Five things

Five things I liked last week.....

• Power walking
• Zumba class
• Ab crunching
• Glastonbury on the beeb
• My itouch
• Downloading apps and music.
• The primary school district athletics meet
• Demonstrating batik to my class

Five Things I disliked last week.....

• The hot weather
• Sinus headache from the hot weather and high pollen count.
• The cricket tournament being cancelled because of the rain.
• The teen eating all the Granola.
• My dad getting badly bruised falling off a ladder (damned proud pensioners not asking for help)
• No crafting

So there you go...that was my week.  I'm now hoping it is not too hot (or wet) for the on-road cycling course I'm holding next week.....fingers crossed x.

23

Last week Nige and I celebrated 23 years of married life.....wow!  it seems like only yesterday I was walking down that aisle.

.........And he still makes me laugh!

oxo



Teens @ play

Don't you just love the teenage years of your children?  *choke...splutter....spews tea over keyboard*  Hmmm, yes they do have their moments, some good and well quite frankly quite a lot of them bad. 

Anyone with teenagers sitting their GCSE's at the moment will know all about the bad moments.  Two exams and one week to go before I can let out the teen from his room and enter into civil conversation without having my head bitten off.  To be fair maybe he didn't want his photo taken yesterday while he was trying to have some down time on his x-box.....but still it would be nice to greet him good day and get the same cheerful response in return.  And what is it about the sleeping?  How can you have over ten hours of sleep and still want more?

So it's great to revisit memories of a fun day out last summer.  Robert, Archie and his sister Cherry behaving....well like kids really.  It doesn't matter how old you are or how old you think you are you are never to old to paddle and then run screaming from a big wave.

 

Stripes

I have really got the beach bug this week.  Another seaside layout inspired by this weeks photo recipe over on the Chicken Soup blog.

Don't you love beach huts, deckchairs and seaside rock....all things stripy....typical British seaside memories.... 

Windmills spinning in the wind....

Sea spray and sandy sandwhiches.....takes me back to those fun family holidays.

Why I hate the Isle of Wight....

As Sian wants us to share a few stories with you on her Storytelling Sunday's, I thought I would share the story of why I hate the Isle of Wight....

Many years ago when I was about 10 years of age I took a trip to the Isle of Wight with my school.  We had a fantastic week, visited lots of places but the thing that I enjoyed the most was finding our own fossils on the beach.

Fast forward 30 odd years and I am telling Nigel what a wonderful place the Isle of Wight (IOW) is and how I want to go fossil hunting like i did as a child with Robert, who was only a toddler.

We drive down to Portsmouth when the first of our bad luck happens....the car stopped and wont start.  We have a ferry to catch so we phoned the RAC who come out and take us to a garage.  They patch us up but say 'Try not to turn the engine off until you get to your destination'.  The sign as we head onto the ferry reads, 'Turn off your engine'....and we are first on so we are also the first off....great!

We do managed to get to our cottage on the IOW but the car isn't quite right so we take it to another garage where they have to keep it for three days.  'That's OK, we can use the bus, we are used to using the buses at home'.....we find out three days before we arrived the summer timetable swapped to the winter timetable....the buses are practically not existent out in the country.

But our cottage is nice, it looks out onto a field of cows, the cottage is very quaint, it has low ceilings and beams.........all the better to hear the mice (who apparently wear clogs in the IOW) scurry around all night.....I don't like mice.  One comes to welcome us by coming down the chimney one night.

Never mind, lets go to the beach, look at the fossilised dinosaur footprints.  The footpath has not been used for a looonnng time, we fight our way down to the beach, avoiding the brambles with bucket, spade, toddler and buggy.

The beach is lovely, the tide is in so no dinosaur footprints today.  let's take Robert for a paddle.  Good job we remembered his wellies as he won't touch the sand or sea with his bare feet.  Whoops!  That wave came in quick, it fills up Robert's wellies....he doesn't like this anymore.  He starts to cry so we fight our way back UP the footpath....with wellies, buggy, bucket, spade and crying toddler.

And that's why I don't like the Isle of Wight.

Awww! Look at Roberts little laughing face in the photo's above.  Got the old wellies on this time.  Looking for fishes in the rock pools......don't quite know what happened next but he just carried on walking.  Splash!  Maybe he thought he could walk on water.....he wasn't laughing after that. 

Guess what.....yep!  it was the same holiday:)

I really enjoyed making this layout....well I chuckled to myself while making it, thinking of Robert up to his waist in water.  However putting the layout together was a bit of a nightmare.  Everything just seemed to go wrong.  Finally when i had managed to put it together it was lacking something in the left hand corner.  I remembered some October Afternoon seaside cards I have been using recently, popped it on then layered a die cut scalloped circle with an 'R' for Robert over the top.  Now the layout is one of my favourites......funny how that happens sometimes:)

It's offical....

I'm vintage!  After dressing myself today I realised I looked like a 80's fashion throwback.  Bright stripy square shaped t-shirt, cropped fitted trousers, curly (though now not permed) hair, white shoes, white handbag.  All I needed was the white button earrings. Vintage or fashionable?  Shall we say, for the sake of my dignity fashionable?

Look....even the label says vintage so it must be true.

Anyway, this week has been half term but have I been crafting?  Nah, not a bit.  I get like that sometimes, just don't have the mojo at the moment.  BUT I have been gardening and enjoying the sun.  So this week I have been enjoying:

Foxgloves, Nemisha and Cosmos flowers.

Nigel made a solitary bee house.....for bees who are known as Beely no mates (get it?)

Only took a year to make.....

Sitting really still and watching the young Blue Tits.  This one made me laugh because a big bee buzzed passed and made him jump.....ahhh.

Wearing my sun hat.

Thank goodness for fake tan....and pretty pink sandles.

That's it for this week, back to school tomorrow for me, a maths exam for Rob and the sun has dissapeared....again.

Dig U

Over on UKS, one of my team mates Amy gave us a challenge to scrap a layout using all the colours of the rainbow.  A dream come true for someone who is obsessed with colours like myself.  I used a sketch from Shimelle's Blog to help me along and came up with this stripy deckchair inspired seaside layout.

The photo's are of little Rob as a tot, grinning at the camera while having a dig on an Isle of Wight beach.  It may be Sandown or possibly Ventor, i can't quite remember.  We had gone over for the day on the hovercraft while staying along the south coast near Bognor.  I can't quite remember the place because we decided to visit shortly afterwards for a holiday....what a disaster that was. But that's another story...

I love his cute smile and the colours of his sweatshirt. The journalling tells the story of how he hated having his feet on the sand or in the sea but loved digging in the sand (with shoes on) and how now he is 16 he has changed a lot except for that killer smile.

Nigel and I celebrate 23 years of marriage this year and I have always said that the secret to married life is give and take and being able to laugh with each other. 

So those girls better look out when Rob's mega smile is unleashed on them...