My new thing for today is... making a calendar

So I had this idea, and I wanted you to help me.

I've been blogging for just over a year, and during that year have seen so many beautiful photographs on blogs I have read.

They have made me think so differently about the world around me, about my house, and about what I choose to stop and see.

I wanted to celebrate some of them by choosing twelve favourites, and then posting one of them (along with a link to their original post, of course) on the first of each month.

I wondered as well if you had any favourites that you could let me look at? Please if you do, let me know with a comment, or by emailing me at cappuccino.mum@googlemail.com

Blood, sweat and tears

Let me give you a run down of my Christmas activities to date.

Step 1: Sip coffee. Sip Lemsip. Snivel a bit. Fight round shops with Little Lattes. Attempt to steer shopping trolley, wheelchair and handy wheeled Hoppa trolley around 500 people loitering by the sprouts.

Step 2: Return home. Sip coffee. Sip Lemsip. Begin marathon baking session which ends abruptly with the discovery that the bottle of vanilla essence purchased was actually a bottle of yellow food colouring. Sob a little.

Repeat Step 1.

Step 3: Sip coffee. Sip Lemsip. Bake mince pies, biscuits and brownies with Little Lattes.

Step 4: Clean kitchen. Enthusiastically wipe down kitchen work-surfaces, jamming ring finger on right hand into kitchen knife left safely out of children's reach.

Step 5: Go to Casualty to be stitched up by nice Doctor. Wonder how it will be possible to make a skirt for niece with massive bandage on throbbing finger.

Look, it's fine. The chocolate brownies have been made, and that's all that matters, right? And Mr Coffee needed to practice his gift-wrapping skills.

I think I'll stay in bed today. It's nice and warm here, and there are no sharp objects, and I have stocked up on Lemsip. It's all good.

Mary, Mary...

The Madonna and Child, circa 1475, Giovanni Bellini (c.1431-1516)

I have friends who have produced all kinds of children. A friend who has given birth to two strong boys; another who has made three children who have slept through the night from Day One of their tiny lives. I have a friend with two almost identical well-behaved girls; a friend who has had three wildly different children: different weights, personalities and very different faces.

And me? I make Marys.

Both of the Little Lattes have taken the role of Mary in their nativities this year - for the Eldest Latte, this was her second outing in the blue robes. I make children who can be trusted to sit still for five minutes whilst smiling a beatific smile (though this seldom happens at any other time); children who can keep their head still enough to prevent a headdress falling off; children who can handle a Baby Annabel wrapped up in sheeting.

It is a very good job that we stopped at two. What would have become of a third Mary? Openings are rare, and the third Latte might have found herself with nowhere to show off her talents: forced into a row of miserable angels, or screaming her head off at the injustice of it all while dressed as a sheep (to be fair, the child who did this in the Littlest Latte's nativity did so because she wanted to be Joseph - even a three-year-old realised that displacing a natural-born Mary wasn't even an option).

Our two Marys are definitely not sheep. Each had her own individual approach to the role, particularly with regard to their handling of the Christ Child. The Littlest Latte held the baby gently before tipping him with a thud into his manger. The Eldest Latte, however, concerned that he was getting cold, embarked on a complex rewrapping that was so thorough - with the sheet being held up, shaken out, and properly redistributed - that her face was obscured for much of the scene.

I don't know what becomes of Marys when they are past the nativity stage. I don't know what skills they keep to take forward into their lives. But for now, they are unbearably cute to watch, surrounded by their Josephs, their donkeys and their stars.

Out with the old, and in with the new

Next year it will be ten years since Mr Coffee and I were married.

Ten years since our lives were changed.

No, they were not changed by marriage. They were changed by a gift - a stovetop espresso maker.



These have been happy years. Putting the coffee on, frothing the milk... and in later years, carrying the coffee cup around trying to find a safe place to put it to avoid tiny hands (this activity can go on until well after the coffee has gone cold).

This year we decided to celebrate with an early Christmas present to ourselves.

I present to you - the dishwasher-friendly new centre of The Coffee House. (See how it shines!!)



Because affection and tradition are all very well, but scrubbing a coffee pot out with a steelwool several times in a weekend just won't do.

Apologies to all of you who came here today expecting something interesting. But let's face it, you knew where you were coming. You should have known there would be some coffee geekery around the corner. It was only a matter of time.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

Mr Coffee thought he would cheer me up last night by reading me a sonnet.

"When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed of small worth held."

Thanks.

Basically, after 40 winters, you look like a 'tattered weed', according to Mr Shakespeare. But never mind, he goes on, if you have managed to produce children they will be young and pretty so you can look at them instead.

It is not a consolation.

Today is my birthday. I am 39. Since I was born during a winter, this winter must be my 40th. And it is not being kind. Shakespeare is right - I do feel a bit besieged.

Today I caught a glimpse of my face in a train window and was alarmed to discover that someone had drawn lines down the sides of my mouth with a marker pen.

The brutal irony of this is that 25 years ago I appeared in a youth drama club play sporting a similar look. And this - minus the beard, of course - is what I saw in that train window this morning.



I realise that these things are all relative, and I still remember the eve of my 30th birthday, where I laughed hollowly at the memory of my 22-year-old self coming home from a nightclub depressed because I was the oldest one there. (I think this was probably the last time I went in a nightclub. And I have no regrets on that score.)

Still, despite his lousy choice of poetry last night, there are good things to say about Mr Coffee. For where else would I find a man who could guess my delight at stringing a cup and saucer around my neck?

My new thing for today is... being amazed

Remember those lucky stars I was thanking? They came through. Just over two weeks ago, an email came to tell me we had won the Mumsnet competition prize of a holiday at Chatsworth in Derbyshire.

Can you believe it? I couldn't. Even as we drove up to the cottage, I expected the real winner to be opening the curtains and peering out angrily at me. Apparently two Mumsnetters had been offered the prize before us, but couldn't make it. That's how lucky we were. (Thanks to them too. Without wanting to rub it in too much). So we unpacked all our things and spent four nights staying in the lovely Heathy Lea Barn.

I'm not sure whether or not this was meant to be part of the prize, but we woke the first morning to see giant flakes of snow falling. It was the Littlest Latte's first real snowfall - living near the coast usually guarantees a pretty useless show of snow - which was very exciting indeed.



For the tedious old adults, the exciting bit was when it cleared away in time for us to get outside and go see stuff.

Chatsworth House, promised the lady from the PR company, looked lovely this Christmas. She couldn't have been more right. The sheer scale of the decorations so awed the Little Lattes that they managed to make their way around the stately home without once attempting to touch something or knock it over. Everything twinkled. At the special Christmas evening openings, complete with wine and Christmas songs sung by a choir arranged on a huge staircase, the Lattes sat under the lights of the enormous tree eating their mince pies, barely spilling a crumb and staring in wonder.

So many excitements to be had! The gardens were frosty, and there was quite a bit of whining about the cold, but they soon shut up when they saw the maze...



and experienced the show-stopping beauty of the Cascade (you can just see the Eldest Latte and Mr Coffee on the shot, but I can see how you might be distracted).



It's not easy for the Eldest Latte to do proper days outdoors. But the number of disabled accessible paths meant we spent a good couple of days in the grounds. We even walked through the estate to the barn easily in less than half an hour. We saw farm animals. We stroked guinea pigs. We did Christmas crafts. We saw the rock garden and the grotto and the deer and the sheep. We ate an awful lot of chocolate cake.

Mr Coffee spent his evenings devouring the guidebooks of Chatsworth family history, as well as getting incredibly excited about the presence of a working Archimedes' Screw in the play area.

We had, in short, one of the best weeks ever.

And we got a good headstart on the magic of Christmas.