Silent Sunday - Bribery

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White

As a relatively new blogger I've only just come across Tara Cain's Sticky Fingers blog and 'The Gallery'. The idea is that Tara will give a prompt (can be a word, phrase, object etc) and then people respond by posting a photo that captures that prompt for them. This is my first time having a go at The Gallery, but when I saw the word was 'White' the only thing that came into my mind was our cat, Bobcat. Here he is:

He is our big, beautiful, white fluffball, I like to think of him as the Liberace of cats! We've had him for nearly 3 years since a good friend of mine moved flats and no longer had a garden. He has settled in and really has a big place in our affections - see previous blog post 'Nocturnal Awakenings' for proof of just how much he gets away with. He has dealt with having a new baby (now toddler) in the house very well, although he spends a bit more time under the bath than he used to! He's found this week a little bit trying with the snow, only ventured out once, for 30 seconds and the scuttled back pronto. This caused havoc with his daily ablutions - he's very modest and doesn't like an audience when he's in the litter tray....
Isla adores him but the feeling isn't reciprocated - he's not so keen on her shrieking "Bobbeeee, Bobbeeee". My favourite picture of them together is this one:

And speak of the devil, he's just hopped up on the sofa to keep me company now. We love you Bobcat!

Recipe Time - Mince Pies!

There is no better time to get cooking than when you've been housebound for a week due to the white blanket currently covering the country! So, yesterday we all rolled up our sleeves and made some yummy mince pies. Isla played her part (mostly by covering her hands in butter and eating it!) and Hubbie did the eating part afterwards....

Mince Pie Recipe

Ingredients:
225g cold butter, diced
350g Plain flour
100g golden caster suger
Pinch of Salt
280g Mincemeat
1 small egg

To make the pastry, rub the butter into the flour, then mix in sugar and a pinch of salt. Combine pastry into a ball. You may need to add a dash of water at this point to help it combine. Knead pastry briefly.

Preheat oven to 200C/ Gas 6/ Fan 180C. Grease cake patty tin - we made 12 mince pies from this recipe (with a bit of left over pastry to stick outside for the birds!)

Roll out pastry to about quarter - half cm thickness. Then use cutters to make the bases and lids for the mince pies. Put bases in the tin and fill with a full teaspoon of mince meat. Top pies with lid and then brush with some beaten egg.

Bake for approx 20 mins until golden. Pop onto a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar. Put the kettle on and once the teas made, your mince pies should be just about cool enough to scoff down with a brew! Yum!

Nocturnal Awakenings!

Just lately I've not been sleeping.... There are 3 reasons for this and all 3 of them live in this house with me!! First things first...

Generally I'm not a night owl, I've always been an up with the larks kind of person - well that was until I had a baby and realised that actually 8am isn't early, 7am is normal and 6am isn't unheard of. So in light of the enforced wake up time i skip off to bed about 10pm every night, whether it's a school night or a weekend, I need my sleep. However other beings have other ideas!

So, I creep up our stairs at the bedtime hour. It's worth saying that it's virtually impossible to creep up our stairs, even our cat sounds like a hippo when he hops up them. I don't think they've been replaced since 1901 when the house was built and my size 8's aren't going to sound dainty. I get to the landing and that's when Isla rouses. "Gummee, gummeee, gummee". So then instead of hopping into bed I'm replacing her dummy and perhaps shushing her back off to sleep. Job done, into bed, bliss.

Well only for about an hour because then the snoring has started. I like to get a head start on the sleeping business because I know sooner or later I will have the husband next to me snoring like a goodun, and I'll have to shove him on his side and hiss at him to STOP SNORING! Ok, so that's him dealt with, back to sleep.....

*BOOOOF!!!* That's Bobcat just jumped on my chest, a little sniff in my face and then settling down for a kip on my legs. Some nights I am so comatose that I don't feel him jump on me but in my dreams I get this weighty sensation that wakes me up to him sitting right on top of me. I love Bobcat to bits and because I feel guilty that he gets a bit less attention in our house since Isla's arrival I let him sleep wherever he likes. However some nights he doesn't just stay asleep. Sometimes he likes to leap all over the bedside tables, run up and down the stairs and Meeeeeoooww as loudly as he can. You see, we don't have a cat flap, so he's reliant on us to let him out and this is how he gets our attention.

So, there's a few good reasons that I'm not sleeping so good at the moment, but none of them are going anywhere and for that I'm glad! :-)

Gorgeous Wall Stickers

I LOVE wall stickers. I think they're great for transforming a room and a few weeks after getting Isla home from hospital I finished off her bedroom with these gorgeous wall stickers from Wee Gallery:

The designs are visually appealing for babies as they are high contrast patterns. I chose the woodland graphics above for Isla's room. She loved just looking at the animals at first and now she's talking she loves to name them and say "night-night" to them all at bedtime. I think they will help with her imagination and they're a break from the usual nursery decor. We love Isla's woodland!

Tea and Crafting

So, I went to my knitting class and it was great! A real nice change to my usual weekday evenings, where I do the harem scarem commute from London to Surrey, making a dash so I don't miss bathtime and bedtime stories. On Tuesday night Daddy took over and gave me a break from The Very Hungry Caterpillar!

The class is run by Jane Gois and I found her site Tea and Crafting when I did a google search for knitting lessons. The site itself looked really inviting and friendly and that turned out to be the case on the night too. I spent 3 hours in the company of Jane and 5 other budding knitters. We were supplied with bamboo needles, a ball of wool, some printed notes and a lovely brew and muffin! Jane was very patient with us and showed us the ropes on casting on and off, plain, purl, moss stitches and chatted about other knitting related things. Once we got started we were all really into it and picked it up quickly. Memories of knitting with my Nan came back to me. She would always cast on for me and make all the first stitches and I'd take it from there. Now I can make all my own stitches, although I might still be calling on her to sort out my mistakes when I go wrong! It takes a lot of concentration at first but Jane told us that she had on occasion gone to the cinema and done her knitting in the dark, showing that you don't need to watch it all the time once you're experienced.

Just to prove the popularity of the Tea and Crafting a couple of the other girls had already done some of the other courses that Jane runs, and now I've completed this session I'd love to try crochet next. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and would recommend it to anyone who's thinking of trying something new or is a bit rusty and wants a refresher. I'm no expert but I think I might start off simple and knit squares to make a blanket, I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Photo above showing my efforts on Tuesday!

Knit One, Purl One

As mentioned in my previous post Seize the days – live life to the full! I’m off to a knitting class and I just remembered this morning that it’s TONIGHT!! Even though I write everything down in my diary I still can’t keep a handle on what I’m doing from one day to the next (bit scary considering I’m a project manager by profession....).
Anyway, the knitting class. I’m not sure what I’m expecting but my intentions when I signed up for it were to learn a new skill. I got obsessed with learning new skills after watching the BBC programme Survivors whereby a virus hits Earth and most of the population are wiped out, apart from a few social misfits who were immune. Obviously it’s a rather morbid thing to happen but it got me thinking if we had to survive it would be good to have skills that you could use to trade with other people until the world got back on its feet. My version of the TV programme would obviously be a bit more idealistic than what happened in the show, people seemed to prefer going round with guns and making threats to get all the things they needed to survive!! In my world it would work something like this: I would knit someone a jumper in exchange for 3 months supply of eggs, or a haircut – sound like quite fair trades to me!
I’ve done a bit of knitting before - well sort of! My Nan would teach me every now and then when I was younger as I would insist I wanted to learn. I would start the obligatory scarf (because this is all you can think of knitting when you’re about 8 years old!), get about 20 rows into it and see all the holes where I’d dropped stitches, get frustrated and give up. So tonight I’m hoping that with age on my side I won’t give up after a few hours, and perhaps if I set my sights on something a bit more exciting than a scarf I might find it an inspiring past time that I can in turn pass on to my little girl. I'm not sure I'll be skilled enough to dress the survivors of a Pandemic head to toe in knitted fashions but I'll do my best! More tomorrow.....

photo by Flickr user The Loopweaver