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Cybèle de Jong
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beautiful mittens! Hope you get some result with the respite care - good luck.
...recharging...
...by knitting, more mittens (could be that there's a slight obsession going on here!) I even like how they look in-side-out and some bunnies in Orkney Angoras St magnus yarn, (50% angora, 50% lambswool) a truly delicious yarn from lovely people ...and by listening (and...
So well said! That's exactly what parenting is, isn't it - enjoying what's been, feeling proud and looking forward to the future.
Happy birthday to your girls!
Indulge Me
Today is the first day that I am the mother of three adults. My. Babies. Are. Eighteen. EIGHTEEN! Not possible. They were just. . . and But there you have it. What mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles will tell you is true. It goes by in the blink ...
Sat here for half an hour trying to think what to say. And nothing sounds right. I just want you to know I'm thinking of you and wishing I could do something to make things better for you. Sending {hugs}.
Clarity, and fear.
What follows below began as a response to a comment about me that I read on Twitter last night, but then I decided I didn't want to engage with the commenter that far. But some of what I wrote does have a place here so, with some editing, I'm going to publish. My post traumatic stress disorder...
Allison, what a beautiful place! I spotted on one of your newsletters that you were doing it up, and I love the way you've done it - very stylish. Wishing you many happy and succesful years there!
The Young and the Tireless
Yes, that would be the title that would describe this week. Every moment has been full of movement and progress. I know at the end of it I'll just crash into the floor. We spent much the last week in PA for a family wedding, thus the blog silence, then we came back into town to celebrate Jame...
Julie, I heard a trailer for a BBC Radio 4 programme that made me think of you and I thought you might find it interesting: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0128hsj Wanted to send it as an email but can't find a contact address on your page!
my little helper
Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of the wonderfully wise comments on the previous post. I suppose I was looking for a little reassurance that my parental compass wasn't completely out of whack! It is incredibly reassuring and heartening that so many people feel the same way about raising ...
Two years ago someone made chocolate and beetroot cake for a cake sale at work. I don't like beetroot at all and was quite sceptical, but it was delicious - you can't tell the beetroot is there at all. Worth making!
spring clean up
We've had 3 back-to-back days of spring sunshine here. It's lovely how a bit of blue sky over your head and sunshine on your face can make you feel so much more energetic and positive and I'm suddenly feeling the need to get my fingers in the dirt and get the garden ready for veggie growing agai...
This so could be my 8 year old. And me, trying not to laugh.
You'd think they'd have outgrown tantrums by now, wouldn't you. They're definitely a lot less frequent, only making an appearance when he's really tired.
it's hard to be the mean mommy
Today I had some Christmas shopping to do, so I picked up Monkey Boy from kindergarten and we headed off to the mall. Now, I would normally shop without MB, but since his kindy is only 1/2 day that means he gets out a 11:15am. And the mall doesn't open till 10am....which doesn't leave me enough ...
Happy birthday Amy! My eldest is 11 too and it's a lovely age (although I can sympathise with the madness - did the sleepover thing here too...)
Happy birthday to Toby too.
Birthday celebrations all around
Thanks again for all of the kind comments on my anniversary giveaway post, I really appreciate them. The good old random number generator has been set in motion again and has turned up number 426 which is a comment from Peggy Sue: How sweet of you to do a giveaway. I haven't a snowbal...
I don't know how you find the time to knit all those! They're very sweet.
giveaway time
At the beginning of September I started my 5th year of blogging and so I thought I'd celebrate with a little giveaway. To take part all you need to do is leave a comment below and I'll draw one winner on Wednesday October 6th. The winner can then choose one of my latest batch of animals to have ...
Nice to see some lunchbox photos - I do get stuck in a rut with ours and it doesn't help that both my two need a bit of encouragement to eat unusual things. Often half the lunchbox will come back uneaten (the other day I made a lovely cheese/salad sandwich on lovely bread, came back uneaten because 'it looked horrible', such a waste!) so now we have a new rule at home, that any uneaten/untouched items must be eaten when they come home from school before we start eating anything else. Mean maybe, but I'm fed up with spending time thinking up nice things, which I know they'd like if they just gave it a try! (I sometimes feel they grab the chance of me not being there to just reject food that I'd make them eat if I was there, if that makes sense!). And I really really don't like the waste. They get the odd cooked lunch (which aren't bad at all at our schools) but it is so much cheaper to make up a lunchbox (or it would be if they didn't waste so much!)
Lunch bunch
School's back in session and I'm back to making lunches for the small men, neither of whom care much for the school lunch choices. So I try to make a fun, healthy lunch for each of them- especially for Little Man since he is starting to eat a lot more (his appetite makes me scared for the teen ye...
O Julie, it can't be easy. I admire you a lot - specially the way you manage to make time for Amy too. I hope the holidays wasn't all hard work and that Toby soon settles down now there is more of a routine again. Enjoy your 'me time'.
return to routine
With the children back at school there is sweet relief in the air today, which is a quiet and peaceful day full of the promise of a little time for knitting. Toby has been quite impossible over the last few weeks with many, many raging tantrums, hurting both himself and us. They've been frighten...
My 8 year old did the same yesterday - only he banged his head on a window - or so he says! Not sure how you can get a cut from a glass window so I suspect he did it and didn't notice till his friend pointed out that his head was bleeding. Only a small cut but boy, do head wounds bleed dramatically!
two recent photos
A nasty summer cold has me in its grip, so I'm just gonna throw a couple of photos up and hope they make for a post! Monkey Boy loves makeup and here he has given himself 'extra dark brows'.... Little Man was playing at a friend's house and banged his head on a brick fireplace surround. A...
I used your voucher idea last year with my two children for the summer holidays. I work from home and have 4 weeks of juggling children home fulltime and a job, so rather than just a voucher, our ones are 'chores in exchange for a treat'. They really enjoyed it last year and asked me last week if we'd do them again this year. My eldest (11) sat down on Sunday night and we came up with chores and treat and matched them up, and she designed the vouchers and cut them out. The funny thing is that some of the 'chores' are not chores in their eyes at all. One of them was that I make a shopping list and we go to the supermarket and they do my shopping, while I stay in the cafe and knit (so it's a treat for me too...). The treat will be that we stay there for breakfast, something they've wanted to do for a while. But my eldest jumped up and down at the chance to do the shopping without me being there!
Hope you have a good break Julie, with lots of nice weather so you can all go outside.
Summer holiday prep
Well, here we are again, on the cusp of the long, long, long summer break. Surely it wasn't a year since the last one - it certainly doesn't seem like it! We're staying at home again for the duration, as a holiday away with Toby is just out of the question. So poor old Amy is feeling a bit hard...
We have doggie (who really is a rabbit) and Bear. Doggie was given to us by I's uncle and he still stays in her bed at night. He's completely fallen apart, totally unrecognisable, but he's still doggie. Bear was the cuddly toy that I. bought as a present for N. before he was born. He's in a much better state than doggie, but goes everywhere still. N. would have trouble going to sleep without him.
Doggie once went for a 'swim' in the moat of a German castle and was heroically rescued by my dad. Bear has been left on a bus, went missing at nursery for a week and was even left behind at my mum's house and was lost for 6 or 7 weeks (although she insisted that he had gone missing at my dad's house! that was, until she found him). When he was returned to us, N. rejected him for a week or so as he smelt of my mum's house.
I myself had a cuddly hare when I was growing up and if N. is feeling very sad and Bear is not available, Hare-hare as I called him, will come to the rescue.
love thursday: lit-tel blankie
this is Monkey Boy and his "lit-tel blankie" (little blanket) MB *loves* his lit-tel blankie- when he was small he would carry it all around the house, his finger hooked through the tag on one corner. Eventually the tag tore loose from the edge of the blanket so I had to sew it back on. It's...
I have one more year at our local primary school before N will move onto middle school. I have been at that school at least once a week for the past 7 years. Although I'm really proud of the kids and how they're growing up, it will be very odd to leave that phase behind. Middle school is so much like 'secondary school', with different teachers, different classrooms for different lessons, and they grow up so quickly there. I've already gone past the stage where you say you have 'small children' but by next year I'll have two children rapidly heading towards teenagers!
last day of preschool
Oh dear....I no longer have a preschooler in the house. Monkey Boy's last day of preschool has come and gone and I'm torn between being glad he'll be at the same school as Little Man next year, and being sad that MB will no longer be a 'little kid'. We've been so happy at this preschool- it's a ...
I love the cherry!
And the decorating continues....
Decorating our "new" house has been a process. I don't know that I can really refer to it as our new house anymore, as we've lived here for over two years. But much of it is still undecorated. We've only painted three rooms, which means that every other wall is still builder-beige. And we ha...
They look great - very professional! My breadmaker manual has a recipe for them too and like you, I always thought they were a lot of work. Must give them a try - I have an 8 year old bagel monster here...
::domestic:: homemade bagels
Monkey Boy had some little friends over for a playdate yesterday afternoon, which meant I had some uninterrupted time in the kitchen (well, minus the occasional preschooler snack-raiding party). It was a perfect day for some baking so I decided to try my hand at making bagels. I don't know why,...
I've never heard of saltines - what are they? And I think boys of that age just eat non stop. I remember N. about a year ago saying 'the problem is mamma, that I'm just always hungry'. He's been known to eat a slice of toast, a bowl of porridge, followed by some Weetabix for breakfast. He's starving when he comes home from school and has to have a plate with snacks. His school lunch bag comes home clean, however much I put in there. I swear he eats more than I do!
creative cook
Little Man has quite the appetite: every day after school he immediately asks for a snack and wolfs down whatever I come up with so quickly that I'm afraid to get my hands too close to his face for fear of losing a digit! Last week I fed him some milk and cookies, but he complained that he was ...
Someone else who reads Susan Hill! Her early books are my favourites, and her Magic Apple Tree is lovely (part cookbook, part autobiography). She has also written some teenage fiction, that according to my partner's 15 year old, was very good.
delight
Delight by JB Priestley is itself a delight. Some of his delights such as trying new mixes of tobacco and smoking a pipe in the bath in the morning may appear dated now, but they aren't that far removed from trying new wines and drinking a glass of champagne in the bath, both of which would a...
Love the mug! (I've got a thing for mugs - I buy far more than I really need)
morning routine
My two are a bit older than your James (10 and 7) but treats when they're ill are lying on the sofa wrapped in their duvet, watching telly all day and getting a magazine to read. O and of course ice lollies or ice cream, which even when they're ill goes down well!
More Solid Colors
I have added several more colors to the Simply Sock Yarn lineup, including the red many of you have been asking for. Cherry Red is on the blue side of red, thus the name. I'm considering adding a more "tomato red" as well, which would be on the orange side. But I just don't know if it'...
He's getting so big, specially in that photo where he's talking to his friend.
My son's at a school where there are 50 kids or so in total... They have joint year groups (he's a year 3 - which is 7 and 8 year olds) as the classes would be too small - 23 in his class in total. I don't know what teachers would do without all the parental help they get.
Hope he enjoyed his first day back - my two have been back for almost a week and are loving it.
first day of school for Little Man
First day of school so soon! I can't believe it! We had a wonderful summer, capped off with our annual Labor Day block party (photos here). We had to wake up at the a$$-crack of dawn for the first day...thank goodness Little Man has always been an early riser. He must have gotten that from my D...
I am way behind on blog reading thanks to two weeks away, but have just caught up on your blog and had to say, that skirt is just great and it is just perfect for you. I love the stuff you're sewing. Have you seen Ottobre Woman? I think you'd like their stuff too.
Nice to see a photo of JR and that new granddaughter, well, what can I say - she's perfect! Hope mother and baby are doing well.
What's new for Fall fashion? What MUST you have in...
What's new for Fall fashion? What MUST you have in your closet? Every day a new catalog arrives, and I wonder which of The Most Important Items I can make for myself. Tweed and Boucle' Jackets are important, as they are most years, it seems. ( a few days ago,I watched the movie "Coco Chanel" an...
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