As Sweet as Honey

It's rare I'm out and about with the kiddo's on a Monday, because yours truly is usually working. Albeit, I work from home, so I still hang out with my children, BUT, days out are special treats for us.

Today was one of those lovely treats.

We had signed up to attend a 'Horsing Around' home education event in nearby Barnham; whereby, the children would get to meet a pony named 'Honey'. Not only were my kiddo's beyond excited for WEEKS now, but they wanted to learn everything possible about Horses. Because, today, they wouldn't just meet Honey, but they would get to groom and ride Honey as well. This was an extraordinary experience they were looking forward to.

One of our 'Family Projects' I'd been putting together wound up fitting in rather well with our 'Horsing Around' event.  The project centres around the fact that we don't do fast food, but my children still do want the novelty of a 'Happy Meal' toy. I don't mind treating my children to a fun toy now and again, but instead of 'Happy Meals', we were going to have 'Healthy Meals'. I found some colourful fun meal-boxes online I ordered, then built a 'Geography' plan around our 'Healthy Meals'. I was planning for 9 meals out during the Spring/Summer, and the children picked 9 different countries they wanted to have a 'Healthy Meal' packed for.  The first country they picked from their list was 'America'.  Go figure (thinks their American mum).  Since I couldn't really think of anything portable and typically 'American' to pack, I used our trip to visit Honey as a tie in.

We started off looking up American Horse Breeds, and even their American mum learned a thing or two. I had no idea that horses were introduced to America by the Spanish in the 1500's! After looking up and learning about a few American horse breeds, we moved on to some Spanish breeds French breeds, Australian, Japanese, English, Scottish, and ended with the Welsh pony. I printed out pictures of all the breeds and the children were off to identify where the countries are on our world map.
They then decorated their first 'Healthy Meal' boxes with the pictures, though Indigo preferred to draw her horses instead.
For the portable meal, I put in fresh cut carrot batons (America has carrots! and Horses like carrots), apple slices, a few other healthy bits and bobs, then a special treat of homemade 'Oatmeal' cookies (made with honey, in honour of the horse, of course). It seemed fitting since horses also eat oats.
Now, I'm not in favour of fast food establishments tempting children to eat their dreadful disgusting food by inserting a cheap plastic toy (usually wrapped in too much plastic). However, I don't compare our 'Healthy Meals' really to these 'Happy Meals' and my kids already eat healthy anyway, so I justified putting a fun surprise inside. I popped a 'Filly Fairy Pony' in each of my girls boxes (seemed fitting for the day), but Zephyr was not really in to horses, and I knew he wouldn't get that excited about it, so I put a surprise I knew he's been wanting for a long long (looooong) while, which was a Lego Ninjaro set.

I was really impressed that my children took their 'Healthy Meal' boxes in the car and even though I said 'you are welcome to open those whenever you want', they wanted to wait.  On the way to our event, Cypress was going on an on about how her favourite horse of all (she had taped to her box) was the Welsh Pony. Zephyr's was the French Meren's and Indigo 'loved them all'. All the children were chattering about everything they had learned and were asking some fab questions.

We found a lovely playground near the stables, and since we were there an hour early, we enjoyed some fun play time. AND, the children ate their 'Healthy Meals', AND they were thrilled with their little surprise.





Then came the biggest surprise of all. We arrived at the stables to meet Honey.....who turns out to be a Welsh Pony!  Looking EXACTLY like Cypress' favourite horse in her picture. It was amazing.  Honey was amazing. She is such a gentle loving sweet pony, and the children learned so much today, not to mention they enjoyed a fab horse ride. Well, the girls did, at least.  Zephyr stayed in the car playing with his Ninjaro Lego.

We look forward to going back for 'Part 2' of 'Horsing Around' in a few weeks time.

We also look forward to going back to Barnham as well. It's such a lovely village, so lovely in fact that we stuck around another hour or so to play in another playground we found.

All in all, another lovely day