Hi lovely scrappy friends! 

Well, it's day 2 of my blog and I'm still as excited as a kid at Christmas! I'm all on my own with it now, the 17 year old has deserted me after cheekily taking the mickey out of my blog 'skills' when he came home from college last night. He and his friends had obviously been snickering at his mum blogging about possibly the most boring topic on earth to teenage boys. He won't be laughing quite so loudly when I post the photos of him as a 2 year old wearing nothing but a builders tool belt and a tiara...

The 14 year old has demanded I take her clothes shopping tomorrow - I still haven't decided if this will be fun, or hell on earth. 

And stepson who is arriving tonight for the weekend has a sick bug. Actually, suddenly that clothes shopping doesn't seem quite so bad.

I'm pretty sure this is why I enjoy hand sewing on my layouts so much - it's the only thing I can get on with whilst refereeing two 7 year olds who are fighting over whose turn it is to play with the Happy Meal Mario toy, or who owns the tiniest Lego Star Wars ship in the box. Suddenly everything becomes 'My. Most. Precious. Toy.' and cannot possibly be shared.

Those cute, sweet photos on my layouts? LIES. They are all lies. They've been bribed with Haribo or iPad time to sit sweetly or hug each other and smile. Those beautiful grinning teenagers? As soon as the camera has clicked they're demanding money or chocolate or lifts to their friends. Do not be fooled, scrappy friends! 

And with that little myth well and truly blown out of the water I'm going to leave you with a layout of sweetly smiling children, taken at the tram station in Altrincham, before they tried to hurl each other into the path of an oncoming tram, obviously preferring sudden death to being taken to the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry.