briefly daddyless...

Jaime went to Barcelona for a week in February. Me and the boys missed him while he was gone but, left to our own devices, we got on fine and even had some fun...

The boys love to play in their room and Liam (when the mood takes him) likes to choose what to wear and dress himself all by himself.

Granddad took the boys for a walk in the park one afternoon...

This sack full of plastic balls was a present I bought Sarah in Imaginarium (our favourite toy shop) years ago along with a little fabric house to play in. When Graham, Hiromi and the kids moved to Tokyo they left lots of toys in Granny and Granddad's attic... all of which have come in handy since we got back... particularly these balls!

See?

The weather in February was characteristically wet and wintery- although not HALF as bad as we had expected- so we played a lot in the garden because it didn't seem wise to venture all the way to the park only to be caught in the rain!

Lorcan all wrapped up in his buggy in the back garden!

hoodie boy number one

hoodie boy number two..!

Mummy, you look very strange upside-down!

You also look strange trapped inside the basketball net... but who cares, the boys got a good laugh out of it!!!

So, as we were saying, we kept ourselves busy while Daddy was away :)

We EVEN made him this beautiful bowl!!

"How did you do it?" I hear you ask. Well, we got this cool craft book for Christmas and it has loads of fun ideas inside. We've already done most of the recipes but we decided to try something a little harder this time....

It's made from papier maché. It took us a few days to make. We used a balloon to make the shape (Malachy was NOT happy when he discovered we had to burst the balloon in order to get the bowl off!) and put three layers of papier maché gunk on, leaving to dry in between. Then we painted it with two coats of emulsion paint and left to dry again....

Then we did the decorating. We painted stripes and triangles and squiggles and dots with acryllic paint and then used some embossing paint to add some more designs. The little red hearts were added because with Daddy coming home on Valentine's day, little red love hearts were in the air :D

And, speaking of love hearts, we also made these yummy heart shaped cookies for Valentine's day! There were some for Granny, some for Miss Cooney, Liam's schoolteacher, some for Daddy and, of course, some left over for Mummy and the boys too. Yum.

We made these cute gift boxes to present Granny and Miss Cooney's valentines cookies in.