Monday Musings…

January and February are hard months to love for me. The excitement of the festive season has past, these two months are often the most dreary of the year, and those short days … 🙁

These two months I generally have to work hardest at trying to appreciate. I make a concerted effort to get outdoors as often as I can during this time, even though we have miserable weather.

And around the home I fill vases, bottles and jars with flowers to brighten little corners up. I have two windows in my stairwell and both have got little bunches of daffodils. These happen to come from my garden but usually they are not in bloom around this time of the year. Usually a bunch of daffs are added to my weekly Tesco shop.

I love their bright sunny yellow, and their fragrance! So lovely. As I go up and down the stairs, catch their fragrance and see their sunny dispositions, it reminds me to think happy thoughts and have a sunny disposition myself 🙂

This week I couldn’t resist these beautiful tulips…

Aren’t they just beautiful? They are on the coffee table right in the centre of my living room where I can get maximum appreciation value from them 🙂

I have hung up my crochet flower heart wreath I made last year. I know it’s a bit early but it seems a shame to only bring it out once a year for a day. Our Bible time this week is focused on love and love in action in our lives, so I thought that It was appropriate to hang it up in my hallway as a reminder to us all.

On the homeschool front…

I’ve been doing a little thinking about what is and isn’t working and re-jigging things a bit. We follow the Charlotte Mason method in our home and one of the things things that we do is Picture Study. In our previous home all the artworks we looked at were pinned up on the wall in our dining room – which is where we did our work. But in our new home we are lucky enough to have a room upstairs dedicated as our school room. Only problem is that although we do sometimes work there, most of our learning is done throughout the house, of late book work has been happening downstairs in the dining room. So all our artworks have been pinned upstairs in the schoolroom and out of sight.

So this morning as I introduced our new painting, I suddenly thought that I should use the front of the refrigerator door as our ‘art gallery’. That way we get maximum exposure to our artworks each term. I have to say I quite like evidence of our learning lifestyle scattered throughout the home – it’s part of who we are after all.

This weekend is the Big Garden Bird watch in the UK. We participate every year and I absolutely love having birds visit our feeder throughout the year, it’s a source of great joy to me. I’m always trying to think of ways to make my feeder more attractive to our feathered friends. When I was having a bird-feeder problem a few months back, I read that the more feeding stations you have in your garden the better. So today I set up a second feeding station. This one is set further away from the house and closer to the summer house and pond. Now I didn’t want to spend money on more feeding equipment so after having a quick look onPinterest for inspiration, I grabbed a water bottle out of the recycling, a couple of wooden spoons from the kitchen drawer, and made a new feeder. I hope the birds visit it!

Now I hope that all my American friends have kept safe and warm over the past weekend. Your snow blizzard was the hot topic of conversation on our British news channels! Your storm is set to hit our own shores tomorrow, but not as snow, rather as high winds and lots of rain. But as of this moment …. I am enjoying the calm before the storm so to speak. It’s been a lovely day with a bit of cloud cover but right now we have lots of blue sky – a lovely afternoon 🙂

Hope you have a great start to your week everyone!