On Top Of The Hill

So tomorrow is a monumental day for me. It is my 30th birthday! Seeing as being 30 is often described as being 'over the hill' I figure today must be the day I am 'right on top of the hill'. The view is pretty good from up here.

For a long time I had all these lavish plans for my 30th birthday party, however with two small children the reality is that I will probably stay at home, do a few loads of washing and generally just be a mum. If someone has told me before I had my children that this was the way I would celebrate my 30th birthday I think I would have been disappointed, but now that I have these two beautiful girls in my life I can't imagine spending the day with anyone else or receiving a gift better than kisses like the one pictured above. Plus, Malia and I have talked about what we should do with the day and we now have big plans to paint our nails pink and get all dressed up just for fun. No fancy, grown up party could possibly be as much fun as that is going to be. My girls are the greatest gift I could ever ask for. They truly are a gift that keeps on giving. Thank you God.

A Model Child

A few weeks ago I got an email in my inbox putting the call out for children to be part of an advertising campaign for a kids clothing brand called 'baobab'. Both the girls have many items of clothing from baobab and I genuinely like their stuff so it was something I was interested in. We have also been told many times that Malia should model, however we have always put it off because modeling agencies usually cost a lot of money just to enroll and even then there are no guarantees of work. I thought this would be a good way to find out if it was something Malia had the temperament for without having to outlay huge amounts of money. Seeing as we have many cute photos of Malia, particularly from our recent holiday, I decided to send them this photo to see if she might be what they were looking for.

I got a response about 30 minutes later saying that she was perfect and to bring her on down, so we did!

She certainly did not make the entire process 'painless', but all in all she was pretty good despite the occasional pouting and refusal to wear certain things they wanted to put her in. I am loath to say it but when she started to pout and refused to look at the camera I did do something I swore I would never do. Bribe with ice cream. It worked a treat though! We were sent the above photo in a 'thank you for letting us photograph your child' email and we were promised that we would be sent a copy of all the images taken of her on cd in the mail very soon.

She is already on the baobab site and despite the tiny size of the photo, looks adorable in her pink dress with red pockets (even though they wanted her to wear the red dress with orange pockets). She is in the middle of the top row. To see her on the baobab site click here.

We're Alive!

I am so sorry things have been so dull around these parts lately. Trust me when I say it is not for lack of exciting, crazy things happening in our life. If anything it's been a case of life getting in the way of me writing about life, LOL! Jonathan thought it would probably be a good idea if I wrote just a small post letting you all know that we are in fact still alive, seeing as the last post has us flying off on our holiday and then not returning.

One of the main reasons I have been so busy and have had little time for personal blog updates is because I am participating in something called the Great Down Under Nappy Hunt with my cloth nappy dedicated blog, Cloth Dreaming. It is an online scavenger hunt where people search for icons on various sites. I am a sponsor of the hunt which means people are searching for an icon on my blog as well. I have been trying to post something new over there every day to give hunters lots to read and enjoy, plus I have been hunting myself, which has been quite time consuming.

I have infuriated many hunters with the difficulty of finding my icon. I didn't really think it would be that hard but I guess I was wrong. Basically I managed to find the words 'great', 'down', 'under', 'nappy' and 'hunt' in various existing posts on my blog and I linked those words to the hidden icon. The tricky part is that I made all my links the same colour as the rest of the text on my blog so they do not look like links. The only way you can tell they are links is by moving the cursor over them. This part seems to be driving people CRAZY as they randomly click on anything that looks like a link. There are of course many other links on the site, all of which are hidden, so hunters have to find the right word. I figure I will come out with the secret here and that way if hunters care to find out more about me they will come here and get the information they need to find the clue. If they don't care about me, they won't!

Anyway, the hunt finishes at the end of September so after that I should have a lot more time for regular posts. There is a lot to catch up on, including our holiday stories. I can't wait to share some of the photos with you. Until then, keep safe and if you've got some time why don't you sign up and have a go at the hunt yourself. It is open to all people on this side of the globe (there is a seperate hunt for the US and surrounding countries). It is completely free to sign up and hunt and the prizes up for grabs are fantastic. Plus there are lots of great discounts for hunters at many of the sponsoring stores. Click here to register.

Here are just a few of my favourite holiday snaps to keep you busy. There are a lot more to come!