mousie mousie

Dulcie and I have been playing quite a bit of Mousie Mousie lately.  Does anyone else remember this game?  I used to play it ALL THE TIME with my granny when I was wee and just loved it.  I'm surprised how much I still enjoy it now.  It's recommended for age 6 and up, but if you don't bother with the counters to keep score, it's easily simple enough for a three-year-old to understand and enjoy.  Basically, if the catcher rolls a red or a blue on the dice, they try to catch the other players' mice with a cup, while the other players try to whip their mice out of danger.  The set we have in our house (I'm not even sure where it came from) only has three of the six mice left, but that's just fine for our miniature family.

I'm so excited at the thought of playing more board games as Dulcie gets a bit older.  One day we'll be able to play Ludo together!  Can you believe it?!  Ludo!

lola the wonder cat

Both our cats are ridiculously annoying.  They are loud and greedy and messy and disgusting, they destroy everything, they pillage and plunder, they cause so many grumpy moods amongst us.  Lola, in fact, is especially annoying with her constant moo-quacking, her ability to steal any food that is anywhere other than the fridge, and her extreme white hairiness that floats around in clumps and lands on every surface.  She drives us crazy.  Crazy!

But, oh, she is so lovely underneath it all.  She's such a snuggly and sociable cat (she ADORES me - isn't it nice how pets let you know just how they feel about you?) and puts up with so much "love" from Dulcie.  Here she is being decorated with Dulcie's extensive sticker collection...

...and allowing yet another hug.  Dulcie calls her Lilo Lill.  They are such a sweet pair.

Poppy, I should add, doesn't allow this sort of thing, but still gives Dulcie special treatment, by which I mean she doesn't spit at her like she does the rest of us!  Ha!  My new theory (not sure why it's taken me nearly nine years to come up with this) is that Poppy is blind and therefore edgy about sudden movements.  It's not her fault she's such a meanie, honest!

cold days at the park

 It can be hard to persuade Dulcie to leave the house these days, so when she said she wanted to spend Friday afternoon in the park, I felt I couldn't refuse, even though the weather was atrocious.  We had the park all to ourselves, but looking at this picture, that's hardly surprising.  It was basically a rainy ice rink.

 The Botanics as a whole were pretty much deserted, except for the people who were getting things ready for the mysterious Electric Gardens event.  Lots of interesting objects were popping up (this giant ice lolly was our favourite) and Dulcie and I had fun dancing in the rain while they tested the PA system with some music.  And there were no other members of the public there to witness out silliness.  Score!

 When the rain got really heavy, we hung out in the orchid and cactus houses, but there were plenty of muddy puddles to jump in once we reemerged.  Dulcie was doing some pretty impressive splashing, as you can see from the state of her face.  I ended up not looking much cleaner.

We were both soaked and maukit by the time we got home and had to throw all our clothes in the washing machine and drink hot chocolate in our dressing gowns :)

swim sunday #3

This picture is from one of my favourite vintage craft books.

Target total this week: 163
Lengths swum this week: 10

Total lengths swum: 130 (33 behind target)

I'd need to swim 88 lengths this week to meet next week's target. Gulp!

Not a great week really, but it could have been worse.  I thought I wasn't going to make it to the pool at all, but I squeezed in a mini swim at the eleventh hour (this morning).  I went to the pool with Dulcie and Graham and Graham managed to put up with Dulcie's protests long enough for me to do those ten lengths.  I spent the rest of the time splashing around in the baby pool.

I feel like I've slightly wavered from the straight and narrow in all aspects this week.  Just one of those weeks, I'm not going to feel too bad about it.  I've got a couple more days of lazy living and tasty treats (it's Graham's birthday this week and we have non-Dulcie plans on Monday and Dulcie-included plans on Tuesday) but I'll be back on the right path come Wednesday and will aim to make a bit of a dent in the lengths I'm down by later in the week.  When you fall off the horse, you've just got to get back on, right?  Yee ha!

snowgirl

 Have you had snow where you are?  Have you been enjoying it?

 While I was working this weekend, Dulcie and her dad (who she's being much nicer to - she must have appreciated his Christmas song!) hung out in Kelvingrove park. 

I don't think we really had snow last year, so this is the first time Dulcie's experienced it in her memory.  She's been loving it - visiting and naming all the snowmen in the neighbourhood, having snowball fights, watching the sledgers, tramping through the crunchy top layer with her wellies, putting snow down the drains and "making it into water".

 On Friday, when the snow really started, Dulcie was having a day of lounging around in her pyjamas, refusing to get dressed or leave the house, but the snow was the perfect excuse to get her up and out.  It was already getting dark by the time we got out there, but we still managed to make this mini snowgirl.  Yes, snowGIRL, and don't you dare call it a snowman in Dulcie's earshot!

Dulcie was so excited to get out and in amongst it, charging around and falling over constantly.  "I'm all right!"  She could hardly wait to experience a snowball fight and took being icily smashed in the face (terrible mothering) in very good humour!  What a gal :)

I've really had enough of negotiating the icy pavements, but I'll take it on the chin if it means Dulcie can enjoy some more frosty fun.

hooses for mooses and spiders in hats

Behold, a regular old tin of mints.  Open it up and...

What's this?  A teeny-tiny bed for a...

...mouse, a mouse in a peppermint striped dress.

 Here she is, tucked up in her bed.

This is one of my makes from last year that I couldn't share until Christmas was past, for fear of ruining surprises.  Not that my youngest niece, Elsie (nearly 3), reads my blog, but her mum does and sometimes it's nice for parents to get a surprise too.  I was a bit sad to part with this mouse.  Like most things I make from my imagination, she didn't turn out quite how I'd pictured (for example, she only has red shoes because I made her too tall for the tin and had to hack her feet off!) but I hope you'll agree she's lovely nonetheless.

I didn't make as many handmade gifts this year, so Elsie was the only one to get something handmade from her auntie.  It wasn't favouritism, just that her older brother and sisters have had lots of handmade presents over the years but Elsie, arriving so close to Dulcie, has kind of missed out on that.  I try to make amends whenever I can.

One of Elsie's unique selling points is her passionate love of spiders.  I'd got Christmas decorations for all her siblings (including an amazing dinosaur bauble from Designosaur for my nephew) but couldn't find a Christmas spider anywhere.  Surprising, huh?  Ha!  So I decided to crochet one.

I used this pattern and learned an amazing invisible decrease in the process.  It really is invisible, even on a black spider with white stuffing.  I wish I'd known about it when I made Dulcie's Foxy.  The Santa hat I just ad-libbed.  This is why I love crochet - I'm a relative beginner and yet I can ad-lib a Santa hat in a jiffy.

Mr Spider hung around on our Christmas tree for a while before we wrapped him up.  I was a bit sad to part with him, but it seemed only fair that he went to live with the spider lover in our lives :)

the sweetness at the bottom of the pie

I'm meant to be at the pool.  I said I would be, but I'm not.  Instead, I've spent most of the morning in bed, finishing this book.  I enjoyed it so much!  Am I starting to like crime fiction, or is it just that I like stories about precocious girls in crumbling abodes?  Either way, so good!  And a very pleasant change of pace following on from 100 Years Of Solitude, which I found slow and hard-going, though not unenjoyable for all that.

Not that I have any hope of completing the Semi-Charmed Book Challenge any more (Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his 22 characters named Aureliano put paid to that!) but I've done a bit of a rejig of my categories and am still going to keep going and see how many points I can amass.  Here's what I'm planning to read now.  (Red means yet to read, green means I've read it.)

5 points: Freebie!
 THE DEATH OF BUNNY MUNRO (Nick Cave - 288 pages, audiobook) 

10 points: Read a book written by an author who has published at least 10 books.

 THE GRAVE TATTOO (Val McDermid - 400 pages) 

10 points: Read a book of short stories.

 VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE (Karen Russell - 243 pages) 

10 points: Read a book with a food in the title.

 THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE 
 (Alan Bradley - 363 pages) 

15 points: Read the first book in a series that is new to you.

 SHADOW OF THE WIND (Carlos Ruiz Zafon - 487 pages) 

15 points: Read a book that was originally written in a language that is not your native language.

100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE (Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 457 pages) 

15 points: Read a book written by a local author.

BUDDHA DA (Anne Donovan - 352 pages) 

20 points: Read a "bookish book.

 THE THIRTEENTH TALE (Diane Setterfield - 456 pages) 

20 points: Read a book with a direction in the title.

 EAST, WEST (Salman Rushdie - 224 pages) 

25 points: Read a book from a genre you don't usually read.

 THE PAST IS MYSELF 
(Christabel Bielenberg - 288 pages, autobiography) 

25 points: Read a book with a song lyric in the title.

 FREEDOM (Jonathan Franzen - 576 pages) 
(i.e. Freedom by George Michael) 

30 points: Read two books with a different meal in each title.

 BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (Kurt Vonnegut - 302 pages) 

and THE CORONER'S LUNCH (Colin Cotterill - 272 pages)
 
125 points achieved, 75 points to go!  I'm already predicting that Grave Tattoo and Freedom won't be read, or at least not before the challenge deadline is upon me.  Ah, well, I can but try and I could always sacrifice swimming for reading...?  Yes, nice try, Laura.