Beautiful Girlhood Part 1

Last week was all about purposefully encouraging my younger daughters to have a beautiful girlhood.  Of course, we try to do that all the time, but last week I had time to actually focus on it.  And can I just say, it ended up blessing me far more than my little ones 🙂

Beautiful Girlhood

I already had the first two books, Beautiful Girlhood and its accompanying study guide:

We used these books with our older girls when they were younger and enjoyed our special times together.  Beautiful Girlhood is revised by Karen Andreola from a nineteenth century book.  It is gentle and remarkably effective, if a little old-fashioned.  Our goal was to read the first chapter about cheerfulness, using the study guide to make sure the girls understood what had been read out to them.

• Cheerfully serving others

We then brainstormed some ideas for cheerfully serving others.  One way I try to serve my husband is by running him a bath on his return from work.  His job is hard and heavy labour, and a long soak in the bath is a perfect opportunity to relax away the grubbiness of the day and an excellent middle point to transition from work to home.  The girls decided it would be lovely to choose some clean clothes for him, and along with his slippers, pop them in the bathroom before he got home from work.  It was very cute to see how seriously they took this ‘responsibility’ and Gary was very kind in accepting whatever clothes they chose 🙂

• Pin-board Scripture Art

As it was my goal for each child to come away with some scripture to hang in their room, using Ribbet I made them some cards to pin up on their notice board, containing a scripture verse reminding them to greet each day with a cheerful attitude:

A Little Princess in the Making

The next book (above) I had bought a few years ago to use with the littles and this was the perfect opportunity.  Again, we only read chapter one which talks about how princesses always say please, thank you, and sorry.  

• Princess tea-party

I wanted this to be a bit special, so I asked the girls to dress up in their best princess dresses:

Whilst they were sprucing themselves up, I brought out their Great-Granny’s tea set and laid an impromptu inside picnic. with strawberry milk and watermelon:

I had bought a princess sticker book which kept my little princesses busy whilst I was reading out the first chapter:

• Card Making to Say Thank You

We chatted about who we could say thank you to.  Bearing in mind I had already planned all the activities, I steered them towards thanking their Granny for helping with their schooling 😉 and they began making some simple thank you cards:

I then suggested to the four girls that we make some simple melt and pour soap using the last batch of home-made-from-scratch-and-almost-killed-us soap.  They tentatively agreed 🙂

We gathered grated soap in plain and green, lemon essential oil and melted it all in a double burner, adding the lemon essential oil at the end.  We poured it into some heart-shaped muffin molds:

I chucked them in the freezer to harden after which the girls stamped a ‘hand made’ stamp on the top of each soap:

We packaged them up, adding some freshly picked bluebells from the garden:

Here are the two bags, each containing one lemon heart-shaped soap:

Each girl took their card and a soap over to Granny’s next door.

A7’s

and B5’s:

Granny was over the moon:

Easy-Peasy Recipe

As Daddy was ill, the bathroom falling to bits at the seams and our lovely week of fun learning unraveling before my very eyes, we chose a really, really easy-peasy recipe ‘Cinnamon tortilla crisps’

Mix together brown sugar and cinnamon in equal measures, sprinkle over a buttered tortilla and cut using a pizza wheel.  Chuck in a hot oven for a few minutes and, voila!, cinnamon tortilla crisps.  Really easy-peasy!

And so ended our fun but fraught-with-difficulties week.  We didn’t manage everything on my to-do list, but, really, when do we ever?  We did, however, create something beautiful during a tricky week, which ended with me flooding the kitchen.  I am such a doofus 🙂