Month in Review

Gosh, I've just realised that it has been a whole month since my last post!  I guess you could say that I've suffering from general lack of mojo.  August was incredibly cold and wet (just the weather to dampen one's spirits) and my husband's new business is taking off, which is good...but...it leaves me feeling like a bit of a phoney because my life is far from simple.  Time to take back a bit of control and at least make an attempt to regain my simple living mojo!

Since my last post, we have celebrated daughter number one's 8th birthday.  She asked for a birthday cake that looked like our Kitty, so I whipped this up...thankfully it seemed to fit the bill!

Kitty birthday cake

Our local kindergarten also held their annual trivia night at the end of August.  We formed teams of about 10 people prior to the night.  Each team was assigned a different colour and we were asked to dress up and also decorate our table using our assigned colour.  There were prizes for best dressed person, and for the best dressed table.  My team was assigned the colour Orange.  I managed to find a nice piece of orange fabric at the opp shop that made a perfect tablecloth.  One of my team mates had a lovely contrasting table runner.  I made a centrepiece by placing a couple of branches in a vase.  I cut out some orange tissue paper leaves and glued them to the branches.  I also made orange some tissue paper pom-poms and placed a few in the branches.  To add to the orange-ness, I lined the vase with slices of orange.  On the table we also placed some orange coloured objects, including Christmas baubels and orange jack-o-lanterns that I made by hollowing out a thick-skinned orange, carving a face into it and placing a tealight inside (the orange scent was beautiful!).  We even colour coordinated with orange food!  The one thing, however, that got us over the line was a couple of vases containing goldfish!  It was a really fun night...even the goldfish had an enjoyable time ;-)

The Orange Table

Miss Eight has also been doing some creative things recently.  Her primary school held it's annual Show Day yesterday.  Show Day is a scaled down version of a country fair, and involves craft exhibits and a pet parade.  Miss Eight decided she wanted to enter the cake decorating and flower arranging sections, and here are her entries:

Alien cupcakes

The cupcakes were inspired by  Martha Stewart's Creepcake Cupcakes.

"Keep off Grass" flower arrangement

Special acknowledgement to Miss Five for this one for donating the wheat she sprouted at kindergarten :-)

There were so many delightful creations on display...but silly me forgot to take photos!  Thankfully Christine had it covered and has given a wonderful description of the day here.

To wrap up my overview of the last month, here is a picture from yesterday's pet parade.  Miss Eight took Pierre along.  It seemed like a good idea in theory, but the poor thing was one of two cats in a sea of dogs!  This picture says it all really...

Pierre and some canine friends