My little Boston bun is now 3 months old. He’s approaching the end of having to share a room with us and will be moving in to his very own nursery for the next year or two. Next year is going to be pretty busy for us and the one thing I want to get done before all the chaos invades life is my little boys room. I’m still trying to find the perfect colour for the one wall that won’t be white. I’m tossing up between an intense blue or a light grey.
I feel bad for the kid. My older children have managed to get hold of our bag of baby toys and they’ve gone walk about. So unless I want my infant to play with little fiddly transformers or hot wheels, I have to start from scratch. Not ideal when you’re frugal. We run a pretty strict budget in our household, you kind of have to! We have $100 a fortnight to spend on anything we want, yep that’s all for 6 people. To some that may be a lot and to others not much at all. That includes any eating out, clothes, outings, toys etc. We could have a lot more but you don’t get ahead by spending all the money you have so we do things bit by bit. 8-9 years ago it was $30 a fortnight for 2 adults and then along came a baby. That was usually spent on ordering in pizza for a big Friday night in lol.
I’ve stunned quite a lot of people by telling them I shop at places like habitat for humanity and the dump. I must not give off a scent that’s assoociated with those places or something lol. I am a total bargain shopper. I scour the 2nd hand stores allll the time. I don’t buy all the time, just go searching for some little treasures, lodge the piece and place in the back of my mind and then buy it when the time is right. It’s like my weekend routine now. I know the store hours and which salespeople will give you the best deals lol.
Anyway, I have started picking up some goodies that will take Bostons nursery from drab to fab on a budget. Here’s what we’ve got so far:
I’ve spent the past 1/2 an hour learning Kanji, basic symbols in Japanese. I can now recognise numbers 1 through 10 and about 10-15 simple colours and phrases. What I wanted to share was the way I’ve managed to memorise them. This is honest to goodness how I memorise things. If this is how your mind works too, let me know!
‘To go out’ oh ok so that symbol is kind of messy, loose, like a woman going out..
‘Mountain’ that one looks like a pen*s. That ones easy to remember. (don’t want my blog to get blocked by anyone!)
‘Moon, month’ looks like a calendar.
‘Blue’ looks like a cluttered Christmas tree.
‘Sound’ looks like a tidy Christmas tree.
‘Earth’ looks like the symbol for a pound.
‘Power’ looks like a less fancy N, unlike ‘Nine’ which is a fancy N
and ‘Water’ reminds me of the initials JK, like Harry Potter.
and thats how you learn how to read Japanese, Chavah style.
Can you tell which ones these are?
I’ve had a lot of inspiration this weekend. On Saturday I worked at City Gallery, Invercargill where I got to sell a piece. It gave me such a rush to be interacting with adults again lol. I’m happy I get to stay home though. It was as though I’d never stopped working in the ‘real world’. I got the signs out, lights on, booklets printed, pitched invitations to an opening night later that evening, answered phones and talked to everyone about the art. I also sketched some pictures of a friends baby bump later that night at home after seeing them and getting the overwhelming urge to draw more pregnant women. They’re just so gorgeous! This morning I began painting a new piece with my 3 y/o sitting beside me ‘helping’ (chatting away touching the brushes I wasn’t using). It’s nice to be creating again. I think I’m finding my flow again. Yay!
Here are the sketches:
This Blog. I love this! I’m always happy to see a proclaimation of love. I get all giddy when I see couples walking down the road hand in hand. Heaven forbid I see someone cuddle or sneak in a peck. It makes my heart a-fllutter. Please. No making out sessions though. No one wants to see that. I recently had an experience walking into the supermarket where a an elderly couple were having a full on pash session in their disabled parking spot with ‘Walk This Way’ blaring so loud you couldn’t help but look to see what was going on. Totally ruined that song for me. I think I’m scarred for life.
There were a lot of murals to choose from to use as the pic for this post but I went with this one because as women, I know we are often far too hard on ourselves. Sometimes we need to stop and remember how our husbands, partners, mothers, friends… see us.
That bring me joy. Like a 7 year old little girl rushing in to ask me to help her put on a freshly made daisy ring. I love being a Mum.
