First Christmas Decoration

I was finally able to put Vienna's name on her awesome Christmas decoration made by Gypsy.

It is so lovely and such a special gift.

Introducing ...

Introducing Vienna Elanor Seabright.

6 weeks old

Bind it All

Ashley bought me a Bind it All! Yay! I have wanted one for ages but when I went to buy it my love/hate relationship with Spotlight prevented it from being available for purchase.


This evening I used it to make these little books for Lily and Esme whom we will be seeing at Tariki on Thursday. It was good to be crafty and get my hands dirty.

Christmas Treats - Oddfellow Truffles

These are a Miss Wendy traditional Christmas food that I have been making on and off for years, they are the best kind of treat - easy to make and yummy to eat!

C

First Harvest

Tiny but tasty! My cherry tomato plants have yeilded their first little red tomato ... yummy!

Cute Food - Christmas Treats

I have finally started some Christmas goodies! As we have a time consuming small person in our house this year I haven't actually done any baking but I have spent this evening being creative with after dinner mints and choc mint biscuits.

And am very happy with the results! Both of these are new to my cute food repertoire.

Tumbling Tiny

Daddy and Miss Tiny having some fun games, she is loving having her Daddy home!

Meeting Beth

On Saturday afternoon we drove out to Mauku to take the pig scraps out to Missy. We had a lovely visit with Uncle Tony and Aunty Lyn who made our little girl feel very special, they shared cuddles, took pictures and Uncle Tony took her for a walk around the orchard looking at the trees. Of course they have heaps of very recent experience with little babies as their first grandson, Jacob is just 2 months older than our little girl.

After catching up on all the happenings we headed down for our little Miss to meet Beth the Sheep. Of course Beth was just looking for something to eat and the little Miss was just enjoying her cuddles with Daddy but it was fun to introduce them.

We were suprised to see how much the black face lamb had grown, it is almost as big as it's mother and Beth. Beth and the lamb are great mates, I think that Beth is enjoying reliving her lambhood through her new friend.

Christmas Books

This year I added A Kiwi Night Before Christmas to our book collection. We have lots of childrens books on our shelf but I discovered that this is only the 2nd Christmas book. A few years ago when I was teaching at the Montessori School House in Hamilton we put this story on as our Chrstmas play, it was great and I really enjoyed it.

Nanny Mihi's Christmas is part of the great series of Nanny Mihi books, of which we have several. Unfortunately is is my least favourite in the series but it is great to have southern hemisphere Christmas books.

Amazing Apron

When we were in Hamilton on Wednesday we exchanged Christmas presents with Kat, Renee and Emily. Kat had made me this gorgeous apron and matching pot mit, it is the most beautiful fabrics and a great style - so very cool!

SMILES

so cute

so CUTE

SO FRICKEN CUTE!!!

Crafting Present Exchange - From Tania

More, more, more ... they just keep coming!!!

Baby Christmas Stocking

This has been my crafting task over the last week ... A first Christmas Stocking for a gorgeous little girl. The little girl in question had a meltdown in the very busy spotlight the other week when we were trying to buy the calico to use for a base so we didn't manage to get it but luckily Aunt Kat gave us some to use. Some of the ribbons were purchased in the little book/haberdashery store in Raglan, he has some great stuff at reasonable prices, have a look next time you are in Raglan, it is worth squeezing into the tiny store. I don't have a sewing machine so the whole thing has been sewn by hand, it feels like it has taken ages but it has taken less than a week and quite a few of the DVDs lent by Paula the Great. I finished it last night and I am so happy with it, I can't believe it has turned out as good as I had hoped!

Renee Moves On To School

Today Miss Tiny and I drove to Hamilton to spend the day with Renee as she moved up from Kindy to School. This is a very special ceremony at the Steiner school and I felt very lucky to spend it with her. I am very tired now, too tired to think of words to share my day with you but i felt truely blissed out by my day spent with my friends.

Ashley Becomes Concept Art

I finished this page a little while ago at a Friday night scrap (actually Paula finished it for me! She wrote the caption that is written down the rigging on the right - it is hard to see on the picture but says 'Ashley becomes concept art', thanks Paula). I love this picture so much, we had it on our wall in the cottage in Ohaupo for ages. Ashley came home from work in Auckland one Friday night with it, one of the artists had asked him to pose for some concept art for another movie - this is what he created with Ashley posing in the production office with a ruler for a sword.

Crafting Present Exchange - From Glenna

Christmas is sooo great!

Crafting Present Exchange - From Carrie

So many cool things! I had better get busy!

1st Christmas

I'm really happy with how this turned out.

Beth's 2nd Birthday

I had started this page at October camp and got it finished yesterday.

Beth was in a funny mood on her birthday ... still sulking from her recent brazillian, she wouldn't eat her birthday cupcake but Missy the pig took care of it for her!

Scrapbooking Workshop

Yesterday was the final Saturday workshop for the year at Caz Dezign. Miss Tiny came along and helped Mummy do some scrapbooking, with her help i managed to get 4 pages completed (2 of which had already been started - 1 at camp in October and 1 approx 2 years ago!)


Keep an eye out for upcoming posts of completed pages.

We exchanged gifts in the crafting present exchange that Carrie, Paula, Glenna, Tania and I have been participating in this year. With the intent to buy 1 present for each person, each month from March to November. I wasn't very good at the monthly shopping but I got there in the end. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts showing all the great goodies.

New Recipe of the Week

This weeks new recipe is Vegetable Samosas - my contribution for the shared lunch at tomorrows scrapbooking workshop. I didn't quite have all the right ingredients so they are more like little vegetable pies but are very delicious anyway and will definitely be on my repeat list!

Visiting Daddy

We have come on an adventure to Whakamaru to visit Daddy at work, we get to see his truck which was empty on an earlier blog posting with all the busy-ness of a mobile IT office. We have crazy fast interwebs out here in the middle of nowhere coz Daddy is so good at his job.

It is a beautiful sunny day, there is grass and trees and a lake and lots of birdsongs to sing a little girl to sleep.

Sleeping Baby

Apparently Mum is more comfortable than the bed today ...

Meeting Santa

On Friday we went into Hamilton ... we went to Les Mills and met people there (remembered how much I enjoyed working there!), took Sheta a Neiman-Marcus cookie, ate at my favourite sushi shop for lunch and then did some Christmas shopping - all these things take so much more effort with a little person in tow!

While we were out Miss Tiny got her first photo with Santa, she slept through the whole experience and Santa thought she was very cute.

I plan to scrapbook this photo at Saturday's workshop.

Thank You Card

Seeing Paula, Gypsy and Tania's Christmas crafting challenge and fantastic creations has been making me feel very Christmassy and also very jealous of all their crafting. But as I only brought a very small amount of crafting stuff with me to Raglan I am very limited as to what I can create. However, today I made Renee a card to say Thank You for coming to meet Miss Tiny and being so sweet with her. The photos don't really do it justice, it is very girlie with loads of bling and the photos of Renee and Miss Tiny included for her.

New Recipe of the Week

Neiman-Marcus Cookies

I have heard this story many many times - about how the lady got charged $250 for their cookie recipe, I think I have even had the recipe a few times. My friend Sheta emailed it to me the other day and Evelyn and I thought we would finally give it a go - we divided the recipe by 4 (it is a very big recipe) and it still made lots! Lots of very yummy chocolately cookies, especially with the walnuts - yum! They are pretty standard to look at but with the nuts and 2 types of chocolate they certainly tickled my taste buds.

Cooking in someone else's kitchen was odd - finding ingredients and utensils etc but it made for an interesting experience. I made regular sized cookies instead of my usual tiny 'cute food' sized cookies, which was an odd experience.

I will take Sheta a cookie tomorrow when I go into Hamilton and see what she thinks of them.

November Mini Book

The first mini book for Miss Tiny's bookshelf is completed.

I hope I manage to keep up the speed at which it was completed after the end of the month.

I am pleased that I managed to complete it with the very limited supplies that I brought to Raglan with me.

I am very pleased with how cute it is!

SURPRISE

We had a lovely afternoon out yesterday; we started in Ohaupo with a visit to Nicola and Marie who loved meeting our little girl. We then moved on to the business part of the day and had a teacher registration meeting in Cambridge - the little girl was a big hit here too! Last stop was Kate and family in Te Awamutu where we got to met and have cuddles with 4 month old Zachary.

We had a frustratingly slow drive back to Raglan behind some crazy slow tourist but when we finally got there to our surprise we found ... DADDY!!! Rain had cancelled movie making yesterday and when he found that today was cancelled too he came to visit us! Wow! I am all a fluster that he is here to see us and our little girl loved getting to have lovely Daddy snuggles - a necessity in life.

She discovered the joys of her black & white book last night - Daddy said the plot was too simple but she seemed to enjoy it!