We had some Lego fun

What it is

Is adventurous.

What it is

Is inventive.

What it is

Is satisfaction.

 

These photos are inspired by 40year old ad of Lego for Woman's day ..
I did not see the ad way back then, but now me&kids had fun lego filled weekend imagining & making things :)
We do this quite often when the weather is bad .. or boredom hits .. or both :D
and as it's raining now we'll probably play with lego this weekend too :) 

Most of the time we forget to photograph our creations, but this time we just had to :)

+ Some more photos of my kids ->

Fun&Fancy pillowcase :)

You better believe it!
I have managed to finish this beauty while playing around with 3 kids 24/7 (oh yes - nights are pretty busy over here still - fun fact - most of the nightly activity comes from the big kids - who would have thought that baby in her 2 months could sleep better then 3&5 year olds combined! :D )

I am loving these totally different looks of my new pillowcase I can (and will) showcase the fun part of rainbowish solid granny diamond during the playtime with my kiddos and will change it to the fancy HexATile side when my girlfriends come to visit ... o, yes :)

Otto is trying to jump on and take a nap on SolidGrannyDiamond side ...
he wasn't lucky today, I'm not ready to share this pillow with him yet :)

and the fancy HexATile side in all it's glory :)

Both sides just so you know I have actually joined them :D and this is how Sam put it in the middle of the room to be her horse .. that was a fun moment :D
unfortunately that gloomy time of year has come when I get ZERO sunshine in my home, so pretty much all of the pictures I take inside looks colorless and murky ...
But outside even the gloomy days seem brighter probably because of the leaves ...

Random Rambling: Little tricksters are growing!

Five more minutes!
Sam's way of bargaining for anything :D

Sam 2&half

Just two bites!
First milk, no carrots, only potatoes ..
Oli's way of bargaining for sweets ... when he promises to eat some amount of real food in exchange for sweets ... he starts this without even knowing if there is something sweet planned after the meal :D
But I am smart enough to tell him that in this case he will have only some part of that particular dessert afterwards .. sometimes that works better than expected and he eats an extra meatball :P

Oli 5min till 5

Mommy is mine, Daddy is yours.
This is a way for them to divide their domains. They are dividing everything! :D parents, cousins, friends, cartoons, music :D
Of course it works only till the other one gets offered something better... for both of them dealbreaker is that the other ones parent is taking them somewhere even if it is something really booooooooring :D

Both (Sam 3 and Oli 5min till 5)

Letter of the week: S

Letter S is first one Sam learned about a year ago, she notices it everywhere! One letter S in a word and she claims that word as her own and I have to remind that letter and word is not quite the same ...

And then in last years October (I think) I made a whole crochet alphabet :) and was planning to share the letter patterns here. (I won't make any predictions on how loooong it might take me to write up all the patterns, because usually those predictions turn around and bite me :D ) And I was planning to share pattern for "S" first, but then "I" came sooooooo easily ;P
I should have written them when I was making them because then I knew every letter by heart, but now I have to look at the finished things and think real hard how did I make them ?!...

SO finally! Pattern for letter S

Cheesy potato pie

A fancy way to heat up leftower boiled potatoes :P

I usually boil more potatoes than we would need for one meal, because then I am half ready for next one :P

This time thought I won't just heat them to eat with sauce or cook with scrambled eggs and cheese - let's make it look good - so I made a pie ;)

Letter of the week: P

Figured out we didn't need to go trough letters alphabetically and well next one we ran across was P.
and this is what we did ;)

We (me and Sam) went to Hesburger for a our First ever (Pirmo reizi) meal (Pusdienas) just us two in restaurant ... we picked Hesburger because kids meal had plus-plus toys in it (this is where we figured out that next letter should be P) ... and I love burgers but I think I like those plus-plus toys more :D so I ate cheeseburger and drank milk (piens) as well as Sam and we built our first P right on the spot ;)

Then we came home and played with Puzzles (puzles) 

Letter of the week C

This is the first post I'm gonna write half latvian ... just because there are not that many words starting with the same letter and meaning the same thing in both english and latvian ... (and obviously right now I am teaching my kids latvian, english will come later when they are a bit older)

This is a pic I took for instagram - C - Computer (dators), Crochet (tamborēšana), Cup of Cofee (kafijas krūzīte), Capricorn (mežāzis)
so you see what I mean ...

Letter C in our household started with CILVĒKS (human).
We took big piece of paper and drew Sam and Oli on it :) they loved it (because it tickles) and the end result looks a bit weird so we talked about CITPLANĒTIEŠIEM (aliens) too..

Then we looked CAUR (trough) legs just for fun and went outside to play ;)

mix match spring hats

I made myself a hat! :)
beanie to be precise. I love it, kids love it. Sam liked it so much I made her one too :)

What happens on the rug - stays on the rug :D

Me and sometimes my kids exercise on my yoga mat - ScrappyRug :)
I document my exercises on instagram acount UnderTheChandeleir ;) I hope this will help me to exercise daily because crazy enough - endomondo doesn't really make me want to exercise more, I use it just to log my workouts ... :) (i think instagram will work better on inspiring me on my daily yoga because I love to express myself and of course I like the likes too ;D )

I did actually just take a two day break after a month of exercising every day and today I started again because I missed it! more than I am willing to admit...

Here are few of my most favorite pics yet, but I hope there are many more to come :)

Happy body - happy soul! ;)

p.s. I used to hate working out because my kids wouldn't let me alone - now I like that they join in and "crash" my poses or do them with me .. ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING!

Tiny elf stocking

This happened about two months ago ...

Sam's kindergarden teacher calls me in the middle of the day .. I almost had a heart attack in those few seconds, million thoughts entered my mind about some pretty crazy scenarios what could have gone wrong (from simple sleeplessness and crankiness to meteorite crushing) ... as a mom herself she starts conversation saying "everything is OK, do not worry!" and only hen "hello!" :D

she had noticed my obvious crochet obsession (I had crocheted there in waiting room while Sam finishes her lunch or washes her hands ... ) and asked me If I could make tiny stockings for all of the kids to hang by their lockers and greet with candy in the morning - what a nice idea - obviously I was hooked! 

First I tried to crochet one, but after two hours I still had nothing or rather I had something that didn't look cute at all so I frogged it with no regrets and turned to my sewing machine :)

this is what I made :)

If you would like to know more, read ahead.

Random rambling: my little tricksters

* when you love to be naked
And are old enough to know how to take off your clothes ... easy game till mom figures out a solution and "help" you wear something that is hard to get out of .. it works for about a week and then you have grown and can outsmart her again - pee in your pants and mom will have no choice but to help you undress ... (evilgrin)

Sam now, Oli 2 years ago 

When this happens after what seems as an eternity spent trying to dress up that screaming monster I just want to cry ... thank god most of the times we are not in hurry to get somewhere so its just frustrating for me.

* drawing is easy!
especialy when all of the drawing is done by the grownup .. "please draw me a car, tractor, airplane, helicopter ... flower, tree, house ... pig, cow, bunny ... " after you have listened to your mom about hundred times why you should draw at least some of the stuff yourself just keep repeating previous sentence and after a while you can easily say just "NO, you!" and pictures will appear as if from nowhere!

Oli always, Sam sometimes

pencilcases

You have probably heard that time flies when you're having fun …
or kids .. or fun with kids …

School year has started in our home too
This year Oli joined the big kids group. And Sam is going to start kindergarten in a week with all the other babies … and with all those lists of needed supplies and stuff I almost feel as if we were getting ready for school ..
As a meditation in this stressful time I chose to make pencil cases by myself :)

Salmon lasagna - Salmagna!

Spring is coming!

To brighten up our weekly meal plans as well as our mood (I have been quite gloomy this week because Sam is teething and enjoys to be carried around all day long (including naps, god forbid I try to put her in bed .. )).
so I was browsing hypermarket  and thinking about the good old boring (well our regular, kid approved) meals and i ran in to salmon and so the idea of my own salmagna was born :)
few hours later it was baked and minutes after that it was gone. to be clear - it wasn't just four of us who ate it.. Sam loved it, but I am not sure Oli even tried it because he saw grandma with the cake just before we sat down for dinner...

but the fact it disappeared so fast means it was good and will be reappearing in our weekly meal plans :)
and hopefully next time there won't be any distractions and Oli will at least try it .. (he is going through some weird phase. if we let him he would eat only cookies and drink milk .. just like Santa Claus :D)

There is more than one color in this row! ;)

Here is my current wip (work in progress).

I call it Sam's universe, because I hope that this will be first blanket for my baby girl that she doesn't throw away during her naps … she loves twirling around the bed and all of previously tried blankets have been recognized just as obstacles :D

Original pattern is called Sophie's Universe and is well written and just fabulous!
It is a CAL (crochet along) so far there is 6 weeks but there will be 20 - it is gonna be a fabulous blanket :)

But here in this blog post I wanted to talk about the tulip row from week 5 (round 39) because I wanted to make colorful tulips and that's what I did!

Happy New* year!

*well I did miss the European one and it is too early for the Chinese one .. lets say this is new year entirely for me :)

Lately I have been too preoccupied with my family, gifts, parties and trying to get some sleep in between night shifts at the "milk factory", that I just didn't want to think about my crafty new years resolution … but I can't hide from in any longer so here IT comes.

My Crafty NY resolution.

V-stitch baby blanket

Fastest baby blanket I have EVER made!
It is really fast growing and it turns out so soft and looks amazing. Ideal for crochet newbie! :)

This one I made for my soon to be born niece and I am thinking that I should make another one just for fun.

Btw, for you out there and myself in the future - you should not work every row (and color) from one side as I did but start each new row at the beginning of the previous one. Otherwise your blanket will not be square or rectangle but rather a parallelogram...

There are some more photos that I made as the blanket grew :)

BBB progressreport: The last one.

It took me 3 years ... (well i did a lot of other stuff in between, but anyway 3 years is a long time)
But I finally DID IT - My Big Bright Blanket is done. and it took me just about two months to get to actual writing of this blogpost :D

I love how it turned out :)
and here are my little princess trying to "help" me with blanket pictures :D

In numbers:

• 3 - is for the number of years it took for me to finish it;
• 6 - is for layers of edging I chose to do till it felt right and the hearts ♡ on my squares;
• 15 - is for all the different yarn colors I used;
• 18 - is the number or blog posts I have written about it (including this one, all the other pregressreports and squares, schemes and formulas that I made up for this blanket)
• 46 different square patterns used (well I might have miscounted, it got quite difficult after 20);
• 50 is the number of skeins of yarn I used (at least)
• 2151 stands for grams this baby weights :) well I actually expected more..

Random rambling: Sleep

I have been a bit sleep deprived lately and I can't say that before kids it was much better .. because going to sleep early always seemed such a waste of time ..
I wonder why?

Well it was a bit better - I could afford to sleep just 5 hours some nights and then enjoy longer 10 or 12 hour undisturbed night sleep occasionally .. now my two little angels are playing tricks and it doesn't seem possible in the near future ..

Few years ago I heard there are some other sleeping patterns than the most used 8h night in every 24 hours ... but I discarded it then because it seemed hard to implement .. but now living with average 6h of disturbed sleep daily it seems rather intriguing to sleep even less but feel better...

More about the daily plan so far and the upgraded plan for the future .. if not interested please return to your own precious daily hours ;)

Random rambling: Time

Introducing new thing around here - Random rambling.

As the name suggests it really will be about random stuff that bothers me or makes me think about life in general or my kids, future, politics, my fears and everything else that's good or badly wrong in world at the time I find the time for checking out the virtual reality...
So this will be a place for me to vent.

Do not read further if you are here for crafty advice/inspiration.. there will probably be none in this post :D

not so pink couch

For past 7 years pink couch has been there for me in good times and bad .. but lately I had neglected to call it pink because it had been stained so badly and was pink just in my memories.. so he* had a makeover and from now on will look like this!
* yes he! .. it feels weird to call my sweet pink couch as "it" ..

Down the memory lane ...