How To Eat Your Words

“This is it”, she said. “We are done”, she said. “If we ever need more space, then we’ll get planning permission to put up a teepee in the back garden.”

Except then we got one of these, which naturally comes with one of these, and then my in-laws came to visit for a weekend with their toddler and baby and filled our little casa with glorious chaos and seemingly the entire combined contents of Mothercare and Toys R Us. And then we looked on Rightmove that very night to see what we could get for our money.

Turns out that what we can get for our money is a near 3000 square foot Victorian beast of a house with cellars, three floors, an attic and a huge jungly garden, about five minutes from where we are now. Yes, it hasn’t been touched in twenty years. “Requires a smidgeon of cosmetic updating”, said the estate agent, hilariously. Yes, the kitchen is so very hideous that it didn’t even feature in the property brochure. Yes, it has a proper old-school fuse box instead of a nice, safe, consumer unit. And a minor damp problem in one of the bay windows. And some rotten timbers in the basement. And the bathroom is turquoise. And after buying it, we’re going to have precisely zero money left to do it up and thus will have to live in it as it is for at least a year (yikes). But it has high ceilings! And beautiful bay windows! And stained glass! And the original floorboards (hidden beneath twenty year old filthy carpets)! And a cold meat slab in the cellar! What more could one ask for?

Our new back garden - taken by the lovely current owner

We move next week. And now I have something to blog about again (I have spent the past year playing with our magnificent daughter and her array of plastic toys, and haven’t touched a paintbrush or a piece of sandpaper in months) so am hoping to resume a fairly regular posting schedule. Mostly comprised of pictures of terrifyingly dusty cellars and cold meat slabs, natch. You have been warned!

Making It Yours Part One - Home Office

One of my 'daily read' blogs is Making It Lovely - I always enjoy spending time in Nicole's honeysuckle, beeswax and coral rose coloured world. One of my favourite features on this blog is 'Making it Yours', where Nicole follows one piece of furniture through several stages of an imagined life, and presents a mood board for each.

In 2009, one of the presents I gave Andre for Christmas was the perennial calendar Perpetual Paris from Little Brown Pen.

We assembled it, and hung it in our home office (and even painted the walls dark blue to enhance its beauty). In summer 2010, we turned our home office into a nursery for our beautiful daughter, Eva Bella (not that we knew our baby was going to be a girl at this stage) - and we kept Perpetual Paris on the wall cos with the numbers and high contrast colours it felt very baby-friendly.

So I felt inspired by Nicole to create my very own real-life Making it Yours featuring Perpetual Paris. Here's the first installment - Perpetual Paris gracing our home office.

Let's take a look at the mood board first...

And now let's check out some real-life photos of how this space turned out. Please forgive the quality - we haven't had any sunlight in Manchester for weeks!

 

In the next installment, we'll see how Perpetual Paris fits into our baby daughter's nursery. That is, if a certain gorgeous baby girl allows Mummy twenty minutes to write a quick blog post :-)

Adrift In A Sea Of Plastic Toys

Years ago, I remember reading an interview with Rachel Weisz, who had recently given birth to her son, Henry. She explained that before Henry arrived, she had been determined that the house would not become overrun with plastic toys. "And now here we sit", she said, "adrift in a sea of plastic toys".

Uh uh, I thought. When I have a child, I will not give in to the plastic onslaught! There is no need for children to have brightly coloured plastic toys with flashing lights and tinkling noises! They should have nice wooden toys that will teach them to use their imaginations!

Fast forward several years, and Andre and I are now the very proud parents of an adorable baby girl. Here's how our living room is looking post-baba.

White shell chandelier:

Pottery vessels carefully arranged on open shelving:

Dining area with cream silk cushions and handmade art:

Vintage cabinet filled with heirloom linens:

Duck-egg blue cushions (and terracotta-and-white Jack Russell) to co-ordinate with the slightly lighter duck-egg blue walls:

And what's this vision of delight? Ladies and gentlemen, please make the acquaintance of the Fisher Price Rainforest Jumperoo:

Oh yes. We may not be adrift in a sea of plastic toys (they all get packed away at the end of the day once little one has gone to bed), but there is no packing away of a Jumperoo that takes up basically the same amount of space as the dining room table. It's hideous. And plastic. But Eva loves it, and spends whole minutes at a time! bouncing happily away in it.

Sometimes I think about making a nice fabric cover in the same material as the cushions that can be dropped over the main seat and activity centre bit at the end of the day, but then I remember I'd rather use my free time to, you know, sleep.

So yeah, I'm definitely a member of the 'give 'em a saucepan and a wooden spoon' school of baby entertainment, but what can I say, sometimes a huge plastic virulently coloured bouncing machine really hits the spot. Even if it doesn't co-ordinate with the chandelier...