Creating a little bit of calm

Having three children under the age of four does make for a rather busy day to day life. Whilst all three of them are good and fairly easy to manage and entertain, they do still require a lot of my time and input which can make juggling their needs hard sometimes.

I am on the go pretty much all the time – even when Mr H is napping I am taking that time to work on something with Mr D and Miss E, or tidy up if they are happily playing alone. Pre pregnancy I was enjoying running a lot – 3/4 times a week and was planning to do a half marathon. Since Mr H arrived, I can feel achey if I do too much so have to be careful before I start running again.

In a bid to create a bit of calm in the day I was excited to receive a bundle of books from Simon Schuster from the creatively calm series. Two colouring books, Creatively Calm: Colour by numbers: Animals and Creatively Calm: Colour, Search and Find: Animals. These are great, quality books. I was also sent two dot to dot books; Creatively Calm: Dot to Dot: Around the World and Creatively Calm: Dot to Dot.

The Dot to dot books are superb. In the last couple of weeks pregnancy with Mr H I picked up a dot to dot magazine. It is strangely relaxing and exercises the brain in a different way. I love doing these and it is something I can pick up and dip into now and again as and when I get a moment.

Mr D has recently become interested in dot to dots so it’s nice for him to see me doing them too. The images in the books are mostly on one page, but some spread across two. They go as high as 600+ numbers on some of them and it is a really therapeutic activity. I find I can complete these in 10 – 15 minutes whilst the children are drawing. These would also be great for older children too… if you wanted to share with them!

It’s fun to try and guess what the image will be as the dots begin to bring the page to life – Mr D in particular likes to watch me complete these and guess what the picture will be.

The colouring books are good fun too. The colour by numbers books is good and Mr D has had fun helping me find the correct numbers for the colours. He is keen to try his own colour by numbers so I will find him one to do – these are probably a little too intricate for him at the moment as his pen control isn’t always great but it is something we can do alongside each other.

I really like the colour and search book. These has a key along the bottom of the page indicating how many of each animal are hiding in the picture. Once found you colour them in to bring the page to life.

Both the children have loved this – helping me to find the animals and choose the colours for them. It has the added bonus of being a good number recognition activity for Mr D as well as a counting activity for Miss E.

I really like these colouring books. They’ve helped bring some calm moments to my day and I have found the dot to dot books in particular really restful.

I’ll be sharing pictures of these books as we work through them on my Instagram profiles here and here.

I was sent copies of these books in exchange for a fair and honest review. All words, images and opinions are my own.

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