A New Hope

We've been watching a lot of Star Wars around here lately so it seemed appropriate to use the subtitle of Episode IV for this entry. 'A new hope for what?' you may ask. Oh, so many things! I think it may call for a list - start as you mean to go on, I say!

- a healthy and happy family. Too much in the way of illness in this house since Hallowe'en, so I shun the germs! They will not be welcome here!

- a less frantic daily life. Hey, if you set your goals too low you'll have them all achieved by the end of January!

- a storage system that will make all the toys that just arrived here seem almost invisible!

- children and a husband who appreciate said storage and use it appropriately and regularly!

- more regular blogging. Posting and reading. I do love my little windows into the lives of other people I know/admire/aspire to be like etc. And I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, but I am going to try to blog a couple of times a week. Shocking, I know!

- a beautiful and complete photography website. It's actually first on my new year to-do list.

- more time to be creative. Not that I'm not creative with my photography, but I want to scrap more. Seriously more!

- an organised and functional studio for aforementioned creativity.

- greater muscle tone that I presently possess. Again, setting those goals high!!

- more laughter. Lots and lots of it all the time. Especially with my family. Must laugh more.

- a greater ablity to let go, go with the flow and generally relax a bit. My mum will probably die with laughter when she reads this bit, but I shall rise above that and not stress about what she is thinking! Going with the flow right there!

So that's probably plenty to be getting on with, I should think. I have lots of other personal goals and ambitions for the year, but I don't want to scream them to the world in case I don't achieve them or change my mind about them. And anyway, if you don't have a few secrets, well, life might be pretty boring!

As a finish to my new year post I am going to post just a couple of photos I've been meaning to/unable to post of late. No reason behind them except to prove that I was alive and well in December!

Taken in Eden Pottery, a local pottery where you can make your own bits and pieces. Had such a lovely start to December here with the girls. Also took Patrick to make presents for his teachers - the cutest thing ever! Will post from that later.

 

A rather rare shot of me! And the fabulous dish I made. One of 3 items from that trip!

The work in progress!

Very cute baby toes poking through the most beautiful crocheted blanket.  And the owner of the toes...

And with that I wish you a very happy new year x

Beautiful girl

Just a few quick shots from a recent session with a friends baby girl. Absolutely love these shots through the cot:)

Today I...

...didn't go to church because a) it was half an hour later because of Remembrance which meant Conor would have been grumpier than ever and I would never have got out of creche, and b) I would most likely have cried because of Remembrance.

...shouted at the boys more times than was necessary.

...enjoyed a lovely walk with some proper leaf kicking at Mountstewart with the boys.

...was a grumpy and humourless mum. Again.

...finally did 75% of the pile of marking that has been lying around since before half term.

...put a white wash on and have just left it in the machine all day. No plans to do anything else with it the rest of the night either!

...let the boys watch far too much tv. Again.

...felt like a single mum for much of the day, because Michael was kept on at work for 5 hours and was therefore not able to be at home with us.

...ordered £87 of free products from Virgin Vie as a result of my party last Thursday! Hurrah for me:)

...made a very small step towards a creative project (at last) by picking some paper and embellishments out for a mini book.

...heaved a sigh of relief when Conor went to bed!

...heaved a bigger sigh of relief when Patrick went to bed!

...heaved the biggest sigh of relief when Michael finally arrived home, rather weary and with a very swollen leg from some sort of bite he aquired at work yesterday!

...felt at the same time that I was achieving nothing and yet was multi-tasking galore.

...thought that even though I had taken not a single picture to go with them, these few words would be a pretty good reminder of what life is like for me right now. And that there may be a layout in here somewhere!

Comedy out takes

We had the best time over half term with our friends in Bury St Edmunds. We relaxed, drank wine (not too much!) chatted, took photos, laughed, went bowling and generally had a ton of fun. It truly is amazing that the internet has been the doorway to such a great friendship. Poor Patrick was pretty sick most of the time we were visiting, but not even that phased the Hafermann family. Even when Dean had to be lifted from his bed so that we could sleep in with Patrick. Thank you guys so much for a great time:)

However, I'm sure I won't be very popular with Mr Hafermann for posting some of these, but they are too funny not to share. These were taken during the couple of photo shoots I did with Annie and her family.

1. The kiddlers in their best Christmas outfits for a special holiday photo.

2. Mr Annie refusing to cooperate at all! He was worse than kids and animals together at times! The blur on these images is mainly down to my hysterics which rendered me unable to take a decent photo.

3. The hi-jacking of the photo shoot! The fact that I managed to get any further good shots after this incident is proof of my determination, skill and answer to prayer!

I'm sure I'll be in big trouble with Annie for this one so I shall leave it at that. With the exception of this shot of the trick or treating. The boys had such fun in their costumes, but I couldn't get enough of Conor and his little old man walk with hands in pockets. Definitley my favourite shot of the night:)

SpooOOooky!

Ok, not really, just quite cute. Yesterday Nana gave the boys some money for sparklers, so nothing would do but we should have our own Hallowe'en party. Now I'm really not one to go for Hallowe'en in a big way, but you can't deny that the big multiples like Tesco, Woolworths and M&S have us stitched up. I actually found myself walking along the Hallowe'en aisle of Tesco last week in a bit of a daze, totally prepared to give in and buy ridiculous outfits for the boys along with any amount of tat I could find. Thankfully I snapped out of it before I caved. But I did go back on Thursday to buy a pumpkin for Patrick to carve as a treat for our last whole afternoon together before he goes to school til 2pm. And we had a blast carving it (admittedly with the pumpkin carving set complete with scoop and mini saw that I did get sucked into!). Patrick doesn't like scary pumpkins so he drew a very cute face on it and we carved it out.

And tonight, after getting sucked into the M&S party food, we had our own little party. Sadly just the 3 of us as Michael is working just for a change. But we had good fun nonetheless. I was very organised and had downloaded some colouring pages for the boys earlier. I've noticed recently that there are a lot of home schooling sites that have lots of cool stuff on them. Seriously, type in 'colouring in pages' and see what you get!

So we ate marshmallow ghosts, or sort of smushed them about our faces and then spat them out in Conor's case. Tried some witches fingers, aka, corn puffs in the same style as Cheesy Wotsits, but not up to Wotsit standards according to Patrick! And I had to agree. And we wolfed down some gummy sweets that I'm pretending were all natural and almost a substitute for fruit! Then we took some photos. Can you believe I've got them on here less than 2 hours after the fact? No, me neither! Check out our self-timer. We're pretty pleased with it, but it does kind of make me feel like a single parent. Just for a change!!

Check out Patrick with his £1 axe from Woolworths! The cape is totally last season, from Tesco.

Conor is LOVING the pumpkin! He tries so hard to say 'pumpkin', but is happy that his fabulous 'brr brr' (burny burn!) is completely applicable! Bless.

Mr Serious Colouring In! And are you getting that it was also a pyjama party - with matching dinosaur pyjamas? Thank you, Nanny!

Hope you have a good weekend, mostly undisturbed by fireworks:)

Happy happy happy me!

It's half term! Hurrah! I am so completely ready for it. 8 weeks of teenagers is really taking its toll on all of us at school. Which really bodes ill for the other 30 something weeks before the summer! But further bridges will be crossed as they are come upon.

I really have nothing interesting to say today, but several people have been talking about me behind my back, or indeed to my sister for not posting often enough, and so for them I shall ramble for a bit. I don't even have any pictures to post, but I can describe with much detail the fabulous box of loveliness that arrived from twopeasinabucket today. Really, as those of you who scrapbook will know, there is little more exciting than the arrival of that 12x12 brown box arriving at your door. Today my mum collected my parcel from the post office so it was sitting in a very enticing manner beside the basket of clean laundry she had done for me when I went to collect Conor after school. And I was extra specially good and waited until the boys were in bed before I opened it, just so I wouldn't be interrupted. Oh, it was worth the wait! A few of my very special friends had given me vouchers for my birthday which I had no trouble spending, and then because I only had to add a few dollars I thought I may as well go ahead and treat myself just a little bit more! Let me tell you, I shall have to put rub ons to every project from now until next Christmas in order to get the use out of them! And I really have no idea what I'm going to do with my new stash of Basic Grey Christmas papers, but, you know, I just had to have them! And the very exciting thing is that there's another package from Lifetime Moments due to arrive any day too! All because I got a bit bored last week. At least I might be motivated to get off the settee and do some actual scrapping now.

I would really love to write a bit more, now that I'm kind of in the flow again, but Michael is watching the Liverpool match he recorded while we had our fellowship group here earlier, and I seriously can NOT listen to him huff and puff over their poor performance any more. I'm likely to make some unacceptable comment about the fact that it's only a game and we all know that's only going to stir the wrath of the defeated fan. So I'm going to bed with some magazines instead. Off to my fantasy world of make believe layouts and dedicated scrap rooms!

Poor little blog

I feel so awful for neglecting my little blog of late. Personally I'm blaming Sheila for putting photos on her Facebook that I had to see and therefore had to create an account for. And the next thing you know you're friends with about a billion people you haven't seen or talked to for 40 years and scouring YouTube for hiliarious videos to add to their sites! It is eating up way too much of my time, so I'm having a little blog love tonight instead.

I have been very busy with my photos of late, especially since one of my best friends just produced the most adorable baby girl. She is the sister to two of our favourite boys, and was just so good for my camera. Needless to say, she will be much photographed!

That's all you can see because looking at her really does make me want one!

As for scrapbooking, I've been doing lots of it in my head, but NONE at all in reality. I don't know what's got into me, but I just can't muster up the energy for it. And the longer this goes on, the more I feel I should be doing some, and so I create this negative cycle of guilt that need not be felt. I can almost hear Ali Edwards and Cathy Zielske shouting at me to let it go and just do something for fun! If anyone has any ideas to help me out of the rut, I'd be glad of them. For now, I shall just post a couple of layouts that have been published in The Scrapbook Magaizne but not on here yet. Acutally, I think I'm being a bit bold with one that is only in an upcoming issue, but there was a tiny image of it in the 'Coming next issue' bit, so I think I'm ok. Annie, you can shout at me if you like!

(Look at the way it got scrunched up in the post - all the archival freaks will be appalled at the poor way I packaged it up for the magazine!)

And that's it for tonight. Looking forward to your suggestions for getting out of the creative rut. Oh, and if you're interested I just added a photo album of cute Christmas templates for putting inside your Christmas cards. If you didn't get an e-mail from me about these and are interested in using them, just let me know:)   

How cute is she?

My latest favourite image from a session. What is NOT to love about this baby girl? Especially loving the baby chub on her arms!

*Almost* making me want another!

A promise is a promise

So here I am again. My laptop is seriously wondering what in the name of goodness I'm doing on here again, but I wanted to post a few layouts I've done recently. The pictures aren't the greatest, but I'm way behind on installing the scanner my dad gave me so it's wonky photos only I'm afraid.

This one came after the realisation that I had a shocking amount of stash, so the natural thing to do was just grab as much of it as possible and stick it on a layout! Rather busy as my layouts go and I'm not sure I'd call it my favourite, but I love it nonetheless. I've wanted to do a page for ages about the many reminders that my house is filled with boys and their toys. I had a stack of much better photos at one point, but managed to delete them.

The shock of the previous busy layout made me revert to the opposite end of the spectrum. I really really love this one, not just for the photo, but it is exactly how I imagined this layout to be. Another one that's been rumbling around in my head for a while. How completely adorable is this wee man?

There are more to come, but I'm rather enjoying this little and often approach, so I shall leave you with this fab photo Sheila took on Friday night when we went out for her birthday. Ignore the flabby arms if you please. Judith, I'm afraid my lips are sealed about the suffering hehe:)

The finished product

Finally I'm getting round to posting the pictures of the kitchen after the tiling and decorating was finished. The reason it has taken so long to do this is that everytime I thought I'd take pictures I realised I'd have to do a major tidy up first. But today it looked good! Behold.....the finished product.

Isn't it fab? We are loving the tiles that go right through from the front door. Michael's idea, which I was initially sceptical about, but turns out he was right!

I haven't posted in such a long time that I'd almost forgotten about the tag that Jo made for me and Sheila and that it was now up to us to reciprocate. Jo, I hope you don't mind that I didn't use pictures from your blog, but my little tag book from the scrapbook mag came back this week and I thought it would be silly not to share the ones I'd done for that. The book sounds very similar to the one Jo is doing about her friends, except that mine is a book of thoughts about friendship, as quoted by my friends. So, Jo and Sheila, you have been tagged!!

True words from both of you ladies! Right, now I have a lot more to post, but I have been suffering slightly today and feel the need to put my feet up and watch High School Musical 2 which I Sky plussed last night (while I was out doing the damage for which I have been suffering today, 'nuff said!) I promise to come back tomorrow. Seriously!