It's that time of year again

Halloween is just around the corner and the kids (well and me) are getting ready for it.  We've decided that Halloween will now run from October 1st until after Thanksgiving. Well you've got to get your monies worth out of the decorations.

Jonah has asked for a fog machine but I think that may be going slightly overboard.  Max and the girls have decorated the front window with a hundred and one stickers and I made this 'spooky' Halloween table runner following this great tutorial from Diary of a Quilter.

The kids are still deciding what they would like to dress up as for Halloween.  Madeleine thinks she'd like to be a black cat, Olivia an orange one and Max a red one but this morning there was talk of ghosts!!  I think we should dress up as a family of Superheroes with me being Wonder Woman of course.

Busy sewing

I've also had the sewing bug so most of my time is spent at my machine.

Presents for the teachers

A bag for my sister

Patchwork table runner

Jonah's camping pillow

Camping pillows for the other three

Yikes it's July

I've been away for a long time, life just gets busy and then Jonah hogs the laptop so I hardly get a look in anymore.

The kids finished school 4 weeks ago and we've been keeping busy.  Jonah has so far done a music camp, a tennis camp and this week he is doing fencing.  The girls have done their usual ballet camp and this week are doing a 'show tunes and shuffles' camp, Maxi isn't so keen but I have made him do one this week so I can have a couple of hours off each day, it's hard work entertaining four kids for 12 hours a day!

Of course they've been having their usual swim lessons too, Jonah and the girls are real water babies and will spend all day in the pool jumping in and diving.   Max isn't so keen and refused to have lessons, maybe next year...

Here's a few pictures of the kids, I'll try and do a couple more posts before the end of the week when we head off on our road trip to Montana!

Jonah with his new braces, a very controversial topic but we've opted for the American way
of making space for new teeth opposed to the UK way of pulling teeth to make space, who knows!

Maxi on his last day of Pre K

Skiing

Yikes where has that month gone!!!  The kids have been on spring break so we took them skiing to Mount Hood.   As expected the girls were off after the first lesson, they went up on the chairlift once with Ben and after that they didn't want to wait so were off on their own.

Jonah was a little more cautious than his sisters who just bombed headfirst down the hill but by the end of the day he was very comfortable and we didn't see much of him as he was happy just going up and down by himself.

Max was a little more cautious, it's not that he couldn't do it he chose not too.  He was very good at getting his skis off :)  The instructor took him up and down three times and he managed it all by himself, turning and stopping and I was very impressed by him.

I however was a bit of a disaster on the slopes.  I had no idea how to control my direction so the first two runs were spent mainly digging myself out of the ditch and falling over lots!!!  On the third attempt I went down with Max and Mike and he put me straight, apparently you need to lean left if you want to turn right (obvioulsy). Once I worked that one out I managed to make it down the hill (slowly) without any falls, hopefully next time I'll be able to pick up a bit of speed and catch my kids who wanted to send out a search party for me :)

Every cloud has a silver lining....

I've been housebound for over a week now with my poorly boys, Jonah had something similar last week but didn't react as badly as Max.  So it means I've managed to get on with lots of sewing and trying out new things, I've even made my first buttonhole and put a zipper in which turns out is not as hard as it looks!!!

My first zip following this tutorial

Buttonholes using this kit

Pincushion from here

This turned into a pillow for Jonah from here

Jonah's blind

The girlies blind

Poor Max

He's been ill for the last week, finally took him to the Drs and he has an ear infection, fever, sore throat and a rash.  Actually this is a good picture as his face is covered in spots which have been weeping leaving a huge scab all over his nose and chin, poor little man.  He's looking much better today since taking the antibiotics, lets hope he's on the mend.

glimmer of things to come

The girls were very excited to see these crocuses pop us at the weekend, hopefully spring will be upon us soon......  We've been lucky so far with the weather and not as many torrential downpours as last year but there's always time and I've probably jinxed us now.

We had a fairly quiet weekend, the girls and Max had their hair trimmed (I'll take some pics later) and Jonah had his stitches out.......  I'll say no more but I think the PA and Ben were deaf for the rest of the day, sadly it's not healed that well and he will have a massive scar.  It's bandaged up again and hopefully by the end of the week we'll see some improvement otherwise it's no waterpark for Jonah on Sunday.