Despite the fact that I have, ah, about zero time to ever sit down and read,

 I remain a die hard book junkie.

At one stage last year I thought maybe the Kindle

 would work for me................but no.

 Not at all.

I need my book to be a book. Exactly.

This is what's on offer at the moment.

"Dinner A Love Story"  I've had a while, purchasing after I stumbled upon this blog one night.

The idea of a family with two young children and two working parents who are able to put nutritious home-made meals on the table every single night (with enthusiasm, no less) intrigued me beyond  belief.

As with most of my books, especially cook books, I go back and forth to it, taking snippets from it here and there. A good book to remind you of the importance of eating together, the importance of food and family.

"Screen Doors and Sweet Tea" was a Christmas gift, and feeds my fascination with Southern culture.

"Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day" I have had for a good two years and never made a single loaf of bread. But there's only so many years of your life you can bare the absolute rubbish that is supermarket bread, and I think the time has come. The master recipe requires Vital Wheat Gluten which, for the life of me I could only find online (seriously, if you can get that stuff at  the local IGA I'll be so embarassed that I went and purchased online) so I await the arrival of that after which I plan to tackle to my first loaf.

Will keep you posted.

I know we're half way through January and there are

 Easter eggs in the shops and all (excuse me?) but I meant to post 

this just after Christmas and it got missed.

And there's no way I can let these babies get missed.

My nieces customized these shoes for me for Christmas.

Eat your heart out Christian Louboutin,

 these shoes are the bomb and I love them so much!

Kills me that they are about a size too small.

I can get them on but walking in them is out of the question.

Totally cements in my head that you CANNOT GO WRONG 

with handmade gifts................ and also that too much glitter is
 NEVER ENOUGH.

I very rarely buy flowers for the house, it seems very extravagant when money is tight.

Yesterday at the supermarket though we nabbed three bunches of roses at $2 a bunch.

Yay!

We love having these beauties in the house, Ruby has a white bunch in her room

 and, seriously, she could not be happier.

She talks to them ('it helps them be healthy' she told me)

 and declared she would change the water daily for them, which she did today.

Clary, also happy, as now he has a place to park his lego motorbike while sitting at the table.

If you're in Australia, you don't need me to tell you how hot

 it's been lately.

Today was a welcome reprieve from the heat, just in time

 for this household I tell you.

The weekend was blistering!

Extreme heat and velcro kids like mine almost always

 results in narky mum.

Yes.

The heat knocked me flat on Saturday which saw the tv being on for a lot of  the day.

That, in turn, lead to me feeling extremely guilty and all 'I'm such a bad mum' by Saturday night.

I knew the next day had to be different so I came up with a couple of activities for the kids and while talking about what we would do with our day at breakfast on Sunday we randomly decided we would make up a little activity board to keep us on track.

I used a recipe book holder I was given for Christmas to put it on,

 and used the box the book holder came out of for our board.

Just cut the box up and wacked some rubber bands around it to hold the pictures on.

We planned to do some rock painting, as well as make some wind sock thingies.

Clary added on the lego picture (can you say 'obsessed with lego'?)

I don't have pictures of the whole process, but I'll give you what I've got.

We had heaps of cans so gathered a few of them up and grabbed the only spray paint we had, colours a bit blah, but we were making do.

First up I thought I would spray paint with the cans sitting on newspaper but then I figured it would work better with the cans perched on these bamboo garden stakes, like so.

                                     

 Sprayed them up and left them in the sun to dry.

 Did I mention the heat?

 They dried in a nanosecond (or pretty close to, anyway)

Then we moved inside

 (I'd like to be able to say we moved inside

 to the cool but the house was like an oven), 

to paint some more, by hand.

Clarys' tree, below.

After the paint was all dried (which it well and truly had because a day passed before we got back to this) we dived into the ribbon/ lace stash 

and picked out what we wanted to add and glued these to the

 inside of the cans with the hot glue gun.

We managed to finish a couple of tin can wind socks which are good for hanging in trees in the yard

or hanging onto while twirling around in the yard. Tutu wearing is 

optional for this, Ruby already had hers on.

Nothing that's going to make the pages of a design mag, but perfect for occupying kids on holidays :)

And it looks like playing with dolls has been added to the list.

 Remember Tiddly Winks?

We scavenged these Tiddly Winks tokens from some friends who were having a clean out and throwing them.

My husband marked out this target in our shed, and, I kid you not, we have gotten days of entertainment out of this.

 Naturally the kids are always much happier
 when they're winning, and a fair

 amount of cheating goes down in that shed.

But when someone flips their first '100', the look on their face makes
 you forget about all the grizzling that went on when
 they couldn't even get a token flicked into the square.

Happy days.

 I have a book which is part scrapbook and part sketch book, a book for this and that.

I use it just to play around in. To practice sketching in. To glue bits and bobs into..

I used to pull it out mainly at night, or any other time when the kids weren't around.

But I'm trying to make a point of doing things in it when the kids are around, getting them to get their own books out and have a bit of a dabble.

Most of these pages aren't finished, some have been added to since I took these pictures just a few days ago.

Some of them I'm not that happy with.

Some pages I've walked away from. I'm not sure if I'll go back to some of them.

I got very frustrated

 with this one below. Couldn't get the arms happening and I lost count of how many times I did her face over before leaving her without any face at all.

This one progressed and still awaits some watercolour.

But I want to teach Ruby and Clary that it just doesn't matter if the things we do don't always turn out the way we want them to.

Sometimes they'll turn out better, and sometimes you have to learn to make peace with the way they are and move on. 

Turn the page.

You can come back to it later.

Or not.

(this post would have made it to you earlier but I have been having no end of browser problems, using Chrome now which seems to be better)

Frozen grapes and jigsaws. If you haven't tried frozen grapes as a summer treat yet you should give them a go. My kids love them and so do I. Frozen raspberries are good also.
I am not much of a fan of jigsaws but I am a fan of doing jigsaws with my son. He quite enjoys them :)

Hot days. Simple food. Holidays.