Creative Mama

8 years old

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Master B is 8 today! I look at my baby and wonder when he got so big and grown up.

Every morning when you wake your hair looks so messy but you don't mind at all.

You have started avoiding having your photo taken which of course makes it more fun to try and take your photo.

You are so adventurous and will give anything a go- even a waterside down a hill head first!

You have grown a few cm's over the holidays- its all the food, and sunshine!!

One day very soon you will be taller than me!

You are loving scootering and biking everywhere at the moment and enjoying the responsibility of using your very own lock.

You love to create everything you can with cardboard, glue, paper, tape, pens and paint.

I love finding your amazing lego creations in strange places around the house

I love the serious faces you pull even when I try and give you hugs and kisses.

I treasure our random assortment of family photos.

You make me laugh so much when you make yourself into a robot!

You are getting so good at playing UNO.

I love listening to you read aloud.

You are enjoying all the captain underpants books.

We hope you enjoy all your birthday lego and will be waiting to see what awesome creations you come up with.

Happy 8th Birthday Master B. We love you to the moon in back in a lego spaceship xxx

you can see the 5th, 6th and 7th birthday posts.

to market to market on Sunday

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Creative Mama will be at the Monster March Market with Les Pommes Rouges Creations on the1st March 10am-3pm.

Very excited to be showcasing some very cool hand stitched Embroidery Hoops I have been working on the past few weeks.

Check out the facebook event!

I'm a very easy going gardener. I enjoy gardening and this could just be possibly because the garden does its own thing and I get to enjoy it. Yes I know we have weeds in our lawn- but the clover brings the bees to the yard and dandelions make awesome fairies when you blow them.

Our garden has been through a lot in the past 6 years we have lived in this house. We had so much liquefaction from February 22nd.

Every year since, multiple times a year we get flooded. Enough water to fill the back yard with more than ankle deep water. Its frustrating seeing pea straw floating from the garden, and tide lines as it takes a few weeks to receded. (the boys do think its pretty awesome having their own backyard pool)

But I'm pretty stubborn so we found Macrocarpa planter boxes for sale- my grand plan was to raise the height of the vegetable gardens. High enough that we can grow our own food and move the plants from the areas we know flood. My grand gardening plan is -if it lives it can stay.

This has of course taken longer than anticipated as we were waiting to fill them since they had no idea where to dig up the sewerage lines *sigh*. We have now filled them all and given the whole garden a nice pea straw topping to help with the lack of water this summer.

We now have a productive garden. We have fruit trees- to my count we now have 25- an assortment of plants like passionfruit, feijoa's, apple's, peach's, nectarine's, lemon's, blackcurrants, boysenberries and also strawberries, tomatoes, pumpkins, celery, lettuce, corn, onions, cabbages, beetroot, peppers, rhubarb, courgettes, potatoes, peas, basil, mint, rosemary.

I am enjoying going out and weeding, watering and admiring all the growth the garden in the evenings. The smell of basil and tomatoes when you water them is amazing!

So in 4 years I think I have experienced every emotion possible.

To see all our hard work taken away in just a few seconds- is enough to bring a grown woman to tears.

It feels so good to actually be in a better space in 2015, to be able to embrace what I can change and enjoy where I am and the decisions I have made to get here.

So welcome to my garden. A place of growth. The boys are enjoying all the bugs and birds and I'm just winging it (I have actually been reading many garden books to gain garden knowledge) and when you accidentally plant all your tomatoes too close the upside is the bird's can't actually see all the fruit- gardening win!

Here's to another year. Learning from the past. Embracing the future.

keeping the boys artwork

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My boys love to create by drawing, painting, making and building.

I have photos of over 200+ pieces of art work created from 2012-2014 from both my boys. I started taking photos at the end of each school year so I could recycle the large quantity of artwork (who has space to keep every wonderful creation?!)

With 2014 year finished I had just over 100 individual pieces of art piled up from both the boys (image above) just waiting to be photographed.

Recently a friend had created a photo book for her daughters time at preschool and I loved how simple the book was and it was an easy way to keep the memories without the huge pile of art sitting around.

I uploaded all the images I had to snapfish and created a 30cm x 30cm hardcover photo book.

It was so easy to use (I think it helps that I use snapfish for printing all my Project Life photos) and with so many options for page layouts and colours I just went for simple 4 images per page and white. I ended up with 44 pages, a little bit more expensive than the original 20 pages price but I didn't really want to split it into 2 books or not use images we had.

I could have taken the time to do photo collages and save multiple images as one image to save on printing but I like that each square is one creation from the boys.

The front cover was a recent image of the boys (thanks to Picmonkey)