Sunday, June 6, 2010

This and That

For Siv's birthday I decided to make her something handmade. She had kindly given me a Tatty Teddy mobile phone case for my birthday as a joke, as I have continously lost it since we got here. Since this case is bright pink it makes it easier for me to locate. Siv also has that disease of loosing things or rather as we prefer to say "putting them in a safe place", we unfortunately just don't remember where that is :( So I thought a perfect gift for her would be a fabric basket to match her kitchen that she could put all said important things in.

I had found a tutorial for a small square fabric basket on one of the many sites I visit daily and just expanded the length to suit. I found them really easy to put together and the result rather pleasing. I have patchworked one for my bathroom to hold toilet rolls and will photograph that for you next week. Surfice to say the birthday girl was happy with her gift but liked it so much that the little bits were to good to go in it!

I have been making a slow indent into my scrapbooking back log. I just have these photos above to go and I will be finished on Maddie's album from last year. I am ignoring the fact that I have both Euan and Ellie's still to do for last year and all of them for this year. Aah who said life was easy.

With the threat of snow coming I hastily made my way onto Amazon and happily clicked my way to four new sledges. I went for the small sit your bottom on it ones which have a handle at the front to hold onto. I was definitely tempted by the bigger beauties but these swayed me when I read you could use them on sand. The day after they arrived we headed down to Bertha's to test them out. It was a rather windy day and after the near loss of Euan's sled (insert meltdown from the boy)we all hung onto them for dear life. We found a fab ball of dried seaweed and proceeded to have an impromptu game of football (sorry John).

The dunes get progressively bigger the further down the beach you head. Some of the dunes were just to soft to try and sled down, let alone to climb up. Ellie didn't really get the concept that you had to lift your legs up for the sled to work and we may have had a bit of bottom lip action, I know hard to believe from my dear sweet Ellie.

Maddie certainly started to get the hang of it and I think with being the lightest she definitely had the advantage.

Although cockiness soon led to a spectacular wipeout! Euan was up and down the dunes like a shot and was generally the one breaking new trails.

The light was beginning to fade fast but I couldn't persuade the munchkin that we would need to head back. They kept asking for just one more try please Mum.


And so the wipe outs continued and yes Mum was sympathetic after I had got my shot!

This one spent most of the time chasing the sea birds in the little inlet and standing barking at us. We had confused him with going the opposite direction on the beach to usual and standing still in one spot. He was not amused.

I guess he took the view of if you can't beat them, join them and was soon racing up and down the dunes after the kids. Let me tell you he paid for that one the next day.

I have to say it soon got the better of me to and I nicked one of the kids sledges and headed up to the top to have a go myself. I did manage to just about poke my eye out on the hard grasses whilst struggling to make it to the top. Nevermind the cross trainer in the gym I tell you, just head up a sand dune a few times and you will do a better workout.

My kind son as always snapped a shot of me on my way down. It would seem I have a bit of the Ellie syndrom to and didn't manage to keep my feet up.

Yep that would be the same feet down as Mum's. I am glad to say though even the fit, skinny kids struggled with those pesky dune grasses to and they attacked Ellie at the top when she was trying to make her way along. Thankfully she is laughing and not crying in this shot.

We soon came to the conclusion though that the next time we went down to the beach to do some sledging that we would take our swim goggles as sand in the eyes is no fun.

The walk home took a lot longer as we were facing into a steadily stronger wind. I hadn't realised how far down the beach we had gone and was rather glad when we finally caught site of the wag. All in all another fun adventure down at the superb Bertha's beach. Now all we need is some snow to test them out on. I cannot believe I just said that.

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