Sometimes €10 for a bit of decorated cardboard is a bargain

Life teaches you many things along the way, and the lesson I have learned over the past couple of weeks is:

No child should be allowed to know of the existence of sequins until they are at least 8 years old.

And in case that's not enough:



Gold lame fabric will suffice in an emergency for wiping a child's bum, but it will look so odd you'll laugh.

So, sequins.

I am so over them. Admittedly, it's my own fault. When Orla chose a plain pink Schultute I rejoiced at the money I was saving. And I also figured it would keep her busy on a little craft project for a few hours. *sigh* how wrong can I be?

I asked her how she'd like to decorate it and she said she wanted love hearts and sequins. I let her choose some fabric to cut hearts from (gold lame- I'd been thinking of a pretty pink gingham, but she looked at me in disgust, and well, turns out bling is cheaper) and of course, guess who ended up cutting out the hearts. Then she wanted sequins glued round the edges of the hearts. I poured them out, gave her the glue, showed her how to apply it, and set her off. 5 sequins in and she was fed up. "Can you just help me a bit?"

Well, sure I can! To give her her due, she stuck around for a minute watching me do it, and then went off to do something less mind-numbing. And so I sat for hours, glueing individual sequins on, all the while thinking it was utterly ridiculous and I should just leave her to decorate the damn schultute herself, and how I was a total mug and should have realised that sequins were a bad idea, and that there were probably children her age sewing blooming sequins on t-shirts in India in intricate designs.

Once completed, my lone typing finger ached with a fresh rawness from applying a few thousand sequins. Orla gave her nod of approval but declared that it needed something 'more'. Wracking my brain, I suggested that perhaps a bit of potato printing might be just the ticket. And so I carved a nice heart shape, let her loose with my acrylics, and bam! She just splodged it on so carelessly it actually looked like a potato, and not a pretty heart.

Well, hey, I'm not spending hours sequinning just for someone to come along and ruin all my good efforts! So guess who ended up doing the potato printing?

But you know, it just still wasn't right. Or so I was told. Couldn't I just add some more sequins to it all over? Well, sure I could! I don't need lunch like the rest of you! And couldn't we do something with the extra gold fabric? Absolutely! Let me just lose a couple of hours of my sleep staying up hand sewing it to the top edge!

You think we're done? Oh no. We're heading back to Scotland tomorrow and plan on buying some large fake colored jewels to stick on it... All this effort for 10 minutes of ceremony.... *sigh*

If you fancy reading some more about Schultuten, try this: Schultute: a very rough guide

This is not Amsterdam.

I'm not sure where we've been over the past week or so, but it's not been Amsterdam. Or Copenhagen. Or Vienna.

We've been talking about taking a weekend trip for a few weekends now. I really, really want to go to Copenhagen. On Google maps it looks so close, and yet it's still so far. If we were child-free it wouldn't be an issue: a 6 hour drive wouldn't be a problem, heck, if we didn't have kids we'd probably fly. But with kids, we always have to weigh up is it worth it for all that moaning and having to listen to "Are we nearly there now?" 400,000 times.

So Copenhagen is out for the moment. Vienna is much the same distance. Then the past couple of weekends we thought "Yeah, let's go to Amsterdam!", it's closer. Except, Stevie's been before and doesn't really feel *fussed* about going again, but as I wanted to go, then fine, we'd go.

Except we didn't. This happened the weekend before last, though admittedly he was shattered after a week working away, and then this weekend we were absolutely, totally going to go but at the last minute Stevie decided it wasn't really a great place to take the kids.

So we went north. To Warnemünde, on the coast. We've been there before, two years ago, and this time the weather was perfect. We  spent the day on the beach, had some lovely fish for dinner in one of the restaurants looking over the harbour, and planned on staying over and booking into a hotel, until Hamish got diarrhoea, and said he just wanted to go home. Thank god it wasn't a 6 hour drive.