hello again! it's been awhile

So much has happened since my last post. It is hard to know where to start. Well, obviously I started with choosing some of my favourite snaps. This took a really long time and was really hard. I brought home 1500 photos, so to choose 12 images to epitomise our awesome holiday was really quite the achievement!

For now I just want to say we are back and we had a brilliant time. Totally worth all the saving and planning and taking the girl out of school. I'm planning to post more about the trip later, focussing on the individual places we stayed. And a post on our accommodation. We stayed in some really great places, a massive thank you to trip advisor for providing such a great service.

My highlights were:

1. The fabulous Spring weather, that made sightseeing so lovely
2. The simple pleasure of flying a kite on the beach in Cornwall
3. The Manchester United pre-match dinner package
4. Our Paris apartment and location
5. So much history

While we were away I also had a couple of bloggy highlights, that had me feeling a little like a 15 year old again. I have no good segue from holiday highlights to this story, but I just really want to share both. And, well, it's my blog, so I can do what I like!!

So, I was on the way to the airport about to embark on our super exciting adventure, when I received a text from my sister telling me that I my blog had just been posted on Facebook by Fox in Flats! Eeeek!! Lets just say that I felt like the cool girl at school had just asked me to sit next to her! But that's not all it actually gets better. Andrea from Fox in Flats has put together a list of her top 50 style dare bloggers and.... I'm on it!!! Sooo excited to be amongst such fabulous company. And really am having that 15 year old 'the cool girl likes me feeling'.

If that wasn't enough excitement for one jet-setting girl to cope with, I opened Instagram on holidays (not the exciting part of the story) and in my news feed Chantelle from Fat Mum Slim was following me! Just to add a bit of background for the non-Instagram users amongst you, Chantelle creates the photo-a-day challenges and her Instagram feed is full of comments from randoms calling out "follow me", "give me a shout out",  "Fat Mum Slim you're so awesome blah blah blah". So to be one of the people she has chosen to follow definitely made me feel like a geeky 15 year old who had been spoken to by the cool girl!

Isn't that weird that I am getting close to 40 and I think I have got my act together and I'm all cool and stuff, but without scratching too deeply it turns out that I am still just as insecure and dorky as I was in high school! Have you had a moment when you realised that you haven't changed much in spite of the passage of time, or are you really quite different from your teenage self? 

a most awesome surprise

I received the most awesome surprise a couple of weeks ago when Leese from A Life of Domestic Bliss left a comment on my blog telling me that she had nominated ME for a Leibster Award! A quick google search for the origins of the Leibster award doesn't really shed much light on it. What it does confirm is the most beautiful intent with which the award is given. The idea is that once you have been nominated you share five little known facts about yourself and then pass the honour along to five other blogs with under 200 subscribers that you enjoy reading.

I "met" Leese (or @domblisleese as I know her) through Instagram. I think it was from admiring each others pics in Fat Mum Slim's January photo-a-day challenge. I do remember our point of connection. We were staying at Pt Vincent with my family, my sister and her family and our parents. Leese posted a photo of her two dogs on Instagram. I saw it and couldn't believe that her dogs matched my sister' and my dogs. I showed Leese's pic to the rest of my family and we all thought it was hilarious to find our Bizarro World dogs on Instagram. I then had to post a photo of our dogs to show how similar they are.

I have been loving using Instagram and the other Instagram users I have connected with I thought I would like to share some of the blogs I have found or connected with since meeting their creators on Instagram. I am making some guesses about the size of these blogs readership. So if you are actually bigger than I am guessing, I hope you will be flattered that I thought to put you here, not annoyed that I underestimated your subscribers!

But first, five little known facts about me...

1. I'm allergic to mussels, but I still keep trying to eat them anyway. I got food poisoning from eating mussels about 15 years ago, and I now get sick when ever I eat them. I took me about 4 or 5 goes of getting sick to realize that mussels were the problem. But I still love the flavour and smell of them, so I keep trying them anyway, just in case I've outgrown the allergy!
2. I have a tattoo of a sunflower on my back. I had it done when I lived in Canada and I still love it. Absolutely no regrets.
3. I secretly like watching 'Stoked' and get very distracted from whatever I'm supposed to be doing whenever my girls is watching it.
4. I have a big scar on my leg from falling out a tree when I was 12. I'd been showing off to my sister that I could climb higher than her, so when I fell she just laughed! I'm pretty lucky that the cut on my leg was the only injury.
5. The reason I didn't apply to do visual art or graphic design straight from high school was because I didn't know how to put a portfolio together and was to stupid/shy/insecure to just ask my art teacher what to do! But I don't regret the path I chose. I am still friends with two of the girls I met studying Hotel Management and their friendship is so worth it.

And onto my Leibster Award nominations, five blogs I enjoy reading and who I connected with through Instagram...

1. Tracy from Our Life in Blog Form
2. Anna from Green Tea & Toast
3. Leah from Sang the Bird
4. Amy from the Misadventurous Maker
5. Sarah from Mismatchbox

Click through the link on their names and enjoy a little time in their worlds. I don't have specific individual reasons for liking this group of girls. I just think they are kinda cool and I like their take on life.
Thank you to Leese from A Life of Domestic Bliss for making me so happy by nominating me for a Leibster Award.

Do you have any favourite blogs? Who would you give a shout out to?