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 24, 2013 by Elliotandme

My amazing Mum

I have the most amazing Mum. In addition to being the most beautiful person I know, and always being there for everyone, she’s undertaking a huge challenge this month.

In fact, as I write this, at 8am on a snowy Sunday in March, she is on her way to the swimming pool to clock up lengths. Yesterday alone she did 130! That’s 3,250 metres! WOW! This is all because she has challenged herself all this month to swim a marathon distance – that’s 26.2 miles (a whopping 42,195 metres, or something like 1,703 lengths of a regular 25 metre pool) all within a month. The very thought would fill me with dread, but she’s doing amazingly!

I’ve joined her on a couple of swims so far and have been so impressed by her drive – she just hops in and off she goes, no stopping, no kicking off from either end, just up and down, up and down. I’ve never been a keen swimmer but have managed 40 lengths each time by just following behind her and that was pretty challenging and I wasn’t even having to keep count. My legs were so wobbly just after that distance so I daren’t think how she’s managing to do so much!

Why is she putting herself though this I hear you ask. Good question, especially since the weather is far from spring-like, and early morning and late evening trips to the pool can’t be much fun. Well, let me tell you…

13 years ago my beautiful cousin Mark was born with a rare liver disease. It is likely that he will need a transplant at some point, though to look at him you wouldn’t realise. He is singularly the most positive and strong character I think I’ve ever met and has the cheekiest of smiles!

The Children’s Liver Disease Foundation do vital work in supporting families such as Mark’s, and in researching liver diseases in all their forms.

As a family, we’ve done lots of fundraising for this cause so close to our hearts over the past 12 years, from triathlons to bake sales. Mum’s epic challenge is the latest, and perhaps the biggest so far!

It’s for that reason that I am posting this here. In the hopes that some of you reading this can spare some pennies for this worthwhile cause.

Please help with any amount, however small. I know one little boy, and his family, for whom it really will make a difference.

You can sponsor online via her JustGiving page. Don’t forget to tick the box if you’re a UK tax payer as we’ll get an extra little bit for every pound you donate.

Thanks!
xx

Photo credit: NontrivialMatt / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

March 20, 2013 by Elliotandme

Shh… the turtle is sleeping!

We spent the weekend down in the New Forest last weekend. When we booked it we thought March would be lovely and Spring-like, how very wrong we were! Rain rain and more rain was the order of the day, which meant we needed to be inventive with activities to keep an active 2 year old entertained.

The pool where we were staying was a BIG hit – we bought a noodle (long foam thing!) and he loved gliding around the pool holding on to it. There was also a jacuzzi-type pool (though it was the same temperature as the main pool so fine for kids) and he loved that too. We taught him how to blow the surface of the water, and he was really good at kicking his legs and “jumping” in from the sides.

On Saturday we went to Bournemouth Aquarium, which was busy (as expected) but still very good. Elliot loved the fish swimming over our heads, and kissed the glass by a pufferfish!

The funniest part of the weekend (of which there were a few if I’m honest!) was as we left the aquarium. Elliot was quite sad to leave and wanted to go back in to see the turtles. I told him they had gone to sleep so we had to go, to which he replied: ” turtle wake up? Eat breakfast and a yoghurt?”, before adding “and a man” Elliot has a bad habit of having a gingerbread man after most meals, so I guess it’s only right that Mr Turtle would have one too!

I think we’ll be visiting aquariums a bit more regularly from now on! It was a big hit (though to be fair the simple pleasure of jumping in puddles was also worth standing around in the rain for!)

(Apologies for poor quality of the photos – apparently rain didn’t agree with my phone!)