Getting the Spark Back

With a baby, it's all too easy to let your relationship with your partner slide to the bottom of your priorities.

Daddy BuBbles and I realised recently that we both needed to put a bit more effort in to "us" so we decided to make Friday nights the night to do this.  

This is the dinner invitation I received for our first date night:

You are cordially invited to...

Friday Night Festivities

Event details:

Dinner at a casual dining venue

followed by

Fine Wine and BuBble's Time
while BuBba is bathed and put to bed

followed by

A lengthy Foot Massage and Chocolate Feeding ceremony

followed by

**Censored** ;)

followed by

A night of relaxing unbroken sleep

followed by

Saturday morning BuBble's time ending 1pm.

Evening commences Fri - 6pm sharp, please be ready on time.
RSVP Friday 430pm.

Bring on Friday nights!!!

Point + Shoot

Last Thursday I mentioned how I had been lucky in blogland and had won a few cool giveaways.

On Friday, I picked up my latest prize and it was awesome!

Thanks to Olay and bellaMUMMA for keeping my skin smooth and supple for a long time to come :)

Play along with Point + Shoot over here.

Friday Drool

If you're ever desperately craving some food prOn, the bestest, and I mean the BESTEST site to head to is Sunday Suppers.

Superb styling, superb photography and, most importantly, sublime food!

Ahhh, sometimes I wished I lived in New York.

Giving & Receiving

Since entering the blogging land at the beginning of the year, I've been lucky enough to win a few fabulous giveaways.  

Well, Claire at Scissors Paper Rock is having her very own giveaway today to celebrate 200 Facebook fans and I'd love to win one of her gorgeous prints.

If you love her work as much as I do and want to be in the running, get over to her blog STAT! and enter.

Oh and it's also Claire's birthday today so a BIG

Have a fabulous day today Claire!

Wordless Wednesday

To join in on Wordless Wednesday and to see more, head over to Faith Hope & a Whole Lotta Love.

Beat the Heat

Check this out.

Image via Concrete Playground via Inhabitat

Space is sparse in NYC so if it's the middle of summer and you desperately need to cool down, where else would you go but your local rubbish skip for a quick dip?  Right?

They've been cleaned of course (duhh) and fancied up and in my opinion are way too cool for school.

Have a look at the image links for more pics of this fab installation.

Point + Shoot

Ahhh, back to reality...

Despite the 3 of us getting sick yet again (fricking hand, foot & mouth disease), we had a fabulous week up at Airlie Beach and the time just flew by.

I thought I'd share a few piccies from our trip for this week's Point + Shoot.

The hand part of hand, foot & mouth disease

 

BuBba practicing his yoga poses

 

Super fine Whitehaven Beach sand

 

The view from my beach towel

 

Tootsies

 

BuBba's new cousin, Eli.  Isn't he a cutie?

 

 

Friday Drool

Today I'm drooling over the beaches, sun, sand and laidback lifestyle that the Whitsundays has to offer.

We're heading back up to sunny Queensland for a mini-break and to meet our  gorgeous new nephew.

Although the weather will be a bit cooler than it was last time we visited, it will still be a hell of a lot nicer than the chill that's being blown around Sydney at present.

See you in a week!

Simple Pleasures

It's the simple things in life that are often the best.  One such simple pleasure for me is the twice weekly drive to work.

It's early morning, the car starts and the iPhone gets plugged in.  The music begins and the volume gets cranked up high.  It's a mere 15 minutes drive but it's one of my favourite parts of my week.

A few minutes in to my drive, I round a corner and view Sydney in all her glory - harbour, bridge and city skyline.  All so stunning at this time of day.  

I take joy in driving over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and often recall the time that we got the opportunity to be pedestrians once and walk it's length.

As I come to the end of the bridge, I round another corner and see such beauty.  The sun rising over the Opera House, ferries below and water glistening.

For the next few minutes I continue singing loudly and grooving away to the music and before I know it I'm at work.  All goes silent as the music is unplugged and the car engine is turned off.

And off I toddle to work.

It's Over

Noooooooooooooooooooo

Sadly another celebrity engagement has bitten the dust.  

Rachel waves bye bye to Hayden :(

Such a shame because they made such a beautiful couple.

Image courtesy of thehollywoodgossip.com

Easy Peasy Tuna Pasta Bake

On the days that I work, the last thing I want to do when I get home is spend lots of time in the kitchen getting dinner ready.  Easy to prepare, quick to cook meals are key on these days.

Thanks to Buttons by Lou Lou for pointing me in the direction of Frog, Goose and Bear and her Easy Peasy Dinner ideas linky.  I'm always after new easy peasy recipes to add to my repertoire.

It just so happened that tonight's dinner was perfect to add and share with others (and taken from the back of a tin of condensed soup).

Quick & Easy Tuna Pasta Bake

1 tbsp oil

1 onion, finely chopped

1 x 410g tin Cream of Celery Condensed Soup

425g can tuna, drained, flaked

250 dried large shell pasta, cooked

1 1/2 cups grated tasty cheese

1/2 cup frozen peas

100g tin corn

*  Preheat oven to 200°C.

*  Lightly grease an 8-cup (2L) capacity ovenproof dish.

*  Heat oil in a large frying pan over medium heat.  Add onion and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes.

*  In a large bowl mix onion, soup, tuna and pasta until combined.  Place in to prepared dish.  Sprinkle with cheese and bake uncovered for 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Et voila!

Celebrate Good Times

Wowsers, what a weekend!  We packed up on Friday and headed up to my hometown, Brisneyland, for a weekend of birthday celebrations.

Friday night saw us celebrating my mother's 60th birthday with delicious Japanese food at Sono and a totally indulgent chocolate mud cake.

Saturday night was more birthday celebrations but this time for my oldest friend (not in age but in longevity).  We have known each other since Year 1 which now adds up to an amazing 28 years.  We celebrated with some cocktails at The Lark, a couple more and then even more.  A fabulous night and we were still home by midnight and luckily no pesky hangover the next day.

During the days we just kicked back and relaxed.  The parentals have a large deck at the back of the house that gets a good deal of use.  I almost forgot how good winter is in Brisbane but was reminded when we were sitting out in the morning sun, in short sleeves, reading the weekend papers.  Bliss.

Come and share your weekend Point + Shoot here.

Scented Nail Polish

I was watching one of the latest episodes of Drop Dead Diva (I know, I know *rolls eyes*) the other day and Leelee Sobieski (remember her?) was playing a lab tech who had her idea for "Rainbow Polish" stolen by her boss - a polish that changes colour when you shine light on to it.  

What an amazing idea, almost like hypercolour nail polish.

Image

Anyways, that reminded me that I had recently seen a range of scented nail polishes that Revlon has put out overseas.  I did a bit of searching because I'm pretty sure they're not available here in Oz yet and a Voguette has said that the range is being launched here this month - wahooo!

Image

Each shade has a matching fruit fragrance when dry that is supposed to last for a few days.  The scents available overseas include Coconut Crush, Mad About Mango, Pretty In Papaya, Sublime Strawberry, Raspberry Rapture, Mon Cherry, Passionate Fruit, and Not So Blue-Berry.

Let Them Eat Cake

Yesterday's pity party is over and I'm feeling a bit better today.  BuBba is still a crawling snot machine and he's also teething so add a lot of drool to the mix and well... you can imagine :)

Tomorrow is my mother's 60th birthday.  I've been trying to wrap my head around this without luck - if my "Mozzie" is 60, then that makes me.... whoa!  Too scary to think about it.

A while ago, with said birthday looming, I thought that Mum was freaking out about it but actually I now think that she is embracing this milestone with open arms.  Last weekend she took five of her closest girlfriends away for a long weekend in the mountains.  I'm sure they gossiped, relaxed, ate copious amounts of chocolate cake and drank lots of red wine by the fire, until late into the night.  Something that I would like to do with my girlfriends when I hit the same age.

This weekend it is our turn to spoil her.  SiSsy has probably already landed in town this morning and we will fly up early tomorrow morning to surprise her because she thinks that we aren't arriving until later in the day.  We'll be taking her out to a swanky dinner at Sono (my gosh the food looks fabulous) and I'm aiming to bake her a cake tomorrow as well.  I also want BuBba to spend as much time as possible with Nan because as I've eluded to recently, the opportunities may not be as frequent if this something big eventuates.

Mozzie has requested a couple of things for her birthday but because I have refused to pay for a facelift, instead I've gone with the Wii Fit.  

Perhaps I should I get that too - the Wii Fit, not the facelift ;)

Bleh

Ugghhhh, I have caught BuBba's cold and I'm at home lounging around, feeling sorry for myself and dosing up on chemicals that are supposed to make you feel better.

It's really not surprising that I'm ill considering I've been eating his leftovers with his spoon and have had his snot smeared all over me but a royal pain in the behind nevertheless.

And you know why it's such a pain???  Because one of my closest friends gave birth to a gorgeous little baby girl yesterday and I was supposed to be visiting them today.  I was so excited!  

There's no way I want to go and spread all my little green gremlins to them though and if I'm not well enough to visit them tomorrow, I won't be able to visit until next week because we're going away this weekend.

Grrrrrrr....

Tuesday Tunes

This tune popped up on my iTunes shuffle the other day and I realised how much I really love this song..  So had to share :)

"Drive" -- Incubus from Pixel Farm on Vimeo.

Point + Shoot

The BuBbles household is having a long weekend and a fabulous one at that.  

We have spent the weekend catching up with friends, eating out, enjoying the sun and best of all, spending quality time together.  

There really should be more Bank Holidays!

A fish tank inside an old school TV - I want one!

A shoe view - because everyone is doing it.  And besides, I want to show off my sparkly Converse Daddy BuBbles got for me from the US.

BuBba at the beach.



Play along with Point + Shoot over here.