A bee at the Honeycomb

A hydrofoil... as if you needed me to tell you that! I have a big love for Lego, though it is a love that has developed as my sons (and husband) have taught me how to play with it! I wasn’t always a Lego fan. I did enjoy building the Stable set I got given when I was small – I think it went alongside my love of puzzles to find the correct pieces and build up this structure down to the details of the tap in the wall and flowers for the garden. But I would never choose to play with the box of miscellaneous Lego pieces during wet play at school and don’t remember ever creatively building something from my own imagination. It took having my big one turn 2 for my love of Lego to develop. That was when my husband decided it was time to get his Lego from his Mother’s attic and I was shown the creativity and imagination that a huge box of Lego could bring about. I am now extremely proud to say my big one has conveyed the title ‘Master Builder’ upon me (though my husband still te...

Sharing stories connects us -and is really lovely too! Stories are such an important part of life, one friend puts it that it is our stories that connects us. We read them to our children to teach them lessons, to understand how different aspects of life work and to explore new ideas. We read them to ourselves to escape, imagine and comfort. I have the same stories that I re-read whenever I feel low or insecure that always help me to rebalance and gain perspective.  Young authors at work Collaborating with Kalahwood has been a great experience as we help young authors to create their own stories and illustrations to be published, if they want. Over the last term we helped 8 children ranging from 5 years to 10 years create stories which are on the way to being published and this past week we have worked with 5   children to make their own stories a reality. They arrived on Monday with nothing.. well, 4 of them did. One young man, who I can already pictur...

In more recent years, as I have been buying presents for my own children and friends’ children, I have been thinking about what makes a toy? Obviously, for anyone without children buying a present for a friend’s child, a toy is the noisiest thing they can find ideally brightly coloured, impossible to turn off and if it has lots of little parts for parents to tread on, so much the better!  However, what makes something a toy? Does it need to be brightly coloured? Play a tune? Tell me on the box that it is suitable for a certain age group? photo from wikipedia When I was younger and I looked back at pictures from ‘the old days when everything was black and white’ (that is a moment of awe and wonder right there when you explain to children that although the photograph is black and white, their clothes may have actually been quite colourful!) I used to feel sorry for the children who would be playing in the street with hoops, old tyres and sticks a plenty. Didn’t they have an...

One of our biggest driving forces at the Honeycomb Hub is to do what we can for the community. It is why the majority of our employees are young Downs adults, why we offer free tea and coffee to everyone who comes in and why we are always looking at different ways we can help different groups. Even before we opened, hosting a blood drive was high on our list of things we could do that would make a huge difference. Currently the National Blood Donation Centre has a 50% shortfall in their annual collection needs, it is a matter of urgency that as many people as possible regularly give blood and we were determined to offer another place for people to do it. Once we had our date, we advertised on facebook, sent out messages and emails and did all that we could to ensure as high an attendance as possible. However, there was one thing we couldn’t plan for … the weather. The week of our blood drive it rained. For those of you not living in Botswana, people here love the rain in the sens...