EVERYDAY ADVENTURES WITH SUPER YUMMIES AND LITTLELIFE
Advertorial bought to you in association with The Super Yummies toddler snacking range, for children aged 12-36 months.
There are two kinds of adventures in my boys’ experience: big and little. This month our big adventures are visiting Father Christmas, going on holiday [although they don’t know it yet] and of course, Christmas Day itself. Big adventures take planning, often require money and usually need a great deal of preparation. The bottom line is that big adventures can’t happen every day. Super Yummies and LittleLife
Small adventures though, can happen any day. A trip to the local shop when it’s raining, making a new friend at the park, finding a frog in the back garden – there are so many possibilities for unexpected surprises when you’re little.
Life can be such an adventure – those new experiences and chances for fun are the little adventures hiding in every day. It’s all about the attitude and perspective of the adventurers – big and small.
Now that Winter is on our doorstep, the days are shorter and the nights longer – and our chances for adventure outdoors are slimmer. The dark skies fall earlier and by the time we’re home from school it’s not possible to go out to play – sofa dens and cardboard box caves are where my boys like to be, calling out for hot chocolate and movies before bedtime.
Weekends are our chance to get out and see what the colder seasons have in store for us in the forest. We’re surrounded by trees, streams and rocks here in the South of England, and our boys love nothing more than bug hunting, leaf gathering, den building, stone skipping and of course, stick collecting whenever they can. Our happiest times as a family are spent unplugged in the woods, wandering in our wellies [except me, I lost mine] trying to jump over little streams and sticky mud patches, and spotting the very nosey New Forest ponies and donkeys.
There’s nothing like the great outdoors for an adventure – and one thing I remember from my own childhood, playing out with my friends, is that whatever the adventure was, it wasn’t a real one unless it involved snacks. Collecting cob nuts, blackberries and egg plums from the trees in our neighbourhood to create a little picnic in our den made us feel so independent, and as though the real world was a million miles away, until Mom called us for teatime.
Just like his bigger brothers, Hero has his favourite snacks – and he loves to carry them too. His favourites for quite some time have been the Super Yummies rice cakes and fruit pouches. He’ll even pretend he hasn’t had one of the strawberry, banana and kiwi pouches by standing behind his brothers and sweetly asking for another one if he believes he might just be in luck.
The pouches and packs fit into my camera bag easily and leave no mess behind – and no cutlery is needed either, which is fantastic. I say that they do fit into my bag, but since Hero became a grown up toddler with his LittleLife rabbit daysack, he’s very reluctant to let me have any Super Yummies in my own bag and prefers to carry his own. I just love his little daysack – Hero has always been my little rabbit since the day he was born, and with the floppy brown ears and velvety fabric, I just want to eat him all up when I see him hopping about with it on. The rein is so brilliant for that little extra safety without them realising that you’re keeping them safe. We had a LittleLife dinosaur when Jensen was younger which was fantastic when he went through his “running” stage and he still uses it for his bits and bobs to this day. Super Yummies and LittleLife really are the perfect partners for little adventures! 
Anyhow, sometimes on our adventures, we need to slow down a little – or stop for a rest, which isn’t something that three boys always understand very well. They long to run and jump, and run some more – yet on our last few trips we’ve started taking activities for the boys to do – and often they help to steer their adventure onto a new and exciting path.
Our favourites at the moment are Nina Chakrabarti’s “HELLO NATURE” and Nature Art by Jenny Bowers. We’ve bought quite a few nature hunt books over the past few years and these ones are probably the best we’ve had yet. Full with activities about nature that can be done indoors and out, they’re perfect for curious little explorers and wildlife seekers – and are brilliant for completing whilst snacking, which means that our hands are on books, not bugs, whilst we’re eating.
So far, the activity packs of books and snacks have distracted a tearful boy from a painful nettle sting, encouraged an interest in the changing of the seasons with our biggest boy, and helped build on a love for the world around our three boys that comes from understanding how it works and looking at why things happen on the simplest level – hands on learning. Our little rabbit has found some brilliant sticks and tried to build his own den even.
In fifteen years’ time, maybe we’ll have raised a conservation scientist, a geologist and a zoologist – and maybe we won’t. Whatever path they take though, our everyday adventures have made the most amazing family memories – and like most of the best things in life, they’re free.
