Looooong post alert!!

Grab yourself a coffee, I've not blogged for 2 weeks and I've got sooooo much to tell!

Coor, this has been a week of tears and cheers, and I have experienced more than one Proud Mum moment this week! To begin with Monday was Common Transfer Day and my eldest son went to visit his new school....sniff!!! :o( I was gutted when he came home (smiling and very happy, I might add!) and reported that ALL his pals are in one class, and he's in another. I went off in a rage but my boy proved that he has a greater degree of maturity than his mother and told me not to stress saying that he's happy and excited at the prospect of making new pals!! Tut!! Then yesterday I could have burst with pride when he was picked for the local schools bell-boating regatta. Lord it rained... and rained and rained and rained. Luckily, across the canal was an idyllic little pub and my friend and I waited for an opportune moment to leg it and watch and cheer the races from the balcony in very civilised fashion complete with a glass of bubbly - coka cola in this case!!! LOL!! And the crowing glory was that our school's Team A and Team B were the two finalists, and my boy's team won!!! HURRAH!!! So proud!

Then just as I was settling down to a cup of coffee last night, my youngest announced that I had to read his report! In fact they had both brought their end-of-year reports home and I am still glowing with pride! Both of them brought home the kind of report that I know my mum would have loved to have read with my name on the front - sadly I never gave her the opportunity to feel the kind of pride that my boys have given me! I seem to recall the words "easily distracted" being overused on my reports, and one teacher even reported "If Anne showed as much interest in her school activities as she does in her outside school activities, she would produce better results!" Oops!! :o)

I have been playing a lot with my stash this week too. Here is my tag for this week's Tag, You're It! challenge - the theme this week is our monthly colour theme and I chose Red, Brown and Cream - don't ask why, I've never used these colours together before but I found a piece of AG paper in just those colours and thought "Hmmmm..."

Last week we offered to send tag kits to 2 people as part of a challenge - we had so much interest and enthusiasm for this that we decided to send out 4 kits instead. Now I can't reveal anything about those kits just yet, but I did make these tags as Thank You's to the ladies whose names we pulled from the hat:

Then midweek I did manage to get around one or two of my favourite blogs and I was really excited to discover that the lovely and totally 'kewel' Deb has nominated me for a Brilliant Weblog award which REALLY cheered me up as it came at the 'tears' time, and was the start of the 'cheers' part of my week!!! So massive Thank You's to Deb and get over there and check out her blog - she does some fantabulous stuff and makes things in 15 minutes!!! Can you believe that!!! It would take me longer than that to find the stuff!!!! LOL!! And now, as part of the deal, I have to pass it on to 7 bloggers whose fabby blogs excite and inspire me so I nominate:

Sam

Carol

Penny

Sarah

Rosie

Dan

Silvia

Phew, that was soooo difficult picking just 7 - I could have multiplied that by 10 at least because there are so many wonderful blogs out there so deserving of this award.

Finally, my week is rounded off with the news that on Wednesday I completed my NVQ and I am a fully qualified Teaching Assistant - I just need a job that will allow me to put it into practise now!

So, if you managed to stick with me this long, go grab yourself a sweetie from the tin and big Well Done to you!! Hopefully I will get more blogging time after next week as the long hot summer (yeah, right! LOL!!) holidays begin!!

Thanks for popping by! ;o) xx