Wednesday, November 25, 2015

In the meantime...

It's been ages since I've updated this blog! For a long time, Twitter and Instagram have just felt easier to commit to in the busyness of day-to-day life. Add in school runs and regular runs to fit in around the usual housework and there's been quite a bit of trimming of the social media fat.

Though there is one thing I've picked up in the meantime, and that's my art! I've been keeping up a Tumblr with the various things I draw and hand-letter and it's been great! I've done commissioned portraits, Christmas cards, and some hand-lettered typography. Plus, all of the art I do just for myself for fun and practise. I've even managed to get an Etsy store up and slowly running!



One of the things I've been really keen to do is sell this series of prints I made specifically to compile a big donation to the Trevor Project, which helps LGBT+ teens and young adults with crisis intervention and suicide prevention.

here's my Trevor Project print! There's another colour scheme as well, both up in my Etsy shop!


A Christmas card of St. Lucia for a little Scandinavian feel!



Henry VIII meets Notorious B.I.G.

A fun character piece that spawned a whole new style!


So, if anyone feels like they want some awesome hand-lettering, or some awesome Christmas cards, pop on by Sketch and Doodle over on Etsy! I'll be getting more and more stuff up there as the interest grows. Plus, my art is always up on Instagram and Tumblr, too. And if you guys like the idea of supporting The Trevor Project in their efforts at suicide prevention, please do snag one of my "God is Love" prints from the store.

Hope to see you soon!

Monday, October 20, 2014

Back to Birthday Season

The leaves are changing and the temperatures are dropping, which - in this house - means it's time to start getting ready for all the holidays and birthday celebrations you can possibly imagine. 4/6 grandparents, 2 uncles, 1 daddy, 2 little boys, and 3 anniversaries! Not to mention Halloween, Guy Fawkes Night, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Welcome to my busiest 3 1/2 months of the year.

So how did we kick things off? The annual pumpkin picking expedition, of course!



Let it not go unsaid: trying to pick pumpkins with 4 rambunctious boys under 4 is stressful, even under the best of conditions.

Now, I'm on to E's birthday party, and this year he's requested a How To Train Your Dragon theme. I have foam Viking helmets, a "happy birthday" banner that looks like old Viking manuscripts, HTTYD colouring sheets, and - of course - costumes for the birthday boy and his brother. E will be Hiccup and T will be Toothless...rather appropriately, since - like his brother - he's nearly a year old and still has no teeth coming in. Hey: if it means that teething is as easy and quick with him as it was with his brother, I'm not complaining!

via, Tried and True Blog
I've been all over Pinterest using ideas like the above to cobble together my own version of costumes for the boys. 8 metres of faux fur ribbon, 1 metre of felt fabric, 2 wire coat hangers, and a borrowed sewing machine later, I have achieved success. I consider that no mean feat when I remember that I haven't sewn anything in about 10 years. Seriously. My last sewing project was my senior prom dress with a youth leader from our church at the time.

Of course, I have now been admonished no less than 5 times by E that I musn't forget his birthday cake. Thank you, Thor, it's nowhere near as complicated as the cake I made him last year! This time, he's just asked for it to be blue and green. I can handle that.

Friday, September 19, 2014

Absentee Blogging

In the craziness of two little boys, and freelance history-ing, and weekly 5ks, and the occasional pause for a deep breath, a chapter of a book, and a mocha coconut frappucino, this poor little blog has become neglected. Blog Protection Services should be making weekly visits to my laptop to ensure it doesn't suffer from benign neglect. Of course, they'd probably be the same sort of organization that took away your terrarium and potted succulents if you were talented enough to kill the things in them. Put you on crafting probation if your dip-dyed curtains were a hot mess. Freeze your accounts after another Etsy rampage.

But none of that for me! I've been Tweeting (the refuge of the blogger too busy to blog, but too convinced of their own wit not to share their quips with the internet) in between all the work and cleaning and running and baby-keeping-alive. I'll share those and frightening photographic evidence of just how much my sons have grown since last I kept a regular schedule of blog posts. Seriously, though: how has it been so long!?

Top row: Tristan
Second row: Ethan
Third row: Ethan, boys sharing pound cake, boys at National Trust site, Tristan
Fourth row: Brand new brothers, slightly less new brothers, sunglasses, and finger chewing

























Work has been brilliant. Who knew you could do the whole historian gig as a freelancer? Well, as a stroke of luck would have it: you can! So I've spent a few weeks going to east London to teach workshops on archives, genealogical research, and WWI. I fully admit to feeling all grown up (thus negating any true semblance of adulthood) when all the little tweens called me "Miss" the other day as they excitedly shouted over each other in a desperate bid to show me the results of their research. You have not enjoyed teaching until you honestly hear a 12-year-old give a disappointed sigh at the end of class only to announce, "Now I'll have to look up Hitler at home..."

Also, I've read some lovely books lately, which I must gush over in more detail. Consider the Fork is the all-around winner, though The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul was fun, if chic-lit-like, and The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden was hilariously sympathetic.

Some day, I will manage to do all of these things with greater balance. I will schedule longer runs, I'll bake with Ethan, and get Tristan to sit through more than one book at bedtime. Perhaps more freelance projects will come along, and maybe - just maybe - I'll even get to have a date night with the Husband! Hey: a girl can dream...


Wednesday, July 2, 2014

At 4 Years, You Give Blisters

So, as evidenced by my hinting at the subject for ages, as well as the title of this post, our fourth anniversary trip was a walking holiday in Cornwall. We divested ourselves of the boys by leaving them in the loving care of their grandparents in Berkshire for four days while we traveled as far west as we could go and still be in England.


The first day, we arrived in Penzance and strolled west to Marazion in order to go and see St. Michael's Mount. Alas, we were too late in the day to walk the causeway (the tide had come in) but we had a nice boat ride there and back and got to enjoy walking up to the top of the island and touring the castle (a National Trust property).

In the end, we covered about 11 miles going around the island, through Penzance, and along the South West Coast Path - our chosen highway for most of the walking holiday. My initial plan had been to walk 7 miles the first day out to St. Michael's Mount and back, followed by 17 miles to Land's End, then 22.8 miles to St. Ives, then back down 12 miles across the peninsula along St. Michael's Way - the old pilgrim trail - to end up back in Penzance.

Surely, we thought, this would be a piece of cake. Sure, we'd be tired, but we'd manage it easily. That, I can confidently say, was my hubris talking.

This is just a sample of the sort of terrain we covered during our nearly-17-mile hike over to Land's End.

Over rocks and under rocks; up hills and down cliff faces; along beaches and through hedges, we hiked, slogged, and limped our way to our destination. You see, neither of us bothered to check the elevation along our chosen route, and so didn't factor in just how tiring it would be to add in all of the ascents and descents.




But, in the end, we made it to Land's End and gratefully soaked in hot baths, lounged on the bed watching crap telly, and called the in-laws to see how our boys were treating them.


The next day, we had breakfast in the gorgeous restaurant: about 200° views of the Atlantic ocean through all the conservatory-style glass walls. We were stiff and sore and blistered, but decided to attempt to press on...if in truncated fashion. So we set off past Sennen Cove and along the Coast Path. Eventually, we turned inland and made our way towards St. Just. The village itself was adorable; the walk, however was vicious. Scorching sun, biting gadflies, overgrown footpaths, and boggy fields. In the end, we decided the better option would have been to stay on the Coast Path for longer, even if it added to the distance we traveled.

But, we made it there in one piece and sat to have lunch and enjoy the scenery before taking the open-top tourist bus to our backpackers' hostel in Zennor.

St. Just Church...much nicer inside than we'd initially thought!
The hostel - The Old Chapel Cafe & Guesthouse - was brilliant. The rooms were spacious, clean, well-appointed, and took full advantage of the gorgeous windows you get in an old church building. The cafe downstairs was cute and there was an adorable gift shop full of snazzy little handmade & small production gifts...many from local artists & companies. Plus, and this is an entirely irrelevant detail - the whole place smelled like my old summer camp, Arlington Echo. Seriously: the smell of the cafe was the smell of the old dining hall from all my years of band camp. Nostalgia is a lovely thing.


St. Senara Church in Zennor...very big on the mermaid theme.

The next morning it was on to St. Ives and the journey back. By this point we'd done 11 miles on Thursday, 16.5 on Friday, and 6.5 on Saturday. 34 miles in three days was still wearing on us, so rather than try to hike the 5 miles to St. Ives over what we'd been told was very difficult terrain, we opted to take the tourist bus instead and have a relaxing last day in Cornwall wandering St. Ives and doing a bit of shopping.





St. Ives was gorgeous and loads of fun. There were cute shops, fun restaurants, awesome art galleries, all sorts of opportunities to bring back nice little gifts for everyone (including ourselves!), and a great prominade facing the bay where we sat and ate lunch from a scrummy little pasty shop.

We arrived back in Penzance just in time to catch a bit of the Golowan festival. We were tired and not quite in the mood for working through a claustrophobic press of people, but there was still a fun vibe, lots of tasty-smelling food & drink, and some relaxing outdoor music as we made our way back to the car.

We'll definitely be going back to Cornwall at some point in the near future: it was just too much fun not to! Even if we did break ourselves trying to hike the Coast Path. Ah well: happy anniversary to us!

Friday, June 20, 2014

Whiling Away The Time

We've not been up to too much of interest lately. Lots of reading, bike riding, and duplo-building. A Fathers' Day outing back to The Vyne, planning a walking holiday in Cornwall (!!!), and coming to the sad realisation that we have long to wait before the next season of GoT. But don't just take my word for it! ...Or, do take my word for it...along with some pictures, because that's what I've got to share with you!

A picturesque Fathers' Day
My other engineering genius.



Basically every other afternoon for the past fortnight
has been these two wheeling around our carpark.






5 months old and already a champion on the swings








Monday, April 28, 2014

Oh, yeah...that blog thing...

First my sister came. Then, my parents came with two of my step-sisters to take us on holiday to Dorset. Then, the Husband went away for a week on business to the States. Then Easter showed up with its attendant family visits. And finally, to top it all off, the boys and I got ill and have been hunkered down in the house for nearly a week now.

Great-Grandchildren...all in pairs.


So I'm still the horrible person who has yet to charge the batteries in my camera so I can download the pictures from my sister's stay and the family trip to Dorset, but I have a few Twitter updates and pictures from my father-in-law to make up for it all. Call me low-maintenance, but I can still rustle up a quick update every once in a while.


































Ah well. In the midst of generally struggling at life (and looking up preschools, and booking GP appointments, and clearing eye-bogeys all day) I get a break at last! Tomorrow I get to go to London for a set of history lectures at my old university. History, London, the Tube, and scrummy frozen yoghurt...sounds like a good evening to me!

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Our Favourite Reads: Seventh Edition

Back again after a long absence is the latest in a series of posts about all of my favourite children's books that come through the house. With weekly trips to the library, I suppose you'd expect more of these, but then, I've tried to save these posts for the absolute best of the best. So it gives a real thumbs up to this edition's authors that their books have brought back my once regular efforts.

The Emily Brown books are brilliant. My hat is off to Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton. The illustrations are cute, and the formulaic writing is brilliant. There's a great repetition of sounds and sentence structures that's perfect for toddlers, no made-up or intentionally misspoken words (my one gripe about the Charlie & Lola books), and a great picture of a child's imaginary worlds (Emily and her rabbit Stanley go into outer space, search for the source of the Nile, and scooba dive off the Great Barrier Reef).

In Elephant Emergency Emily Brown and Stanley go on adventures with their friend Matilda, but Matilda's Mummy keeps calling their emergency telephone. Only problem? She's not calling about emergencies. Emily Brown is at the end of her tether when she is the one with an emergency and Matilda's Mummy is unavailable!

That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown involves a spoiled queen who insists on having Emily's stuffed rabbit Stanley all for herself. Emily Brown rebuffs offers from the queen's Footman, Army, Navy, and Air Force, but the queen is insistent. In the end, it's up to Emily Brown to teach her an important lesson about toys.

I've loved these books from the minute they came back with us. Ethan can already tell me how Emily Brown puts the emergency telephone back on its cradle, and knows to recite the rat-a-tat-tat on the garden door when the queen's henchmen come to call. These are the sort of books that know their target audience well & will stretch them to learn new words & phrases with ease. I'm already resolved that the boys will have their own copies of these before the year is out.