tues, 19th - 46/52....

the 52 project: a picture of the girls once a week, every week, in 2013.

day 1378 / 477:

a stunningly bright, Autumn day......in one of our favourite parks

Limi: watching planes overhead.....(with Zozo)

Claya: crunching acorns underfoot.....happiest when she has plenty of space to roam....

i'll be back with ones that caught my eye, next week.

nov, 17th - portugal: alcácer do sal....

day 1376 / 475:

we fell in love with the town of Alcácer do Sal in Portugal.....with it's pretty, crumbling facade, river promenade, interesting restaurants and history.....it had us completely intrigued.

it seems to have passed through many hands: Phoenician, Roman, Arab, Portuguese, it strikes you as the type of place that keeps getting reborn. it looks like it's ripe for regeneration once again....

nov, 12th - tales of trips gone by......

day 1371 / 470:

back to Portugal this week and lots of pics of pretty buildings coming up......

(playing serious catch-up in all areas at the moment!)

nov, 10th - 45/52....

the 52 project: a portrait of the girls once a week, every week, in 2013

day 1369 / 468:

Limi: happiest when climbing trees and trunks......

Claya: her own version of climbing a tree trunk....

ones that caught my eye this week:

• sleeping
• a halloween face
• lalie and her new sister, marguerite

nov, 9th - broken doll....

day 1368 / 467:

Halloween is long gone and I'm still playing catch-up.....

after a disastrous first year trying to make Limi's costume from scratch.....i now stick to customising. this year, we chose a 'broken/ forgotten doll'.....i used what we had in house and tried to make her look like she was stitched up with stuffing coming out. she was game for the whole outfit except the messy hair and couldn't understand why there were leaves and twigs in the wig......

Claya was meant to be stripy with a pumpkin head but as expected....she was just stripy!

nov, 4th - halloween pumpkins....

day 1363 / 462:

i will still finish off our adventures in Portugal on the blog but just wanted to drop some Halloween posts in between. we had such a great time this year....Halloween is fast becoming my new favourite celebration.....

Limi helped me with the pumpkins again this year. she scooped out the pumpkin flesh (well, i did most of the hard labour and she did the easy scooping) and then i asked whether she wanted to draw the faces on.....to be honest, i had a moment of thinking that the faces would be a disaster and did i Really want her to do the drawing but i had to completely 'eat my thoughts' or, whatever the equivalent is to 'eating your words'....as her faces were better than anything that i would have thought up and she loved being part of the process. it was such a good lesson for me.

i found that the easiest way to do it, was to lie the pumpkins on their sides and let her draw on them with a thinnish black marker pen......the first set of eyes were a little too close for carving so we rubbed them out with a wet wipe and she drew them again.....by the second pumpkin she had it down pat.

i absolutely loved the end results, especially the off centre growl on the second pumpkin.

Limi (and Claya when she's able to) will definitely be our pumpkin face creators from now on.......and i'll happily stick to the menial tasks of carving and heavy duty scooping......

Happy Halloween!