doodle do

today is a special girl's first birthday

One of my friends from work lost her baby girl a year ago today. I have no understanding of why these things happen, no answers but today I wanted to say something rather than nothing. Thinking of you Natalie and Clint. Happy Birthday to Miss Niia xx

Niia 

can you hear all that grinding and turning..?

that would be the cogs of my grey matter struggling to understand adobe photoshop.....

ugh..i am so frustrated by my lack of knowledge, photoshop is such a clever software, i just want to understand it and i want to understand it NOW!!

heh heh..this might be why my learning a foreign language ideas never got very far!! Its so annoying when the only thing stopping you is you...

a little, very simple one that is a template. ta da...

love food..hate waste...

lovefoodhatewaste.com that is. 

On the last day of the easter hols we went to Stafford. Why oh why did you and your family go to Stafford Sarah? i hear you all ask...well that would be because of my 6 year old son who loves trains, paticularly red, shiny pendalino trains which only stop at Stafford before they go straight to London..and we didnt want to go there. So we went to stafford, which is about 40 minutes on the train.

 It started a bit stressful, we thought we had the wrong ticket, so we all got off the train, Ben ran to the ticket office, ran back for the family card, ran to the ticket office, the guards waited impatiently, we all waited impatiently, the girls fretted that Daddy wouldnt get on the train, I fretted that Daddy wouldnt get on the train, Isaac fretted that he wouldnt get on the train.....

we finally did get on the train....and sat down. At which point Matilda added her own full stop to the merry event and filled her boots ( quite literally) and I had to wobble and bounce my way down two carriages, carrying a baby (far enough away from me so as not to leave a delightful yellow patch on my top...) and also my bag in search of a change room. Then change a baby on a slightly dodgy (above the toilet) change table on a very fast moving train with about 2 wipes in total. Yep....no stress!

Anyway moving on we got off at Stafford and decided we would have a walk round and came across a road show for the above website with a celebrity chef (apparently) and couple of other people promoting things like compost bins. We stopped and listened and it was shocking just how much food poeple throw away. £600 a year per family..thats insane. imagine £600 worth of food in a trolley! Its nuts! 

So now I am trying to be a bit more imaginative with what i use the food i buy for and also to be aware of just how much is being thrown away..which cant be that bad financially either and what with this sort of news..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4435339.stm

don't really want to add any more than i need to,  to the profits of that particular retailing monster

so go check out the website and get creative

:)

who said girls cant play football??

preserved...

Matilda is now 3 months old and fitting into family life really well. She is sleeping through and so I have less of those sleep-drug moments throughout the day. She is smiling and chatting and beginning to show those individual parts of who she is. I have discovered this week that she does not like to be left by herself, she is quite happy to sit for a while if she can see you or another member of the family but left by herself is not a place she is happy with. It must be odd to cope with silence when you are so used to noise! 

The other evening i was bathing her, this is something we are doing every day pretty much now. We used to do this with the other three but then had got out of the habit what with various after school things for Isaac that were making it impossible or just too late. But little Matilda needs it, needs the routine,the familiarity and the space to have a kick in some warm water and get rid of some of that 'baby cheese' they collect around their neck all day! Sometimes she goes in with the girls in the bath or Isaac but often I run the water in the baby bath and its just me and her in the bathroom. We have never had one of those bath seats for our babies, no particular reason really, but it means that you have to support her head all the time and so there is a constant contact between us. Looking into her deep blue eyes, perfect baby soft skin, eyes never moving from my face, her complete dependence and trust in me, Im struck by how these few minutes of time are so important. Moments like these are too fleeting and I found my eyes pricking with tears when i thought of how quickly this time will pass and how I might not be able to remember the beautiful little fragments of her early days. Its too easy for me to think about a billion other things as these moments too, what are the others doing? how much tidying is there to do? what will we have for tea tomorrow. What I am aware of it that I need to, have to focus on exactly where I am, drink in the moment, the feelings, the sensation and try and preserve the memory. Recently I read this comment on a blog...

“But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swingset on a summer day, ages six, four and one. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked while they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.”

Much of what i write here on this blog is to help me preserve these moments so I can remember, look back and know exactly the feeling of that wonderful baby skin, the eyes that stare so deeply into your soul with such questions behind them, the first time she discovered that kicking her legs on the change mat made her break out in bubbling baby giggles and then the sensational smile she shares with most people who say hello and how that cute baby chuckle just warms up the room. 

3 months old and 31 years.......

would you believe it...

i found a way back....to the dark side ;)

:)

a little boy who wants to ski....

and we dont have any problem with that being snow sport people but i have a feeling he may well be in for a shock because he thinks he can ski because he can ski wii...and I have told him that actual skiing is much much harder and colder than living room wii ski...which he seems to understand....

this is Isaac and grandad 'skiing'

this little monkey...

is finally putting in some effort and getting her last couple of teeth..at nearly three and a half...honestly its a bit slack really...

Mind you, all our kids have got teeth late. Isaac didnt have any teeth up until he was 1 and the earliest to gain a tooth was Maisie, i think, at 10 months! So looks like Matilda is going to be a 'gummy' for a while. Which is cute in babies but not so much for 6 year olds whose teeth are showing no real interest in wobbling or moving out the way for the big boy adult teeth. Its tough in school when all your friends are loosing their teeth (which in itself is a slightly weird sentence to write!)

So Poppy is getting some teeth and that makes her m.a.d. 

She is in a bad mood most of the time, she reminds me a bit of a cat,  sitting with its tail flicking back and forth. Just waiting.....

We love Poppy!!

Who said 'the apple doesn't fall far from the tree?'

:0)