Croutons Schtuff.

A few wee bits and pieces going on with Croutons at the moment:




1. I'm having an End-Of-Summer sale on the kids clothing.
It will take place over on my FB page at 8pm (NZ time) on Monday evening (15th April). There are shorts, skirts, a few tees and dresses. Everything is marked down under $30 - with most things under $20! Bargain.
I'm looking forward to making some space for new things.

2. I'm giving away a flower brooch!
It will be drawn at the same time the sale starts, and is open to entries from anywhere in the world.
All you need to do to enter, is head over to my Facebook page and comment on the competition picture.A further entry can be yours if you hit 'share' and spread the love.
I'm ever-so-close to reaching 600 'likers'. I reckon I might give away a bag when I hit that magic number... fun!

3. I have re-opened my Felt shop. I've loaded on a few flower brooches, and a few upcycled embroidery rosettes. I hope to add to the shop regularly now that I am, slowly, starting to sew again. I'm quite excited about it.
(Also, how stunning is my lovely model, Fiona? Gorgeous!)

Curvy Style Friday.

My lovely friend, Stella, has started something beautiful. (Actually, as most of you know, everything Stella does is beautiful..) Stella has started 'Curvy Style Friday', an extension of Wardrobe Wednesday where she not only wears super cute clothes, but celebrates her curves at the same time! Sa-weet!

Soo.. my photos are not half as fabulous as Stellas, but I certainly have a shapely body to flaunt - so here I am!

I haven't been having a great relationship with my curves lately. Or with anything, much. I'm in a funk!
I've been struggling to lose some weight since having Mol and I seem to be fighting a losing battle.. a kilo off here.. two on here.. and I'm still the same weight I was two weeks after giving birth. Bummer.
I'm hoping that, along with upping the exercise and cutting back on the food, taking the odd outfit picture might help bring my self esteem (and mood) back up again.
Also hoping the three handfuls of supplements a day will help to restore some health to my body. Healthy body + happy mind = ideal. We'll see...watch this space!



Flats - The Warehouse
Skirt- Salvation Army
Belt - Kmart
Singlet - Glassons (online)
Cardi - Salvation Army

A funny aside; When I walked out wearing this outfit the other day, Otto looked at me a bit funny.
'What is that on your lips, Mum?'
'Lipgloss! Does it look nice?'
'Ummm, not really. It looks pretty weird. Does it hurt?'

Safe to say I don't wear make up very often! Hah!

Sleep and bribery.

When I say that Otto has had a hard time settling into our new place, I mean HARD.
He struggled with the idea of moving home - asking constantly whether we would be taking this toy or the other, saying he would miss our house and that he didn't want to leave his favourite neighbours. Fair enough really, he was born in the old house (literally!) and has never known anything else.
He started having bigger, more intense tantrums which involved lots of hitting, throwing, yelling (any 'bad' words he knew were involved' and lots and lots of 'NOOOO') and screaming.

This was not helped by the fact that long before we moved, Otto's beloved homecarer stopped doing homecare. We hmmed and uhhed about putting Otto into preschool, or in with another homecarer. But, we wanted to hold out for kindergarten (which had a waiting list of a few months), so Otto was home full-time with Mollie and I.

Safe to say he was bored out of his brain, and all muddled up with his new surroundings and all the change around him. The poor guy has been miserable, and completely out of sorts. (I did enough consider taking him to be assessed for depression.. )

I have been at my wits end for weeks, having tried everything I could think of and everything the internet could suggest. I threatened, I begged, I cried, I reasoned, I comforted, I even gave the odd smack or two. NOTHING. Absolutely nothing helped. We got the stage, in the past week or two, where every single night resulted in a gigantic whopping paddy. The behaviour during the day was not much better.

Then I realised, the one thing we had not tried - was chart-driven bribery. Not the finest parenting practise, probably, but it bloomin' well works. (Five days in and counting.. touch wood!)
Each night that Otto goes to bed without a big fuss, he receives a sticker. After two stickers he gets to choose a reward from the box (small things like lollipops, Lego figures, activities etc). This number will go up in a week or so, to three.. then four.. etc.

Between this, and the lad beginning kindy, our house is beginning to find a small amount of order again. There is a smile on his dial a lot more often (he IS three and a half though, that attitude is still there! haha!) and all three children are managing to get to bed much earlier, with much less effort on our part. There are less tears being shed (and cider being drunk!) by a certain grown-up, too.

Well worth the extra sugar and plastic toys!


Are you a stickers/rewards family, too? Or do you have a different system?

Mollie's Chair - 11 months (a catch up..)

Mollie
11 Months
Miss Mollie celebrated 11 months last month. ELEVEN!
Do you know what that means? My tiny one will be 12 months old this month. Holy schmoley. Not so tiny anymore!

Mols is making leaps and bounds in her development at the moment. She is sleeping well (touch wood), eating like a champ, moving around the place at a great rate and starting to build a wee vocab.
(So far we have: Brubba (brother), nyum, ta, seeya, hello and bath.)
My favourite is the way she now says 'Mwah!' and leans in for a kiss. My heart melts everytime. Also ridiculously cute is how she pretends to eat the plastic fruit in the toy kitchen - loudly saying 'nyum nyum!' and making biting noises. She's such a sweetie.

As much as I wish she would just stay little, I must confess that I am looking forward to her toddling around - for purely selfish reasons, it's very hard to crawl in a sweet little vintage dress.. heh. I'm sure it will happen all too soon!

(Oh, that wispy, downy little head! I love it so.)

Corners of my (new) home.

Why, hello! Fancy seeing you here! It's so nice to bump into you again.

We've been in our new home a few weeks now and are almost all settled in. Phoneline dramas are sorted, nearly all of the important boxes are unpacked, a few things have made their way onto the walls.. it's gradually beginning to look like home.

It's hard moving into a new space, especially after an extended time in the previous one. I spent four years looking at my belongings in our (beloved) rental, and they all seemed to fit so nicely. It was a slightly bigger space, and had so many lovely, retro, features that worked so well with our things (built-in china cabinet, wooden pelmets, 70's patterned carpets.. oh I miss these!). Our new place, as it is, lacks the character of the old one.

Don't get me wrong, it's a GREAT house. It has plenty of ticks in boxes. I'm just saying, it is very much a blank canvas in terms of style.
The walls are basic colours, the carpet is pretty non-descript, there are very little 'quirks'.
That will work in our favour, in the long run, but it's going to take a wee while for us to find the time and the money to really put our thumbprint on the place.

We are constantly coming up with ideas, and making lists of little things we want to do (once the essential, boring, jobs are done.. window frames painted, roof cleaned and painted..). It's both ridiculously exciting, and crazy scary at the same time! So grown up! I had planned to save money for more tattoos this year but, instead, I'll probably spend that money on redecorating my (pink?!) kitchen!

The kids are settling in, slowly. It has been a bit of a process, for Otto especially. We've had plenty of tears, and plenty of VERY long days and nights. That boy really doesn't do big changes well. Poor guy. Luckily he has started kindy, finally, this week and is not stuck at home with Mol and I full-time. It is making a huge difference to his attitude, and mine.

Phew, we had a real whirlwind of a month in March - and I'm looking forward to getting back into some sort of routine now. Part of that routine will mean spending a little more time in this part of the world, and also returning to the sewing machine. I'm very excited about both!

Homeowners FTW!

As most of you already know (Via FB,Instagram etc), this is the reason I've been a bit quiet - We've just bought a house!
It's been a very, very stressful week or so, getting everything teed up and all the conditions ticked off, but we made it. It went unconditional yesterday and we're soooo excited!

The house is on a gorgeous, tree-filled, cul-de-sac and is very close to Aesop's school. He'll be able to walk to and from school each day! He also has some cool school mates living just around the corner.
It has four bedrooms, which was really important to us. Got to have a sewing room, of course!
The yard is fully fenced, giving the kids room to ride their bikes etc. Our current rental has a shared driveway, so there hasn't been much room for them to play. (Also so, so looking forward to not having to lug groceries and kids up from the road in the pouring rain anymore!)
The bones of the house are good and solid, and it's a fairly blank canvas. Not many of the features are too distinctively once era or another, which is pretty lucky. (Obviously the dream would be to have amazing wooden floors, and a pastel coloured 50's kitchen.. but that might need to be the next house!) Once we find a bit of spare dosh, we'll be able to start painting and doing bits and pieces to it.
I CAN'T WAIT.

But for now, I have a TONNE of stuff to get rid of and a whole house to pack in the next 4 weeks.
Good golly, wish me luck!

(Pictures are from the real estate website, obviously. Consider them 'before' shots!)

Check The List: #17 Go Camping.

Last weekend, we headed back over to our fave camping spot - Ohiwa Holiday Park.
We headed over after Abraham finished work on the Friday and my parents met us there, in their campervan. It was shaping up to be a lovely weekend already, and even the stress of putting the tent up for the second time ever (without the instructions that somehow disappeared..) didn't put a damper on things.

The nights were verrrrry testing of my happy-holiday mood, but the days were most lovely. The picture above, quite accurately, shows what my kids all did instead of sleep each night. One would think that running around all day in the fresh sea air would have them out like lights.. but, no. Mollie was even worse!

The days and evenings were filled with beach, bbq and beer. As all good holidays should be.
The boys quickly found a few mates (both ones they knew from home and some newbies) and we often didn't see them for hours at a time (this is less neglectful than it sounds, I promise.) it was quite delightful.

We managed to get out and do some crabbing, which is my personal favourite Ohiwa activity. There's something so enjoyable about the squelching mud and the thrill of the chase (and the dares to see who is brave enough to big up the big 'uns!). And then watching all of the crabs disappear back into the mud at the end. Mollie slept through the entire thing, but it was very cool to see Otto getting braver and braver.

That's not to say that Mollie didn't work on mastering more of her own tricks that weekend, though. Mol has finally taken a real liking to food - LOTS of it. We are doing baby led weaning, so the lass is eating much of what we eat. While we were packing up our campsite on the last morning, Mollie managed to get into a whole loaf of bread. We were, admittedly, so zonked (and needing two sets of hands to take down the tent..) that we let her go for it. It's so nice to see her really getting amongst it. (Fear not, she didn't actually eat a whole loaf of bread, just half a piece.. and soggied the rest of it. Hah)

So, another sucessful tick off the list. And another camping trip under our belt.
I must say that I hope camping gets easier as the kids get older... surely?
(I'll let you know next Summer.. we've already booked in for Christmas!)