My Dad

It is with a very heavy heart that I am writing this post. My Dad, my pillar of strenght, the best daddy in the world, was diagnosed with a brain tumour today. Please pray for him. He is going in for a operation next tuesday and I will keep you updated.

It is hard to think that the person that has been there every single step of my life is now so helpless, I hate so see him like this. He has always been there for me, every single day.

Please, please pray for him.My gran, me and Little Mouse and my Dad

I love you daddy!!!!

Lemonade Stand Award

It is always so great to hear that there is someone that enjoys reading your blog. I have been honoured by two mommy bloggers and fellow blogging friends with the Lemonade Stand Award! A huge thank you to Christina from Three A's and a C and Jamie from Momma's Playground.

I love your blogs to bits and I feel truly honoured that you thought of me! :)

The Lemonade Stand Award is awarded for being a blogger who shows great attitude and gratitude. The rules for accepting this award:

- Put the Lemonade logo on your blog or within your post.
- Nominate at least 10 blogs with great attitude or gratitude.
- Link the nominees within your post.
- Let the nominees know they have received this award by commenting on their blog.
- Share the love and link to the person from whom you received this award.

I just love the following blogs and I would love for you to pay each of these awesome blogs a visit!

1) The Journey
2) Mommies Little Artist
3) Handprint and Footprint Arts and Crafts
4) My Bilingual Boys
5) Fun with Mama
6) Her Cup Overfloweth
7) A Mommy's Adventures
8) Adventures of a Flake
9) J Daniel4's Mom
10) Growing Up Our Style

Christmas 2009

We had a wonderful Christmas this year, spending every single minute with family and friends. Christmas Eve was at our house, we had so much fun just chatting, eating great food and opening our gifts. Christmas day we visited my cousin on their farm just outside Malmesbury. We were about 24 people (all family!) and we really enjoyed ourselves! I don't think that I can eat anymore, with all the Christmas breakfasts, lunches and dinners I am truly full till 2010! :)

Here is Little Mouse opening some of her gifts:


She got this Horse from my Mom and Dad, as you can see, my little sister enjoyed it as well!! LOL!
We got her this mini kitchen, since then the first thing she does every morning is to go to her kitchen and prepare breakfast! So cute! My brother gave her the doll that is "sleeping"on the stove!
My little sister gave her this truck filled with blocks, this is also a firm favourite!

Hope that all of you had a blessed festive season!

Muffin Tin Monday - New Year / Party

Little Mouse is a bit under the weather today, she has the sniffles and the warm summer weather isn't helping at all. She is also going through a phase of being a fussy eater all of a sudden. I decided to make her a snack tin based on a Party theme. This way she can snack when she wants to.

She had Chips, Chocolate Rainbow Balls, Chocolate Lollipop, Biscuits, Cheese and Viennas. Not the healthiest of tins, but she at least ate some of it. The tin at least put a smile on her face! :)

If you want to see what other mommies did or if you want to join in, visit Her Cup Overfloweth.

Daddy's Christmas Gift

Finally I can post about Daddy's Christmas gift! We made Daddy this handprint canvas for Christmas for his office. We had so much fun doing it and since then she wants to handprint absolutely everything! I just love items like these as they are truly so special. We now have her little handprints forever as it was at the age of 1 1/2 years.

I bought a cheap canvas at our local supermarket and then I applied a coat of blue poster paint, I left it to dry overnight and the next day we did the prints. It was so easy and it created something so unique.

Hope all of you had a blessed festive season!

First Bicycle!

My mother and father in law gave Little Mouse this Bicycle as an early Christmas gift, she just loves it! All her teddies had to go for a spin as well!

Thank you Granny and Grandpa!

Christmas Tradition

Christmas is my all time favourite time of the year. I love the feeling of love and giving in the air and the holiday spirit that surrounds everyone.

In our home we had certain traditions, my mom always made up the tree on the first of December and all of us helped, we also took turns each year to put the star up, and that had to go on last!

I think that it is so important to have family traditions like that, it provides loads of memories and I think for a family it just brings everyone closer.

I read about the absolutely great tradition on two of my favourite blogs, please visit them, Momma's Playground and Three A's and a C. They have this great idea of giving each child a Christmas ornament each year, by the time your kiddos leave the house they have their own collection of ornaments to take with for their very first tree! I just loved this idea and I decided to start with this immediately. I went out and bought Little Mouse two ornaments as we skipped last year.

Here they are!

Muffin Tin Monday - Holiday

Today's MTM theme is Holiday, so I decided to make a tin with a Christmas Tree theme. Little Mouse is a bit fussy all of a sudden and I had to make the tin with her favourite foods at this stage.

She had chocolate "ornaments", Cheese Christmas Trees, Oros Cooldrink, "Tinsel" Chips, Toast "Presents" - I know that it just looks like squares of toast, but let's pretend... :)

If you want to join in the fun or see what other mommies did visit Her Cup Overfloweth.

Christmas Gifts

This year I decided to hand make some Christmas gifts, but because I left it to the last minute I only made 4 this year. One of my new year's resolutions is to start with Christmas gift shopping and making of gifts in January already! I will not leave it till December again!

I made 3 Fridge shopping lists and 1 Fridge Photo Frame.

This was so easy to do and I had so much fun doing it! I bought a packet of post it notes in different colours to use for the shopping lists. I have loads of coloured construction paper at home as well as letter stickers and ribbon, so I used that for the base of the shopping lists as well as the photo frame. Every year I get at least 4 calenders in the mail with magnets on the back, I always keep the magnets and this year I finally put them to use! I used the recycled magnets for both the shopping lists and the photo frame and I think they turned out ok for a first attempt!

Book Fan Friday - Let's Get Ready!

This wondeful book Let's Get Ready! by Renee Lighton is definately a must have! Renee has a BA degree and diplomas in Specialised Education for the mentally handicapped, Foundation Phase and Montessori Pre School Education. The book is filled with wondeful ideas on creative play with kiddies from the age of 3 through to 7. This creative play is aimed at getting kiddies ready for school and what I love about this book is that Renee uses everyday household items, for example old cereal boxes, to make educational toys with. You will not only save money, but you will also have tons of fun with your kiddies!

Even though the book is aimed at 3 - 7 year olds, there's a few activities that I can already to with Little Mouse. I will definately advise this book to anyone thinking of doing some homeschooling with their toddlers before they start school.

I will incorporate ideas out of the book with next year's Tot School and I will mark them as from Let's Get Ready!.

For R100.00 I think this book was a steal, if you would like one of these please contact me, they are as far as I know only available in SA at this stage.

If you would like to see what other read during the week, visit Three A's and a C

Geography Postcard Exchange

Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn is hosting this Pay it Forward Postcard exchange and we are so excited to get involved! The idea is to collect as many postcards as possible to help with geography lessons. I think this is such an awesome idea as you can collect postcards from all over and if everyon writes just one or two interesting facts about the country or state that you are sending it from you automatically have tons of fun facts!

This will also make a wondeful keepsake for the kiddies as they grow older.

It is so easy to get involved, simply leave me a comment with your email address and I will contact you to exchange addresses. Little Mouse and myself will then send you a postcard from SA! The idea is then to post about this on your blog and send postcards to at least 3 other families and to us.

Here are some other blogs that are involved:

My Bilingual Boys
Momma's Playground
Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns

Hope to hear from you soon!

New Blog Look!

I am soooo excited! My blog friend Jamie from Momma's Playground redesigned my blog! Just look at how awesome this looks!! Thanks Jamie, you are a star! It looks absolutely fab, love it, love it, love it!

Muffin Tin Monday - Christmas Story

The theme this week was Christmas Story, I told Little Mouse of the birth of Christ and that He was born to give us life.

She is only 17 months old, so I really don't know how much she did understand, but I would like to make a point of it to tell her as much about what Christmas really is about, even though she is still so young.

She had in her tin: Egg and mayo (Egg is life, like Jesus gave us life), Bread (the Bread of life is Jesus, God and Holy Spirit), some Marie Biscuits as a sweet treat (God wants us to enjoy life!) and some Oros cooldrink.

Want to see what others did or join in? Visit Her Cup Overfloweth!

Tot School - Week 2 | 17 Months

Little Mouse is 17 Months old

We have been so busy with Christmas goodies and we were on a family holiday that in the process we neglected Tot School a bit. We will take the rest of the year off and start with Tot School again in the new year. I constantly put myself on a guilt trip if I do not do Tot School as often with Little Mouse and I tend to forget that this is supposed to be fun for the both of us! I decided to take a break till January, do all my planning and then enjoy it with Little Mouse!

Here is some pics of what we did do, more Life School than Tot School, but she enjoyed it sooo much!

We played Hide and Seek!


We made a Christmas gift for daddy - I will post about this after Christmas!

We made Christmas Gift Tags....

We did some Open Ended Art....

We went to a Christmas Party...

She played on a Jumping Castel for the first time!

Want to see what others did for Tot School? Visit 1+1+1=1

Open Ended Art - Red and Green

I really have a problem, I simply cannot throw away anything that Little Mouse drew! She loves drawing and doodeling with a pen and paper and I simply cannot get rid of any of it. I really need to think of a good storage solution, any ideas?

This week for Open Ended Art the theme was Red and Green, I gave Little Mouse a sheet of green construction paper and some red glitter glue and this is what she made! This is as open ended as it gets! :) If you would like to join in or see what other kiddies did visit Mommies Little Artist. I just love her blog - always packed full of stunning ideas for art projects!

Book Fan friday - Thousands of Things to Spot

A few weeks ago I bought Little Mouse this book Thousands of things to spot by Usborne, we both LOVE it!

The book has 8 different sections:
Monster Things to Spot
Wizard Things to Spot
Things to Spot in Fairyland
Pirate Things to Spot
Things to Spot in the Sea
Bugs to Spot
Things to Spot on the Farm
Things to Spot in Town

Each section consist out of 30 full colour pages, packed full of the most beautiful illustrations and then of course different things to spot! She really enjoyed the Farm section with the doggies, puppies and other animals. I can see that we will still spend many hours spotting things in this beautiful book!

If you want to find out more about Book Fan Friday or join in - visit Three A's and a C

Christmas Gift Tags

I wanted to make my Christmas Gift Tags a bit more special this year, and save a bit of money by not buying them. I saw this totally awesome idea on Mommas Playground (Thanks Jamie!) where she used her gorgeous baby boy's hand prints to make Christmas decorations.

I decided to use Little Mouse's prints for Christmas Gift Tags! Here are some of them, still deciding if I should decorate them more, they are so special - everyone can keep theirs as a reminder of how small her hands were! :)

Muffin Tin Monday - Christmas Morning

I haven't had time to participate in MTM for a few weeks now, and I could see that Little Mouse missed it, yesterday was also super busy and I only got time to make her tin this morning.

She had from Left to Right (top): Chicken, Oatees, Rooibos Tea
Left to Right (bottom): Homemade Pumpkin bread

She LOVED her tin, she is crazy about the Pumpkin bread and I specially made it for her this morning.

If you want to see what other mommies did for MTM visit Her Cup Overfloweth.

Mommies Little Artist: Marble Textured Painting Lesson

Mommies Little Artist: Marble Textured Painting Lesson

Check out this really easy, but super cool idea!

Summer Holiday - Mauritius

My hubby suprised me with a summer holiday in Mauritius! It was truly an awesome week filled with rest and relaxation! We stayed in the Pearle Beach Hotel in Flac n Flac on the westcoast of Mauritius and the staff and hotel was superb. They always went out of their way to accomodate Little Mouse and always made a special effort with her.

I can honestly recommend Pearle Beach hotel to anyone. Here's some pics of Little Mouse enjoying the sun and sand.



We also went sight seeing and the views are just spectacular.

Truly a fun week! Just a pity that a week goes by so fast!