Sunday, 29 September 2013

Busy few days

My son now has "activities"! We get towards the end of the week and most people go, 'yay, time to chill'.

Not us, the Dude finishes nursery at 11:30 on Friday and it's all go. Quick lunch & then swimming lessons. Home to chill - will kids chill, I usually end up in the kitchen trying to make up some kind healthy meal.

Then a lie in on a Saturday maybe? No his gymnastics starts at 9am. I miss lazy Saturdays, not even lying in bed for ages, just not having to leave the house before 9am! 

But he is coming along so well - 6 weeks in on the swimming lessons and he was swimming with NO armbands today and going under the water.  Now for a boy who protests about getting his hair rinsed because he hates getting water down his face, that's a big step.

So Sundays are my lazy days now. I'm up and presentable - even hung a washing out and done some ironing already (not even 10am!) but the kids aren't dressed & I'm still trying to decide what to have for breakfast. So probably not as lazy a start to the day as I used to have pre kids but I don't HAVE to be anywhere,  which is a nice feeling.

Friday, 27 September 2013

Scrappy trip

I've had a bit of burst of sewing mojo in the last week!  Don't know what has come over me.  I know what hasn't been done (housework!) but all the blocks for my scrappy trip around the world are complete - 24 blocks all done.  Yay!!!

I should really have been catching up with housework or even playing with my daughter this morning, y'know being like a proper housewife/mummy.  But I decided to play about with the layout of the blocks instead.

There's a lot of yellow and green.  (apologies for the rubbish quality photo - bad combination of rubbish light, phone & fabric colours not coming through properly)  Not sure if I'm entirely happy with this layout, might need to fiddle about with it in a day or two before I'm happy to finish the top off.

Next on my sewing To Do list (I'm a woman of lists, I feel uneasy when I don't have a list!) is to catch up with the Mystery Quilt that Sheila started a couple of years ago.  I got about half way through then it just fell by the way side.  So that NEEDS to be finished and soon.  Actually after a wee trawl through previous blog posts, I found this post which is from 2 years ago and that was pretty much the last time I worked on the quilt.  I had better look out all the instructions and get cracking.  Might even end up as a christmas present, now there's an idea ;)

Right some parenting it called for the dude needs his lunch then it's off to his swimming lesson!

Friday, 20 September 2013

Progress at last

My sewing machine has been in use!  Wonders will never cease :)

The partially started cathedral windows have progressed.  I pondered for a couple of nights on the layout of the inside bits (my rubbish with technical terms) to make sure it looked just right.
 Version1 - Just wrong - too samey
 Version 2 - Better with the blue but still not happy with it
 Version 3 - Still liking the blue but the middle 3 are just wrong (they look almost yellow but are green!)
 Final version - much happier with this layout and combination.  Much more pleasing to the eye.

All sewn up and finished.  No idea what I'm going to do with it now.  It's FAR from perfect, at the moment all I can see are flaws but I've done it and I'm reasonably happy with the results.  Might try the technique again with a bit more thought as to the end use!
I've also done some more of my scrappy trip around the world blocks (go me!) so 11 blocks done out of 24 - almost half done.  Isn't it odd how taking a photo can make things look different - I just randomly laid out these blocks with no intention of creating any pattern and now that I'm looking at a picture of them there is a slight pattern.

I'm going to publish now as I started to write this post about 10am (it's now 2.50 - thankfully Firefox has restored my last webpage both times)  Since then my laptop has crashed twice since then, I've collected Euan from nursery, made lunch and taking him to his swimming lesson.  Now Little Miss has just woken from her nap, I need to do other things that don't involve fighting with a laptop!  I'll finish with a little snap of the kiddiewinks from yesterday when I was doing my monthly photo of Megan - 7 months old.  I think I blinked!

Wednesday, 11 September 2013

The @$*&? Fence

Phase one of repainting our fence has been completed - yay!
I'm really pleased with how it's looking too.  Painting over red paint with green in a pain in the butt to be honest, as it take 2 coats, but it's looking lovely.  Although the husband is definitely wishing he'd just stuck to the original colour and not changed so there's been a few choice words flying about at times!  Oops ;)

Just need to get on with phase 2 ........

 (we really do have a big side garden!)

Saturday, 7 September 2013

Strictly Saturdays

My Saturday nights are now feeling back to normal!  I'm not a big reality tv fan - can't be doing with X-Factor, Big Brother or whatever else is on but I LOVE Strictly.  I even like Craig (at times).  It feels like the start of autumn/winter - nights get darker, husband is generally out working (although not tonight so I've got a night off bedtime duty), ideal way to spend a Saturday is to snuggle up on sofa and watch Strictly Come Dancing.

The rest of my night is planned to consist of settling down with a cuppa and a donut and doing some more of Jack's cross-stitch.


Thursday, 5 September 2013

Redesign, Refocus, Relaunch

Welcome to my new bloggy home :)

A new home to record all aspects of my life - family, home life, making stuff!, work - if I do it, then I might just end up blogging about it at some point. 

It's been another period of change in the last few weeks as I've only just returned to work after being off on maternity leave after bringing Little Miss into our wee family.  So me and him (that'll be the husband Pete) are finding our new roles and getting ourselves organised.  We are in a very lucky position where due to how he works (guitar tutor - so mainly late afternoon into evening) and me being part-time, we juggle childcare between us with a little bit of assistance from grandparental units.  It's taking some time to readjust our time management skills.

It's a bit weird being back at work - somethings have changed but somethings have remained exactly as they were when I went of at the end of January.  I shouldn't really be surprised but as there was basically no-one covering my mat leave so a huge chunk of things have been on hold waiting for me to return!

Other than returning to work the end of August was busy with the Dude returning to nursery, he's a pre-schooler now - eeek!  Less than a year til he goes to the 'big' school.  I dread to think what I'll be like next August, I'm already stressing about it *facepalm*  However, he loves it and is definitely thriving because of it, this was him just before he ran off on his first day back (I have no explanation for the 'jazz' hands!)

Now that Little Miss is 6 months we have started down the road of weaning, which I know there have been various approaches to over the years, but I'm stuck to the current recommendation of waiting til babe is 6 months.  However, unlike what we did with the Dude (purees) I'm attempting to try 'baby-led weaning' - basically babe eats pretty much what we do and no purees.  Basically I'm reminding myself of the motto 'food for fun, before one' every time I give her something to try.  She's getting the hang of food and finding her mouth more often than I expect.  This is tonight's dinner, some pasta and homemade tomato sauce and a bit of rice cake - she seemed to like the sauce :)
It's also been my dad's 70th birthday.  It's weird to think of him being that age, part of me sees 70 as an old person.  But give him is due he's still working (3 days a week in a supermarket bakery - his preferred shift if 5am-2pm!), he's getting a bit more forgetful these days but hey, my memory is shocking, so I can't really comment and he does loads of funding raising for his church including making approximately 200 jars of jam and marmalade for the christmas fayre every November and runs a cafe at the church every Monday.
I've even managed to do some making and decided to try my hand at cathedral window blocks.  As ever it's not finished yet but I did the immense ironing task which is involved, and actually found it quite enjoyable, so currently it looks like this  (actually it's a bit further on than this, there's 16 sewn together) just need to pluck up the courage to do the next bit of adding in the 'window' fabrics.  Procrastination is a wonderful thing!
That's a bit of round up of August.  Blogging will happen more frequently (well that's the intention) so I hope I didn't bore you too much and you'll pop by again to see what else we get up to :)