...

…what you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.

…so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.
Norton Juster "The Phantom Tollbooth"

Bathrooms

The bathroom renovations are going to start tomorrow. Not the best timing, but we can’t put it off any longer as we can only use the sink in the main bathroom – everything else is leaking/broken/about to disintegrate. The builder thinks that both bathrooms will be done by mid March. Fingers-crossed that there aren’t going to be any unexpected delays.

On Thursday it dawned on me that planning to wash baby cloths during the bathroom renovations is probably not such a brilliant idea and not wanting to leave it until the last minute I did silly number of laundry loads during the weekend. On the upside we all have plenty of clean cloths, bedding, etc and now I know that we don’t need to buy any baby cloths for at least first three months. Now I just need to figure out what we do need to buy. We aren’t exactly in denial that there are only seven weeks left until the due date, but somehow too busy with everything else to spend a lot of time thinking and preparing ourselves for labour/newborn. Maybe it is just how it is with the second (and subsequent) kids.

My mum is coming in two weeks time and before we put up the inflatable bed for her I decided to use the only big enough available floor space to block the shawl I finished knitting on the 1st of September (!). While blocking it I remembered why I procrastinated for so long – it is huge and there was hardly enough space and not enough pins to do the blocking properly. However, it is so soft and warm and the colours of Rowan Kidsilk Spray are lovely. I didn’t get around to taking any photos of it after blocking (weekend was gloomy and grey), but today I couldn’t resist snapping a quick shot of my own little matchstick girl or maybe babushka in training – love her miserable facial expression specially put on for the photo.

Jazzing up the window

A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach, so that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.
Hundertwasser Window Dictatorship and Window Right

One day I'll build my own little house or a studio and it will have grass roof, plenty of plants, odd shaped windows, curved benches and mosaic inserts, but for now I'm just changing the decorations attached to the kitchen window. Few weeks ago we took down the snowflakes and to add some colour to our greyish view my daughter and I made three stars from the kite paper.

Katya choose her favourite colours (red, yellow & orange) to make a star with some help from me and this detail tutorial. I made the other two and there are still three more variations that we can try making.

To the Barrier

On Sunday morning a nostalgic South African, a jet-lagged Australian, a pregnant woman and a four-year-old decided to go to the Thames Barrier. Despite forgetting to bring any of the three maps we made it there and afterwards took a short stroll along the Green Chain Walk.

My husband visited the Barrier at the age of 10 with his dad, so he got a bit nostalgic and during our coffee break at the visitors’ information center he reminiscenced about the good old times.

The four-year-old just wanted to go down the long slide over and over again, but after some diplomatic negotiations we were able to move to something I really wanted to do – walk the walk.

The sky was blue, the sun was out for the first time in many days and it was lovely to walk along the path surrounded by tall trees. Since Katya started attending Steiner/Waldorf kindergarten 4 days a week at the beginning of this year we don't go to the parks as often as we used to and looking at the houses, cars and asphalt roads all the time makes one yearn for the views full of trees, grasses and flowers.

I would’ve loved to stop in many places to allow us to enjoy the beautiful details of our surroundings, but since the sunset was quickly approaching we had to hurry up a bit (as much as one can hurry with a 4 year old and a pregnant woman). As the name suggests, the Green Chain Walk goes through the green areas (parks, woodlands, meadows, etc) in the South-East of London and from the short stretch we managed to do it looks like one can learn a lot about local history, geography and nature, so I really want to do the rest of it this year.

There are few more photos on Flckr.