Good Friday? I think so :)

Surely it's not the Easter holidays if you don't pack in a few hearty family activities, and so that's what we did today. In a dramatic about turn, the weather changed from storms and downpours to calm and sunny - perfect for a spot of (v amateur) bird watching at Castle Espie. It's only a short jaunt from our house and the boys have been hankering after a trip there for a while, and since we're total pushovers with them anyway, off we went. It's been a long while since either Michael or I have been there, and if I'm being truthful, I don't really get the whole bird thing - the Young Ornithologist Club wasn't one I was a member of at primary school. Now I'm sure I've already offended one or two of you with that statement so if anyone feels they could enlighten me I'd be much obliged! Anyway, the birds were indeed plentiful and lovely.

 

And I have new love for my camera and felt it needed a workout today as I had a photo session postponed at the last minute. So I let it do what it wanted. And it worked out pretty well. There were some really interesting outlooks and objects just begging to be photographed. Lots of lovely springtime textures as well. I felt altogether artistic (and just a little bit cool!) snapping random shots. Like this upturned boat. It would have made a perfect spot for a family portrait if it hadn't been for the half dozen diggers and miles of muck directly behind it, so it shall remain a random shot of a boat!

 

Also loved the look of this pile of logs. But cross an artistic shot with 2 boys who have been housebound for 3 days and you get this!

 

When we stumbled across this massive tractor tyre there was really only one option for taking a picture. If you know Conor in person you will recognise that this shot speaks volumes about his life. Wheels. It's all about the wheels. And the bigger, the better! We might need this enlarged and framed.

 

So how do you top that? Well, with giant buns, of course!

 

 

Family adventuring was swiftly followed up by the delivery of a few eggs from the Easter Bunny (now there's a topic you could do a whole post about! I mean, really, a bunny? With presents? You're kidding me!) along with a note explaining that Mummy and Daddy had cut a deal to be able to give an Easter present themselves for once! And so ensued a game of hot and cold (just the most fun on any day if you ask Patrick) which resulted in a lot of building for the rest of the day. Jo, can you spot the similarities?!

 

They are now all complete and sitting on the boys' dressing table in the hopes that we might steal an extra half hour of sleep in the morning while they play happily. See, if you believe it will happen, it might just happen! And we need the rest as we have a big family bbq tomorrow for my uncle who is visiting for a few days. So the family busyness will continue, and the camera will have lots to capture. I hope you have a lovely weekend too, whatever you have planned:)

A little bit of girl time

Q. What do you get when you cross 3 over-tired mums with a heap of scrapbook stash and a trip to London?

A. A perfect 48 hours.

Admittedly Sheila and I should have had a smidge more than 48 hours for our whirlwind visit to see Jo, but the 7.05am flight to Southhampton (which required an alarm call at 4.15am!) didn't actually take off until 12.10pm. Not an ideal start - I mean, who actually wants to spend 4 and a half hours in Costa Coffee in George Best Belfast City Airport? Although, if you're ever delayed and need some cheering up on your way to somewhere lovely can I suggest you phone Sheila and invite her over to spend the time with you! I can think of no one who would help put the time in quicker, and to be honest, it went very quickly and the £7.50 food vouchers did aid our caffeine high nicely! See below for details of time and the gigantic bowl of cappucino!

 

When we did finally make it to Jo's we embarked on a splendid weekend of coffee, buns (clearly Sheila and I had a head start on that!) scrapbook loveliness and shopping, topped off with a trip to see Hairspray in the West End. Amazing fun all round. Sheila and Jo are fab fun and Sheila's alter ego, 'Brave Sheila' provided some controversial entertainment along the way! I amazed all and sundry with my unwavering self-control over my wallet (firmly trained by Martin Lewis - he would have been so proud) and came home with enough money to allow a brief online shop for some new stash for all the layouts in my head. A wonderful time all round.

 

 

 

I thoroughly recommend creating a bit of girl time on a regular basis - it's working for me!

I shall leave you with a photo of Patrick in full concentration on the marching (a term we use loosely when associated with the Anchor Boys!) at the display a few weeks ago. I doubt that a child has ever practised singing the marching tune as avidly as Patrick did in the run up to the display - it was the theme from Pirates of the Caribbean and we had to download it and make him a cd of it so he could master it perfectly. I suspect this may how he travels through life - totally prepared and dissatisfied with anything short of perfection. Please pray for us as we deal with this!!

Today

...we played monster trucks, thought we spied a bit of spring in the garden, found a lot of spider webs in the fog, scooted, bounced, hung washing, rediscovered the joy of taking photographs, listened to good tunes and relaxed. I liked it a lot. And the dust in the lounge wasn't even noticed. It might even go unnoticed again tomorrow!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of us also spent a lot of time making his mummy feel bad for almost wanting to give him away last week by doing this face a lot and giving her kisses. His mummy is a pushover! Seriously, who wouldn't be?

Doing something funny for money

The camera has been having a lovely winter rest for the past few months. And I get the feeling that all the people I live with have been pretty relieved not to be having their every move documented for once. I've even rather enjoyed it myself, not feeling the need to capture everything for posterity and then spend ages wondering whether or not the pictures were worthy of a scrapbook layout! But the brighter weather is a-coming and my hands have been gradually forming their camera-shaped grip and today we did this.

 

Oh the comedy value of the Red Nose! We are very much looking forward to a day of laughs tomorrow, particularly Patrick who has carried his red nose with him since he got it and gets to wear it and something red to school tomorrow. I am especially looking forward to Conor laughing again - apparently his laugh fell out of his nose along with the excess mucus of his itty bitty cold this week. Today he was definitely not funny! Here's hoping. Enjoy your laughs :)

A good romance will win me over every time

This post, as I compose it, has an almost confessional feel. There would be several reasons for this. Firstly, I must confess to having always been a romantic at heart. It probably all began in my early teenage years with the Sweet Valley High novels that were prolific in our school (it was an all girls school so you had to take the romance where you could find it!) I borrowed them from girls in my class and read 2 or 3 at a time, as the stories of the Wakefield twins took over my life somewhat. This was quickly followed by classic romances, started in school with 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Wuthering Heights', after which it took on a life of its own as I devoured as many as I could get my hands on. Clearly the BBC also has a lot to answer for with its dramatisations of the classics and I would have to confess to owning several of them!

My second confession is that there appears to be a teenager lurking deep within me who is trying very hard to escape at any given opportunity! Evidence for this would be found in my collection of High School Musical dvds and cds. And there is no guilt associated with this. In fact, I am trying to embrace it thoroughly, spurred on by my friends who are having similar experiences!

Which leads me to my final confession. I love Edward Cullen. No two ways about it! And it's all Sheila's fault. There she was, ploughing her way through the Twilight saga over Christmas with me thinking she was crazy, until a copy of it landed in the school library and I thought of Sheila's obsession and decided to give it a read. Well, who knew what I was getting myself into? I am not kidding, these books are seriously addictive! I don't wish to give anything away for those of you who haven't read them, but not since 'Wuthering Heights' have I come over so smitten by words on a page. And I don't care that it's a teen vampire romance. Not even slightly. I read all 4 of the books in a fortnight, mostly over half term. Which meant that all my rules about the Wii went out the window during our break in Bushmills because, frankly, children and husbands otherwise occupied meant important reading time for me! I kid you not, I was sleep deprived because I couldn't put them down. In fact, I'm reading them again (Sheila tells me it's the only way to get it out of my system) and I'm slightly miffed that this post is taking me so long because I have serious reading to be getting on with. So, when Sheila and Lesley came round for some scrapping it seemed only right that I confess on paper for posterity (and to give Michael something else to mock me for). I am loving this layout, particularly the glittery letters inked with red!

And this also explains my not so prolific blogging, or anything else for that matter in the past few weeks. So I'll take the opportunity to share a couple of photos from the past few weeks that I really love. We did have a lovely break at the north coast over half term, even getting to the Giant's Causeway in the sun. And Michael took some lovely photos of me with the boys. I'm always lamenting that there are loads of him with them and none of me. But after these rather lovely shots he won't be getting off so lightly on the camera front in future. Really, I love these pictures, especially since I don't look completely rare!

 

 

A skill I failed to mention in my last post was my ability to imagine something in my head and make it appear in the flesh (other than chocolate made real by a trip to the Centra). Patrick had a character day for book week on Friday and wanted to go as Luke Skywalker. He proposed wearing his combats with a white t-shirt, which I thought was rather tenuous, and so I offered to help with a Tesco value fitted sheet turned Jedi robe! For £2.88 and an hour's effort on Thursday night, I was pretty pleased with it. And given that it was worn all day Friday, so was Patrick!

 

(I hope you're loving the wellies in lieu of the Jedi boots that I wasn't able to magic up at all!)

And finally, a couple of very cute baby shots. Sorry to bore you, but he is just so adorable!

 

 

 

I could just eat that chubby tummy up!

Now, back to the books....

7 things

So Jo also tagged me a couple of weeks ago and I have been procrastinating over which 7 random facts to share about myself. I suppose if I'd just asked Michael he could easily have furnished me with at least 7! Anyway, prepare to know me better!

1. I was once pictured in our local newspaper doing splits on a gymnastic beam - I think I could have been quite a good gymnast if I'd had any motivation and could have got over my fear of the asymetric bars!

*eta - sadly the splits is no longer part of my repertoir!

2. I have a deep longing to be a dancer! Maybe it's a latent gene left over from the gymnastics days, but if I could find somewhere I could learn all the High School Musical dances I'd be there!

3. I LOVE musicals, particularly the Lloyd Webber variety but I'm also partial to a bit of Blood Brothers, Les Miserables and Hairspray.

4. I haven't a clue about the rules of rugby but will gladly sing 'Ireland, Ireland' quite loudly and then watch a 6 Nations match shouting such advice as "Hoof it up the other end!" I do try to learn the rules from time to time but seriously, there are just too many!

5. I worry unnecessarily about most things in life. Needless to say it's been greatly exacerbated since the arrival of children - I'm sure there's a lesson I'm meant to be learning in here somewhere.

6. One of my favourite ways to spend a quiet 15 minutes is sitting down to the first flick through a new magazine with a cup of tea. The Fat Face or Boden catalogues will do if no new magazines are available!

7. I have lost the ability to enjoy shopping for fun. I would much rather spend my Saturday afternoons with aforesaid magazines or a good book and a steady supply of tea while my boys pester me and inflict all sorts of boy activities on me. Makes for a pretty perfect weekend afternoon in my book.

The whole tagging thing is a great idea in theory if you are popular in the world of blogging or if you are the first one to do the tagging so you can tag all the bloggers you know (like Jo did!) But I am neither of these, and so I tag the lovely Annie and Anna as the only other bloggers I actually know, but I require the following people to leave theirs in the comments - you can't lurk there with no responsibility, you know!

Heather F, Julie W, Auntie E - I eagerly await your responses!

Now I think my post will feel naked if I fail to include any photos so I'm just adding a few from recent sessions that I haven't remembered to post so far.

 

 

 

Lots of photos and a couple of questions

Those of you who know me personally will know that I've been suffering from snow jealousy this past week - tons of the stuff everywhere apart from where I live. It has been upsetting me to the point that the other adult in the house told me to get over it yesterday! Well, it's not my fault - I blame the BBC homepage where my postcode has been promised snow for days on end but to no avail. I might suggest to the Met Office that they need a weather observation point somewhere around Ballyholme to stop this sort of thing happening again in the future. But today, we met my folks for coffee in Craigantlet, about 5 miles from our house, and look what we found!

 

 

Oh, we had snowball fights galore, even getting nanny and grandpa in on the action. In fairness one would have to say it wasn't exactly the powdery dry snow of your average ski holiday, but beggars can't be choosers! At least we had 2 very happy boys with rosy cheeks and now I can do a snow layout too!

It was also the perfect day to sport the fab new wrist warmers - turns out they're very hard to photograph whilst wearing them so it was time for a new self-portrait.

 

And to think I've allowed my wrists to be chilly for the past number of years! Michael says I look like I just stepped off the set of 'Fame' - who cares - that look has always been a winner in my books! And if I had the patience and inclination I could knit a matching pair of legwarmers just to really give him something to mock me for!

This week I also had a date with Patrick. It's getting harder to find time to spend with him on his own that doesn't involve Star Wars characters or a nunchuck. So we headed to our favourite Eden Pottery so that he could make his own bowl for breakfast. It took every ounce of willpower on my part to just let him do it, especially when it came to the paint splodges on the inside! It has a shark, a dolphin, a spider, a wasp, and a dinosaur on it. And he loves it!

 

 

We had a fun afternoon and ate ridiculously gigantic buns and scones far too close to teatime, but I won't tell if you don't!

Finally, my 2 questions. There are no prizes but answers and suggestions will be much appreciated.

Question 1 - what on earth is going on with the moon?

 

When I went out to get the washing from the machine on Thursday night the moon had a weird ring of black and then another ring of light around it. I've never seen this before and thought I'd try to get a picture of it so that people would believe me. To be honest, at the time I thought to myself, 'if this is the second coming, then good, because I've had it for today'! I'm informed it is something, but no one seems to know what - and I can't stand not knowing.

Question 2 - will you call the hair police or shall I?

Cheeks that beg to be kissed!

The baby that was tucked up inside my beautiful friend in this post made it out into the world last Friday, and, as his mum will verify, he was worth the wait! I got to photograph him yesterday at the marvellous age of one whole week and I had to force myself to leave without stealing him. There are likely to be many more shots of this little blessing in coming months!

 

 

 

 

 

Isn't he a dreamboat?!

In other news, the wrist warmers I've been knitting for the best part of 3 months are finally finished, but as I completely forgot to photograph them today you will have to wait a few more days to see them. I am very impressed at my handiwork, if I do say so myself. Mother will be proud (although best not show her the seams - something to work on for next time!) And with that I am off for a square of chocoloate. Or 2.

Sorry, did you say monster truck?

It would be fair to say that the words 'monster truck' pretty much summed up the tiny one's birthday! Let me walk you through the day.

 

The first present opened - 2 monster trucks!

 

Just making sure you believe me!

 

And in action in the monster truck arena - or stadium as Conor likes to call it. Who knew you could have so much fun with monster trucks? Although, in my opinion, the Hot Wheels organisation have a lot of work to do on the parent/ear-friendly aspects of their products!

 

I cannot believe how cute Patrick's card for Conor was. He made it himself with a picture from the new Cbeebies show Chuggington which is already a firm favourite in our house. One to keep, I think.

 

This was the 'fun' blowing out the candles - apparently we now have the same aversion to candles as we do to the fire, hence the hands over the ears. It's a self-protection mechanism!

 

Although once the candles were out he was more than happy to eat the Smarties off the top! The icing is a delightful teal blue which is what you get when you put blue food colouring into butter cream, Who knew!

 

And would you believe it, but the most fun of the day came from a bouncing balloon which I put into the party bags (Patrick insisted!) from the party bag stash! I must remember there are more of those next time we're bored!

 

The fabulous sister took this photo of the 4 of us, although we could do nothing to put a smile on Patrick's face. It seems his smile goes in the same box as the Wii! And that was pretty much our day. Good old fashioned fun with family!

3 years ago

We were blisfully unaware of the way our lives were about to change with Conor's arrival. I was telling him about it tonight at bedtime and he kept asking me to read him that story again - he definitely added to the cute factor of the Boyd family! Anyway, I'm feeling slightly wistful on the eve of his 3rd birthday and thought it a good enough reason to share the layout I did at the weekend. It's inspired by a layout in this post and I must confess that the photo that says 09 was actually taken a few days before Christmas - he looks exactly the same this year I promise! (Do you think I could be excommunicated from the scrapbooking world for lack of authenticity and stretching the truth? Oh well, it's done now!)

 

Oh I love that little face!