my new favourite photo. i took 12 shots in the mirror, and this is the most i got of me in any of them!
happy birthday dude
time is flexible right? so i can start writing and blogging about alex’s birthday which was three weeks ago, and because i haven’t blogged since it doesn’t look that bad. yes? yes.
every year a lot of thought and discussion goes into their birthday cake design. it’s one of those things that i love and hate. hate, perhaps, because my children never seem to want to stick to the women’s weekly cake decorating book cakes, and instead want satan’s fingers bursting out of a particularly appetising shade of grey cake or some other fabulously original thing i’ve got to figure out for myself. love, because whatever they end up with it is a labour of love and there’s always a story. like how i really can’t believe that alex thought he could just swipe icing from the side of the cake without anyone noticing the trail of fingerprints. (see photo above;)
and things like .. my mum gave me some cookie cutters in the shape of hands a few years back, and they went with some grudging thanks into the drawer-of-things-i’ll-never-use. who the heck makes hand-shaped cookies?!
until alex’s birthday, with a quiet apology in the direction of her house, they came out again to make a load of co-ordinating cupcakes. which is clearly what every 10year old head-banging’ kid needs for their birthday party.
anyway, after last year’s sleepover, which i was about to link but it seems i didn’t blog (that’s trauma right there, people) and the year’s sleepover before that which wasn’t so bad, this year I really wasn’t going for the sleepover birthday plan. I was totally going for the let’s-pay someone-to-have-you-all-for-two-hours-plan and NO sleepovers. So we discussed venues and got down to invitees, and he indicated that really, he only wanted four friends(his band), so maybe it’s wouldn’t be so bad having it at home. I know that is is really kinda cool that he still wants to have them here at home (and i guess there’s not too many years of that left) so i agreed, and the all-night let’s-sleep-on-the-trampoline party idea was born.
really?
nah not really. but frank hung the christmas lights around the trampoline and we had bedding and everything ready. they did spend some time out there, but the story of the murderer-who-lives-next-door spread like wildfire.
so they decided they might sleep in the loungeroom after all. and somewhere between 2.30am when i emerged and read them the riot act and 4.30 when frank found them all fast asleep, they went to sleep.
maccas pancakes for breakfast saved me an hour or so of slaving over a hot pancake pan.
one thing i’ve never got around to doing on the kids cakes are those trick candles which don’t go out when you blow, but i saw them in the party shop and thought that alex was just the perfect age to really appreciate them now. the instructions on the candles say to let them burn for around 30seconds for best non-blowing-out results, so as the kids got distracted by something outside the front door, i took the opportunity to light them. They get up a fair flame though, and when the boys didn’t return within a minute or so i started to worry. Then i started to pace. Then i tried to blow them out.. which, of course, hello! they wouldn’t blow out! So i paced, i yelled out the front door for the kids to come back… i didn’t want to leave the cake unattended in case flames started leaping .. argh! it was one of those moments i manage to have at some point in every party where i just wonder how i got into this mess.
eventually frank and another dad who had come to pick a child up appeared from somewhere, so i left them in charge of not letting the cake burn the house down while i went and found alex way around the corner and up the street and rowed him to hurry up (and have fun on his birthday) and come blow out the candles.
and the series of photos that followed was worth the house nearly burning down, to see his bemusement at these candles that wouldn’t blow out… much of the time i was laughing too hard to take photos – those good, uncontrollable type belly laughs.
the inside of the cake was red velvet, which i thought went well with the body part theme. and it was yum.
and because you can never have enough of a good thing, the funny candles got a reprise at the family dinner. it was just as funny the second time around and now mum wants some to play tricks on other unsuspecting 80year olds in her circle of friends.
and that was another birthday done for another year. i’m so proud of the way this kid is growing up, i swear he has awesomeness oozing out of every overgrown hair on his head. i worried for a while that ‘cool’ was becoming too important, but he’s actually quietly self-confident and is starting to forge his own path.
with bed hair.
oh look here’s one
This was for the Colour Theory series on the Aussie blog as well. At least i did try to perk up the neutral background a bit – inspired by the very clever Lou Nelson of course. There’s lot more texture and stuff in there than you might imagine. anyway, it’s about my boy and his many, ever changing obsessions – from the early days of ‘mini guys’ (galactic heroes) the current scarier ones of skateboarding, parkour and (better for a mum’s sanity) drawing and graphic design.
generation gap
We’re doing a challenge on the Aussie blog daring you to tackle pages of substance which look at some of the the differences between your childhood and those of your children. When i started on the page above, i didnt’ have any relevant photos of my own childhood to refer to but it was so much fun to wander down memory lane and try and remember some of the emerging technolog of the period (and be grateful for Google Images, which wasn’t even a spark in a geeks eye back in the day!)
I like to think i’m not that old, but ‘Simon’, etch-a-sketch and even calculators were pretty cutting edge in the early 70’s in my Top 10 list of childhood favourites.
While I’m sharing, our other series is on Colour Theory, which is always fascinating to revisit and understand. This was one on my sunshine girl and how you apparently design a much better Easter Bonnet when you’re wearing bunny ears.
And you may think i’m just in a neutral-background-with-repetitive-coloured-shapes-with-photos-of-a-pretty-girl rut but you’d be wrong, because i’ve got some of a boy coming up soon too!
ava’s tea party
Many of you will already know the heart-breaking story of the beautiful Ava Rosemeyer. It would have been her eight birthday yesterday. Out of a yearning for what might have been, the concept of Ava’s Tea Party was born. I wouldn’t even presume to be able articulate any of it any better than her mother can, so please have a look at her website.
Now you don’t need to talk phoebe and i into pink sugary things, and perhaps because the girls are close in age, or perhaps because her mother’s words touch my soul every time i visit her blog, but there was no question of us not doing something. We invited a couple of little friends over and the pink planning began.
We made the cutest little strawberry mousse ‘milkshakes’, pink and white meringue kisses, marshmallows, cupcakes, quiches, heart sugar cookies and strawberries double dipped in milk and white chocolate.
Phoebe’s birthday is in January which means she never gets to take cupcakes into school on her birthday so we decided to make an extra two dozen cupcakes, two shades of pink buttercream icing, a load of pink fondant hearts and flowers, sprinkles and even edible glitter, and had the girls decorate the cupcakes.
Like snowflakes, no two of these cupcakes were the same and the girls had a gorgeous time listening to girly songs and piping beauty onto each cupcake. They were all pink as we decided that even the boys in their class, if they had to choose between pink cupcakes and no cupcakes, would choose pink ones. (turns out we were right).
It’s hard to imagine anything good coming out the senseless tragedy of Ava’s story, but there were at least two things. One is the advice and growing awareness created by Ava’s rule and the postcard below (click on the pic to see it larger). The other is need to grab the moment and the people you love and hold them close and remember to be thankful always for what you have, because life is a bit like a three year old.. fragile and precocious.
home improvements
a few weeks back i took these photos of areas of my home that need a little help. they’re the non-glamorous corners that are kind of overlooked, that just need a little love attention, finger-print removal and perhaps colour. i shot them as they were at that moment – clearly no tidying or styling was done beforehand!
the idea in my head of turning these neglected corners into something more loved and deliberate co-incided nicely with an aussie scrap source brief that i’d also been sitting on for a while. i had to find a beautiful (to fit the brief) and useful (to justify its presence in my home!) use for one of the gorgeous 7gypsies receipt holders. (i’ve seen somewhere a heap of them all together in a long line, which is stunning, but for now i’ve just got the one.)
so i created a heap of little folders and filled them with the ‘before’ photos and a heap of little ideas, cut-outs, printouts, paint and fabric samples and diagrams of what i’d like to do in each space, and put each one inside the receipt holder clip. the beauty of the receipt holder is that it’s a temporary home – when i’m done with each of the areas i can throw the folder away, or (more likely!) bind it into a little mini album of its own. it’s funny and seems a little banal, but i would love to be able to read my mother’s thoughts of her own home and decor when she had a young family, so perhaps it is.after all, a thing worth preserving.
these are some of the insides. for the record, it’s phoebe that wants the purple room. i’m currently trying to guide her towards a more gentle ‘lilac’…
you can see more of this project – and the mindblowing contributions from the rest of the team here.
elvis the stripagram and other stories
I’ve had these photos ready to go for weeks now, but something has been stopping me with the words. I’m not sure if it’s that i don’t want to acknowledge that my mother has just turned 80, or if perhaps i just don’t have the words for the special events of the day.
I prepared a lot of the food including the cupcakes above (her favourite flowers are daisies) and a rainbow cake that really deserves its own post. My brother in Amsterdam sent money so that the drinks at the party were on him, as well as the er, entertainment. Mum had asked me if i would speak, but it’s really not my thing. So i also organised with David that he would email me something. He did – in five parts and recorded upside down on an ipad.
In the end though that wasn’t the important bit – his words were, as always, eloquent and beautiful and might just have brought a tear to my old mum’s eye. and mine.
my beautiful mum. eight candles, one for each decade that she’s graced the earth.
and then came the entertainment :) This was my sister-in-law’s suggestion – and how could a stripper not lend a certain charm to a quite proper do?! he came in the form of elvis and this was at the moment he entered, and i had mum sitting in the chair he’d asked me to put her in. To alleviate any blame, as i sat her down i whispered, just so we could be quite clear ‘This one’s from Suzanne’.
And i think the photos speak for themselves!
Happy birthday mum – not sure what we’ll do for your 90th, but i’m looking forward to it.
chocolates
pesky kids ate all my chocolates, but left me one. it looked so sweet i couldn’t even get cross at them ;)
planned obsolescence
so you hear a bit about this concept, that things today aren’t made to last, that there’s a lifespan for every appliance and gagdet that was built into it before it left the warehouse.
and you may scoff at the implied ‘conspiracy’ like i might have.
we built our house five and a half years ago – you’ll find blog posts way back here about it (have i been blogging that long?! cool!) and with our house came (obviously amongst many other things!) the dishwasher, the oven and the ducted heating.
and generally, even an extended warranty, should you bother with such things, only covers five years.
so, five years and six months after installation, the dishwasher stopped working. repairman came. motor burnt out. recommendation: buy new dishwasher.
five years, six months and two weeks after installation, the oven stopped working. repairman came. some wiring burnt out. oven fixed.
five years, seven months later in the middle of the freezing cold june long weekend: ducted heating stops working. technically (for anyone reading who may be able to offer advice about such things), it doesn’t stop working, it just blows freezing cold air. and won’t turn off. recommendation: live under blankets until long weekend penalty double-priced callout fees for repairman no longer apply.
i think i’m keeping local repairmen in business. or maybe every five and a half year old house keeps them in business. I had to look them up in the phone book (who am i kidding – google) but maybe they should have maps and charts of each area that was built five and half years ago and bomb the letterboxes in that area with awesomely accurate timing.
i mean really. i’m scared to ask what next, but what next?! and those conspiracy theorists – you’ve got yourself a card-carrying member.
ahh. nostalgic sigh at a photo from yesterdays crepe making sunday breakfast photo. when you didn’t have to turn up the volume on disney channel over the sound of the kids teeth chattering.
something scrappy
it’s been a long time since scrapbooking and i have been at one with each other – for many months each page has been a chore that i’ve put off till the very last minute, with predictable results. then, i gave myself a break, a good talking to, a brief where i had to showcase my own style, and a long weekend to see if i could make the stories come. and with a slightly different outlook, i came out with these…
the mandatory double about this years easter extravaganza…
and this one was something that happened on the same day i scrapped it. i love that i can take a photo and put something on a page in the same day that i’m bound to have forgotten otherwise. last weekend i let the kids loose in the kitchen to make their own breakfasts and the results are chronicled here. Phoebe did a lovely thing with cooked apple, while Alex took an interesting sweet/savoury route with rice noodles, honey and parsley. He declared it was delicious but i suspect it’s one of those things where if by some weird chance i had made it and served it up to him it would have been rejected, but because it was his invention it was all good.
and then, because i was feeling quite good about the whole scrappy thing, i went on to make these, which go up on the aussie blog today
this uses the sweet Epiphany epoxy buttons, and keeps safe one of those notes phoebe’s forever writing that pull at my heartstrings
this, which uses much tattered angels goodness including the really old frames from their chipboard alphas, and really new heidi flocked mistables. alex walked into my room when i was just waking up one morning (again, only about a week ago), and he must have been thinking about it quietly beforehand, but he reeled off this long list of the weirdest favourite things i’d ever heard. he was three or four items into his list when he actually got my attention, and we afterwards we couldn’t remember some of them, but i’ve left this open to become a double if he comes out with any more weirdness!
a zva and buttons summer double. the photos are from a few years ago but i love them.
and finally this is, of course, one of those gratuitous layouts that occasionally even i can’t avoid. but she regularly just dresses up and asks me to take photos, and that’s all the story there is. i loved playing with the mix of jenni bowlin papers though – there’s three or four different ranges in that background and i wanted it to reflect the homemade-ness of the dress. that’s a word. really.
and after i managed all that – and a few more yet to come that still need to go up on the aussie blog first, i feel more at peace with my memory-keeping hobby.
perth – part 1
just some highlight photos from our trip to perth in the last school holidays. it was the kids first airplane trip that they remember (apparently it doesn’t count when you’re a baby and can’t recall any of it).
i’m normally pretty happy with my photos straight out of camera (either that, or too lazy to edit them) but i have a scrappy project in mind for these photos and i wanted them to be as good as they could be. So a while back i did erin cobb’s amazing clean colour workshop and i’ve finally put it to good use with these. I find it hard to look at them with an objective eye but i think, particularly in the realm of colour/white balance, this workshop was a revelation to me, and there were a lot of particularly strong colour casts in these shots – from the fluorescent lighting in the airport and dodgy lights in the plane to the strong cyan cast in the pool shots. her process for lightening darker areas without overexposing the lighter ones is fab too. i love learning stuff!
christmas presents
i’ve been meaning to revisit a few more of the presents from last christmas that were handmade, mostly because i’m trying to motivate myself to start a bit earlier this year.
last summer, wendy treseder showed some of the most divine little cricketers made i think by her sister-in-law. They were made out of champagne corks and felted cricket whites on facebook. i left a comment saying they were the perfect idea as a gift for my brother, and i was totally going to swipe the idea. the problem was i only had about four days to drink my way through a dozen (of course i needed a twelfth man) bottles of champagne so i could use the corks. Normally i wouldn’t be deterred by a challenge like that – after all it was christmas, but i did have a little too much to do at the time to spend it quite that bubbled up.
so i went with the next best thing and used cotton reels and these are my little men.
and phoebe made some wickets…
how insanely cute are they? if you have a totally hard to buy for, cricket loving man in your life, this is perfect. I’m hoping david will use them to demonstrate field placements to my little nephew.
speaking of whom, though neither of these were handmade, i did carry through the whole australian theme for little ollie – how cool is that superman sweater with the australian flag through it.
and alex was enchanted by these coloured pencils made of twigs that we found in the Oxfam shop at Chadstone, so we bought them for Zoe.
This is supposed to be about the handmade stuff though, so finally i made a box of these little notecards for my sister in law. I love this fabric and just transferred it onto cardstock with iron on applique stuff. And i totally swiped one of the Prima journalling notecard boxes and altered that too to hold them.
I’ve got bigger plans in the homemade gift department for this year, which is why i need to start pretty soon. just imagining being able to avoid the overhyped overcrowded shopping centres on christmas eve eve makes me sigh with happiness and though the chance of it is slim, it’s worth working towards.
a happy mother’s day
It’s a bit special when the kids make an effort all by themselves on mother’s day. This year it was just the three of us, and the kids seemed to rise to the challenge of not having dad around to help them make the day special.
Once she’d established i was awake, Phoebe came in in her ‘waitress’ outfit (black and white) to take my order. She wrote ‘rasin tost, cofey’ on her pad.
I was nervous letting her loose on the coffee machine. I heard her grind the beans, mumble a few things and she returned to report that she had some ‘technical difficulties’ so to be honest i was kind of relieved when she let me get up to make my own coffee.
At her direction, alex took himself outside to pick the little flowers you see there, and they carried in my breakfast in bed treat together.
Alex had selected this little candle and holder as one of my presents from the mother’s day stall, and phoebe held it out for me to make a wish and blow out. A first for mother’s day, but it seemed like a good idea, so i duly made the wish that i’m sure all mothers would make and blew out my candle.
After breakfast it was time for the ‘stash’ which included an ‘i love mum’ photo frame, ‘world’s greatest mum’ pens (because we’re always stealing yours) and a beautiful silver jewellery box. And home made cards and toffees.
Flowers arrived the day before from my brother for no real reason (except that he was sending to mum anyway and figured sis might like too (sis did!)).
I had also finished sewing this dress for Phoebe the day before, so she decided it would be an extra special mother’s day treat if she modelled it for me. I guess it was!
More photos soon – another extra special mother’s day present just the one day late – alex got a haircut. I can very nearly see his face.
melbourne
just after christmas (and that’s just one sign of how behind my blogging is) i took a day out from kids, christmas, crap and commitments, just to take photos.
many years ago when i lived in london i took myself off to canterbury for a weekend. it was only different from all the other weekends and trips away in that i went alone and took the time for intro and retrospection. it, along with a few other solo adventures, stands out just because it was me time. i don’t think i spoke to anyone for the entire weekend.
this day taking photos in town reminded me of that same indulgence – something i know i don’t do often enough. It’s also something that many will feel sorry for you for if they hear about it - ‘what, you went by yourself?’. i’ve never been afraid to walk into a bar or pub on my own, spend an evening in a restaurant or go to the cinema alone – in fact it’s always seemed somewhat luxurious and self indulgent and never moreso now as a mother.
anyway, i digress. the reason for this photographic adventure was to create a unique present for my brother. we both lived in london for 10 years from 1990 to 2000, when i finally caved and returned home. he remained, and although in the last few years he’s relocated with his family to amsterdam, he still remains, resolutely, on the other side of the world.
as kids though, we were lucky enough to grow up in the heart of melbourne, a stone’s throw away from the mcg, a walk through the fitzroy gardens directly into the city centre. it was a genteel area in the 70’s that has become exclusive and leagues out of ordinary budgets as time has gone on. we moved from there when i started secondary school to hawthorn, a then shabbily middle class suburb, now much smarter with properties just starting at seven figures, and much sought after due to its proximity to all the exclusive private schools.
and so i take every opportunity i can to remind him where he’s from. it’s some futile hope to make him homesick enough to drag himself and his family HOME. it’s not worked yet, but i won’t stop working on it.
so i took the above photos – some are kind of famous melbourne landmarks, but more of them are slightly offbeat memories that are unique to our own childhood – and i turned them into coasters for him to take back to amsterdam and put his sterling silver stein, or posh ol’ wine glass on. ;)
random photos and stuff i probably shouldn’t blog
but will anyway :)
i have a mouse that lives in my kitchen. every night my cat goes outside and finds himself a field mouse, and brings it inside. to eat. in my presence. some nights i wake up to the sound of crunching bones. he used to just play with them, and i would chase them both back outside. but now he’s eating them. it’s gross.
the mouse that lives in my kitchen, though, the cat seems to tolerate. perhaps they’ve come to some kind of arrangement. he lives in the dishwasher and i first found evidence of him when i pulled out the dishwasher when it decided to stop working. and i know he’s still here because i found more ‘evidence’ after the initial evidence was cleaned up. the mouse eats the cat food. i wish was joking. i hear it in the night when all else is quiet, crunching on the dry food. i wish they’d make mouse flavoured cat food – let’s see how he’d feel about cannibalism…
there’s also the neighbours cat who lets himself in the cat door and eats the cat’s food. i wonder if he’s also in cahoots with the mouse in the kitchen. i just walked up the hall and did a head check – phoebe asleep in her bed. alex asleep in his bed with the dog at his feet. cat asleep on my bed. but as i walked i heard the cat door swing. the nightlife in this house is wild ;)
in other news, the dishwasher has died. i apparently either have to buy a new motor, or a new dishwasher. or stand at the sink for an hour a day as i have for the last few weeks doing the dishes myself.
so, new dishwasher it is.
and it’s funny because less than a month ago i was taking photos of, amongst other things, the dishwasher with an idea of doing some pages on things i’m most grateful for. or things in my day i need but take for granted. something like that.
along with itunes… and i had to scroll up just then to decide that the fingerprints on the screen are fingerprints in the photograph, not on my screen. although it’s a photograph of my screen which is the kind of thing that goes around in my head for a while until it explodes.
and speaking of exploding heads, there’s also this recent treasure. this is a photograph of alex drawing still motion figures on his whiteboard, to make a movie with on the galaxy tablet. so perhaps not explode, but it certainly makes my head ache.
as does this treasure from phoebe. this reads ‘treasure’ (i spelt that bit for her). tac ten steps. clos ryour is’ (take ten steps. close your eyes) and is a post it note on the loo lid. not so sure what the treasure was…
and this is where she made herself up as a sheep dog.
and not even jesse knows what to make of that.
webster’s pages
I’ve started a new album where i can indulge to my creative impulses (rather than my journalistic ones – which is where i mostly like my scrapbooking to carry me these days). But every so often Phoebe dresses up in weird and wonderful things and drags me away to take photos of her. That’s all the story is so they don’t need journalling or justifying, they just are.
I used wonderful Webster’s pages on this particular layout which means i can segue neatly into reminding you that we’re running a readers challenge over at aussie scrap source where you can win a guest design team spot on the Webster’s Pages blog if you enter a layout or project using their products. Entries close next Wednesday 4th May – you can find all the deets here.
This is another page for the album – i think she was the nature fairy or something – anyway the Prima branches came in handy both on her and later on the page! I used texture paste and glimmer mist on the background paper, and then tried to create a panel using glimmer mist to reflect the colours i found in her eyes. Other than that, i kept it pretty simple, as is my wont…
easter
well hello.
i’m thinking i ought to either make an effort to blog, or close this place down. i’ll evaluate over the next few weeks.
i am here today though, because phoebe asked me to. you see she designed, helped to bake and decorated our easter cake, and she asked me if i would put photos of it on the blog to share.
this was the design i got her to draw up instead of bugging me that she worked on while i was trying to finish some work. the top line translates ‘blown and painted eggs’ and the bottom explains ‘chocolate mud cake’. i know her spelling is appalling, but it never stops her!
we blew and painted the eggs in the lead up to easter but i didn’t bother with the photos. we baked the chocolate mud cake the day before and i didn’t bother with photos…
i wondered if it would survive till sunday night dinner. amazingly it did but perhaps only because i was able to deflect temptation with early egg raids. on sunday we smothered it in whipped chocolate ganache and phoebe did her thing with her eggs, and finally i bothered with photos. i think we were all impressed at how like her plan it turned out.
complete with cardboard crown.
easter happened this year much as it did every year. the hunt…
the impromptu game of catch the egg in the bucket…
the dog wondering if this year, if he stares hard enough at a child heartlessly eating an egg, he’ll score…
the stash, and the wheeling and dealing..
and the beauty of knowing that if they have chocolate for breakfast and lunch, i won’t have to cook till dinner time.
hope your easter was a happy, egg filled one.
layouts and doubles and bears.. oh my!
ok. not really any bears.
but i have done some serious scrapbooking in the last week, in the form of three double layouts for aussie scrap source. That’s no mean feat – if a single takes me a day, a double really does double that. And i think i’ve found my joy again. This one uses the cutest Jillibean Soup christmas papers (Chestnut Soup) and documents our Christmas Day – family, food and presents. That pretty much sums up Christmas Day for me. Oh.. and eggnog ;)
This year , i’m really trying to scrap what i want to see in my albums in years to come. And i know what I want to see in my albums now because I look back into my last seven years of albums and there are layouts that i love poring over and others, not so much. So it’s all about keeping focus.
This is one I can’t show you quite yet, but I just love the perfection of this Prima flower. So beautiful.
Speaking of aussie scrap source though, i can finally share something else i’ve quietly spent an awful lot of time on over the last few months – this week the new look Aussie went live.
We’ve got a new home page, a new logo and a whole lot of new information including this really cool tutorial page with links to heaps of technique, product and project videos that I vow to update regularly.
This project has been blood sweat tears and lots of swearing all technically packaged up in css and swf and some rejected js. But in the end the amazing adobe cs5 and i have made friends and we look forward to a long and co-operative relationship..
and in case you’d forgotten what they look like, here’s my little treasures, shot (in a good way…) in the golden dusk last night. lucky it wasn’t tonight,we’ve got storms. they’re happy little treasures anyway tonight, because their dad is finally back from far north western australia for the first time since christmas. i might even get a night off…!
back to school
i love them. i love having them home. and i love love love sending them back to school. it was a long school holidays, full of magic and watercolours and dodgeball and glitter and skateboards and poptropica and water and friends and sleepovers and beach trips.
what’s that you ask? no, no actually it wasn’t full of haircuts. clearly. but i’m just ignoring that and loving the handholding. which i think he enjoyed about as much as he would a haircut..
regular programming (whatever that is!) any time now.
i’ve started so i’ll finish…
“hey mum guess what i’m going to do.
when daddy comes back i’m going to give him some metal and he’s going to weld it into a space cruiser for me.
either that.. or i’ll make it out of clay.”
my girl. she’s soft as a feather but has a will of iron. if she wants a space cruiser, she will make one.
that wasn’t actually what i was planning to share tonight, but she just came and said and i think it’s a keeper.
…
this is what i was going to share. it’s a layout that’s cute and shows off the sassafras ‘mix and mend’ line, but i’m not really sure it captured the vastness of what we’ve accomplished, my kids and i, in the last six months.
it’s one of the myriad of reasons why my blogging has been infrequent. when you spend a minimum of an hour at bedtime reading out loud to them, and often another hour in the mornings before we got up before school, and during the holidays, when two plus hours of your ‘free’ time each day disappear into harry potters adventures, other things must clearly fall by the wayside!
so in that two plus hours a day, i’ve read, out loud to them, the whole harry potter series. all. seven. books.
it all started with alex picking up the philosopher’s stone and starting to read it to himself. he would read bits out to me, and eventually, for the first half of the first book, we alternated chapters. some he read quietly, others i read out loud to him. and then phoebe started listening, and obviously she wanted to know what happened next. and so it evolved into our bedtime reading, though with that first book i looked at the size of the subsequent books and thought.. they’ll never stay into it through all of them.
well. they did. chapter after chapter, pleading for another chapter long past bedtime, just another few pages please mum, and when a book ended alex would head straight to the bookshelf and bring me the next one.
a few months down the track and we had a hilarious session with the camera on self timer to try and capture the above photo. though we’re generally not quite so cheesy and alex isn’t always hugging Harry the Harrods Bear, it has kinda looked like that.
it was such a pleasure to get to the second half of the last book – to a point where the kids hadn’t seen the movie first, to a place where the twists and turns of the story were still a surprise (and there are a few left!). All along the way in the books there’s been ‘aha’ moments, where the movie might not have made sense until we read the details, or where jk rowling cleaned up loose ends that had been skipped, but for the most part, they knew how each story would end because of the movies that they watched (over and over again) as we’ve been reading.
