a rainbow spotted whilst driving
cute giggles
playing on the beach
coffee and cake with my girl
teaching lil' brother the ropes
eating with the big boys
climbing on mummy
what i wake up too
tired eyes from a (good) busy weekend
words of wisdom ;)
Hope you had a lovely weekend too!
This little man loves to sneak into his brothers room when they are at school and get into all thier things. Oh, how he can make a mess. He can destroy an entite room in under 60seconds...no lie!
Don't worry, i clean it all up before the boys get home.
Well, not always.
Sometimes i leave it, with a note like this one on top....
Made these invites for a client today.
And then spent the rest of the day recovering with my little mess maker on the couch.
I had a lovely , very full weekend this weekend . Maybe a bit too full as i'm feeling a bit unwell today. So's little man. So were both chillin out today .
On friday night i helped my sister with her market stall for nZkat Designs at a the Village Markets in Miami. If you've not been to these markets yet, they are definitely worth a look. They are on the second friday night of every month. These markets are full af art, fashion and vintage goodness. Oh, and lets not forget the yummy food! Nam from Hatchi (my fave restaurant in Palmy...such yummy japanese!) has a stall with really good chicken skewers and edaname. You can even purchase a beer or wine to drink as you wander around.
The night was so much fun. I love doing the markets. I even bought a new wallet from Lokoa, another stall holder there.
On Sunday we celebrated Mothers Day. My sister came round and her and Adam cooked me and mum (and everyone eles) a really yummy Breaky Stack (my fave breaky.....sooooo good!) Afterwards we played some Wii Racing and then headed to the beach and chilled for awhile in the sun, before dropping the bigger kids of to mums (her mothers day request) and heading down to meet my sister and her man for a drink and some live music at Point Break. All in all, it was a pretty good weekend.
To all the mothers , grandmothers, mothers to be..... i hope you had a lovely day!
Happy Mothers Day!
family time at the beach....
This is a little Easter DIY project i did, tute poted over on the RubyJu blog.
Now were off to dye some eggs :) Happy good Friday to you !
But i finally got to throw a little girl (well, maybe not so little now) Party! Woot woot! Yes i was very excited :) There was no 'theme' as such, i just had lots of random ideas i wanted to use. The colours were loosely lavendar, light turquoise and just a splash of fushia. I didn't get a whole lot of pics, in all the business, but i did manage to snap a few instagram shots...
This was thier little sitting area where they had water in cute little jars and sweets from the dessert table.
Speaking of desserts....
I set up a craft table with little jars filled with craft goodies for each girl. My friend Bec and I also made them each a little mini album and notebook to decorate. They LOVED this bit, even more than i thought they would. I loved watching them craft and chat away happily. It kept them busy for almost 2 hours! They each decorated thier albums and notebooks, and each made thier own hairclips from felt, buttons and flowers.
My favourite idea was the 'Milk and Cookies' bar i set up in the loungeroom for when they watched their movie (Alice in Wonderland). The couch was covered with blankets and pillows and we had a few blow-up matresses' on the floor as well. Above them i (the Mr.) had hung some light blue and white balloons, just for fun. I was going to hand silver stars as well, but we ran out of time :(
The "milk and cookies' bar had little bottles of milk, stacks of freshly baked oatmeal choc chip cookies and little boxes of freshly popped popcorn. I made some little clouds (tutorial to come) and hung them above the 'bar'. It looked so sweet. Unfortunatley i didn't get any photos during the day as i hadn't popped the popcorn yet. So the pictures don't quite capture the real feel. But it looked SOOOOOO cute! And at night, when we turned the lamp on, the starts were so sparkly and glittery!
The girls were awesome. I have to admit i was a bit nervous about having 7 girls staying over, but they were just great. They did stay up ridiculously late, but i guess thats part of the fun, right? One of the girls had her own iPhone, and Tat thought it would be fun to send me text messages all night while i was trying to sleep. (it was kinda funny). I don't know how they all had so much energy the next morning though. I was dying.....sooooo tired.
And would you believe that i ran out of coffee beans! I went to make a coffee and couldn't because i had no beens left!
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I called mum to see if she would go pick me up a take-away coffee and bring it to me, but to no avail (she didnt answer)
So i opened the coffee bean grinder and scraped up all the beans i could, pulled the machine out to see if any beans had fallen behind, checked the fridge to see if any had fallen out of my last bag. I searched EVERYWHERE! Kinda like the way we used to scour the house for spare change as a teenager to be able to get up enough money to catch a bus/buy some ciggies(yes, i used to smoke, shame shame)/ grab some junkfood. I managed to scrape up a pathically small handful, but still not enough to grind me a shot of coffee. Why oh why don't coffee places DELIVER?
Anywho....somehow i made it through the day without coffee. All the girls were gone just before lunch, and my exhausted little 11year old had a VERY long nap.It was a good day.
Now i just need to get through Entoni's party tomorrow!
for our first ever girly girl party in this house!
everyones helping
well....not everyone
some have it good, no?
It's been a crazy busy few weeks round here so TJ and i decided to go to the beach this morning. We felt wild and reckless as we closed the door on all our chores and mess and headed staright to the ocean.
I love living this close to the beach. I love that i can walk to all my fave places to eat, my most fave coffee place, and the beach, all in a matter of minutes. I love hearing the ocean at night from my bedroom window. Looks like a bit of beach time was just what we needed!
Or for 5, in this case! We have 5 birthdays in 2 weeks...my mum, the Mr., the twins, and Lorenzo, my sisters boyfriend. So we decided to throw one big birthday dinner at my house and kill 5 birds with one stone, so to speak. Remember all the crazy amount of seafood we had here? Well dad did it again...2 HUGE boxes of seafood...prawns, crab, bugs, oysters, salmon....you name it! My sister and Robyn did all the salads and bread, my mum made hummos, my brother brought the drinks and i made the desserts. Between us , we had it nailed!
Dad and all his grandchildren (well almost all of them....one was asleep)
I love a good cheese plate...
The kids table....
Gluten free lemon curd cakes and vanilla cupcakes...
I also made lemon and custart tarts (T likes lemon, E loves custard) and caramel slice (robyns fave). Oh, and choc chip cookies for Lorenzo.
Whew....now i only have 4 more birthday parties to plan! Really?!
{sigh}
So today i've been busy cleaning out my studio , the art room, the spare guest room the shed. It's this space that used to be a garage, but was converted to an office by the previous owners. When we bought this house our intention was to turn it into a guest room/ studio space to house all my creative bits and pieces. We cemented and raised the floors, but that was as far as we got before running out of money. We still need to seal the floors, paint, fix lighting, add a sink ....
So for now, it's just a junk room The catch-all room if you will. It's where we store all the boxes we still have to unpack (yes, we are still unpacking!), and all the outdoor stuff like bikes and mowers and whipper snippers until we get our outdoor shed built. So really, its a nicer than average shed.
And this is what it looks like...
Don't you just loooove the curtains ;)
Can you see the potential there though?
Anywayyyys.... i still have most of my craft stuff in boxes and it drives my nuts when i want to make something and i have to spend time searching through all the boxes to find my supplies! By the time i've found them i'm usually hot (it's like a furnace in there) uninspired and lost my creative mojo. So on a whim i decided i NEED to clean it out! I started unpacking all the boxes and putting the contents in my dining room. Not a good idea in hindsight....
I think we'll be eating on the stairs for awhile, sorry kids...
But once i started i was determined to keep going till i got it done. I went and bought a whole stack of clear storage boxes on sale at Target, and started sorting through everything.
I have 2 really big boxes which i am filling with stuff i will never use. I plan to have a craft sale at my house, kinda like when we did this just before Xmas.
Of course, i thought i'd be done in a day. It didn't take me long to realise i needed way more than a day to finish. So it looks like this mess is here to stay for just a bit longer.... And you can wish me luck trying to tackle it with a toddler around, ugh!
Speaking of cute little toddlers, this ones been keeping me extra busy lately.
He will almost NEVER sit in his pram for me anymore, which is really fun when trying to grocery shop.
He loves Cheerios (not the healthiest snack i know, but this kid is one PICKY eater!) but won't eat fruits and veggies which KILLS me! What child hates fruit?
Any suggestions there? I'll take them!
He loves his rainboots. Wears them everywhere. Wears them in the nude even.
He LOVES reading. Thats awesome, love a kids that loves to read. I could do story time with him forEVER. His fave book is Winnie the Pooh. i love that too.
Well....back to cleaning!
Too fast.... Way to fast!
{sigh}
Oh, it makes me sad how quickly they all grow up. This was TJ last year...
So little!
Back then he would just roll around mostly. Now he eats by himself.
He LOVES his baths! As soon as he hears the word bath, He'll run over to the bathroom and start emptying all his bath toys into the bath.
He knows where his ears and head and fingers and nose is....
He loves to watch daddy cleaning the pool, but doesnt so much like to go in it.
He's good at making messes.
He likes to read.
He likes it when i read him Winnie-the-Pooh until he falls asleep.
Right now he looks so big, but i know a year from now i'll look back on these photos and he'll look so small again. I have to constantly remind myself that at the ages of 18 months, 8 years and 10 years, they are still so small. It's what i struggle with the most as a mother, how quickly it all seems to go buy. I constantly worry that i am missing out on too much, that i'm not doing enough, that i didn't teach him enough, hold him enough, read to him enough, play with him enough. Why does it all happen so quickly? Where has the time gone? Was a the best mother i could be or was i too distracted by the wrong things?
{sigh}
He is my number 4 and i still seem to be making the same mistakes.
Will i ever get it right?
But he is loved, so loved. And amidst all my doubt as a parent, the one thing i do know for sure is that my kids, all of them, have been told each and EVERY day of thier lives, that they are LOVED.That they have NEVER been told, or made to feel otherwise. And that, (so they tell me) they have never doubted.
