reading the junction numbers as we went to see how far we had to go (I was impressed at how well he subtracted them). A bit of a sing song also helped to pass the time. Once we got off the motorway my daughter used the Maps function on my phone to navigate the last stretch.
On arrival at the store I was pleased how easy it was to find a parking space before we headed inside for lunch. I don't remember the funky multi layered cafe trollies that allowed more than one tray to be carried by one person. I do remember long zig zag queues but they did seem to move fairly quickly. We all opted for a kids' portion of meatballs but had a mix up of which ones had gravy on but eventually we all sat down to our Swedish lunch:
