Four Years of You

My gorgeous Miss D, two days ago you turned four, I can't believe how fast time is disappearing, how much you grow and change before my eyes. Right now this is you:

You are a real girly girl. All you wanted for your birthday was "A dolls house and lots and lots of Barbies".... we obliged, and you are enthralled.

You can write all the letters of the alphabet, and several words unprompted. You also recognise lots of words by sight, and can tell the time quite well. It amazes me.

Whenever I ask you what you want to wear today, you say automatically "A running shirt and shorts"..... I think you might be a little more than impressed with Mummy's running:)

If I give you a pile of craft stuff to play with you will sit for hours making things, but you prefer my company while doing so.

You are constantly impressed with my sewing, you want me to make everything for you, the other day you called me "A Sewing, Machine", it made me laugh until I had tears.

You swap jokes with your Daddy, you have an amazing sense of humour.

You love dress ups.... "Mummy, I have a moustache and I've come to clean your house!"

You are very sensitive, you get embarrassed easily and your mood swings baffle me.... you remind me a little too much of myself.

You are thrilled to be starting Kindy properly this term "Mummy I get to eat my lunch there like the other kids!" I think you are going to thrive.

You are a small mystery.

You have a kind and beautiful heart. Your sister is your best friend and you constantly watch out for her.... Even if you do sometimes use her face as a blank canvas.

I love you baby girl. x

An Experiment

WARNING: Lots of pictures of randomly coloured flowers, because they make me smile and I can't choose which ones I want to show you.

And with the warning out the way on to the experiment.....

I found this gorgeous pic of rainbow roses on Pinterest the other day, and of course being a lover of all things brightly coloured I felt the need to try out my own version of some rainbow flowers with D and M, so yesterday we visited the local florist and came home armed with a gorgeous big bunch of white daisies and a refreshed supply of food colouring.

We began by getting out my big glass IKEA Vase and six random small vessels, six shot glasses would have been perfect, but alas I have no idea where luke has put the 50 (!) or so we own (mental note, must ask him about that!), so we ended up with two shot glasses, two espresso cups, a tiny stine shaped glass and a pony glass, my usual mismatched style. We put a little water in each glass and then quite heavy handedly added food colouring to each one. We went the the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. We then placed these individual vessels into the base of the big vase.

Next we chopped a little off the end of each stem (we could have done more!) and split several of the stems in two for a short distance and then placed each stem or half of into a different colour water/food colouring mixture. The big vase helped all the flowers to stand up nicely.

Within an hour you could see a little colour coming out into some of the daisies.

By this morning we had lots of beautiful daisies with brightly coloured centers, stems and leaves.

We found that the green, red and blue colourings worked the best, but the whole effect was quite delightful. We even found that on one of the bunches where we had split the stem at the base into two and placed one half in yellow and the other half in red, that we actually had a half yellow, half red flower.

Over all, it was super easy, lots of fun and a great way for the girls to learn about plants..... plus I have this unreal bunch of flowers now!