Free school holiday fun with small children....and snails!

Before Josie got chickens, this is what we liked to do with our snails....turn them into pets! Beautiful, shiny, sparkly, glittery pets...

A little nail-polish can go a looonnnggg way on a snail! We transformed their shells into moving works of art.
Now I thought about writing a tutorial on this, but figured you would know what to do! Don't worry, they aren't as hard to catch as you might imagine...try the stalk and pounce approach, then when you pick them up dangle them by their shell and then make girly squealing noises when they start "blowing bubbles, Mummy!!!"

Then of course we had to name them all. 

So what does one name a snail?

With a four year old and almost 2 year old this is what we came up with...

Ruby

Snow White

Mandarin

Sparkles

Rosie

Pinky

Violet

Pearl 

What do you think? Better names than the 7 dwarfs right? I know, my girls are VERY creative!!

And the fun didn't stop there. Once we had painted and named them all we had to:

Watch them race (I know, its cruel and should be banned!)

Watch them climb Rapunzel's tower (aka an icecream bucket)

Hide them in the garden and play "where's the snail"

Make snail towers (no snails where harmed in the making of said towers)

And then the next 3 or 4 days, EVERY morning the first thing we had to do was race out to the garden to play 'find the snail'!

The look on her face says it all really, doesn't it? ❤

Now before you go thinking I have become a big softie...this was the last snail-loving activity we ever performed in our garden...as only a week later The Owl household got CHICKENS!! Yes, my snail loving days were over in an instant..we became the Snail Hunters in The Elephant garden and those chickens started getting FAT!

What do you do with the kids to create memories during the holidays?

Thought of the moment:

Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly