Two things I appreciated finding in my limited travels around the ‘net this week:

• Stuck for a Snack? 7 nutritionist-approved supermarket snacks from Delicious magazine.

A nutritionist recommends some healthy packaged snacks, listing the amount of protein, sugar, and carbs in each compared with similar snacks. Very handy.

• 10 Rules to Being Happy Parents by Leane VanderPutten at Finer Femininity.

This is just super inspiring. The basic message I get from it is: Be cheerful at home around your kids and spouse, even if you have to ‘fake it ’til you make it’. I’ve written on this theme myself a few times and parenting expert say it’s really important too. I really need to remember this every single day!

Other things I’ve loved this week:

• Making a little part of the house look nice (this explains the above photo). There are seven people in my family, with five of us under 13, and I can handle a fair amount of dirt and disorder, but I also love to have things looking nice. So clearing the top of the toy shelf of plastic bins and piles of books and finding some pretty things from around the house to put there instead was fun. The orchid was a wedding anniversary gift from my husband. The long seed pod at the back is from one of my walks, and my daughter popped a couple of pinecones into it. I love decluttering but I’m not good at decorating so for ideas I sometimes look to friends’ houses or this website.

• Watching my kids play together. I love that they still play these intense, noisy, role-playing games, even the eldest who are 10 and 12 fully get into it. This morning it was some drama about one of them being attacked in their house by the three year old and having to call the police and ambulance and put him into jail. They played it for about an hour, making up increasingly weird scenarios about who/what the three year old was – a rampaging elephant eating the furniture was the last one, I think.

• Getting a little further into the zombie book while waiting for a swimming lesson to finish this morning. I haven’t read anything vaguely academic for about a year so I can feel wheels slowly turning in my brain that haven’t had to use for a while.

• Going to a photo shoot at a local study centre with a group of girls. It was a fun couple of hours, the photos look great and I’ve just finished writing the article for The Catholic Weekly to go with them. I’ll post a link to it when it’s up.

• Seeing lots of new leaf shoots on the maidenhair fern I rescued from a nursery a couple of weeks ago. I’ve often wanted one, and this was $1, marked down from $15 because it was in a sad state. They’re tiny, but see?

So exciting! But that’s just a few highlights out of the last six days. It’s amazing how elastic time can be. If I were to write out everything that’s happened since, say, Monday, I could write a book – which wouldn’t all be happy, no sir-ee. There have also been patchy moods, stretched tempers, worry, fatigue, and various bits of sad news in there too. But my book about this week would have a good ending, which is all that really matters isn’t it?

That’s all from me for now, if you’ve got this far and you haven’t subscribed to my blog yet, please consider doing so in the section below 🙂 and enjoy the rest of your weekend!