April 1, 2013 by Elliotandme

A corner of my house

Can I just say, I love our house.

I like being surrounded by things that make me smile.

It’s a little busy right now, with a growing toddler and a busy lifestyle, things do often get piled up on tables, and shoved into drawers, but looking beyond all the mess, I wanted to remind myself how lovely it is and so a new series of posts is born. Welcome to a corner of my house – hopefully once a month I’ll post an image of an area of my house and note down all the stories that are shown within it.

The first is a small bit of our dining room. This photo shows the top of one of the two built in cupboards either side of the chimney breast.

1. This is a home-made collage of some photos taken from my grandmother’s house after she had died. There is a photo of their house, one of their garden, several of me as a baby and toddler (planting in the garden with my grampy) The one in the middle is of my great grandmother, my sister and me at my uncle’s wedding. I was four the day before and I still remember being so excited about having a hoop in the bottom of my dress! It also shows my sister picking her nose, which makes me laugh. In the top right, there’s a picture of me and my sister – I love this one.

2. These are Elliot’s footprints, taken when he was only a few months old. I remember thinking they looked quite big when they were done, but now they look tiny!

3. This is a beautiful tea tray given to us for our wedding from my sister and her husband (then boyfriend) It’s so ornate, and I love it!

4. This is a candle surround with crocus cut outs – I made it a local craft evening, Makeve, just before Christmas. It looks so nice with a candle flickering behind it.

5. This little wooden doll was bought in Tokyo while I was there for work. I love it as it reminds me of a past life, when I was an international jet-setter!

6. This lamp was another wedding present, and we’ve struggled to find a lamp shade to suit it – still not sure about the one we have, but it works well with the wall paper so perhaps it’s fine for now!

7. Should have taken a special photo of this actually, it’s Elliot’s Christmas hat from nursery. Covered in sequins (which get everywhere) but definitely something that will go in the memory box whenever I get time to tidy it up!

8. An iPod dock I got for Chris a couple of years ago for his birthday. This gets us bopping around the dining room and sets the tone for nice dinners!

So there you go, a corner of my house….anyone else want to share a corner of your own?

March 26, 2013 by Elliotandme

The History Race Project

Some time ago I was asked to contribute to a friend’s new website, HistoryRace. The idea behind her site is to record local history in a country-wide map, with posts added by residents who are encouraged to ’embroider’ their patch.

I posted mine about the town I live in and how it is still firmly linked with the Blanket/Wool industry.

It was a brilliant excuse to look again at the place we live in and dig a little under the surface to see that history is actually everywhere you look. As you’ll see from my entry, Elliot loved it too!

I hope you like looking at the site as much as I do. I can’t wait to see where it goes next!

You can also follow the HistoryRace on Twitter @historyracer

March 10, 2013 by Elliotandme

Silent Sunday – Mothers Day 2013

February 11, 2013 by Elliotandme

The MADS – if you’ve got a spare 5 minutes?

Hi there dear reader,

I address you in the singular as I’m pretty sure there’s just one of you that keeps coming back and looking at my blog rather than a whole horde of people. But do you know what? That’s ok with me, and I love you all the same no matter how many of you there are. The intention of this blog is to record things so that my little man can read it when he’s older and (ignoring my rants about random topics) find out what he was like when he was little, so I’m not really after a huge readership (although that *may* be quite nice…)

I, on the other hand, have spent the last couple of days looking at other blogs – most with huge followings – and coming up with a list of nominations for the MAD Blog Awards. These are awards for Parent bloggers and quite frankly what seems like a perfect excuse to get out on the town!

I am under no illusions that I could actually ever get to go to this event you’ll understand, but if you did feel like nominating little old me you can do so on the MAD Awards site (or have fun nominating the masses of other simply amazing blogs there are – I have had such great fun doing this, can’t wait to see who wins!)