10 things to inject FUN into family time!

There’s never a dull moment in family life, especially during the Summer holidays. That’s why Team Come Round are working with Bassetts Vitamins to offer families like mine the chance to host an August Adventure Week party!

Don’t you sometimes find that family time could be summed up like this:
Wake up reluctantly with a child screaming in your ear,
Get up reluctantly whilst in the shower,
Make children breakfast,
Listen to children complain about breakfast,
Survive the day,
Quick chat and crafts,
Cook dinner,
Read bedtime story,
Clear mess,
Sleep.

Well, our day Monday and Tuesday went slightly different as my motley crew were chosen among one thousand others in the UK to participate in Bassetts Adventure Week!

Bassetts wanted to make sure families can carry on enjoying life with never a dull moment whatever the weather whatever the season! That’s definitely what we’ve been doing this summer holidays and seeing as our weekends are quickly filling up on the run up to returning to school we’ve got plans to never have a dull day at all!

Watch my Box Opening

About Bassetts Vitamins

“Bassetts Vitamins pledges to support family life with more colour, and that means they’re making sure you and your family have everything you need to be ready and set to go, whatever your days bring!

Their tasty, fruity and vibrant little vitamins are here to help support your health, so the whole family can enjoy every single moment of life together. But, when the leaves turn amber, the radiator reluctantly goes on and the days shorten, you’re certainly not alone if you feel like opportunities for family fun and adventure are limited. And, if that wasn’t enough to contend with, we all know that getting your quota of time in the sun can feel like an extra challenge with a chill in the air and clouds in the sky!”

With this in mind, and Department of Health experts now recommending that during autumn and winter everyone should consider taking a daily supplement containing 10 micrograms of Vitamin D to protect bone and muscle health.

The Bassetts Vitamin site is amazing! Full of family fun ideas from bubble painting to making a pinhole projector to nature mandala AND even includes what’s suitable for ages and the weather read on here for more.

What are vitamins

Vitamins are organic compounds that are essential in very small amounts for supporting normal physiologic function.
We need vitamins in our diets, because our bodies can’t synthesize them quickly enough to meet our daily needs.
Vitamins have three characteristics:

• They’re natural components of foods; usually present in very small amounts.
• They’re essential for normal physiologic function (e.g., growth, reproduction, etc).
• When absent from the diet, they will cause a specific deficiency.

Vitamins and their derivatives often serve a variety of roles in the body – one of the most important being their roles as cofactors for enzymes – called coenzymes.
Vitamins are generally categorized as either fat soluble or water soluble depending on whether they dissolve best in either lipids or water.
For more information on Vitamins visit the NHS Website.

Hurdles to qualify family time

• What and how the family eats has an impact on family life.
• A lot of houses these days don’t have a room big enough for a family dining room table.
• Everyone in the family has a busy schedule – in their own way – my baby has firsts to achieve!
• Technology is not always banned at meal times.
• In the digital world we live in, we have less and less down time. We are overstimulated and have a tendency to over schedule
• Modern life is stressful.
• Housework won’t do itself (where’s the cleaning fairy at?!)
• Mardy children.
• Multiple children.

10 things you can do to inject some fun into family time

1. Role modelling is the best way to improve the way our children eat. How could you expect your children to eat broccoli if you refused to touch it with a barge pole?
2. Get involved in the fun at the park. Why not try to go higher than them on the swings or go down the slide once in a while?
3. Here are a few realistic tweaks for better family life and balance – schedule fun family time, e.g. a craft session, cinema party every Friday night with the children making supervised hot chocolate choosing a film all together then cuddling in bed completely ‘in the moment’ with no distractions like tablets.
4. Take 10 minutes to sit at the table after dinner and play a board game or in my childrens case they enjoy water play in the bath with bath bombs and colours! Also playing with building items are good as that’s when everyone gets involved in the building process.
5. Allow children to experiment and have fun with food. Why not have a cooking session together once a week? Not only will you have some quality time together but you’ll also have something delicious to eat afterwards.
6. When you only have 5 minutes to spend with your family, it doesn’t have to be a boring 5 minutes – chat about dreams, ideas and plans! Decide what you would do if you won a 100 pounds, talk about the food you enjoy, gossip about what new toys they’ve seen. If the conversation is fun and they feel you have time to chat, it’s likely to encourage little ones to open up about issues they might have had at school (friendship troubles, worries about swimming, new people at Beavers, starting school)
7. What could you children teach you? It could range from something simple like making your own bear, to craft boxes, or how to use a new game on the tablet, to a lesson on maths to more adventurous activities biking. I played with my daughter with lego with her and we had a great time building random things!
8. Rainy day? Just put your wellies on and jump in muddy puddles with them! Getting wet and dirty is the perfect excuse to snuggle up on the sofa in pyjamas afterwards with a large mug of hot chocolate. Read here for Why Nature Is Great For Us!
9. Let the children be in charge. This summer we’ve just spent days planless, aimless and goalless – we didn’t see any exciting sights but it was nice to spend time doing what we wanted, without questioning why or what the end goal was. There was no goal and that was the fun part!
10. Family devotions don’t need to be fun, but they must not be drab either. Focus on engagement, not entertainment.

What did we receive in our packs?

• 10 lots of adult vitamins
• 10 lots of age 3 to 6 omega 3
• 10 lots of age 3 to 6 multivitamins
• 10 lots of age 7 to 11 multivitamins
• A cute bunting
• A pack of Veggietrumps
• Kids National Geographic magazine
• Set of magnets featuring Basset Vitamin week, superhero face masks to colour in, a magazine
• 13-storey treehouse book
• Three packs of Stabilo felt tips – one pack jumbo, one pack scented and the other power, plus one pack of Stabilo crayons 
• Colouring paper!

These are all the goodies we received!

Close up of the goodies!

We played Veggie trumps

The aim of Veggie Trumps is to raise children’s awareness and familiarity of Fruits and Vegetables by learning about their nutritional values through a fun to play game.
Well, really anything that encourages them to eat fruit and vegetables is good with me, hence why I really do like Veggie Trumps! I also now know that cauliflowers are actually underdeveloped flowers,
Veggie Trumps have also included a healthy eating challenge on one card, which I thought was a great idea and so glad it was included. I love the mini facts that they include at the bottom of the cards and I love the way it involves children in an activity.

Kids National Geographic

National Geographic Kids encourages kids to explore the world through its award-winning books, magazines, and more. As the only major kids brand with a world class scientific organization at its core, their magazines are the perfect boredom busters for kids of every interest and reading level.

We discovered the best of facts and fiction the most popular kids . Let your kids join in on the fun and help support vital exploration, research, education, and conservation projects through the National Geographic Society.

The magazine we received was great quality, had such amazing facts, stickers and on the front was talking about dinosaurs! Which my son loved and he sat and looked through with my nana reading to him about sea cucumbers. The magazine is great for children to learn and interact with you – by asking questions.

They also are on social media like facebook.

The Treehouse series

These books are so cool! My daughter can read it by herself too.

This book is about friends Andy and a Terry that live in a really cool 13 Storey Treehouse, with cool things like a bowling alley, games room and secret lab. They invent things and write things; Andy does the writing and Terry does the pictures and when the story is over, there are still jokes, a spot-the-difference, a maze, word search and treehouse trivia to enjoy.  

There are lots of fun, detailed pictures to amuse and zany adventures to capture the imagination of your kids. Read this with your kids and they will want to read it again and again and why not!

Stabilo pens

Stabilo help to make writing easier and colouring a bit more fun.

The new Stabilo Trio Frutti felt tip pens have awesome fruity scents to add a little something extra to your artwork! From a strawberry-scented red to a lemon-fragranced yellow, every colour corresponds to a different fruit. There’s even a black coloured scented liquorice! It’s incredible!!

They are pressure resistant medium tip with a width of approximately 2mm. The cap which is ventilated can also be placed on the end of the pen. 

The Stabilo Power is a fibre-tip pen with a colour rich application that are great for both adult colouring and for children. Meant to have an extremely long cap off time – up to 5 weeks without drying out! So is the ideal solution for the heavy demands of a playroom.  The ink in the Power pen is washable to give peace of mind and the cap which is ventilated can also be placed on the end of the pen.

Stabilo have razed and reframed the approach to Childrens colouring from the ground up looking at developmental stages of artistic expression and motor grip with appropriate products to support each stage.

The Stabilo Jumbo are great for kids! Even more chunky for little hands and for those with problems flexing their fingers – I know that many older people now are enjoying adult colouring books and these are ideal for the larger areas – the bits that fine pens would take too long to fill in.

These quality pens feel good in the hand, they are clean and safe to use, any mess, marks, can be washed away. The rainbow of colours are just the perfect range for a lovely picture, the flesh coloured light pink is especially good for ‘portraits’. The felt tip stays strong and in shape despite heavier pressing down that sometimes happen when children first use felt tip pens.

Our Bassetts party

It was also my daughters birthday party today so I thought for extra fun I’d incorporate lots of activities into the afternoon – we planted seeds, pretend festival camped, played card games, drew, coloured in face masks, chocolate egg hunted and of course ate party food!

We’ve also been to the beach and had extra fun family time with more mini beast hunts!

All the vitamins and activities set up at the table ready to go! I’d also done a seed planting set up to discuss the topic of Minibeast hunting which was a recommended activity. Plus we did a chocolate egg hunt!

The pens were great – every child loved using them! STABILO colouring pens are an innovative new range carefully designed for daily use by children.  The favourite were the scented which are unbelievably amazing, they smell so great! 

They had great fun drawing fruit and vegetables!

The age 7 to 11 age had great fun using the stabilo pens to draw fruit and vegetables as what reminds them of the vitamins.

Even the small ones joined in!

They all joined in with Bassetts Vitamin Adventure Week

How great do they look in their masks holding their vitamins and magnets!?

Even the adults were impressed that they get gummies too!

My children full of energy!

We went on a mini beast hunt and found loads of lady bugs!

Adults LOVE the idea of these vitamins!

 

 

Oscar curious about his vitamins and why he likes them!

Eva-Beatrix had great fun colouring with the scented pens!

Final thoughts

Knowing that your little people are getting all the vitamins they need just from one chewy ‘sweet’ a day, though they’re not sweets but the young children that came over and my four year old called them ‘vitamin sweets’ and yes they were all told about one a day only!

Some of the children (or all) were not one for fruit and vegetables and having vitamins in a form like this is so encouraging to get them to not only take vitamins but perhaps learn they are good for you.

Having my children take vitamins means there’s one less thing for me to get the parent guilt about too! These chewy little gummies have no added sugar, are made with natural colours and flavours.

In fact I tried each one just to see and can see why not only my children enjoyed them but why the other children did too. Gummy vitamins and chewable vitamins are both potentially good options for people who can’t swallow pills well and what makes chewable vitamins a slightly better choice isn’t that they’re better absorbed; it’s that they tend to contain more nutrients and higher amounts of nutrients than gummy vitamins although you’ll find lots of various information for pros and cons but for the purpose of this blog post I won’t go into that now.

I thoroughly enjoyed the sponsorships of the goodie boxes and very grateful my family were sent them for people in our area to try. The whole box went so well together and added a different vibe for my daughters birthday party too.

 

From an adults perspective I do think they enjoy being able to have gummies too – also why do our gummies not have happy faces on!?