Snapshots of a week

♥ High tea with friends on Sunday.  I thoroughly enjoyed this and have plans to make this a regular feature of life in our house.  Cake, cheesy nibbles and wine.  Dreamy, dreamy!

Look - a bowl of tomatoes - just to prove it wasn't all high-sugar, high-calorie fare. Tokenism, that's what it is.

♥ Some of my beautiful new Pip collection.  It gives me a little thrill every time I catch sight of the dresser.  Once upon a time it used to be Hobbs shoes, now it's plates....

♥ A lovely, sunny day at home with my two smallest babes.  All the more lovely because my middlest child was supposed to be at school, so it felt a bit naughty.  (If you happen to be a teacher and reading this - he did have a temperature the night before, honest.)  We pottered and potted:

♥ My first session on my new and lovely allotment (more, oh so much more, on this to come):

Do you know what Mr N said when he saw this photo?  'Bloody hell, look at my hairline.'  You'd need a magnifying glass to even see his head, but like a laser, his eyes were drawn to it.  Pa-ra-noid.

♥ Still working away on my granny ripple blanket and really, really loving it:

I'm in ripple heaven, me. x

Winter blahs

Ugh, I'm having a massive attack of the winter blahs today*.  Blah, blah, blah.  Big, fat, ploppy blah.

Blah one - one of my absolute best, most lovely friends moved a long way away on Friday and I am veeeeery sad about that.  She and I saw each other almost every day for the past six years - during which time we both had babies, we both had worries about our children being bullied, we discovered a mutual love of John Lewis, tea cakes, Chanel perfume, White Company lamps and white wine amongst other things and we discovered that we are both, in fact, sweaty buffoons.  I mean by that, that we get ridiculously intimidated by other people, jibber incoherently, go a bit red and sweaty and walk away feeling like we've made a complete tit of ourselves and then spend quite a considerable amount of time angsting over that fact that said intimidating person probably thinks we're an idiot.  I think if you too are a sweaty buffoon, you will be nodding in understanding and sympathy with this, in which case I salute you and say 'welcome to the club'.

Blah two -I'm currently experiencing a wellie crisis and I'm getting a bit fed up with it.  I need wellies, I spend a lot of time pelting about in the mud with my boys and I have an allotment (eeeek - did you see how I slipped that in there??)  It's a long and boring story, but it involves wellies that rub my ankles, wellies that perish after about five minutes, wellies that leak, wellies that I can't squish my sturdy calves into (when I lived in Lesotho I met a woman who said to me 'aaaah, you have beeeeg legs.  They are gooood legs, like mine.  You can walk well with your legs'.  She meant it as a compliment.  I felt like sobbing into my rucksack.  It's a cultural thing.)

Blah three - Yarn.  Horns.  Dilemma. 

Blah four - my daughter pooed on the floor this morning.  She did it in her pyjamas and it fell down her trouser leg onto the floor, where she trod on it.  This was my fault - I neglected to mention to Mr N that she was without a nappy as I swanned out the door to work.  Ooops

Blah five - I took loads of photos of my little heart chainy buntingy thing this morning - I think it looks really pretty in the hallway, but all the photos are really noisy and some are a bit blurry (I obviously took them before my morning cup of tea had kicked in) and I'm just annoyed about that.  So it's just the one photo today - I hope you can get the gist of it.  Soz x

* This is an expression that I have shamelessly copied from Lucy Attic 24 - I think it may be the best expression I have heard for a very long time.

PS - do you like the way I've used blah colours for my bullet points today?

The gubbins post

So today I present you with a random collection of things.
❄ random thing one: these hyacinths smell a bit lush, sitting on my sitting room windowsill.  I've gone a bit bulb-crazy, actually - we've got a little pot of daffodils that middle brought back from school to raise money for Macmillan and a pot of narcissi that called out to me from the shelves of Waitrose as I was doing a quick sweep for weekend rations on Friday.
❄ random thing two: I've sorted out my bunting.  aaaaahh - sigh.  It's so much more Zen now:

❄ random thing three: I love this little jug, which a very lovely friend gave me for my birthday.  I've put it on the radiator cover in the hall where I can see it every time I come in the house - though this is does qualify as pure madness - it's almost crying out for some clumsy dervish to whirl past it and knock it off:

❄ random thing four: I'm at a slight loss with my crochet projects at the moment.  I am desperate to start the starry blanket for my boy, but I still haven't located the elusive, perfect yarn - grrrr.  I'm also mulling over a ripply blanket in pinks, greens and creams for the sitting room and am thinking about using Drops cotton light - has anyone used this?  What's it like?  For the moment, until I can finally start my next big, 'proper' project, I've been fiddling away making some little hearts:

I have plans for turning these into a garland to hang on an old mirror that I'm going to paint white and hang in my newly-redecorated-yet-mysteriously-already-grubby hallway.
I've also been messing about with some little bits with a vague idea of making a hangy thing for my beautiful nephew, who I'm going to visit in a couple of weeks - the added boon is that his mum and dad (my lovely brother) will be there too.

❄ random thing five: I've been given two awards recently - the Versatile Blogger from The Craft Giraffe - thank you so much, Niamh; and Liebster Blog from Chaos, Kids, Crochet and Cake - thank you Sandra!
And with that I bid you adieu - here's hoping we don't all disappear under a snow drift... x

Peace

I'm really enjoying taking ten minutes out for a bit of this:

and a spot of this:

before the madness of the bit between school and bedtime!

Happy Friday, hope you have a lovely weekend x

A little teeny bit of a catch up

Erm, okaaaay, so it's been a while...I'm thinking that if I just write like I've never been away then maybe you won't notice...attempting to fill you in on all my goings-on over the past two weeks would, frankly, be a) daft and b) a bit boring for all of us, so here are the edited highlights, presented in bullet point form (I used to have a proper job once upon a time, you know, one where I was forever using bullet points.  There's not so much call for them now I spend my days running around after small, noisy people...)
✪ I have hoovered the entire contents of not just one but two boxes of Rice Krispies off the floor/worktop/bread board/cooker.
✪ I have caught a regurgitated marshmallow as it flew from middle n's mouth (think Witches of Eastwick and you have an idea of what my Saturday night was like).  Nice.
✪ I have finished my blinds!  Yaaaaaaayyyyyyy....no more goldfish bowl-effect sitting room for us:

I'm absolutely thrilled with them - they have turned out exactly how I'd pictured them and they make such a difference to the general cosiness of the sitting room. 

✪ I've also finished my cowl.  (Pause for a happy dance).  No pictures today though - there'll be more on that when I've found someone to take pics of me modelling it (in a headless way, of course...)

✪ I bought a dresser on a whim; as you do:

Love it!

✪ There's been plenty of crochet action on my summer hols blanket too:

It's neeeearly fiiiiiniiiished.

✪ An exciting parcel also plopped onto my front door mat this week.  Here it is in action, Claire:

This is the most stunningly well-made and beautiful tea cosy I have ever seen - Claire is a real artist and I urge you to visit her lovely blog if you haven't already done so!

And now I need to go - Mr N's just walked in the door after spending three days in Paris with 90 14-year-olds.  Who'd be a teacher, eh? x

♥ Things on my table

A little bit of early morning sun casting beautiful shadows on my favourite little tablecloth (my granny would be horrified at all the wrinkles being thrown into relief here).  I've been relishing the sun and slightly cursing the mugginess at the same time (I feel guilty for even writing that) - it's all very well being lovely and sunny, but enough of the shiny-face-inducing clamminess.  Thank you.
Humbuggishness aside, it was a joy to spend time sitting at the garden table peeling half a ton of apples that a friend gave me:

Mmmm, a cup of tea and a bit of peace and quiet while baby n was asleep - is it wrong that I love this time so much?  I do adore my daughter but really, I do love my time alone while she sleeps.  Guilt...

And my favourite table scene of all?  Why, it doesn't get any better than this:

It upsets me too much when my wine, in its unsteady wine glass, gets spilt all over the table.  I have learnt from experience, my friends.  Take it from me, beakers are the future x

❊Watch out, there's a whinger about...

Ugh, I'm feeling tired and run down and sorry for myself and what I'd really, really like to do at this precise moment in time is crawl under my duvet with an enormous piece of cake and have someone on hand whose sole role in life is to play with my hair and rub my feet.  Boo hoo hoo, moan moan moan...
WHY is my daughter a nightmare-inducing insomniac?
When will I get a proper night's sleep again?
Where is the fairy with the magic wand to make all the crud in my house magically disappear, to be replaced by only clean, sparkly, freshly-laundered things?
How can I lose half a stone whilst simultaneously indulging my deep love of wine and cake?
Where is my 'back up brain'?  The one that will kick in when my scrambled egg head forgets things like where exactly I left my children, and hospital appointments, and what I need at Waitrose when I've left my shopping list in the kitchen.  Huh?  Where???
Actually, that 'back up brain' idea's not a bad one - as soon as I can track down my front door keys, I'm hot-footing it to Dragon's Den. x