Not clever

I hurt myself this morning. I went to get out of bed and (somehow) managed to pull all the muscles down one side of my neck ... bloody-ouch-hell. I had a long soak in the shower and has helped some but I'm very stiff and having to constantly remember not to move too suddenly and when I look round I have to turn my entire body rather than just my head.

Not sure how I managed it ... stupid me.

Anyway, I noticed something today - I've got loads of visitors to this blog from so many different countries now! So, hello to those of you in....

The Netherlands

Belgium

Michigan, USA (and a few other places in the US besides!)

Germany

Ontario, Canada

Spain

Hong Kong

Portugal

Romania

Australia

Ukraine

India

Wow! :)

Bit late in the day with this but ...

....to mummies everywhere :)

Was it good for you? Was good for me - breakfast in bed, LOADS of cards all made by the kids (looking at the row of cards along my dining table, you'd think I had 50 kids!) Lovely roast lunch and a glass of wine then off to Tim's mums for tea and cake :)

Of course, the day didn't pass without my thoughts turning, briefly, to my own mother - the poison little dwarf who gave me so many years of misery. I haven't seen her for many, many years and probably never shall again. It always makes me a little sad that she had to be that way and ruin our relationship and so, today, Tim caught me staring a little sadly out the back window. I told him I was a bit sad because I didn't really have a mum to wish happy mothers day to and he said, never mind, it's for the best this way because she made you so miserable ... you can share mine. *Laughs* very sweet eh?

Anyway, that episode only lasted a very short time - the day was happy otherwise - weather good again :)

Going to watch the next episode of Wonders of the Universe again tonight - don't miss it! It's really good :)

Here comes the sun ....

.... and I say it's VERY alright.

It has been gorgeous today and the temperatures have very noticeably gone up (hence April running around outside with no cardi although I don't think it was QUITE warm enough for that!) I got my washing hung outside for the first time in aaages and then went out with the camera and snapped away. Behold!

Run! Run! (please excuse the poor state of our lawn!)

Flowers and sweet little leaf buds *sighs happily*

Hemmy stalking something in the bushes - he's hardly been out over the winter, I imagine he probably enjoyed a bit of sunshine in his old bones :)

Aaaaah! Looking a lot (scarily) like her daddy in this first picture!

Art, telly and gardening

Despite ongoing sicky-ness, we've packed a fair bit into the last couple of days. Yesterday was utterly gorgeous weather wise and April and I spent AGES hunting (quietly!) for in-progress birds nests in the garden. We stared for a long time at our resident pigeon flying backwards and fowards ALL morning with twigs in it's beak. We've also got blue tits in the bird box in between April's and Rosie's bedroom windows which is sweet :) The kids decided (eeek! a bit of homeschool stuff slipping in here!) to make maps of our garden and start plotting where birds are building nests - this is largely so that they can go back in the autumn and locate the now empty nests and investigate them!

Today (noooo! more homeschool mentioning!) Rosie was studying Picasso in art and she drew, in pastels, a Cubist portrait (hers will be on the homeschool blog if you want to look). This looked like a bit of fun so I had a go to - here is my (rather lame) effort *laughs* - the neck is too skinny and the yellow side of the face is far too "sloped" - I think there should be a gentler angle upwards and off the paper. Oh well, it's good to be creative sometimes even if it does turn out shabby :D

I started watching a new series on telly - The Wonders of the Universe (9pm BBC2, Sundays) - Empire of the Sun was the first episode and it was totally amazing! The bit with the total eclipse of the sun was incredible! If you want to watch it you can still catch the first episode on BBC iplayer for another month.

Due to the increasingly better weather (although today was a bit rubbish) and the leaf buds popping up everywhere and the crocuses on our lawn, I've gone all garden-minded :) So, today, we went to our local garden centre and came back with 2 bags of compost and a tub of plum tomato seeds. I've also got various flower seeds and herbs to plant so I think me and the kids will get started on those tomorrow or the next day.

Very sicky

Not been about (blog wise) for a few days - been nursing the sick pretty much - and spring cleaning.

Just as April was recovering from her hideous virus, Rosie came down with a slightly less severe version of it. Then, just as she was (is!) recovering from it Tim got ill. Actually, I didn't realise that Tim felt ill until yesterday morning because he never mentioned it to me. He left for work at the usual time 4.45 ish (am!), I got back into bed and fell asleep. Then, about an hour later i was woken up by a knocking and I lay in bed thinking "eh?" and not sure if I imagined it or not. Then there was another knocking and I started to panic because I wondered who the hell was knocking on my door at quarter to 6 in the morning! Then the phone rang and it was Tim and he said "hello, I'm outside would you let me in please?!" Oh. Ok then.

So in he came and told me that he felt really ill.

You want to know something really stupid? Before he told me that he felt ill, I had no idea and no idea why he was home again. Did I think "oh my god he's been sacked!"? No. Did I think "oh my god, the car broke down!"? No. Did I think "oh my god, he's ill!"? No.

The first thought that popped into my head was "oh my god, maybe the warehouse burnt down!". What?! Well, I was half asleep! *laughs*

So anyway, Tim got up, left the house at 4.45, went for a little drive to Christchurch, told the work people he felt crap, drove home again and went back to bed!

Today our landlord came to visit. He lives up north somewhere and all the years we've lived here we've never met him. He was down visiting his parents so he'd thought he'd pop in and whilst he was here he measured the kitchen because, apparently, he's thinking of having a new one put in sometime. Lovely! It's a really badly designed, hideously old kitchen so a new one would be very welcome - he also said he'd design it in such a way as to create space for our fridge/freezer which is currently in the dining area! Oooo!

So that was that. Tomorrow afternoon Tim and his sniffles are going off to the church because he has a rehersal for the Easter service - lucky them - hope they don't get his germs!

The great gnome races!

We have these little gnomes which have ball-bearings in so that when you put them on the top of a slope they tumble (head over heels) down to the bottom. To anyone with no sense of humour or fun this might sound rubbish but it really makes us laugh!

We've had the little gnomes for ages but today Rosie decided to try and make a really big one out of a toilet roll tube so we did and here he is next to his smaller brothers :)

Then, Rosie took a few bits of video, from different angles and put them together in one film (with some funny music!) and the result is everso funny *laughs*. Here you go:

Muddy walk

Gorgeous weather today (after a fair bit of rain recently) so we took our sickly (ok, not THAT sickly but a bit "coldy" still) children for a walk in Christchurch along the river. It was pretty flooded down by the quay and there were a lot of aggressive looking swans hanging about menacing everyone.

Then we walked along the footpath at the side of the river, up to the ruined castle, climbed the steps, admired the view and came back down again (sliding about in the mud). We'd brought some bread so we fed the ducks and one VERY friendly swan who virtually ate from our hands. He was all by himself so we came to the conclusion that he'd been ousted by the other swans for being too wimpy *laughs*.

Rosie collected a lot of swan feathers and when we got back the kids stuck them in their nature books.

Nice day :)

Butterflies for Spring

This is a little post to show (one) reason why I couldn't have short hair - I just LOVE doing cute stuff with it :)

Today, in honour of the fact that it's a) sunny and b) not freezing cold, I've gone all springtimey and done a messy bun decorated with little sparkly butterflies (there are 2 - one each side). You can't see that they sparkle but they do :)

I do love messy buns - takes a lot of work to get my hair into a "neat" bun simply because there's so much of it - I had to twist it round several times just to get it this contained! Messy buns are more doable ..... and cuter.

Photo by Rosie (who is still coughing madly)

Oh, and here's an "April-thing" for you. Today I was doing some work with her on rhyming words and she had a little poem in her workbook that she had to complete by thinking of a rhyming word. The poem had the lines:

"My favourite foods are cheesy bake

And treacle tart and chocolate ........."

When asked to come up with a word that was suitable and rhyming, she said STEAK! Chocolate steak?! Mmmm, yum.

Going now ... lunchtime - not chocolate steak though - Coronation Chicken :)

Multiple choice quizette

Here's a little quiz for you lovely readers. Ready? Ok.

Q. Which of these things has given me a LOAD of hassle today?

a. Trojan horse viruses

b. Yahoo email

c. Chrome web browser

d. The Leaning Tower of Pisa

e. None of the above

A. Actually, that was a bit mean because they ALL have! Well, not d and e obviously ... that was just being silly.

What a bloody day!

Started off by opening my Chrome browser this morning (which observant readers will remember I mentioned a while ago as giving me grief). It was running MEGA, MEGA slow. Oh god, *yawn*, here we go again. I finally, got to my Yahoo mail page and tried to sign in at which point I was given some rubbishy message that due to some security "issue" I was being locked out for 24 hours! What?! Erm...

At that point, Chrome decided to give up the ghost altogether and completely jammed up taking the rest of my computer with it. Ok. Fine.

Restart. Restart. Restart.

I could NOT open Chrome again but (and this is a feast of weirdness for you!), on one occasion after restarting the computer but BEFORE I went online I checked the task manager and there, strangely, I found Chrome still apparently running!

Anyway, to cut a very long story very short, the computer just kept jamming up so in the end I decided to uninstall Chrome. This in itself took several attempts because everything was jamming before I could even get into my add/remove programmes list. Bloody hell!

Finally got it removed and decided to do a scan "just in case". It was part way through this when it found .... the Trojan Horse virus. Oh lovely. Super. Then, about half way through the scan, the computer jammed AGAIN. Aaaaargh!

Restart. Restart. Restart.

Got the scan going again .... from scratch and this time it didn't pick up any virus and the computer is running quicker and not jamming so I'm guessing AVG sealed away the problems. Weird thing is, trojan horses are supposed to run quietly in the background stealing all your stuff NOT make your computer wade through treacle and get stuck!

Weird no?

Anyhow, tried Yahoo again - no silly message this time so that's cleared up whatever it was *shrugs*. Computer is now running fine (fingers crossed!). Just leaves the question as to where the hell the virus came from! I'm very, very careful about sites I visit and never open anything dodgy in my emails or anything so I'm at a loss to know.

Gone boggle eyed from staring at the screen all day and sorting out the problems. Be glad to go to bed tonight!

Night, night honeys.

Silliness

Ahh, dear .... I've gone from being very good to very bad. I did lots yesteday but today found all kinds of reasons not to doing anything important. Bad me. I played with maps with April (we put Dora the Explorer fridge magnets on our magnetic map of Europe and moved them around from country to country "Dora is in Italy, Swiper is in France ...." ..... does that count as educational? Hmmm?) We also coloured pictures, played on the computer and other stuff I can't remember. Poor old Rosie was stuck in bed because SHE now has the virus :(

Tim got home and told me that he was unloading some stuff at work and a homeless person came up and started talking to him. Apparently, the guy said he always talked to men with long hair! I was a bit cruel at this point (to the homeless person) by suggesting that perhaps it was because he felt comfortable talking to Tim who usually goes around looking somewhat vagrant-like himself what with his scruffy clothes and TOO LONG hair! There, I said it. Wish he'd get it cut *grumble grumble* Anyway, that was mean of me ... poor homeless person :( Tim gave the guy some money although he thinks he was actually after some stuff that he had in the van! Noooo! Don't give away the deliveries! Richard-the-boss would be most annoyed!

Finally, I've just been on my facebook page and, as usual, they were recommending a load of people that I could "be friends" with. Firstly, I had NO idea who any of them were and secondly one of them was called Steve Hamburger. Steve Hamburger!!! *laughs out loud*.

Sorry, I'm clearly in the mood to find the silliest things funny today ..... but really ..... *goes off giggling*

This is for Tim ..... sowwy baby ;)