Advent.....

I love this time of year, don't you??? We are now into our third day of advent and with it brings some pics of the craft we did yesterday..... Miss Connie (with a little help from me) made a Santa Calendar.....

We used this great free printout for the Santa and then made the rest up ourselves. Each day of the month leading up to Xmas was painted, then a piece of paper was painted to match. On the back of each of these piece's of paper we wrote a little Xmas activity to do together as a family.....

Each day you cross out the day, grab a piece of paper the same colour as the day, do the activity and than hang it on the spike to the left of Santa's beard... Today's activity was 'read a Xmas story'....

It's so hard to take a pic inside, I can never get the light quite right, but here's a pic of our advent stockings hanging on the piano anyway.

After all of the great advice I got for stocking fillers back here I ended up opting for a Xmas craft activity in each one... Today's activity was 'Bake Some Biccies'... After a team effort, Miss Connie Millie and I have some pretty wild looking ginger bread in the oven baking..... Stay tuned for a progress report, we'll be icing or should I say 'dressing' our little men tomorrow...

Now time for a pest update, for those interested.....

I seemed to have stopped my tomato grub problem, FINALLY!!!! It turns out that by planting my tomatoes next to my beans and cauliflower they were more susceptible to pests and disease... I removed my 2 cauli's and 3 bush beans, squished any nasty looking critters lurking around my toms that shouldn't have been and now a couple of weeks on I have healthy tomatoes again... This is what I harvested this morning....

That big one down the bottom is bigger than my fist!!! I really do think a batch of Tomato Relish is on the cards very very soon, don't you???

To conclude, without all of your great advice from back here I really would have been lost so thank-you..... :)

Take Care.... Jodie.....

Early Riser....

For Valentine's day yesterday I set the little princess up with some paint, card stock and an old egg carton... We were determined to tackle this craft idea from A Little Hut. All went well up until we had to cut out the egg carton to form a heart shape. Boy this was HARD!! We did the best we could and ended up with this.....Pretty cute hey??? The back of the heart was coloured in with red pencil by the little princess and had a Valentines Day verse written on it... This will no doubt be the first of many Valentine Day pressy's that she'll make for her Daddy...

With the rest of the card stock that was painted red we cut out heart shapes in all different sizes and scattered them over the table at dinner time.... It looked gorgeous teamed up with a red and white check table cloth. We all sat down to a lovely candle light dinner of Lasagne (daddy's favourite) and salad with homemade chocolate bavarian (also daddy's favourite) for dessert....

How did you spend your Valentines Day???

I got a chance to whip another set of these coasters up this morning...You see, I couldn't sleep and was up at sparrows fart, 4:27am to be exact... The house is sooo peaceful at this time of the day and it was nice watching the sun come up, maybe I should do this more often!! What time do you like to rise out of bed in the morning??