Friday Favourites 21st January - 3rd February 2017
FF03.02.2017
So the past fortnight has been a bit hit and miss for me, busy yet a real non event. My last Friday Favourites was written just after I'd been to Manchester and in the end I was ill for a full 3 weeks and 1 day -insert celebration emojis here-
Now I am back to being able to breathe through my nose and I don't feel like the weight of the world is crushing down on my head I thought I'd get all girl boss and complete 1290839238 tasks and schedule blogs for the next two weeks but naturally I completed basically nothing.
I was insanely busy all week and yet none of it was work related, none of it was exciting or note worthy....
So my Friday Favourites this week are a little boring, a little less glam than sometimes but they're good ones all the same.
1. Home Sweet Home.
Our building work is finally done!! As of yesterday the builders have left, the electricians have departed and all the construction work and odd jobs are over. The house is a mass of dust and fresh plaster and the clean up job is VAST but holy moly I am excited to actually find my things again. I haven't seen my kitchen utensils since Christmas and we're celebrating with a first meal of fajitas cooked in our new kitchen. My boyfriend only gets two days off a week, as most people do, but the rest of the week he works till around 11pm so there's no evenings of decorating, we're limited to a Friday and Saturday so the next few weeks are going to be LOTS of painting and getting stuff done.
2. IKEA Haul.
FYI this is NOT from IKEA, I just couldn't actually photograph our new stuff cos uhm, most of it hasn't been delivered yet. Last weekend we spent an 3 hour evening in IKEA getting all the bits and bobs we don't have, from as big as a bed to as small as a cushion. We filled the car with all the 'stuff' that comes with a trip to IKEA and we have a truck coming on Sunday with all the big furniture. I feel like once it's actually in the house it'll feel more like we're getting there. Hopefully we'll make it through a weekend of assembling flat pack furniture without murdering one another.
3. First Birthday.
Wahoooo my little blog officially turned one on January 25th and I posted two blogs (this one and this one) to celebrate. Because I blogged a little on a different platform in 2015 it feels weird to be celebrating only one year when it feels so much longer but it was only when writing my 'in numbers' post did I realise just how far it's come and grown. I had a lot of lovely messages surrounding my blogs birthday and I bloody love the bones off the lot of you.
4. New Blog Design.
To celebrate my blogging birthday in style I took my site offline for a few days and had a bit of a redesign. It's nothing drastic by any means, I was super happy with the layout I had before but I just made a few tweaks. I wanted to hold off on the sleek black and white design I love on everyone else's sites and add more colour, something I could tweak and change with each coming season and it just suddenly feels so much more me. I'm also super happy to finally have the scrolling Instagram bar at the bottom of my blog because lord knows I've been waiting a long time for that one.
5. QT With Ma & Pa.
The past week I've had a lazy day with both my Momma and my Dad separately and it's been so nice to just sit and watch a butt load of TV. Last weekend my Dad and I caught up on about 4 episodes of The Grand Tour and a bunch of other stuff and we basically just sat around all day with endless cups of tea and bacon sandwiches and I started work on my new bullet journal (yes you read right, coming soon) and it was just what Sundays are made for. Then this week my Dad was away for a night so I stayed at my Mum's and we ate chips and sausage rolls and binge watched Location Location Location and whilst both very different days, both were glorious.
6. Daughter Brownie Points.
Firstly can we all just appreciate how cute this bunch of boots are? Grandparent life.
Sometimes in the past 18 months or so since I've been home from uni I've really felt like I'm repaying my parents in some small way for everything they have done for me. Slowly repaying every lift, every traipse around the countryside for me. Obviously I'll never match it but sometimes it feels nice to have done something nice for them or done a favour. Since I passed my driving test and got my car in November 2015 there's been a lot of these times where I've thought about how much easier it is now I can do stuff for them. Yesterday I went to the supermarket for my Mum to do a big shop, something she detests and then in the evening I picked my Dad up from Cardiff train station when he got home. It's simple stuff like this that we all recognised how much easier it was that I could collect him and my Mum could stay home and make a meal for when we got in, when just over a year ago she'd have had to have done it all. Simple appreciations.
7. Toddler Days.
My little pal is no longer a baby, she is a fully fledged toddler at 20 months and she's genuinely the best part of every week, I just can't keep banging on about her. She's got such a personality, such a temper and is such a clever little gal my heart can't keep up with her. On Wednesday she said to me Daddy (my brother) and Auntie Gwennan best friends and I just died. When we say goodbye to her when we take her home she says 'see you Monday' or 'see you Wednesday' depending on when we next have her, she comes up with the funniest answers to everything, she really listens and learns and she's super smart. When I'm reading about other kids her age recognising the farm animals in their books she's onto gopher, polar bear, jellyfish...she can differentiate between a crow, a pigeon, a robin, a parrot...she just knows so much and there isn't ANYTHING that escapes her ear, or her ability to repeat it.
8. Mac & Cheese Croquettes.
So I don't have a photo for this one because I snaffled them down my gob before you could say Instagram but oh sweet jesus what an invention. Joss' Mum bought them for Christmas Eve party food and nobody but me was that impressed and then I found she'd left them in our freezer last weekend and dear god. It's exactly what it says on the tin, it's macaroni cheese, sauce and all in a croquette and it is hands down the best thing I have ever eaten. I haven't really stopped thinking about it since I had them.
Here's to a busy weekend of painting, flat pack furniture and trying to find a home for everything. Have a corker my loves!
