Free Our Kids – Why Hattie isn’t spending anything on her son from Kieron Bryan on Vimeo.

We made it with our friend, the uber talented Kieron Bryan, and even did some stealthy filming in Westfield. Basically, we risked an embarrassing scene with security for you guys.

We’re on holiday all week in sunny Wales, so we’ll leave you with this for a while. The next pictures you see of us will be impossibly glamorous and sun drenched, I am sure…

“If you close your eyes and put on a jumper, you could almost be somewhere warm,” Tom said enthusiastically on Saturday.

And it’s true – we did it, everyone. We got through six months of ‘it’s almost certainly going to rain’ and made it to the blissful, two-month period of ‘it’s probably not going to rain, those clouds look like they’re moving away from us, and if we’re quick and bring our woolies, we can probably squeeze a picnic in.’ Hooray for the British summer!

To mark the occasion, I’m going to start a series on picnic foods. The very best thing you can do with kids on weekends, once ‘summer’ starts, is to pack a picnic, pick a park, meet some friends with kids of similar ages and let them engage in hours of feral play while you relax on a rug.

It’s my favourite kind of fun: the lazy sort that mostly involves sitting; the kind that all the generations enjoy together; the kind with good food, drink and company; the kind with fresh air; the kind that doesn’t involve sitting in traffic for hours in order to be robbed first for a entrance ticket and then again for a grey floppy sandwich.

Also: it’s a stealthy way of sneaking decent food into your kids. If you work on your aim, you can shoot out an arm every time then fly past the picnic rug and deposit a vegetable in a fast moving open mouth before they know what’s hit them.

Actually, though, the foods we took on this picnic were some of J’s favourites. And since they’re all healthy and cheap, I thought I’d share them with you in the hope that you’ll suggest more for our next chilly adventure.

So… Picnic #1:

Venue: Springfield Park, London E5

Attractions: tonnes… Narrow boats, river walks, rowers, ducks, a sandpit, a lovely wooden playground, hills for rolling down, a cafe for emergency ice creams…

Weather: Ermm… brisk.

Picnic guests: The three of us, four other adult friends, two other kids of J’s age.

We brought:

1) Carrot felafel. These are a sure fire way of getting vegetables into J (I think the sweetness of the apricots helps) a winner every time and just as good for adults. To make them, I whizz up the following, then shallow fry them till they’re golden.

• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 400g can chickpeas, washed and drained
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 2 carrots
• handful parsley, chopped
• 1 egg, beaten
• Three dried apricots, soaked in boiling water and chopped
• Pinch of salt

2) Homemade hummus. I’ve always struggled with hummus. I’m not sure if it was my technique, or the fact that I have heathen tastes (a mix of both?) but it never came out as good as the supermarket kind, and J always agreed. A couple of weeks ago, though, I cracked it. J inhales this stuff, I’m not much more ladylike myself and it’s lovely and cheap to make. Whizz up the following

• 1 can of chickpeas
• 4 tbsp of apple juice (this is the KEY thing, I know it’s supposed to be lemon juice, but this makes it a little sweeter, closer to the supermarket kind, and more palatable for kids)
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• Pinch of salt
• One and a half heaped tbsp LIGHT tahini (essential that it’s light – another thing I was doing wrong before my epiphany)
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

3) Lime chicken pieces. Bite size for kids, delicious for adults. I slice up some chicken breasts and marinate them in the following for at least an hour (overnight is ace) before grilling or frying till golden.

• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• juice of two limes
• handful of parsley, chopped
• salt and pepper to taste

4)  Dates. These are going cheap on our local market at the moment. When I was small, my Mum managed to convince me that dried apricots were a naughtier treat than chocolate. We’re working on giving J the same impression…

5) Strawberries. Still two punnets for £1.50 on our market. Woop.

6) Turkish bread, from our local corner shop.

7) Shed loads of juice, scored illicitly from the people running the bar at the kids’ festival where we ran a workshop a couple of weekends ago. There were tonnes of cartons left over, J worked his magic on the girl running the bar and we came home with a bin bag full of juice!

Kids – they have their uses…

Week 15

Wearing: Still in my old clothes, but have shovelled a good few bags of the slimmer, non elasticated stuff into bags in the attic. Feels quite liberating to have less clutter and less choices. Especially since I’ve decided on a new resolution: I’m not buying any clothes for this pregnancy.

Nothing, not even charity shop finds. I’m going to make-do and alter my ordinary clothes. Does this mean I’ll be wearing my own duvet cover from next week till the middle of November? Quite possibly.

Either way, I thought I’d try to photograph myself in this same outfit throughout this pregnancy diary, right through to the end. Even when I can’t do my trousers up, and the top turns into a boob tube. You may want to stop looking at around week 20. Certainly avoid looking while eating your breakfast.

Feeling: Where is that fabled energised, glowing pregnant woman? Because this (above) is not her face. Pah.

Also: anyone else find they do a bit, errmm, loopy when they’re pregnant? I don’t just mean the incontrollable urge to eat shaved ice and shout at your husband. When I get pregnant, I seem to channel Captain Planet.

Last time round, I became fixated with the environment. It’s not that crazy, I suppose, for your mind to turn to the things we’re doing to our planet and the way we’re going to leave it for the next generation when you’re pregnant. But, as with most things, I tend to take it to extremes.

So last time round, I became obsessed with the nasties that go into cosmetics and shampoos. Psyched up by my friend Penny and her film Toxic Baby, I stalked the aisles of Boots, sneering at the small print on labels and battling the urge to snatch toiletries from the arms of perfect strangers.

I got over it, in time. Mostly. Then I decided that the Costa-ification of the high street was ruining traditional British culture and possibly, probably, my unborn child’s future community. So I boycotted pretty much all chain stores until my cravings for Birds Eye Potato Waffles and inability to roll my enormous girth further than the local Sainsburys Local squashed that crusade.

And it’s starting again. I spent three hours (THREE HOURS) pacing the streets looking for rosehip powder, rolled spelt and raw cacao powder this weekend, only to get home and discover that the only thing my body would accept without complaint was Birds Eye crispy batter fish fingers.

Where toiletries and kitchen cleaners are concerned, my monogamous love affair with the one pound shop is in danger of coming to an end. I’m craving ineffectual lavender sprays and eco laundry balls. Thank god I’ve already converted to reuasable nappies, but this, from Ecover, still tipped me over the edge:

So yeah, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m off, balaclava in hand, to glue up the doors of my local Tesco.

I’m bored. I’m the chairman of the board.

Okay, neither of those things are true. I’m not the Chairlady of any board but I have, recently, been asked to be a board member of a new organisation, The Save Childhood Movement. It aims to look at the ways that the modern world’s rapidly changing environment is effecting childhood, invite experts from a myriad fields to weigh in on the issue, then come up with practical proposals for the future. And I’m not bored. I’m really excited.

We have an amazing, star studded advisory board but now we need to hear from the real experts – parents. And I don’t mean that in an empty, head-patting sort of way. These things are made by parental involvement. What are your most pressing concerns? What needs examining and debating and what can’t wait for that? What needs putting right, right now?

One of the things we’re doing is launching National Children’s Day UK and after months of research, debate, late night scribbling and head scratching it’s finally upon us… May 15th – two day’s time – is henceforth declared an annual day to celebrate kids’ crazy, anarchic, brilliant and inspirational minds. A day to pat yourself on the back for surviving another year, take a step back, and let the kids and their explosive imaginations take the lead.

The National Trust, Play England, Eureka (the national children’s museum) and loads of other organisations are on board.

One thing we’re asking families to do is ask their children what their perfect day would look like. If they had an entire day with no school runs, no mummy-and-daddy-have-to-be-at-work-in-half-an-hour, no limits at all on their imagination, what would they do and who would they spend it with?

What do our kids really value? What would yours say?

I’ve written a bit about it, today, over on the National Trust’s Outdoor Nation blog. Want to see it? Well, I’ve copied it in here, just in case…

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Where are mini conservationists, zoologists and explorers made? Is it on their first trip to London Zoo, squinting through the bars at a Sumatran Tiger taking his tea? Or the first school field trip, peering out at a sodden landscape from under an anorak hood? No. In my experience, for my son at least, it happened two weeks ago, in a friend’s garden, while I was looking the other way.

After half an hour of intense silence, prodding a stick into a pond and examining frogspawn, he asked to take some home. We scooped some into a jam jar, filled an old coke bottle with pond water, and cycled home via a nerve-racking and leaky trip round Sainsburys.

They lived in a yellow bucket in the garden, under the grave and vigilant guard of an enrapt two year old. And last week, they turned into tadpoles.

Our kids don’t always need us to prompt and prod their enthusiasm for learning. That instinct, that spark of curiosity and need to explore how the world works, is innate within them. And sometimes, we blundering well-meaning adults who have lost that connection with the world, just get in the way. We talk about the importance of play, but then trip ourselves up with the urge to quantify it in adult terms – what impact is it having? What are its results or its ‘value’?

As Bill Gates has said, “If you’ve ever watched a child with a cardboard carton and a box of crayons create a spaceship with cool control panels, or listened to their improvised rules… they you know that this impulse… at the heart of innovative childhood play…. is also the essence of creativity.”

National Children’s Day UK (http://www.nationalchildrensdayuk.com/) is about making sure that, at least one day a year, we stop to appreciate and liberate that instinct in our kids. Big players from the National Trust to Play England and Eureka, the national children’s museum, have signed up. It’s the easiest call to arms ever issued to adults: on May 15^th, simply step back and let them take the creative lead, wherever that ends up. Maybe they will build a cardboard space ship, unleash their inner adventurer through the National Trust’s 50 Things to do before you’re 11 3/4, nurturing tadpoles or, as William Bake wrote,

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And heaven in a wildflower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour

(Photo from our Cardboard Kingdom workshop at the Land of Kids Festival… more on which later, I promise… Courtesy of Momma Loves and Sonya Hurtado)