Please come to this

There will be a Cártaí Rúbaí stall at this great Craft Festival on Sunday.

We will be launching our new range of Irish language greeting cards, which I collected from the printers at the crack of dawn yesterday. We (my sister Cáit and I) are VERY excited about them. This is what my car looked like yesterday morning:

All of those boxes are now in Cáit's living room, where there will soon be a 'Card-packing-party'!

We'll also have some button-badges for sale and a 'Make your-own-badge' element to our stall so that everyone gets a chance to be creative!

There is no entry fee to the Craft Festival and many, many wonderful demonstrations, classes and stalls. Have a look at their site for more details or follow them on Facebook... or just come along and see for yourself - I can't wait!

Moon and Stars Party

I am still at the desk, using the great hulking antique, which, although slow, is at least steady. Unwavering in it's support of my pathetically irregular attempts to tell you about my comings and goings.

It feels like forever ago. We've had Easter and other important birthdays and many other events since, but nevertheless, as promised and without further ado - here is the girls 2nd birthday:

Tricycles for two

...were a big hit!

Balloons above the kitchen table

Moons and Stars in the living room

Moon and Star themed food

... lot's of Moon and Star themed food (I went a bit crazy)

The INCREDIBLE cake,
made by my wonderful friend Aoife
(who's going into business, and why wouldn't she with talent like that?!)

Sábha blew out her candle, while Lile blew kisses at hers!

I had told everyone that there was a surprise inside the cake,
everyone waited with bated breath while it was being cut...

Surprise!! - a delicious rainbow!

We had a fantastic day. A house full of young and old and no particular structure made it really enjoyable. I had considered organising some simple party games, but with all the excitement I know my girls would not have been capable of following instructions - so the kids just played with whatever toys I had set up and generally amused themselves with running around and eating!

I did have a tub of pavement chalk outside in the garden and all the kids (even the bigger ones) had a great time drawing brightly coloured graffiti on our drab grey walls.

The cake made a striking centrepiece and everyone just loved it. Too often, fancy looking cakes don't taste very nice, but not this one. It was moist, perfectly moist, with vanilla buttercream and orange sponge... and every scrap of it got eaten. Every last scrap. Not one half-eaten, semi-played with piece went in the bin. Even the tiny children, who had already eaten their weight in biscuits, buns and chocolate buttons(moons!) ate their share.

If you have a party or indeed any occasion that needs a special (and more importantly delicious) cake, let me know and I'll try to hook you up! Aoife is great to work with and really loves a challenge. She's working on a website, so I'll link to her when she's all set up.

I forgot to photograph the goodie bags - they obviously matched the theme, but I'm not sure if I even fully remember what was in them! There was a glittery bouncy ball (to represent the moon), some chocolate stars, a couple of lollipops, some colouring pencils and a Moon and Star craft project.... which I will link to when I can remember where I found it...


I really enjoyed putting this theme together. There were lots of things I didn't get done on time (eg I only started making the savoury food as people were arriving, which was a bit crazy late...) but I'm happy with how it turned out.

I'm probably nuts doing big theme parties for tiny people who wont remember them... and I'll probably be all burned out and bored of it by the time they start requesting their own themed parties... but whatever... it makes me happy!

How about you? Do you go crazy creating themed parties for your kids or  do you keep it low key? ...or do you just get out of the house altogether and head for the zoo or someplace else that does all the work for you??

I'd love to know... I'm already thinking ahead to birthday number 3!!

This is not the post you are looking for

... or rather, this is not the post I intended writing... but my completely battered laptop committed computer suicide by taking a solo nose-dive off the arm of the couch yesterday. There was nobody even near it for me to blame. Lile was innocently jumping up and down in the same room and all I can conclude is that the floor vibrations were just too much for the poor thing to bear and it decided that the end was nigh. It would have been four years old next month... I'm not sure what that is in computer years... probably quite a lot...

Tea & Tulips for Mother's Day

There are some signs of life left, a blinking of little blue lights when I turn the power on, but the screen has flatlined, so until we can afford to have lifesaving surgery performed it has been doomed to a dusty, forgotten corner where it will have time to think about what it's done.

Handprints on  a Paper-Clay scroll for Mother's Day

I am attempting to post from the ANCIENT desktop which creaks and groans so much that I am catching up on a little light reading as I wait for pages to load... it's like dial-up but without the infuriating noise (at least)... and it won't let me install Google Chrome, so even blogger hates me today and is making it very tricky trying to insert things like links and photographs... which reminds me that I also can't find the wire for the camera to extract all the wonderful (ha!) photographs I was going to share. The ill-fated laptop had a handy little card reader built-in, so the wire has long-ago been lost to some other dusty forgotten corner (there are too many of those in this house!) All I can share today are a few phone-snaps from the past few weeks.

Mini birthday celebration at Great-Nana's house

What I was going to do was a write a bright and shiny post about Lile and Sábha's second Birthday. It was yesterday. We had a party. Not as big a party as we had last year, but with an even stronger theme and another amazing cake and little ones that sort of 'get' what a birthday is. It was lots of fun... but you'll have to wait a few days for the details! All I can share of the day is a sneak-peek of the theme:

... and a picture of the girls on their birthday tricycles:

They can't read, so blatently ignored my name-tags...

In other news, I got a new sister-in-law - YAY!!:

... all decent photos also trapped on camera...

The girls had their first ice-cream cones during our surprise late-March week of summer:

They also had their first trip to the fun-fair, with mixed reactions:

... And some new friends came to live with us:

All in all, apart from the laptop incident life has been rolling along quite nicely, if a little insanely hectic! More soon.

Big Fat Gypsy Babies

I have written before about my Lile's love for shoes. Sábha also loves footwear. Not as much as her sister, it's true, but enough to get quite excited when she gets a new pair!

They enjoy playing with the shoe basket almost everyday... trying on every shoe... over and over again. They are learning to help me tidy up afterwards!

This evening, my brother arrived with a gift for the girls. His fiancée and he found them on sale last week and just couldn't wait for their birthday to gift them... and so here they are!!

Tiny, little, pink satin, high-heeled, butterfly-sequin party shoes.

They are hilarious! The girls look ridiculously funny clacking around in them. They are slightly too big, which, somehow, makes them even sweeter.

They are little bit Suri Cruise, a little bit this (click 'this' to understand the title of this post)... but the girls are head over heels(!) in LOVE with them.

Best. Dressing-up shoes. EVER!

In fact, Lile brought all four shoes to bed with her. I had to sneak them away after she had fallen asleep to take this picture.

I think I may have trouble convincing the girls that these are not suitable as everyday footwear...

Fragile

Most days pass by in a blur of routine. Most days nothing remarkable happens. Most days I get up. I tend to my babes. I go to work or not. I eat. I talk. I listen. I read. I cook. I clean. Things happen and then more things happen. I do things and then I do more things. I sleep. Most days. Most days are common, ordinary days, full of the little things in life that are mostly unremarkable in and of themselves.

Some days, however, are remarkable. Some days there is something in the air that doesn't quite feel the same. Maybe a heaviness in the atmosphere... maybe not... sometimes a remarkable day can trick you into believing it is just another ordinary one. So that when the remarkable thing happens you will really notice it. It will really stand out.You will really, really notice it and it will change something. Sometimes it can change everything.

Yesterday started out in an almost ordinary way, except that I went to work instead of working from home as I usually do on a Friday. I got the bus to work and sipped peppermint tea from my travel mug. I took this crappy picture.

It was a little warmer out than it has been and I took off my scarf as I walked from the bus stop towards my office... a cool breeze started and I put it on again...

I met a colleague as I approached our building and we began a brief chat about how glad we were that it was almost the weekend. There was a man, high on a ladder, washing the second floor windows of our tall Georgian building. We walked a few  more steps together, my colleague and I, and agreed that it had been a hectic week... and then... all of a sudden and with no warning, the man on the ladder was falling... the ladder bending and coming apart in the middle... and he was falling and clawing at thin air... and we were running as if to try and catch him... and we were at the steps of our building and he had fallen, 40? 50? feet, down to the basement level, narrowly missing the black, spiked railing. There was a woman crying and a man clambering over the railings to help him. There were people on the phone to emergency services and passers by holding each other and people in the offices across the road standing at all of the windows with hands over their mouths. Faces stricken. My hands were over my mouth too, blood rushing and roaring in my ears.  I was shaking and I could see his legs...twisted on the metal staircase that leads to the basement entrance. I didn't look down at his face... I couldn't... I physically shook for almost an hour after the ambulance came and took him away. The ladder lay mangled on the pavement.

The police are keeping us up to date on his progress. He is in critical condition, but stable. Yesterday afternoon he was just critical. Today he is critical, but stable. It seems like a contradiction in terms... but what comfort that word 'stable' brings. It brings hope... and I am hoping so hard that he will be ok... hoping that he has friends and family around him comforting and supporting him... hoping that he will pull through... hoping, hoping, hoping, hoping that he will be ok. Just be ok.

I am sitting here quietly now and I am acutely aware of how fragile life is. I am thinking about how easily life can change... how quickly everything can unravel... how, at the flick of a switch the routine can falter and break... how all of those little unremarkable things - the eating, talking, listening, cooking, cleaning, tending, working, sleeping, doing can be utterly altered... or even taken away completely...

... and I am grateful. Grateful for the health and happiness of my loved ones. Grateful for the way my colleagues have pulled together and checked in with each other regularly, even though it's the weekend. Grateful that I live in a country with accessible health care and speedy emergency services.

I am grateful for the unremarkable. Grateful that I get to continue with the blur of my routine... most grateful for my unremarkable days.

Update: He is out of ICU and continuing to improve. 

Pride Comes Before A Fall

So, we took part in this wonderful exhibition recently!

Our room is second from the top in the middle row.

I asked the girls who lived in a small house - they said "Miss Mouse". They used their new markers to decorate the back wall. Lile chose the blue fabric for the carpet and told me that the plastic shells she found in the button box were tea-cups. 

Sábha decided the egg-carton seats I made needed cushions and chose the fabric, she also told me that the old wooden button was the light. 

They both did drawings of 'a gorilla eating an orange' to hang on the wall (they have a poster of gorillas in their own bedroom). 

I also made the table from a pesto jar lid and a wooden thread spool. Lile and Sábha are still enjoying having tea with the little boys almost everyday while we wait for 'Miss Mouse' to arrive!

(I have since found a pattern for a 'Miss Mouse' and hope to sew a duo for their 2nd birthday - which is sooner than I like to think...)

I'm so proud of the girls, the shoebox house was totally directed by them and only assembled by me because they are so very little. I'm so happy we took part in the exhibition it's given me such a buzz for the last few days to see our little room alongside all the others!

Well the buzz possibly got to my head, because a couple of nights ago, Lile cried out  - with a saturated nappy and a teething mouth. She wanted "MORE BOCKLE! MORE BOCKLE!". She has a BIG voice and I didn't want her to wake her sister so I quietened her and then hurried to get her some milk... and then I slipped... and fell down the stairs! At 4am. My body was still asleep and instantly went into shock, so that I lay curled in the foetal position, winded, while Lile cried and called "MAMA OK? MAMA OK?" over and over and Devo jumped out of bed believing that I had fallen with her in my arms - his dreams having filled in the knowledge gaps on his behalf... and little Sábha awoke last, rubbed her eyes and wondered what all the commotion was about.

Portrait of my Mother at age 12(?) painted by my Grandmother.

I didn't fall far (as you can see - there is a turn in our staircase - thankfully) but I sure fell HARD! Days later, my neck still aches. My elbow seems to look uglier with each passing hour and Devo rolls his eyes every time I mention that I feel sore. He is so OVER it. (I probably look for sympathy a little too often - but come on- as an adult you don't tend to fall down that often. It's kind of a shock to the system!)

In the cold light of day it doesn't look like much - but it HURTS!

I feel so much better after a pleasant weekend of friends, family and food - the most important things in life. These three things will never fail to cheer me up.

Spending twenty minutes throwing away some loose change in the late night gambling emporium, after a great meal with lovely people, in exchange for some bright colours, flashing lights, giggles and ... well...not a lot else really, doesn't hurt either.

100

I have finally, FINALLY reached post 100. It has taken a long time. A lot longer than I imagined it would.... but there you are! 


To mark it, I decided to post the first post I ever posted, (try saying that really fast) here in my little corner of the internet

****************************************************************. 

I've only just discovered

... where wishes come from.

Thousands of them tumbling from the thistles in my unkempt garden.

Catch them as they float by on the summer breeze
Whisper your wishes to them, then let them fly
So many wishes.... I hope they come true!