A review

This is an excuse for me to put up some pictures of my gorgeous baby girl! But not many because she doesn't seem to be very photogenic at the moment. Mostly her expression when looking at the camera denotes a combination of mild shock, suspicion and disdain.

See what I mean? To be fair she's sat next to the engine of a rather noisy paddle-steamer. But still.

So a while back I mentioned that we won a giveaway hosted by FutureMama for some stunning hair clips made by GeorgiaBlue. It was pretty hard to choose, but in the end we went for some colours Nutmeg has in her wardrobe (pink and turquoise) and some others we just thought looked nice. They arrived at the end of July - and they are sooo pretty! I was excited about them already before they got here but when we saw them we were all thrilled. Even The Engineer thinks they're wonderful - and let me tell you, he is picky.

Here they are threaded onto a pen because the bows arrived looking a little flat. I don't normally take pictures of the wrapping a parcel has arrived in, but I was really taken with the presentation of these. They came folded up in brown paper sealed with the cute GeorgiaBlue sticker and arranged on several lovely little cards, which we're now using to keep them all in one place.
OK they were inside a jiffy bag too. But that was as un-photogenic as my daughter.
I know, I should have picked a different colour pen for the photo, it was just what was to hand.

Here's Nutmeg on the swings near our home, with me. Looking suspicious and frowny, as usual. I'm told she gets it from her mother... My hair isn't that colour any more - that's the natural look, which I intend to go back to at some point. For the wedding I had it dyed dark brown with two blue streaks.

As we've been away visiting family, Nutmeg has been wearing her new bows quite a lot. Here she is at the wedding, eating her first ever rusk.

I think my favourites are the ribbed polka dot ones, both green and black-and-white. The silky fabric ones are cute but there's something about the texture of the dotted ones that I just love.

Look a smile!

Two things I particularly like about these clips:

Firstly, as Nutmeg has such fine hair and relatively little of it, it's been hard to find anything small enough to stay put, but these don't slide by themselves. She has to knock them to get them to move, and even then they don't actually fall out.

And secondly, these are clothes-peg type clips, whereas all the ones we've found for her over here have been the sort that you bend back and then snap shut. Which, on the top of a small baby's head - you know, where that soft spot is - is not brilliant. So these are absolutely what I was looking for.

I'd like to be able to balance that by giving you some things that I don't like about them...but (un)fortunately there isn't anything! My only quibble is that there aren't enough bright blue or turquoise ones on offer.

If you like the look of them, you know where to find them.

MTM - people and faces

This was a last-minute tin but Froglet was very excited about it because he loves face-biscuits. They're very popular generally over here. The Swiss call them spitzbueb which means something like cheeky rascal. (Bueb is boy).

Avocado, olives, tomato, cucumber, nasturtium flower, bread-cheese-jam people, spitzbueb

Froglet made three different faces with his ingredients. I had thought he might put the flower in the persons hair but it got used as hair and as a nose before he ate most of it. After that he used the rest as a flower! In picture two the bread-person and cookie are "bruises" (?!) and in picture three the bread-people are ears.

Don't forget to check out what everyone else made here.

Another award

Another one from Susana, whose blog you should certainly visit if you like crafts, or baking, or homeschooling, or babies... And she even likes cleaning too.

The conditions for the Honest Scrap award are as follows: I have to tell you ten things about myself, and I have to pass this on to ten other blogs. This is a fun one and I'd honestly love to hear ten things about all of you so if you're reading this and haven't had it already - or have but would like to do it again - consider yourself awarded!
(Please leave me a comment with a link to your ten things, in case I'm not already following you)


My ten things:

1/ I loathe cleaning. Probably because my mother did/does.
2/ I trained as a conference interpreter - my dream job.
3/ Public speaking scares me stiff. Yes this does clash with number 2.
4/ I currently work from home as an (occasional) translator from Danish.
5/ When we were first married we woke up one morning to the sound of scraping at our back door. Looking out of the window I saw a lad only slightly younger than me (I was 22) trying to force the door. When he saw me, he smiled, waved, and left through the back gate!
6/ I always wanted 4 children, but The Engineer beat me down to 3 and now probably just 2.
7/ I like doing the washing. Even though we share a washing machine with a potential five other families (currently just one though). And I like folding it too.
8/ We own rather a lot of books. Whenever my parents visit, they bring more of mine that they found in some box or recess of their house!
9/ It's really hard to think of ten things to say about myself rather than my children or husband!
10/ When The Engineer gets home from work we are going out to buy a 7-seater Citroen, to replace the ancient Audi that we currently have. This is because a functioning car heating system is pretty much essential in Switzerland in winter if your parking space is outside. Unless you don't mind not being able to see through the windscreen. This year a heating system would have been nice on several occasions in summer too!

So there you have it. Enjoy your award everyone!

I'm FLYing. Or will be, soon.

The house is overwhelming me. I had considered showing you all a picture of what the living room looked like Monday morning when we got home. But I figured you've all seen footage of earthquake zones before.

It shouldn't overwhelm me, because it's not such a big place, at least not by American standards. We have three bedrooms, a living/dining room, a kitchen, bathroom and shower room. And the balcony - no garden or stairwell as it's an apartment.

But nonetheless, it does overwhelm me. I don't know how other people manage to raise children and clean at the same time. (I understand still less how anyone enjoys cleaning!) At the moment, the house is in such a state that I barely know where to start. So I have turned back to FLYlady, in the hope of getting a routine set up.

Flylady says: You can do anything for fifteen minutes.
Flylady also says: It didn't get like this in a day, so it won't get sorted out in a day either.
And finally Flylady says: Are you living in CHAOS? (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome)

No, no I'm not. Actually I'm living in COBYHTTUAYFUS.
(That's: Come Over But You'll Have To Take Us As You Find Us Syndrome. I know, it's not so easy to pronounce as CHAOS).

But I would quite like to be able to feel that things are always nearly company-ready. So let's see if this works.

We're back!

We just got back from the UK where we visited the grandparents who live there and attended Zia's wedding. Ewythr is the name for my new brother-in-law, on here at least. Of course you all immediately recognised this as the Welsh word for uncle. ;-)
Zia looked beautiful, the wedding went smoothly, and I did not fall off my ridiculously high heels when going up to pray for the happy couple. Oh and the speeches were very funny. Froglet got to see his little cousin S and run wild with her. Ewythr didn't want children at the wedding for this very reason, but Zia said her nieces and nephew would have to come and in fact S was a bridesmaid. She did very well for a two-year old! And Froglet ran wild in a quiet sort of way - lots of running but no screaming - so we thought that was pretty good too.

Once the wedding was over and we'd seen all the various bits of my family, we headed back north to The Engineers hometown and had a proper holiday with his. (Weddings do not count as holidays. In fact anything that involves me wearing high heels does not count as a holiday). We went to the beach twice, even though it's a rather long drive by UK standards. Froglet loved that. He paddled in the freezing water, hunted for shells with me, looked for crabs with Granddad, built sandcastles and flew a kite. The Engineer is hoping that we may be able to rent a cottage near the sea next year so we don't have to drive for two hours every time we want to get there.

On another occasion the boys flew some rockets and aeroplanes. Most importantly, we went to Leeds and visited Borders while the grandparents took care of Froglet and Nutmeg, so we had a whole hour to ourselves to just look at books. Ahhhh... wonderful. Of course we came away with loads.

Hope you've all been enjoying your holidays. We'll be back to our usual posting sort-of-schedule soon!

Birthday cake and jelly

(You probably already know that when Brits say jelly they mean jello. But I thought I'd mention it just in case anyone is reading this hoping for a jam-type jelly recipe.)

So yes, we made birthday jellies and birthday cake. Mainly because I really wanted to try out our new jelly mold/muffin tins. And I also wanted a birthday cake, of course. We made Cranham Honey Cake, which involves glacé cherries. I love glacé cherries.

MTM - I'm 30, and Switzerland is... much older.

Well, this weeks theme - Celebration - was remarkably apt. Monday was my thirtieth birthday. (Although I've been thinking of myself as thirty for a couple of months already. This seems to happen whenever my birthday is approaching).

Moreover, August 1st is Swiss national day. So we combined the two into a Swiss birthday tin. I made Aelplermagronen (Alpine macaroni cheese) and put all the ingredients in the tins separately.

Clockwise from back: pasta x 2, cheese sauce, bacon, fried onion, apple sauce

I had to make it all separately anyway, as The Engineer is not a big fan of onions or applesauce - at least not on his mac-cheese! It is a pretty odd combination, but I rather like it. Some cantons also put potato in, but potato and pasta is too much starch for us. I should also say that the pasta we used is the wrong sort, it ought to be proper macaroni.

Froglet ate the pasta (under duress), the apple sauce and the bacon, rejecting the cheese and onion. He must be the only child in the world not to like macaroni cheese!

We also made cake, and birthday jelly/jello (non-Swiss this time!) in our new muffin tins. These are they, minus the jelly - which you can see by clicking here - I just wanted to show you because I'm really chuffed with them:

As you can see, they have lids at the top and the bottom, because they are actually jelly molds, but I thought they would be so cool for having MTM picnics, like this one we had last week.

Don't forget to check out what everyone else celebrated this week.