catch up from April

I had the children for a few hours while Mummy worked, Emily is being the proper hostess and giving her Mummy a cup of tea when she came to collect them....I can't believe how quickly she is growing - it seems such a little while ago that she was just learning to walk, and now she has just had her fifth birthday.                                                                                                                                                                    

Joshua is showing her the airplane he made out of my very old Lego.....they always get this out when they get this out when they come to  play.   He is very clever at making up the Lego, and has even been onto the Lego website and made up things from that with the kits that he has.  Daddy has loaded pictures onto the Lego site of the things Joshua has made. 

May is nearly with us..........!

May is nearly with us and I haven't blogged for ages.......we have been busy, have had more birthdays, dreadful colds, done some gardening, cleared the greenhous - you know all the usual busy household things.

We spent a day at Polsden Lacey  - lovely National Trust property on the North downs. The weather was superb - we walked round all the gardens and lawns and woodland - found loads and loads of cowslips -n ot seen thes growing wild since I was a young woman - they apparently like the chalk soil of the downs.  The house is worth a visit too - it s not like the usual NT property where you are kept behind ropes and can only view from a distance - here you can wander round the furniture sit on the armchairs, wind up the gramophone, pick up hte books and magazines laying around and even have a game of billiards in thebilliard room, while listening to someone playnig the lovely old Steinway piano.

I have been sewing still and have got stuck on how to quilt a Maple leaf quilt top......I will work something out I know, but in the meantime I have made a couple of table mats and  have been using some of my stash to make a mock up of a quilt for my youngest daughter - she wants one in pinks this time.  Her new bedroom is nearly finished - just another coat of paint on the walls and the raidator installed and a carpet on the floor and she and her DH will move in there.  I made her other quilt nearly 10 years ago in blues and although it is still on her bed and is still good she wants a change! 

I have had a bowl of fruit standing on the green and cream mat and hadn't realised that there was an imprint of the bowl on it!  Ah well it does show that we use what I make.

I have also done the next 'round' on the stay-at-home Round Robin quilt......pictures at a later date .......promise!

Busy days

Gosh where has this week gone? I know I have been reasonably busy,  Sewing all day Wednesday -  Joshua's, family birthday party on Wednesday -  Supermarket shopping Friday plus the dreaded h/w (don't like to mention that here! so will whisper it - housework) , oh and Sarah came and cut my hair..........hooray! (I was begining to look like shaggy sheep ) and all day yesterday I was at the first lace day of the year........lovely day.......lots of folk I know and my special lacemaking friends to gossip with all day.

I have some photo's of Joshua's birthday party, when I down load them from my camera I will show them here, but no photo's of yesterdays outing - somehow I just forgot to take any.  There I have done them. The orange thing is another Lego cake made to eat at home.

Brian is gradually improving - thank goodness, but his leg and arm are still very weak, and his leg collapses under him sometimes.  He says he has to think about how he puts his foot to the ground before taking a step!  He has started doing exercises to strengthen the muscles and is swimming early every morning again.  I expect it will take some time to get back to normal - after all he was out of action and doped up to the eyebrows for over two months altogether.  I am finding it difficult to allow him to take over the reins again - I have done his chores as well as mine all the time he was ill.

He had a good day out with our sons yesterday - unfortunately Chelsea lost the first game at home for many many months..... but they had a good day any way.  Kevin has told me today that Dad had trouble walking from the car to the ground as they had to park a long way from the entrance and that he was getting cross with himself - his strength will come back slowly we have been told by the Doc. provided he does as he is told and excercises!

Birthdays

Although his birthday isn't till Thursday, Joshua had a party yesterday afternoon.  He shared the party with another 7 year old also named Joshua - Mummies then can share the cost! They went to a local play area called Little Angels.  It is like a giant climing frame made with metal rods (scaffold?) commando nets, rope walkways, bouncy castle like stuff, tubes, a plastic ball pit,  shutes and a massive slide. great fun if you are between 3 and 12.  After the fun they had chicken and chips in a basket and plenty of soft drinks.
Grown ups are not allowed on to the equipment unless it is to help a little one get up and down the steep steps and commando nets but I went on it.......hehe.......I just love slides and this one was superb! long and bumpy! My son-in-law was amazed that I had done this and I got away with it because I made Emily (4) take me to it and go down with me.......

Joshua was telling me the other day that he had lost anpther tooth and this photo shows that it was a bottom one - his two new top ones are growing well.  Don't they look funny when they have a gap in the front - we had been teasing him over Christmas about the top  gap but the teeth have grown so quickly.

Mummy Sarah made the cake - Joshua is obsessed with Lego so of course his cake had to be a lego brick! he loved it. I didn't get any as it was all eaten by the children but Sarah is making another identical for Thursday afternoon's tea, so we shall go and have some then.

Although I haven't been posting lately I have been busy,one of the quilts shown is now finished and the other is well on it's way. 

The bag I made in a few days and has been on it's first outing, I made the handles a lot longer than they are now and found that they were too long so I have altered them - I can still get them over my shoulder, so I am happy about that!

These little pin cushions have been mad using paint palets, circles of fabric, wadding and a hot glue gun! they are for friends of mine as pressies.

I have done quite a lot of sewing over the last couple of months as my DH has been so very poorly and has done nothing but sleep - he missed christmas totally as well as the New year celebrations - he is now on the mend but has to watch what he is doing as being inactive for so long has meant that he has lost o lot of strength .

Updating - again!

We have had the snow that most of the country has had - when I last  measured the depth with a metal rule it was 9" deep.  It has been very cold but not as cold as Scotland has had it, and I don't like it -can it all go away soon - please?  The icicles that have formed from the gutters on the conservatory are amazing! sooooo long!  Our conservatory is heated by a radiator on the house wall and the roof above gets warm - so the snow has melted there and the melt water has run down and icicles have grown and grown and grown!  it has looked very pretty but I have now had enough of it!

I have been house bound as our road was impassable, not a car has been moved for a week - now people are finding that the main roads are clear and they have no excuseto stay home any longer - so the weekend saw lot of drive clearing and car cleaning.  This last picture shows the car on Tuesday evening  last week - just an inch or so of snow but by the morning you couldn't see the car at all - just a heap of snow!

My grandaughter wanted to borrow my car to day so I told her that she would have to dig it off the drive first - so she and her Mum and Auntie did just that - I had already cleared enough snow of the drive to enable them to get to the car........well I had to get out to post birthday cards for friends and rellies and didn't want to fall over before I had begun my adventure to the post box at the end of the road.....!

I don't know if we had fairies in the garden early in the morning when this picture was taken or if it was just the reflection of the flash on snow flakes, but as you cansee the snow was quite deep at this early hour and it continued snowing all day!  How my sister in law who lives in Montreal Canada cope's with snow for nearly 6 months of the year I don't know - I don't think I could.

I know that the children have all been having loads of fun,  building snowmen, making snow angels, toboganing down slopes in the park and helping Dad making an igoloo because they have had time off school - but yesterday they had to go back to  their classrooms.  I believe that every school in our town was closed.

Snow!

Well here it is - the first snow of the winter.......it had been -5c over night,  cold enough for me to put another quilt on the bed and have a hotwater bottle to cuddle. It was very frosty and we had to scrape the windows on the car before we could go and collect our grandaughter to take her to school.  It only started snowing half way through the morning and we didn't think it would settle - but it looks as though it may - the temperature at the moment is -1c (30f) so unless it gets warmer this afternoon we will have this stuff over night!  I  just feel sorry for a friend of mine who is moving house to day!  but I suppose it is no worse than our move in the pouring rain a few years ago.