Hello! Merry Christmas!! One week to go! Our tree started off pretty but now looks wonky and fondled and ragged. The angel is facing the window like she yearns for escape from this lunatic place.

Evidence of lunacy:


Further evidence of lunacy:

We are having another one of these??

Meanwhile, inside...such scenes as this:



and this!

So there you go. When are you coming with your paintbrushes?

Also, outside epic fence-making is going on, with Uncle Colin* at the helm. His latest suggestion - that we should have just got chain link and lined it with shade-cloth. I am not confidence inspired.

I won't launch into a homebody-whinge about the trails of mud, left particularly in clumps in front of the toilet every day. Or the comments from various builders, builder's helpers and feral uncle fence foremen about the noteworthy contents of my pantry (I cook, OK?), or how everyone would benefit from 'throw it out! throw it out!'. Because I am grinning and bearing it.

Love, Anna.
*names have been changed.

Back again!

OK so it's been umm...7 months give or take a few weeks, since I tried posting here. In the meantime, I have been roaming the web, enjoying so many entertaining and informative and generous blogs. Maybe I have a better idea of what I want to do here. Maybe I don't. Either way, I may try to pick up where I left off.

So many things have happened in the last 7 months. Boys 1 and 2 have changed and grown phenomenally when I think about it. I am 10 weeks knocked up with #3 and not very well with it. My fabric stash just keeps on growing although, the way I've been feeling, not much is being done with it, except scattered and ambitious schemes. Should I try to render these in pictures, I suspect they would resemble my sewing corner. Shamefully chaotic and non-committal.

Summer is upon us, in September. I've been envying our Northern Hemisphere sisters, with their talk of fall and knitting. Oh for a little rain...

Oh Dear!

Where have the days gone. It's the 2nd of February! 2009!! I have become so obsessed with searching for new crafting tutorials and getting wound up in other women's sensational and addictive writings that I have done no crafting or blogging of my own.

I am currently making a handbag, tweeny style, for my niece Bea who is turning 12 on Feb the tenth, but yesterday my bobbin case spat its spring in my face, so I am temporarily without sewing machine. For the first time in 15 years!

The house is strewn with toddler trade - bank statements pulled from their temporary filing (ahem piled on top of something else within Boy2 reach), vintage Glomesh handbags granny-style (ahem waiting to be listed on Ebay), a toy drum, empty egg cartons. Oh boy, I could list so much stuff just looking around from my seat and I had better get up and tidy. Later I will come to figure out how to add some of these wonderful crafting links.

Oh so Boy2 thinks it's the donkey's ears to throw toilet paper into the toilet. He sometimes bites shreds off in little toddler toothy chunks and spits them in, or unscrolls the whole roll on the holderand drapes it in Roman-style, or goes for broke godammit, and just chucks the entire roll into the bowl.

Boy1 has seemingly been oblivious to the paper being set up on the cistern, the vanity and generally away from the sparey basket or holder as today he sat on the toilet awhile then I heard 'Mu-um, where has all our toilet paper gone?'

I was thinking I might begin my new blogging craze right now, but what with the 15 minutes it's taken me to set up and tweak a few bits and pieces...this is what's being said
Boy1, who speaks largely in run-on sentences barely pausing for breath for about 12 hours a day: 'Mum, you need to wipe my bum...mum, 'scuse me mum, that 'lectrizity post is made out of wood - it used to be green, it really used to be like that...mum how does the pole stay up mum. Mum?'