Polyvore is really totally cool!

Thanks to a Crafty Mummy who pointed me towards this website. I had many happy hours playing with backgrounds and designer clothes. When else can a girl see if an Alexander McQueen gown would match with a pair of Chanel earrings?  I have been happy to sit beside my lovely husband while he watches football to play with clothes and bags etc.

Above:  I call this 'Spring by the Sea'. This outfit would be perfect to wear to stroll through beach side shops. I imagine tanned legs, icy drinks looking for a great place to have a luscious lunch with someone cruisy.




Above:  I call this 'Shopping Anyone?'  Stylish, comfortable and versatile. Who wouldn't want to stroll around in this stunning dress?



Above:  I call this 'Doing the School Pick-Up', it is easy to wear, simple, fun but the shapes are all very classic. As those of you who have been reading my blog, know that black, red and white are my favourite colours to wear.


Do some playing for yourself at www.polyvore.com

The Coolest Thing

I  had a really cool weekend recently.  We had to be in BrisVegas for a variety of reasons and the bonus was we got to spend some time with good friends who had recently moved away from our friendly clutches.

I could list the things we did like; markets, brunch, watching old movies, eating cake and just hanging out...  But that wasn't the coolest part of our weekend.  The coolest thing was, I finally worked out what the coolest thing in the world is..  It is friends.

Yup, that simply:  it is friends.  People who share the journey of life and voluntarily stand on the side lines and cheer you on.  Now family is cool too, but they HAVE to love you - warts and all - that is their function, but friends, they don't HAVE to do anything, but they do, I love that.

I have an amazing little snatch of friends.  I hold onto them dearly.  We were thrust together by a haphazard coffee morning and have been inseparable since.  We have shared so much life together, that I think we are now permanently linked together, threads in each others' tapestries of life.  I could not imagine my life without them.

I have been going through a tough couple of months, for a variety of reasons, which are not cool to go into here.  Basically, I am always wishing I was better, thinner, smarter, healthier, smilier etc etc, but these three women in my life (and you know who you are, you gorgeous things) just accept me and listen and love me, and I think that is cool. Through my friendship with these three gorgeous women I have become a much better mother, wife, cook, friend, teacher ... well person really. I am so grateful that they are in my life.

But it is not just my relationship with these three women that give my life its coolness. I have lots of friendships and they all have their degrees of coolness; Friend #435 and I meet once a month for 'prayer' - our husbands think we just talk (pfft what would they know!), Friend #653 and her gorgeous family, share Easter with us every year and we have many catch ups through the year, Friend #198 lives in London and although she is oceans away, text messages and emails keep us in touch, Friend #878 is quite new to my friend list and is so refreshing in her quirky and thoughtful ways it challenges the way that I think and Friend #651 has grown children but shares her life stories and experiences with me.

I love that I have discovered the coolest thing in the world.  I also love that it is free, environmentally friendly, decomposes, comes in pretty packaging, sustainable, non-poluting and energy efficient.  But more important than all of that it is renewable; it will just keep going on and on.

Crumbs

When I started this blog, there were some topics I just did not want to touch on.  Firstly, I did not want to comment on children, especially my children, as I really don’t think I should be giving any advice, stories, findings or evidence that may result in me having my children taken from me. I would miss their cute little faces. Secondly, I did not want to write about cleaning. How dull. Cleaning is something that empty nesters or real grown ups talk about. I also wanted avoid to eluding to the lunacy that is intertwined in my thinking regarding this topic.

But, here I am, about to do something I said I never would. I am about to discuss Crumbs. Sigh.

I hate crumbs. Crumbs wreck a perfectly clean floor. They wreck a clean tablecloth. They work their way into drawers, cupboards, corners and cloths. They require more work to get rid of than I have time to give to the task. They blow from tables to floor, they are indiscriminate in their origin and can be made from virtually anything. They are also created by another thing I was not going to discuss on my blog - children.

One of the nick names for my five year old is ‘Captain Crumbulator’. She has an amazing ability to make crumbs out of anything. We have a little joke that she can make crumbs when eating yoghurt. She is a shocker. Can you sense the conflict I live with?

Now, I do love having a clean house. I know that this probably puts me further down the cool thermometer, but that has to be a reality I live with. I like to know that my house is ready for people to drop in any time - not that this happens in this day and age anymore. My mother lives not ten minutes away, that is reason enough to keep my house in some form of order! I have a little mental list in my head of the bare minimum to be done each day, week, fortnight and month but I have to be careful not to get too thingy about this as it kind of stresses everyone out. However, I do love a clean house.

I have been quite remiss in my cleaning for the last couple of months and I have a good reason. I have been pregnant and I have been working part time. This has meant that for the past 6 months I have been either sick, tired, aching, bloated, swollen or generally stressed pretty much the whole time in varying combinations.

Now, lets meld all these pieces together. 

1. I like a clean house
2. I do not like crumbs
3. I have not been cleaning
4. I do not have much time 

Of course you have made the connection; my kitchen drawers have been a disaster. I had put off cleaning out the kitchen drawers for ages, knowing that this is one job that just could not be half done, once I started it, I wouldn’t be able to stop until every drawer had been completely gone through and cleaned.

So, the day came when I could not avoid it any longer - I had run out of excuses, the crumbs were out of control. We had gotten to the point where I thought by putting utensils back in the drawers would make them dirty again.  It didn’t actually take that long to do in the end, and I was able to get rid of things from my drawers that I hadn’t used for ever and my children got some new things for their pretend play stash.

Feeling rather sorry for myself for being so danged boring, I vented on Facebook. My status basically said that,  ‘I would rather be people watching sipping lattes in a trendy cafe, than cleaning crumbs from drawers.‘ I was hoping for a whole heaps of ‘Me too’s but this is not the response I got. I got a whole stream of people commenting how cool it was to have a clean cutlery drawer. Or how cool a clean house is. One of my Facebook friends has since said that there is nothing cooler than a clean house.  So.....  I guess I am cooler than I thought!

There is a cup Friend #458 has at her house that I like to use, it says, ‘A dusted house is the sign of a wasted life’. I think this is hilarious, and I chortle away while sipping tea from it, secretly trying to track how much of my life I have wasted dusting and polishing, cleaning up crumbs and arranging my house. Years I imagine. Drats.