Happy Mother's Day

Okay, so I'm a day late, but hey! Happy Mother's Day to all the mummies out there. I hope you all had a good day. These flowers came to me the week before mother's day - a present from Carl. Isn't he wonderful?

My day on Sunday was just lovely. A card and special Bruno's truffles from Carl and Romily (the card came complete with a smiley face drawing by Rom) was followed by breakfast made by Carl (Rom will no doubt be all over that next year!) and then a trip to the zoo.

Romily helped me make a carrot and walnut cake, which we left cooking while we had a sleep together. Carl took it out of the oven for me while we were still sleeping. Unfortunately the thermostat on our oven is stuffed and no matter how much I reduce the temperature and cooking time by, it burns the tripe out of the top and sides and leaves the middle uncooked! I ended up putting the cake in the microwave to finish it off, but of course that dried it out. I iced it with cream cheese icing anyway and we're eating it over the next few days! No more cakes here - I think I'll stick to muffins and slices! I will post a copy of the muffin recipe I'm using in the next couple of posts...just have to type it up!

Then we went round to our friends' house for a late afternoon tea - I didn't end up taking my poor excuse for a cake - a good thing too, as there was oodles of cake already there!!

Romily was on her best behaviour all day and was an absolute delight. Bub#2 got in on the act with some kicking during a Braxton Hicks contraction. That was not delightful! A reminder of what's to come in three short months!

I quite enjoyed the course last week - it was probably the best leadership course I've been on, as it was run by a couple of really fantastic faciliators and tailored to the Australian Public Service, which is a peculiar beast and has plenty of foibles! They really got us to take a long hard look at our lives and realise that family is far more important than work could ever be...it put what I'm doing at work in perspective and made me realise that I'm devoting way too much energy to things I can't change at work, not leaving me with enough energy for what's most important to me - my family. I am working towards destressing about work and just doing my best every day without taking on everyone else's work! Let's see how long I can keep that up. I finish up work in less than 10 weeks now, so I won't have a choice soon :)

Here are a couple of photos of the table runner I made for my mum for mother's day.
It's also from the Denyse Schmidt Quilts book - in the book it's a full single bed quilt, but I thought it would make a really interesting table runner and it did. I did simple hand quilting on the red fabrics - I think it really works. Might even be tempted to use these blocks again (there are three in this table runner) for a full quilt one day.