getting on with

'stuff' lately - cooking up this...

...and that.  If Granola counts as 'cooking'.  The cake is parsnip and sultana spice cake, baked on the back of the frenzy of health and activity that always accompanies the arrival of the first veg box.  It's quite nice - good with a cup of tea, as my SiL always tells me my cakes are.  Oliver said it sucked all the moisture out of his mouth, so - same view different windows eh?

I have bravely branched out in the crochet department and taken a departure from my normal blanket making to create this little fella:

I left him on the kitchen table for Oliver when I went to work with a blue ribbon and a lable round his neck calling him Pascal, which I thought very natty indeed.  He is a French poodle you know, but by the time I came home the blue ribbon was discarded on the floor, Pascal had been renamed 'Stitches' and absorbed into the toy mountain which lives in Oliver's bed.

Emboldened by this foray into toymaking, I recently purchased this:

and hope to produce a whole heap of cuddliesomeness.

And a Navajo Ripple update:

The white is working.  Phew.

Just after Christmas the three of us took our Christmas double chins out for an airing.

The three of us NOT being Mark, the squirrel and I, obvs.  And Oliver doesn't have a Christmas double chin weighing him down either.  Obvs.

The local squirrels were very tame, and very overweight, the fat little blighters.  Too many peanuts bought by cooing tourists, no doubt.  We tried to tempt them with cherry tomatoes, which is the only food I had with me, but they obviously hadn't started their New Year diets yet, as they were very sniffy about them.

Hmmm, what else.  Looking forward home-ed wise I have decided to focus on reading, writing and spelling for a few months.  This is a weak area for Oliver, and I suddenly woke up the other morning in a cold sweat panicking about how the hell he would ever sit an exam in anything given his current loathing of the written word.  Shoulder to the wheel and all that.  Poor Oliver, getting his education solely on the back of his mother's twighlight epiphanys seems a little ad hoc, even by my standards.

Anyhoo, his spelling and writing is improving, albeit slowly, so a focus on it for a while won't hurt.

Tootle pip.