It’s time for us to put Kiddley on the back-burner for a while. Since the birth of our daughter Lily back in June we have been struggling as a family to find the right balance of life, work and blogging. Unfortunately life has been suffering more and more. It has been regularly occurring to me that it’s somewhat ironic that a website dedicated to helping parents and carers find things to do with their kids has been taking us away from ours! In one of those blinding flashes of reason I suddenly realised that something had to give, and unfortunately blogging is it.

Kiddley has been a joy and I want to quickly thank some good people for their support since its inception. Asha Dornfest, Kathreen Ricketson, Darren Rowse, Ben Hosken, Michelle Griffin, and Amber Carvan have all helped out in various ways, and we are most grateful.

To the awesome array of guest contributors we had in November and December who took the time to put together beautiful ideas and tutorials which made me realise just how amazing Kiddley could be – Thank you!

And thank you to our kids! Amelia and Lily who are our biggest inspirations every day.

And your kids, for getting in and doing stuff, for taking photos and for sharing the joy with us on Flickr.

And you – for your ideas, emails, comments, photos and links.

We hope you will still find much fun in the Kiddley archives. Please see our new sidebar links which will take you to some other fabulous kid’s activities sites.
Lots of love,

Claire and Phil

xx

Christmas is done! We had what I would possibly call our best yet and now it’s time to kick back and relax.

A big special thank you to our awesome guest contributors who made Kiddley so special during November and December. We hope to have them back to play again next year.

Thank you to everyone who visited Kiddley since our launch in May. Thank you for your enthusiasm, your suggestions and your emails (if you are waiting for a reply, we will get back to you soon, we promise!) and we hope that you found something appealing on our site over the months which has worked fabulously for your family.

And now we are going to take the next few weeks off to spend a bit more time with our friends and family and we hope you manage to get to do some of the same.

We will be back for 2007 in the middle of January so we look forward to seeing you then. In the meantime here are some posts from our archives which might help you fill in some of the holiday moments.

For the holidays

Camping with kids

Activity bags

Nature rambling

Planning for the holidays

Finding time to do stuff with your kids

Keeping a short term journal

Be a tourist in your own city

Introducing your kids to digital photography

And our all-time most popular posts

What’s the time Mr Wolf

A button boquet

DIY Marble run

Crayon cookies

Make a “stained glass” window

Now available at Cafe Press are these two designs on all manner of gear – including kids’ and women’s t-shirts and kids’ hoodies, mugs and bags… get in quick to order stuff for the holidays!

Kiddley: I Made it Myself Store

Kiddley: Crafty Girl Store

What? A new blog? Why not! Kiddley Links!

Increasingly we are finding that posting product information here on Kiddley just didn’t fit with our aims for the site. But instead of ignoring all the wonderful things we stumble across available for kids online, we have started a new shopping blog so we can share them with you. Each day we will be posting quirky, fun, creative and imaginative goodies from around the web for your kids. You will also find the occasional competition, give-away and Kiddley Links exclusive offer.

Hope you enjoy it!

On Sunday evening the Kiddley crew got a new arrival, a beautiful 7 pound 4 ounce baby girl named Lillian Jan. LJ’s Kiddley activities will be drool-related for quite a while, but eventually she’ll become an associate activity tester.

Thanks to everyone for the best wishes you’ve sent along, both here and on Claire’s site. Kiddley’s normal programming will resume today.

As I move towards being 42 weeks pregnant, things will be slowing down here just little bit on Kiddley.com. Since launching we have endeavoured to post something every day – which I am proud to say we have managed to do with the exception of yesterday! With the arrival of child number two the Kiddley staff will no doubt be preoccupied with feeding, sleeping, burping, bathing and so on for a bit, so while we will still be here and still posting, it may not be with quite so much regularity. Hopefully this will only be for a relatively short time. AJ is still crafting and playing and getting used to being photographed in her guinea pig role. We are still plotting and planning great ideas for you to share with your kids and readers with small babies may be pleased to find an explosion of baby ideas coming up in the next few months!

As always, if you have any bright ideas or fun activities please feel welcome to send them in to us. We have had such a great response so far and we thank you!