Take one sheet............

What else can you do on a cold afternoon apart from grab a sheet and make a tent? For once my two little darlings were not trying to kill each other and played beautifully for about an hour! With the help of a few chairs, a sheet, ALL the cushions and blankets in the house and a bagel with Nutella spread (a new discovery, unhealth I know but truly delicious!) peace fell on the VH household. I did try sitting in there with them, trying to recapture the excitement I felt as a child after building a den, but to be honest it was a bit hot, so I left them to it! Bliss.........

The lovely Catherine at mollycupcakes awarded me this last week.........

I'm very flattered, thank you so much Catherine. If you haven't visited Catherine's blog you must! She sells the most gorgeous painted kitchen accessories and hearts. I can vouch for their gorgeousness having placed an order before Christmas. The only problem is that the wooden spoon is so lovely I can't quite bring myself to use it!

I'm supposed to pass this award on but I can't choose only seven of you, so consider yourselves all included, a cop out I know!

This morning was supposed to be the day I finally started sewing again. Andrea and I have a very busy couple of months coming up, including the biggest fair we've ever done, so I should be creating. However I feel a bit grotty today so I dropped the children off, came back, made a cuppa and sat down for a few mins blogging. Two hours later I'm still here! I think I'm a person who works better with a deadline, it's just that I leave everything until the week before and then give myself a nervous breakdown trying to do it all!

Thought I'd leave you with a couple more gratuitous house shots, I can't put just one picture on so here we go........

Our bedroom fireplace with the disembodied head, she should really be on a wall somewhere but I quite like her in there.

The top of one of our dressers in the kitchen. I love the kitten money box, bought for 50p from the car boot sale, haven't got round to putting any pennies in it yet! The picture behind is Jack's "dream house". Notice it's all alone at the top of a hill, just like his mum he craves his own space and loves his own company, sometimes difficult in our very noisy house!

Right, enough procrastinating. I have and hour and a half to create something before I have to collect Kit, hang on though is that the phone I hear..........................?

Quirky..........

It occurred to me today as I was scrubbing behind the toilet seat with a toothbrush (just one of the many joys of having a 7 year old with a none-too-accurate aim) that there are many bits of this house that exist for no apparent reason but mean a lot to all of us who live here.

For example in our bathroom we have this.........

Don't ask me why he's wearing a cycling hat but I think he suits it, don't you?

When we bought this house we loved the fact that one of the previous owners had cobbled together any old pieces of wood to box in pipes, create cupboards etc. This is one of his masterpieces.........

It covers water pipes running from the top floor of the house and sort of looks like a mantlepiece stuck on the wall for no apparent reason. I can't explain why we like it, I'm sure to some people it looks faintly ridiculous, but then, so is life!

This sits on the shelf on the top floor. Ian gave it to me for our first Valentines together and it's just so cute I had to frame it, needless to say nearly 12 years and 2 children down the line, Feb 14th isn't quite the same!

Jack's room yields all sorts of treasures..............

..................including shells, stones and bits of feathers stuck into white tack (don't ask me why?)

Hanging next to Kit's dressing table is a teddy that Jack made in Year 2 at school, aptly named "fat tummy" by his beloved sister, much to his disgust.

Finally, perched on the living room bookshelves is my little birdie. It took me ages to find a shape suitably bird-like for my Christmas decorations. Most of them looked strangely fishy. Finally I managed to come up with this one and they were one of my best sellers, so I'm rather fond of this little one.

So there you go, just a few of the weird and wonderful things to be found in this house, I'm sure a few more will pop up along the way. See you all soon..........

Out of the mouths of babes...........

Yesterday evening, whilst snuggling into my rather ample, "oooh go on pass another chocolate brazil nut", post Christmas tum number one son remarked :

"Aaaah, pleasantly chubby" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think it was meant to be a compliment!

Pass me another hot cross bun please, real butter not olive oil spread if you don't mind!...............

Bicycles, books and blankets.........

There seem to be three obsessions going on in this house. Wherever I go I'm faced with piles of books, blankets in a heap, or bikes. I've just removed one of the aforementioned bikes from our bedroom where it was lounging against the fireplace, not an attractive addition to the decor to my mind. At the last count we had about 10 bikes in this household, bearing in mind we live in a terraced house and have no garage and a pretty small garden, that's a lot of bikes to conceal! To Ian they're a thing of beauty, to me they're an obstacle (apart from my gorgeous "Cameo" of course!) and I can regularly be heard muttering after catching my ankle on one of them.

Blankets are another key feature of this house. I can't resist them and the children seem to be following suit. Kit even has a serious blanket routine at bedtime, where no less that one duvet, one eiderdown and three blankets have to be tucked round her in the same order every night.

This is my latest little bargain, had to have it for the car. It's one of those gorgeous soft blankets, and red polka dot to boot!

Finally, books........All of us love books, they are in every room in this house. We have so many that I worry that one day I'll come home to find the house sunk into the ground under the sheer weight! I love the vintage Enid Blytons in Jack's room almost as much as he does (although Beano is beginning to take over!). Some of them are rescued from Mum and Dad's garage, but I've had to replace most of mine from childhood because most of our toys and books were passed onto our many cousins.

The books we keep on the living room bookshelves include Ian's beloved "Biggles" collection and all the books passed down by his Dad who was a professor of law. Needless to say I'm not often to be found reading "Employment Laws of Scotland" but they mean a lot to us and remind Ian of his Dad who's no longer here.

So there you go, what little obsessions do you have I wonder?.................

Bliss...................

An empty house, a cup of tea, a large (very) piece of cake, the latest copy of Country Living, a warm blanket and a comfy chair, what more could you ask for??..........

Note to self, buy at least 2 packets of magnetic letters in future! Anyhow, happy new year to all you out there in blogland! It's been a while (again!) since my last post, must get into better habits this year.

I hope you all had the Christmas you wished for. Ours was noisy, busy but not as frantic this year. We spent a lot of time together, about 10 days in all and we were still speaking at the end of it, a minor miracle! It was a wonderful Christmas and we brought in the new year playing Pictionary and Articulate, laughing at my dad's artistic skills and the new words introduced to us by the teenagers, plus I did a bit of middle aged lusting after Take That (Howard in particular) at midnight!

Christmas Eve we all ventured to a local church for the crib service, needless to say we were late, and went in the wrong door having to walk past a very large congregation. We even managed to persuade my 17 year old nephew to join us, and it was lovely family event.

The weather was the usual Christmas affair, plenty of grey skies and rain, but we looked out of the window one day to be greeted by this, there is something about a rainbow which is really special, don't know why but I think we all love them.

Yesterday was D-day for eight walls in our street. Before Christmas a row of us decided that we would like to replace our mismatching walls and hedges with the railings that would originally have been here. After much organisation by one of our neighbours Frank (a lawyer and therefore very well organised!) we finally demolished the walls yesterday. What a day it was!

Ian battled through a horrible cold to demolish ours, which turned out to be very well built, if the ugliest in the street. Helen and I supplied bacon sarnies, tea and cakes. Our new neighbour Lynn made the most delicious soup for lunch which we ate in our kitchen. Eight hours later we were still there! Various people would disappear and come back bearing wine, the bottles this morning bear testament to the alcohol consumption! No wonder my head was thumping when I went to bed!

It was a brilliant day, it made us realise how fortunate we are to live in this neighbourhood. When we decided to move here there were a few raised eyebrows and comments amongst some of our friends. Our street is opposite a large council estate with a reputation it really doesn't deserve. This meant that we could afford a much bigger house than those in the supposedly "better" areas. It was the best move we ever made. Ok, financially we could have made more elsewhere but here we have fantastic neighbours, a lot of whom have been here for 30 plus years. There is a real sense of community, people buy here because they want a home, not a pension. Yesterday proved that even more to me, we all sat around and chatted for hours and have made a pledge to have these get-togethers once a month from now on. What a great way to start the new year!

By the way, I came downstairs in peace and quiet to do a bit of blogging. For once my battling children decided to play in Jack's room. Great I thought, I'll disappear and write my post in silence. Ha! Two minutes later, here they are behind me fighting over a piece of string and singing "The Skye Boat Song" - at least Jack is, Kit is just putting words together that make no sense, much to Jack's annoyance. Children - who'd have 'em??!!...............