We were actually quite busy for a change...

Friday night is pizza night in our house. It's a great easy meal and it allows Richard and I to eat more 'grown up' food because we have our own pizza and the girls have theirs. It also lets us use up lots of wonderful garden veggies. This one has spinach, red onions, baby tomatos, basil and mozarella on it. Yum. The girls love to make their own and they take it to their Wendy house and pretend they are in a restaurant (with lots of bossing waitress Mum around!)

 We had a busier than usual weekend this weekend. It wasn't planned that way but we seemed to do an awful lot. We woke on Saturday to discover the girls (including Maisy Kitten) were 'camping' in the lounge. They had packed their suitcases and draped blankets over chairs to make their tent.

 So cute.

 I'm getting ready to teach my Sew Inspired course out at Corban Estate this coming weekend and M helped me hang out the freshly washed blank tea towels that we'll be using for part of the course.

 We also managed to take all the furniture out of Maddy's room and fit a new carpet in an attempt to make it more asthma friendly.

 It's incredible how much stuff a 7 year old can own. It almost filled our bedroom (and our room is twice as big as hers). Thank heavens for good storage!

 We managed to get the room back together again by 7pm and took the girls out to the Lantern Festival in the city. They thought they were going to a music concert and dressed 'cool'.

I don't think they were too disappointed when they realised there'd be no dancing.

 

The lanterns were incredible. I'll post more about that later in the week.

And no Saturday is complete without a something wonderful in the letterbox.

I was lucky enough to win the Tiny Eyes Valentines giveaway on Lil'Magoolie last week. Isn't she gorgeous? E was so excited to open the parcel and find her. She's sitting on my (very messy) desk at the moment and I'm loving looking up and seeing her smile. Thanks so much Dee. I love her.

Hope you had a lovely weekend too. x

Anniversary day

It was Auckland Anniversary weekend this last weekend which meant an extra day's holiday for us yesterday. I love long weekends. There's always so much to do around the house on normal weekends, that we don't often get the chance to have a family outing. Do you find that or do you make a real effort to have a trip somewhere with the family every weekend?

 Getting out of the house at a reasonable time seems to be our main problem at weekends. The girls are at an age where they are happy to potter until we get up which means that by the time Richard and I get up and have had a cup of coffee, it's close to 10am and by the time we've done some gardening and other jobs around the house, the day is gone. We managed to get out of the house in time for the Anniversary Day Tugboat race yesterday morning which really made the weekend special. We all picked a boat and walked around the top of North Head following to see who would win.

Eloise insisted on taking her baby doll, Jasmine, with her to see the race. I made her a dolly sling (using Amanda Blake Soule's tutorial in her book Handmade Home ) a while ago and that sling gets so much use from both girls it's fantastic. So much easier than lugging a doll's pram up a steep hill!!

We got back from our tug boat race excursion with plenty of time to do our jobs and it's really making me think that we should be making more of an effort to get up earlier and out of the house so we can make the most of our weekends. What do you think?

Beach Break

We just got back from a much needed weekend break at the beach.

There's nothing quite like a weekend away from the housework, TV (and the sewing machine!) to recharge energy levels! Hope you had a great weekend too.