It's my birthday!

Yay for birthdays! Andrew and Lucy have lots of good things planned for me today. Last night they locked me out of the kitchen so that they could make a birthday cake and today they made me breakfast in bed. We are going out for lunch a little later on. Later in the day I am heading off on a women's retreat with church. I'll report back on Monday!

Fondue

Recently I've have been to two different fondue restauarants in Wilmington, the original long-standing, 'Little Dipper' and the newly opened franchise ,'Melting Pot'. (Andrew hasn't been to Melting Pot yet as I went with the moms group)

They offer a number of courses, firstly cheese fondue, then a salad, followed by 'entree' fondue (translation 'main') finished off with a chocolate fondue.

The Little Dipper wins the best decor - it has a flourescent-lit fish tank filled with jelly fish! It also had a better dessert selection and it's prices are very reasonable. On the other hand Melting Pot is much closer to our house and has a lot of available parking.

Both are extremely fun and tonight Andrew and I are heading out to Melting Pot for my birthday dinner!

A big girl bedroom

A lot of the busyness from last week was due to getting Lucy's new bedroom ready. The walls were wiped, cupboards were emptied and restocked and carpets were steam-cleaned. Given Lucy is already in a big girl bed we didn't have any furniture to buy but I did want to decorate her room so here are the couple of things we did:

1. Book Bin. Lucy LOVES to read. She especially loves to read in bed. However given the guard rail on her bed it is difficult for her to reach her bedside table. The simple solution was to install a book bin on the wall near her bed. Now she can easily access books at any time (and we can get a little bit more sleep in the mornings!)

2. Butterflies hang from the ceiling above her bed

3. Tree decal on the wall. One of her walls is a large blank canvas so I bought a removeable/reusable tree sticker to brighten the wall. It is a big hit as it includes butterflies!

4. Wardrobe storage. Lucy has two wardrobes in her room (one for toys and one for clothes) but both only have one high shelf. I bought some colourful storage units (red ones as the purple ones were on a long backorder).

Product of the week: Crumpets

To our delight we found crumpets (or English style toaster muffins) at the supermarket. Lucy and I couldn't contain our excitement so we had some straight away, some with butter and some with honey. But to our disappointment they just didn't taste great. The rest of the crumpets were left for Andrew who concurred on our conclusion. We haven't purchased any more since.

Back to gardening

Given the mild weather we headed north to Pender Pines garden nursery to check where things are at. Lucy got to feed the ducks and talk to the emus but not much else is happening this time of year due to the weather being warm one day and frosty the next. It was a good chance to see which plants stay green all year long and as such we got some holly bushes for near the pizza oven. We also got lots of herb seeds to plant next month, along with some ornamental kale for the herb garden.

Our most exciting purchase was an apricot tree which is supposed to produce fruit in its first year. We have planted it in a nice sunny spot and we hope to see it grow quickly.

Lucy got some pansies for her garden near her playhouse which she has diligently watered with her watering can!

We also took the chance in the milder weather to start raking up the thick carpet of pine needles that have accumulated over the past 5 months since the lawn was last mowed.

Life is too busy to blog, see you next week!

Valentines Day

It's Valentines Day tomorrow so this week seems to have been filled with hearts, roses and red. We went to a playdate on Wednesday with a Valentines theme. We ate red food (raspberries and strawberries) and heart-shaped food (rice krispy treats), made Valentine hearts for the Dad's, and did a Valentines Day quiz. The kids all got a heart shaped helium balloon and the host gave out the Valentine gift seen to the left. It says 'Seth goes bananas over great friends like you' and inside the bag is a banana. Lucy was extremely excited about the banana and wanted to eat it straight away. It was such a welcome change to the usual artifical candy given out.

Tonight we are going to church for a Valentines dinner. I think how it works is that Andrew and I get a romantic dinner (with everyone else from church) whilst Lucy is looked after separately. All the money collected for the dinner goes to the youth mission that is occurring in July. So whilst we wouldn't usually do anything for V Day we are participating in this one for a good cause!