Fly.

It's a fly crawling on a window. I took photos with my macro lens and used the manual setting. Not sure there's much more I can say.

I like the wings, so that is what I tend to focus on.

It's fascinating how the wings can have such vibrant colours in one shot, and yet be so translucent and colourless in other shots. It's not photo editing, it's to do with the light I expect.

Henna Tattoos

My lovely and talented sister (in law) Leah was very kind and gave up part of her evening yesterday to do this henna tattoo.

(I shall just add a disclaimer that this is natural, traditional henna, not that awful black henna with PPD in it! Natural henna is highly unlikely to cause any kind of reaction in your skin, but black henna can burn and even leave permanent scarring so please be careful when getting henna tattoos from street sellers - always ask what kind it is!)

Over the past couple of weeks we'd been having fun with the children doing transfers, face paints and little henna tattoos on their arms, legs and even bellies! I'd really wanted a more traditional type of tattoo on my hand but they take significantly more time and are awkward to allow to dry when looking after young children. So last night we sat the girls in front of a dvd (or two) so that we would be undisturbed....

The finished product having just brushed the dried up henna off late last night:

The tattoo this morning, quite a bit darker and likely to darken even more over the next 24 hours. I'm really pleased with it:

Bacon n egg

Quail egg to be specific.

Bye bye laptop

I'm about to go camping and I was going to make one more blog post before leaving the world of the internet for a while. However yesterday my laptop decided to stop working, and then it stopped being able to boot the hard drive, and then it stopped recognising there was a hard drive.... and now even with a new hard drive it won't start. Waaaaaaaa.

Thankfully I have my data and photos backed up but not anywhere that I can upload them to the blog just yet. So today's post is photo-less. Hopefully I'll get lots of fantastic photos over the next couple of weeks!

Froggy Rescue

Frogs frogs everywhere!!

This little amphibian had a lucky escape this morning. I went out to the garden to find Big Squish holding something in her hand. A jar, one of those really small jam jars that hotels use. "What's that darling?" "It's my pet frog!" "Oh right! Can you give it to me for a second please?!" "I put water and grass in for it mummy." "Yes but no air - it's needs to breath."

Thankfully I had got there in time. I tipped it out into a bigger tub with grass and water and it just sat there for a while, it's little body going up and down significantly more than normal. We had a little chat about breathing and needing holes to let air in. Frog spent a bit more time in this tub until eventually he/she felt ready to try and escape!

Puzzling

Indoor activities.

Jigsaw puzzles are quite popular in this house - just not with me! I don't have the patience or determination. Jigsaw pieces make quite interesting patterns when they're scattered. I've tried to take some shots of them before but the lighting conditions are usually terrible, and it's not really the kind of situation I'd set up for a photo shoot. Perhaps I should?!

I wanted to get an intimate shot of pushing the pieces into the right place, but the girls are not doing it for my photography they are racing o see who can finish first! If I were to do a jigsaw photo shoot, I'd make sure that they either had unvarnished nails or newly done nails - non of this chipped off unaesthetic nonsense!!

Why of course I'll let you take a picture of me with my finished puzzle mum, just don't expect me to smile....

Can you tell what it is yet....?

It's a *very* over exposed photo of, yup, you've guessed it - cherry pie!

This is a prime example of what happens when you just flick your camera on and take a quick snap without checking the settings first :-) Non of the photos were particularly stunning even once I had changed the settings, but for some reason despite all it's flaws I still quite like this one.

Clearly summertime brings with it yummy food stuffs, because I have yet another pudding orientated post! So far this year we have done cherry picking, black current picking and strawberry picking. Soon we will embark upon tackling the bramble bushes for our yearly blackberry harvest!

I'm never sure what to do with cherries so cherry pie it is. It really was quite delicious - particularly the pastry, even if I do say so myself.