It's been a while since my last post - in a nutshell, life just got too busy for me in December. Now that is is middle of January I feel I can post again.
December was full of birthdays for our family. My baby boy turned 8! Definitely not a baby anymore but, I guess, he will always be mine!
Easy birthday party - Ten Pin Bowling for 10 of his friends. Simple I thought!!!!!! Should have been simple - I forgot what 10 little 8 year old boys can be like - very very hyper!
I felt a little guilty about having it so easy by having the party organised by the Bowling Alley, so I thought, yep, I would do my bit for the environment and make a 'Loot Bag' for all of the lovely little boys!!!! A simple drawstring bag, with the boy's initial on the front! Simple! All very simple but a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be. The response, though, to the bags was well worth all the effort that was put in. Instead of lollies and sweet things, we had a whole lot of fun 'gag' toys for the boys. I got them from this Aussie site, and I found them to be really quick, cheap and top quality (for what you pay).
That only left the cake - I had a big think about it and remembered a fellow blogger who I think was Hoppo Bumpo (please forgive me if I am wrong) , used the recipe from a recent Better Homes and Garden magazine to make a Pinata Cake. Definitely a big hit (literally) with me, the birthday boy and all the little cherubs that couldn't wait to get their grubby little paws into the chocolate money lurking beneath the shell.
Very very simple and easy to make! Highly recommend and will be doing this one over and over again!!! And of course, all the parents of the little cherubs were suitably impressed too!!!!
So that was part of my December - it was also a month for big decisions about our 15 year old son's future in mainstream schooling - we had many sleepless nights over this and I could rant and rave for a long time about the state of the school system here in Victoria Australia but I will spare you all of that , and give you the condensed version. We decided to haul him out of mainstream schooling and instead put him in a small school which truly meets his needs. It seems most schools cater for the brilliant ones, the academic ones and all they seem to want is to get high ENTER scores!! But what if your kid is arty and very creative! Our school system, unfortunately, doesn't suit our very intelligent but 'arty' son! Thankfully we stumbled upon this small school who cater for kids that main stream schooling forgot!!! We are so looking forward to our happy boy coming back to us. I will keep you posted.
On another note, my father had a warning two days before xmas, a mild heart attack. Thankfully he is okay, and is recovering well, but it sure did make me think how quickly you can lose someone very close.
So there are some of my excuses for neglecting my little blog for so long, and of course two gorgeous weeks at the beach was another one good excuse, and I haven't even mentioned that we had a graduation and all the other goings on in December.
A big thanks to Mandy for your email urging me to post again.
Today I was back at work at Amitie. Louise and I had 11 young ladies who wanted to learn to sew in one of Audrey & Maude's classes. What fabulous girls they were too and very talented - you can check out the whole post over at Audrey & Maude with pics!
I promise I will post again soon.
