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pashley poppy

I'm very excited to be enjoying this incredible spring weather on my **shiny new pashley poppy.. with my little sausolito on the back.

We sing all the jack black songs from yo gabba gabba whilst we're whizzing along the clifftop. It's beautiful.. and I wonder if she'll remember this when she's older..?
** it's not actually that shiny any more since I dropped it once onto the car of a local estate agent, and recently down the side of a poor driver's car. Luckily the damage rubbed off... and I'm determined to practice my parking.

party time

we've just had chicken pox with a flu chaser

but this side of things was fun - sausolito very carefully made a party for her toys

the toys each had their own little dance mats. she had hers at the front and they did routines to 'Om Shanti Om'. It's her third birthday on Sunday, her party is tomorrow. It's smaller than planned due to the pox, but.. we're all quite excited anyway.

shane waltener

shane waltener
makes beautiful installations and sculptures

found via montmarte's sketchbook

duplicate-blogged here

single crochet

how very exciting

I found this via id textile blog

I love this crochet and have wanted a thousand times to be able to crochet words, but harumpfh, I never seem to find time to learn

In the meantime, the work will be available here, you can sign up to be notified when it re-opens or why not leave a message on her beautiful blog, which is here

I'm cross-posting this. I have two blogs and can't decide which one I want

bunting and jack black

Christmas was a bit tough this year with our little one's health. So I haven't been able to work on any big projects... except all this bunting. It's everywhere now, hanging from lamps, over doors, chairs, pictures, dangling from ceilings, like a prettily coloured spider's nest.

My clients have been using them for dinner parties, birthday parties, and general prettification. I frequently supply props for their table settings and so on, so this has been an addition which they've happily used to adorn all variety of surfaces

And we'll just have to try and fight our way through this constantly growing jungle of bunty bubble bunting every day.

Currently, sausolito calls herself 'Jack Black Girl'. After seeing him on Yo Gabba Gabba, he's her God and after seeing that, who wouldn't agree..?

food...

Somehow today I rather fortuitously found my way to the nonchalantmom blog and came across her piece about children's food intolerances. When my daughter was born she was intolerant to every major food group. Intolerant versus allergic, for us, means that our daughter would pass out for the day, have a (ridiculousy) trotty botty every 15 mins, have giant blisters on her bottom, be sick, be in pain, be bloated.. the list goes on. We were unable to get anyone to help us for nearly a year. By this time she was unconscious (although not anaphylactic), had refused milk and food for nearly a week, she lost a huge amount of weight and we were seriously worried. We couldn't get help because I was 'an older mum' so my judgement was questioned. God knows why. We were then ripped off by a private doctor who charged lots and made her worse.

So in our stressed-out and sleep-deprived state, we opted for the expensive decision that I wouldn't return to work but instead would watch, listen, read and learn as much as I could about my daughter and her rather peculiar and complicated digestive system! So another year or so followed of her and I at home, cooking, being ill, testing, watching, comforting...
Now she's nearly three and is through most of it. So these photos of her having chocolate ice cream this summer, warm my heart enormously. I now chat with a few people who have simimlar experiences, which is fantastic. It can be very isolating as you are just not having the same time as other new mums and in my experience, I was told not to trust my isntincts. In fact, my instincts were incredible and now I can tell by looking at her face that there might be stormclouds a-brewing... In our house, it seems quite unanimous that I'm pretty much always right... well, when I say unanimous... I definitely agree with me..

Thanks to nonchalontmom