Here... there... everywhere!

I have felt a little bit that way in the past couple of weeks and have missed out on my self-imposed bi-weekly blogging...grrrrrr!! With winter behind us, I had hoped that Baby Suisse would be relatively healthy for the next few months until the start of next winter but it seems that germs don't take holidays. We have been through 2 anginas and 1 stomach flu in the last few weeks which has been unsettling for Baby Suisse and for us as we had got used to our undisturbed nights... Couple this with 2 weekends spent abroad and here we are mid-July in the blink of an eye. In between rushing to work/nursery/home/doctor/abroad, I have had a little bit of time to:

1) make some strawberry jam (unfortunately not from our own strawberry plants which have so far this year produced a grand total of 6 berries...)

2) Finally use the chimenea we bought last year second hand from a expat who was leaving Switzerland

3) rejoice in the fact that the plants have finally picked up and started to produce small crops...about time!

4) picked a few kilos of cherries from our tree in the garden and turned some of them into a delicious cake (clafoutis if you're curious) which I brought to work.

I need to sort my pictures from our various trips to share with you soon...stay tuned :-)

Popping by to say hello and hopefully stay for a while...

Baby Suisse ready for summer if it ever decides to come our way...

Almost 6 months on since my last post, I am starting to feel like I can breathe again. After 4 difficult months at the beginning of the year when Baby Suisse was constantly ill and more often at home than at nursery, I think I am starting to master this full-time working and commuting mum thing...it's about time, Baby Suisse will turn 10 months in a few days!

Alf, Baby Suisse, Mr T and I have been on a couple of excursions in la Suisse and abroad (I am hoping to share these with you in the near future) and a few small crafty projects have been completed. Nothing outlandish but I guess that's part of the changes in your life following the arrival of children...small victories appear disproportionately grandiose!

I look forward to catching up with all of you :-)

Because there are only 24 hours in a day...

... I am going to do like Alf and take a little break from blogging. I have really be struggling to find anytime to go on the internet since going back to work full-time in December. I knew it would hard but juggling commuting, work, nursery and evening classes with a teething baby has been leaving me with very little free time. You know things are bad when you struggle to find 2 *30 minutes time slots a week to wash and blow-dry your hair...

I haven't been able to catch up with what has been happening on blogland, let alone do any crafting of my own so I have to face the reality that I will not have anything remotely interesting to blog about for a long while and that I should momentarily "shut the door" so to speak. I truly truly hope that I'll have more time to nurture this little corner of my life later in the spring or summer. Until then, Alf and I wish you all the best for the start of 2013 and we look forward to catching up with you in a while :-)

Silent Sunday

A Special Handmade Monday

Here is what I made during the last 2 weeks I have been away from Handmade Monday...

Baby Suisse came 3 weeks early and in France on August 1st like a true Swiss patriot!
Now I really need to get that mobile finished...

Pop over to Wendy's Handmade Monday to see some actual crafting :-)

Another unexpected event in 2012...

Thanks to the imminent arrival of Baby Suisse, 2012 has been a year rich in emotions and unexpected happenings! Because unmarried parents have very different rights in la Suisse than anywhere else in the civilised world in that the father has to adopt his own child to have any legal rights to his flesh and blood, Mr T and I organised a small private wedding ceremony in Brugg on June 29th in an attempt to cut down on the subsequent amount of paperwork we'd have to go through with Baby Suisse's arrival (but 2 weeks on it appears that we were disillusioned on that point...).

Alf not impressed with having to wear a bow on the day!

Because I was 7 and 1/2 months pregnant, had 5 weeks to organise the wedding and a limited budget (we really hadn't planned getting married in Switzerland, the most expensive country in the world), we only had 8 people with us on the day and kept the whole event very relaxed (yes, yes mostly!). We had 6 people staying at home with us in Brugg for a few days and the place where we got married was literally a 5 minutes walk from the house. Annoyingly on the big day, the buidling where we got married was covered in scaffolding as the town was installing some sort of stage in front of it so I had to steal these pictures from the internet.

http://www.heiraten.ch/trauungslokale/marketimages/1312890905_Heimatmuseum_2_a.jpg

Inside was beautiful though and the room was just the right size for our small wedding party and made it feel special.

Although an unconventional wedding in many ways, I did stick to the tradition of something old...

Summer sandals bought in Morzine last year,
this is summer and I was 32 weeks pregnant: this is the best I could manage!

...something new...

Handmade hair accessory by http://www.flutterbyweddings.co.uk/
to match the belt on my dress

...something borrowed...

My late grandmother's pearl necklace

...something blue...

Bracelet and earring also handmade to match my dress
by a Glaswegian friend with a blue tartan ribbon!

I was lucky to have not one...

Why spend 150CHF at the florist for the smallest wedding bouquet
when 15CHF in Migros can get you these?

...but two wedding bouquets, including this lovely one made out of vintage buttons by two Glaswegian friends! How beautiful and unique!

The last of the "accessories" came straight out of the Tiffany's store in Zürich...now THAT was exciting!

The dress was a summer cocktail dress which accomodated nicely for the ever-expanding bump!

The evening was spent eating some truly delicious food in Zürich old town near Fraumunster

Although we dearly missed not having more of our families and friends with us to celebrate with us this big day, we had a lovely time and are glad that at least both our sets of parents could travel to attend the wedding. We hope to have post-wedding parties in England and France next year so that we get to celebrate the wedding and the arrival of Baby Suisse with everyone (and I get to drink more than half of glass of champagne!). But life is full of surprises so until then...

Cold doesn't even begin to describe...

... how I feel everytime I step out of my front door! I mean, we are not the only one in Europe to have been hit by this cold front from Russia, but we are having it bad in la Suisse!

I would defy you to find a working public fountain in our neighbourhood:

and yes, this is a picture of the river Aare half-frozen.

With temperatures barely going higher than -15 celsius during the day, Alf's whiskers actually freeze and we have to dress up for an expedition to the North pole when we go for walks.

I wonder how our garden birds manage in this weather, they certainly seem to appreciate being given some food!

Wrap up warm peeps and stay indoors if you can!

PS: Thank to my friend Ashley for being brave enough to remove her gloves to take these pictures at the weekend!

Where's the week gone?

Seriously, how can we be Sunday already?

I had meant this week to try and post a couple of times but it appears that I still haven't quite got the hang of this "working week" business and here we are, Sunday 2nd of October (October!!) and I have nothing to show for it!

Well, actually I do...we went this morning to sign the contract for our new house in Brugg and to se how the building works are progressing. We now have a kitchen with a window giving onto our almost completed winter garden:

two bathrooms (with green tiles I probably wouldn't have chosen but then again we are only renting...)

and stunning wooden floors throughout the living room and bedrooms!

We are moving the furniture on the 29th of this month and we are moving in officially on November the 1st. This is all getting real now so we need to get a move on the furniture buying front to have things delivered before we move it.

The other exciting development of this week has been me signing up for my first swap! The undomesticated scientist is hosting a Christmas stocking swap. The scientist's great stocking swap 2011 deadline is the 24th of October (or a few days earlier) so if it sounds like something you'd be interested in doing, go and check out her blog.

Come back tomorrow for Handmade Monday where I shall reveal my latest creation!!

Personalised postcards

Good morning,

I was so pleased the other day to receive a small parcel from http://www.snapfish.co.uk/ where I had ordered some personalised postcards. The variety of things you can make with your photos nowadays is astonishing and I thought I would try and have a few of my best ones printed as postcards to send to people. Can you remember where the photos were taken?

From top to bottom, left to right:
Collage of Bern fountains
Collage of Spring in my garden and in Meilen
Swiss flag flying in our garden
View of Zurich's old town
Wood sculptures at the European lumberjack competition in Pfannenstiel
Collage of Morzine's shutters and balconies
Collage of forest fungi taken from our walks in and around Morzine
Bear statue in Bern
Owl fountain in Uetikon
View of Rapperswil rooftops
Pair of mandarin ducks encounter on Kusnachter tobel

I am so pleased with them ;-)

To the rescue

FACT: bats cannot swim.

You would think that being able to fly from point A to point B would be a fast and efficient mode of transport, thereby making the need for knowing how to swim redundant?Do you agree?

Then why, oh why, did I find this little guy/gal attempting to swim (well drowning is a more accurate term really) in the bucket of water we always keep on the balcony for Alf. I guess a small mercy is that I got there before Alf did giving the little guy/gal 1) a chance to make it; b) and not give me the nasty surprise to walk into my living room and find a dead bat on my rug. One afternoon I came home to a trail of feathers and a dead blue tit on my white living room carpet. To this day, I am still unsure who started the fight, but Alf had won it for sure.

So what would you do? Well, I called Mr T to the rescue who came armed with a tea towel to scoop up the bat. I claim that it still counts as me rescuing it on the basis that if I hadn't called Mr T this thing would have drowned for sure. FACT! I don't know why I froze when I saw it really as I used to work with rats for a living!



Yes, this is me holding a foot-long giant molerat outside my kitchen in Ethiopia.


Anyhow, I did not really fancy giving the bat a bit of a blow-dry to fluff it up, so we put it in a box lined with a towel and left it in a dark cupboard for a few hours in the hope that it will dry itself.

That seemed to work and a few hours later when we opened the lid, the little guy/gal crawled out...

... and took off. It did not go very far, 2 meters perhaps, and stayed hanging onto the side of our balcony for a bit.

We went to check on it a bit later and it was gone so we assumed this had been one successful rescue mission.

If you want to hear more stories about wild animals attempting to swim where they shouldn't, please go and visit one of my favourite blogs called "The Bearded Iris" and her recent post on an unfortunate squirrel's adventures. Warning: there may not be a happy ending but oh my this is hilarious stuff. Don't forget to clink on the link to see the picture.

Right, today is August the 1st, the Swiss National Day so we're off to Zurich to watch the celebrations and eat sausages. What else would you in Zurich on a bank holiday monday but eat sausages?

Tchuss!

Toilet humor (stay clear if squeamish)

Mr T and I have been watching some old British comedy lately. The series was called Man Stroke Woman and ran for two seasons a couple of years back. If you don't know the show, or if you like not-so-subtle comedy (like me), go and check it out! They have several clips on You Tube but I include one of my favourite below.

WARNING: Do not watch this video if you feel squeamish about body odours or toilet humour!

That's what they call lowering the tone...have a lovely weekend everyone!