Se7en’s Fabulous Fun Post #358

If I said what a week, I bet you would believe me!!! I knew it was going to be crazy busy, the whole year was piling up into this week… and I kept thinking I am sure that if we couldn’t make it to all the action this week that the world would keep on spinning and we would all be better off for it. Well it turns out that we weren’t going to make all the action this week, we were completely taken out by a vicious tummy bug and we weren’t better for it at all!!! That being said, we made it to the first few events before we bailed and the world is still spinning without us… a good lesson on priorities. (But do life lessons always have to be so hard?!!!)

So life has calmed down to a mild storm… all our big kids have left on summer camp and everything is terribly quiet and the house sound asleep at a reasonable hour. Teenagers and sleep, just saying teens can make toddlers look like the best sleepers!!! In other news I went for my first snorkel ever… can we call it snorkelling if I didn’t actually use a snorkel and just swam about with goggles on… I cannot believe how much I loved it and I cannot wait to get back into the water. I am putting a pair of goggles onto my list of goals for next year.

I noticed that I posted my 5000th instgram post this past week… Wow… the years have flown by. I have been watching the countdown for weeks, intending to post something deeply significant, and then I totally missed it!!! Turns out the post was unintentionally significant…

Lovely Links from This Week

1. If you are looking for Christmas Delights and Crafty Inspiration then rush straight over to Willowday’s Scandinavian Creativity Calendar, Day 1 starts here… Fun, quick and beautiful crafts. If you want to step back in time then you can take a peak at the last three years worth of Christmas Scandinavian Craftiness over here… head straight over and enjoy. Thank me later…
2. You have to know Veld and Sea’s Lovely foraging Workshops… I spotted this post on Gardenista… all the loveliness!!!
3. I have just loved this entire series on Handmade Charlotte, and here is an English Country Doll Making Tutorial.
4. Oh Poetry Heaven… Playing by the Book has a Poetree Adventure with a beautiful new poem from a different and beautifully illustrated children’s poetry book each day… it is just beautiful!!! I love the Emily Dickenson, and the Yeats, and the new Child’s Garden of Verse illustrated by Michael Foreman. There is a ton of stuff to love, go and follow Playing by the Book and fill your illustrated poetry bucket forever!!!
5. Here’s a great homeschool resource, actually parenting resource, packed with podcasts, 10 Best Podcasts for Your Inquisitive Teen on Blog She Wrote. Piles and piles of great resources.
6. I am just a little bit excited about GreenPop’s Eden Festival of Action Regreening the Garden Route…
7. Evidence that kids just don’t need all the stuff, on Becoming Minimalist: Before you Buy Your Kids a Bunch of Toys for Christmas, Read This. And if you are giving gifts because you feel obligated to, or worse receiving gifts when you are already overwhelmed with all the stuff… Minimalist Mom has a great post on Holiday Gifting.
8. House Swapping, on Almost Fearless… it’s a thing and we are all for it!!!
9. Food shopping, budget beaters… Taking the Bite out of the Student Budget, or the “Mother of Many Teenager’s”… great tips from WWF.
10. If you are going to enter a GiveAway right now then head over to one of the most beautiful stores in the world… Imagine Childhood has a fabulous GiveAway!!! Just take a wander through their beautiful catalogue of beautiful natural toys. Oh gasp there is so much to love… page all the way, you have to see the Element blocks and the Constellation books… These are real toys for real kids, that do the work of play!!!

A Blast From the Past:

• 2008: Clearly Christmas: Spicy Christmas Cookies in Se7en Steps…
• 2009: Giving and Receiving Through the Parables…
• 2010: Se7en Summer T-Shirts Bleach Shirts…
• 2011: Se7en+1 Stockings to Fill…
• 2012: How to Declutter Your House in Se7en+1 Steps…
• 2013: When You Lose a Love… How Can You Help?
• 2014: The Se7en + 1 Stages of a Bibliovores Life and All the Books to Go With Them…
• 2015: Se7en+1 Things You Really Don’t Have to Do Before Christmas…
• 2016: Se7en + 1 Simple Christmas Traditions…

Book of the Week

So recently I went to a book launch at the Food Barn Deli in Noordhoek… and I met this book and then discovered it’s author… And you can meet her on her website here, Heather Costaras, aka The Mad HAT.

I fell in love with the book first. You can read it in a flash, it is a poem really … and I don’t know a woman anywhere who won’t relate to the journey that her magical Hatness has been on. A wild and creative soul, whose life is slowly ebbed into the four sides of a box, all the spunk and feistiness is tossed aside to conform and be the best wife/mother/worker/person/whateverlabelyoulike one can be, all it will cost is your inner smile that is going to get hidden along the way.

Then Hat has a vision to redefine herself as the person she wants to be. This book is about being your genuine self in a world where we are all a little worried about being ourselves in case we don’t quite fit… when actually we are who we are and there is a space for each of us… Get hold of this book: Read it, then give it to your best friend, give it to your mother, give it to your teenage daughter. You don’t have to be squashed in a box to be great, you just have to be yourself and you will be brilliant!!! LOVE THIS BOOK… it has to be shared. Read the back cover here:…

The Back Cover
The book is really a graphic novel for grownups, about that lost feeling, that confidence slump, that we all collapse into without even noticing… the book is a journey and reads like an arty journal… Loved it… not a sponsored post at all… just sharing something great that I think our readers would enjoy too.

That’s us… hope you have the most fabulous week!!!