Happy Birthday Conor

My baby boy is 8! It was his birthday yesterday. It doesn't feel like I've been a mother for 8 years. Usually when you've done a job for 8 years you should feel like you know what you're doing! But sometimes I really don't! I love being a mum, but it is sometimes challenging. But looking at my gorgeous boy and how proud I am of him all I can say is that I can't wait for what the future brings.

He had his birthday party on Sunday at mPowerdome, which is a local indoor sports centre. There were 16 of his friends and 2 party hosts ... the party hosts wore the kids out playing European handball, indoor soccer and dodgeball. He wanted an ice cream cake which was eaten up very quickly.

Then yesterday for his actual birthday we had a family bbq - mum and dad came over too. He requested vanilla cupcakes.

Anthony came up with a great idea: he asked me to get some photos from all of Conor's birthdays and we put them on the digital photo frame. So we've been playing that all week. I think I'll do the same for Christmas too!

Happy birthday cutie pie! I love you!

Stamp Storage

Quite recently (since the beginning of my obsession with Copic markers) I've found that my unmounted stamp collection has increased. With the majority of my stamps, which are Stampin' Up sets, storage is pretty easy - they are all in the bottom cupboard of a bookshelf in my craft room.

But with these new unmounted ones, I was worried they would get lost on my desk. So I decided that a binder ring was the best solution. I have a series of hooks hanging up on the 2nd desk in my craft room and the binder ring lives on one of the hooks.

So, why am I sharing this now .... I talked about my obsession with Copic Markers. In large part it's because a friend of mine directed me to Lime Tart who have a fantastic Copic Marker Club. And of course they sell tons of cute stamps and other stuff too. And they have a fabulous blog as well.

They have a great blog candy right now, if people share their stamp storage systems on their own blogs, and then link back to the Lime Tart blog they will be entered into a drawing to win the cutest little stamp storage tote. And it's open to international members ... so get blogging!

Happy Halloween part 2, aka "trick a treat"

I'm still learning and fiddling around with Blogger ... can't seem to get the pictures to be the way I want them. Anyway, I decided to start a new post rather than wasting more time formatting the last one!

Trick or treating is still not really big though. I'm not sure why, but Conor LOVES the idea of Halloween. Last year he wanted a Halloween party for his birthday. And this year he really wanted to go trick or treating so I eventually decided "why not". He has this great pirate costume that my sister gave him for his birthday 3 years ago and it still fits him.

He had a whole act he was going to do .. knock on the door and say "trick a' treat" (that's the way he pronounces it). Then if they didn't reply he would say (in a pirate-y voice) "do I have to get out my sword?". Then he would say "just tricking" and walk away. Of course he was too shy to actually do it! We went to 3 neighbours houses and he struck gold (or rather chocolate) at the first one! Nothing from the other 2 though. Then we walked to to of his school friends houses who live nearby. At the first house it had been his friend's birthday party so he got a big handful of goodies. And at the second house they'd had a Halloween party the night before so he was lucky enough to get some candy corn that had come from America! Then we went to mum and dad's where he got 2 packs of chips! So he was more than happy

He had a really nice idea too .. he took along a treasure bag of gold coins and decided that anyone who gave him lollies would get a gold coin!

The interesting thing was that as we were driving back from mum and dad's we saw 2 groups of people out trick or treating. And we got a doorbell call that night!

Belated Happy Halloween!

As any Aussie will tell you, Halloween is not celebrated here. However, over the past few years, we've seen more and more Halloween products available for sale. In fact when I was doing the grocery shopping the week before Halloween I was surprised at how much stuff was available, from bags of lollies to decorations to pumpkins for carving. I was horrified at the price of the pumpkins though ... excuse this bad pic taken on my iPhone which I must have moved just as I clicked the camera button