Drawing at bedtime

How can I insist on bedtime when she's doing this:

Well, I didn't. Because that would have been cruel in so many ways. Although I did ask her if she could leave the three further people she had planned for tomorrow (she agreed, phew).

It's the one thing that keeps her busy for hours. Drawing, drawing and drawing some more. I'm not ever allowed to look until it's done. Not an easy task, if you know that she comes out with the most incredible designs. By now, she's better at drawing than I ever was. It must be her daddy's genes. I totally think she's incredibly talented, which might be because I'm biassed or because I'm a dork when it comes to drawing. Or both.

Today, she painted shoe boxes and drew 3 full pictures with great detail. All of this on a day where we spent the whole afternoon out of the house, and where we spent a considerable time feeding hungry children, dancing wildly to music and dressing up both wooden girls, teddy bears real children (for a woodland creature themed event in the Children's Wood in the afternoon). Snowflake, ever keen to copy her sister, painted one shoe box and drew one picture, and the table, two outfits, her hand and the chair.

There's a lot of colour in our house.

PS Everything is called Rosie in our house. She wrote this herself hence the phonetic spelling (the s is really a flipped z). 

weekend in pictures: here comes autumn

We've been oh so busy. Thursday to Friday noon in Clackmannan, braving the outside world twice, painting, playing with water, climbing, baking. Then straight to North Ayrshire for a night camping on a colleague's farm, to give a proper goodbye to 3 amazing colleagues who are the last in a way too long list of recent redundancies. Cubling was manically and frantically excited, the kind of excitement that is impossible to control, about seeing animals, sleeping in a tent (a first), a pumpkin head, combine harvesters, tractors, mud, kittens, massive dogs, cosy fires, a trampoline tent, cutting logs with an axe, lighting a real pyre. Next visit to another Ayrshire town to see granny and grampa, a shopping spree, finally crash landing in bed. It was all good. Particularly last night's sleep to recover from it all and Cubling's boundless energy.

I have a pile of blogposts to come, more than making up for my recent silence, but to start off with, here's our weekend in pictures:

Cubling dressing up as Mr Kickeriki
Guess who was the first up in the morning?

Making leaf prints with collected leaves. Cubling got really into this, while her cousin is more into letters and numbers, so he counted up to 100 and demanded the numbers to be painted one by one. He's only 2 3/4...
Making (and eating) fairy cakes
Too many cooks spoil the broth? Rubbish. And who has climbed onto the table again, licked the butter tub, stole some dough and tested what would happen to an egg if you dropped it from the table, while her cousin patiently mixes the ingredients to a soft dough?

The attack of the one-eyed killer kitten.