More Apple Fun

We headed to the other side of the mountains today to a place called Bilpin - famous for delicious apples.

Unfortunately we had only gotten to a place called Kurrajong when Miss Rhianna declared she felt ill and lost her breakfast on the side of the road :: a lovely way to start the day!!!


We decided to refuel her and popped into a local cafe for pancakes and fruit.

I had a little something myself. Well it seemed rude not to.

Ten minutes further up the road we are in Bilpin and easily find the orchard to pick some apples.

After full instructions we head off into the orchard with a basket to fill.

We are thrilled to find an apple that looks just like the storybook kind.

There are plenty of apples and they are so easy to pick. They are dropping off the trees.

We are allowed to eat as many as we like as we pick our basket full.

The basket is getting full and we still have to lug it back to get weighed. Luckily we had Bill with us.

Boxed up and in the car I think of all the apple recipes I know on the way home.

I think we'll be eating apples for a while.

Sunday 27th February

Today we decided to have a day out with Van and Reynold. Reynold and Bill are business partners and Van and I are their long suffering wives who have to endure the late nights, the filthy work clothes and the endless talk about industrial chemistry.

We try to get together socially as much as possible as the kids love to spend time together and I love to go anywhere with Van as she is such a foodie.

Today we headed to Cabramatta for some Yum Cha.

Van of course, knows the best place to go. The food is plentiful and some of it is very interesting - chicken feet anybody????

Van talks through each dish as it comes out. What this woman does not know about food is not worth knowing.

The kids are great - trying almost everything.

After lunch we go for a gourmet tour around Cabramatta. Van shows me where the best places are for fruit, veg and fish.

The kids are bored stupid doing this of course and look around for anything that could be considered a playground. Unfortunately, there is only a horse statue to climb - oh well, any port in a storm.

After a quick trip to the most amazing bakery - we load up with treats and head back to Van's house to have them with a coffee. A fantastic day.

Our Very British Weekend

As it was the Queen's Birthday last weekend and I have 2 friends about to depart for the UK any day now (hi Libby and Natalie) we thought we'd have a bit of a British weekend in our little house.

Now I wouldn't be me if that didn't involve some sort of naff (look, my first English slang )

craft using a photocopier and a toilet roll. Rhianna got to colour in the Queen and no we don't mind that she looks like a third degree burns victim.

We also had a crack at the Union Jack. ( Hey, I'm rhyming again)

Then it was time for a lovely pot of tea... now this was blissful.

More craft was to follow - a "bobby" to colour and stick together. We said "gobsmacked" and "bollocks" a lot while we crafted just to get in the spirit of things.

Then yesterday on a day out we found the British Lolly Shop at Darling Harbour. The lovely ladies there let us do some taste testing before we purchased. Oh my lord....what a heavenly place.

Maybe next week we'll do Mexico.........

Coughs, Colds and Craft

It's an absolute cough and cold fest in this house at the moment. I'm still as sick as a dog, Bill is on the improve and Rhianna, whilst sick, refuses to acknowledge the discomfort and phlegm in case she should have to miss anything - like parties or trips to the playground.

The only two not suffering are my two lovely boys below.

Nothing like a bit of pottering and a bit of craft to lift your spirits (or send you mad) when you are down. I had planned these activities for Rhianna anyway. They just took a bit longer to do with one hand making paper flowers and the other hand stuck inside a tissue box.

We used magazines and odd craft papers to cut out and assemble petals which we then stuck onto pencils rolled in greeny paper to represent stems. I admit its not brain surgery but i's all I could manage craft wise when I am this sick.

I'd bought these doilies a while back, for what purpose I did not know. Sometimes I just buy things for the shape or colour or cuteness factor and I figure I'll think of something to do with them eventually. Today we dyed them using food colouring - very messy business that was.

Then strung them up garland style in the dining room

I've been looking at a few blogs lately with various ladies talking about their "creative" spaces.
They are all visions of loveliness and organisation. Unfortunately my house has no room for a seperate creative space, believe me I've tried numerous times to create one. But short of the children leaving home there is no room left at the inn for such selfish ideals as "one's own space".


But then I realised that my dining room and my kitchen are my creative space. I live in my creative space every day. I blog on the lounge, I cook in the kitchen, we eat that creation of food in the dining room. And then we clear the table to craft.

The whole area is a creative space. And for some reason that little thought cheered me up immensely. I am a simple soul.

Saturday

Some crafty fun was had today and I have to say, I love it when I find a little project that uses up all the stuff I already have. Saves my money and my patience. Today we made some little pom pom owls. We had a bit of wool lurking around from the blanket I am knitting and the rest is just felt pieces and googly eyes. They are really cute and we had a lot of fun making them.

Here are the 2 new owly friends perched on the mantlepiece.

The thing I find most annoying as a mother is that I constantly put everybody else in the family before myself. And nowhere is this more evident than in the night wear department.

Look at what I have been wearing to bed for the past 2 winters. A pair of my darling husband's old tracksuit pants and his old sailing jumper. Very warm and comfy but not the least bit feminine or dare I say it, romance inducing.

So, time for some new additions. Now, I am aware that I have bought basically the same thing that I already had, that is, big sloppy pants and a loose sweater type thing. But they are new, they were from the womens department and most importantly they are pink.

At this time of the year there is nothing I love more after a busy day then to have a lovely warm bath, pop on my (new) jammies and settle in for a night of telly and knitting.

Even our dog Finn is enjoying the Autumn weather and has taken to curling up on the lounge at night time in blissful slumber.

Hope everybody is having a lovely weekend.

Love on a Tuesday Afternoon.

Time for a bit of baking.

It's been quite a while since I've baked something new. I really needed something to inspire me and then Donna Hay appeared in the Sunday morning paper. And suddenly I felt some inspiration hit.

She had a recipe for Melting Moments. My all time favourite biscuits. I've been known to pay up to $3.50 for one of these babies in an up market cafe. And who knew they were so easy to make?

The hardest part was making sure that all the bickies are the same size so you can "glue" them together with the icing. Oh yummy, yum yum......


Of course there is nothing better to go with a lovely home baked biscuit than a cup of cold milk and piles of Milo floating on top. It says on the tin its full of iron...so its actually really, really good for you.

And then Miss R who is learning to read and write at a rapid rate presented me with a little plaque for the kitchen. Never have letter tiles been put to a better use. All this love...I'm enjoying every moment.

Our Sunday

We had a "home" weekend this past Saturday and Sunday. That means that we basically lie around in our jimmy jams all weekend doing as little as possible. We've had a busy few weeks and really needed to recharge our batteries.

I had a little smile when I got up on Sunday and saw all my knitting lined up on a shelf in the early morning sunshine. Not much more knitting to go now and I can sew it all up.


Next up we wanted some new art supplies - particularly some yummy pens for our planned art project today. We found these in the local $2 shop and look at all the yummy colours.

We spent a lot of time at this table this weekend making mandalas. They are our new art love at the moment. They gave us lots of opportunity to talk about pattern and sequence and all about colour wheels.

Here are some of the mandalas we made. It really was so much fun - very meditative and they really look colourful when we put them all together. We were stupidly happy with them.

Hope you all got up to a little bit more than us.

A Few New Loves

Don't you just love it when someone gives you a gift for no reason. Well, I do. Yesterday one of my lovely new friends, Emma surprised me with this card making tool (on the right). She then further surprised me by lending me this fantastic book all about vinegar and its wonderful uses.

You see she sometimes reads my blog and thought this was something I might be interested in reading. Umm... yes please. Thanks Emma. I wish there were more people like you in the world and that I was one of them.

Going through my scrapbook stash the other day, I started to feel mighty guilty about the amount of scrapbooking supplies I have for somebody who has not produced a layout in about 6 months.

So I got to work. These two pages are in their early stages but I felt a great relief that I can again say with pride "Yes, I scrap."

Do you remember what it's like to fall in love? The thrill of seeing your beloved for the very first tim? well, I felt it all again today - at the newsagents.

I am a magazineaholic and these, dear readers are my new drug of choice. Peppermint and Frankie. Another blogger got me onto these 2 magazines and I am loving them. If you love your craft with a good deal of kitsch thrown in - have a look at these next time you are at the shops.

And in the mail today, some welcome junk mail. My new Cath Kidson magazine from the UK. I am having a bit of a moment lately with everything British - (think tea and toast and woolly cardigans). I just applied for this online and a few weeks later here it is. All things Cath Kidson - very drool worthy over a cup of Earl Grey.


Rhianna decided to make some flags with chalk in the backyard. One was an Australian flag. (Rhianna actually wrote this part of today's post herself)

Hope everybody had a good hump day.

Love Padlock Lookout

A couple of years ago I read about a place called Pecs in Hungary where lovers began to clamp padlocks to a wrought iron fence in the main square of the city as a symbol of committment to one another. This tradition has now been replicated in other cities over the world. I thought it was such a cute custom.



Last year Bill and I celebrated 10 years of marriage and I had my own padlock engraved with our names and date of marriage. But where to put it??????

Hungary was obviously out of the question. So I presented it to him at our favourite lookout walk at Glenbrook. It's a lovely bushwalk of around 20 minutes and then you come out into a clearing with a view all the way back to the Sydney CBD. We locked our padlock onto the fence in July last year. Today we decided to pay our padlock a visit.

The troops get organised

Here is our padlock. It's only been attached to the fence for about 9 months and already its quite weathered. After we attached it last July we threw the keys over the edge of the lookout into the bush. I said to Bill "And there it will stay forever." And he replied "Forever, or until the vandals hack it off." Well, we are happy to report it is still there. And we had an added little surprise today......

..someone else has followed our lead and now there are 2 padlocks on the fence. Hello to Melissa Gilbert and her beau. I was so excited to see another padlock I screamed. I've started a tradition. Me, little old me, has started a tradition of love in my little suburb. I was so chuffed.

I'm now hoping to see more whenever I go.

The Little Things

It really is the little things in life that bring you the most happiness. Wondering around the house this morning I found these little pockets of happiness around my home and I couldn't helping smiling as I saw them.

Last night my husband brought me home a bunch of flowers, for no particular reason but it was Rhianna who opened the door to let him in. Of course being a woman in training she assumed they were for her. "Oh Daddy, you bought me flowers. It's the very first time you've ever bought me flowers. You usually just buy them for Mummy. Thank you so much."

Bill didn't have the heart to correct her. So when I woke up this morning and saw them, I really did smile.

Then when doing a tidy of the lounge room I found lion and puppy sitting, waiting patiently for the return of their Mumma from school.


And lastly I had a proper look at the little Bingo bags my Mum has made for our school fete. You really are a treasure Mum.

I hope you all find something to smile at today. Have a great weekend everybody.