How To Cover Bad Skin With Make-up

Our beautiful daughter, Bethany, was troubled by really quite bad skin as a middle to late teenager.  I used to feel awful for her, and frankly, I sometimes wondered how she might feel about going out in public at times when most of her face was so very red and inflamed.  (I never said that to her of course.)  But then Bethy would appear on her way out the door, looking like the gorgeous young girl she was, and you couldn't see a pimple or spot in sight!  We all knew that her self-worked-out routine required some mysterious time factor, because Bethy always worked her days around the time that she needed to begin applying her face, but the truth is that I don't think any of us ever really asked her for the actual details of her routine.  We were just all in awe at the incredible result!

I thought that it's finally time for us to find out Bethy's secret.  Thank you Bethany! :)

I have added a couple of photos of Bethy from that time period.  I know that looking at these photos, you will probably not believe that she was suffering from acne.  That was the magic of her routine!   She was actually so good at covering her bad skin that when Bethy looks at these photos now, even she thinks that she couldn't have had a too big a problem back then after-all - but she really did :)  

I have included the photo below, not only because it was a bit hilarious, but because if anything shows Bethy's awesome face-saving make-up skills, this is it.  Not only was Bethy in the middle of a break-out, but she had just returned from a trip to the Great Barrier Reef in time to be a bridesmaid at her sister's wedding.  Of course she had thought that it would be great to have a suntanned glow for the big day, so had managed to burn her face to a crisp a few days earlier.  It didn't look too bad the day before, but on by the morning of the big day her skin began to turn a very dark brown (think multiple layers of dying skin), and begun to peel.  By midday she had thick, bark-like layers practically dripping off - and later spent half an hour in the bathroom removing her nose, forehead and upper cheeks, after which things looked slightly better.   (This photo was taken heading in to the drippy stage.)  Yet she still managed to look completely beautiful!   She is a bit of a make-up genius, our Bethany :)

Bethany:

I've always had the bad skin in the family (yay for me :S) and I remember all through my teenage years hating my skin and thinking it was awful. I hit the lovely age of 20 however, and that's when my skin decided to show me what awful really was!! What?? I thought when I finished teens my skin was meant to get BETTER, not WORSE! I thought I was meant to feel MORE confident in myself, not LESS!
*sigh* So not fair :(

Now I look back on photos of that clear, lovely skinned 17, 18, 19 year old girl that I was and am jealous. Didn't know how good I had it!
Now, even though I know that my skin was way better back then, mum says I still struggled with it, it's just that I can't see it in the photos because I covered it up so well (woohoo :))

So anyway, mum asked me to write a post about how I apply my make-up.
I'm really not in any way a beauty artist. I can only seem to cover the make-up basics on my own face and would be horrible at even attempting to apply somebody else's make-up.
But for some reason my mum and sisters have always talked with admiration and wonder about my foundation-applying abilities. Maybe it's just because none of them have ever suffered the self-loathing phenomenon of bad skin (blessed things! :P) and so they've just never had to try that hard to look good. But they seem amazed that one minute there's an ugly red blemish, and the next minute it's gone! Viola! :D
I just figured that's the whole point of foundation. But apparently, I "do it well"  :) (go me!).

If I have to stop and think about it, there is something I do a little differently to the other females in my family. It's a little technique that has earned me the nickname 'Spotty' from my siblings throughout the years :) I don't know if others out there do it, I'm sure they do, but this is what I do:

I cover my face in spots.

See, I have this theory about letting foundation 'soak in'. Let me explain...

• I start out by using liquid foundation on my face to give it a bit more of an even tone all over. 
• Then I get my concealer stick, and dot all my pimples or blemishes with spots of concealer.
• I then leave it there and continue with my day, letting the make-up kind of 'soak' into the skin a bit. 
• A little while later, I might come back and lightly pat my finger over the spots or around the edges so it blends in with the rest of my face a bit better, but not too much, and then go about my business again. Still soaking.
• Every now and then I'll repeat this, until it's time for me to actually get ready. Then I'll lightly pat around the edge of my concealer spots so that they blend in completely with the rest of my face.
• After that I brush my face lightly with foundation powder. Done!

I don't know if this makes any sense at all. But this is how I do my make-up.
The more time I have to do it, the better the end result! So the nicer I care to look, the earlier I start my spotting routine :)
If I only have 10 mins to get ready and do all my make-up, then there's less time for the 'soak' to happen and it won't look as good. If I want to look nice for, say, a formal or something then the initial make-up and 'spotting' applications begin in the afternoon so it can sit and soak for a lovely length of time :)
(I'm sure letting make-up really soak into your skin is probably not good for your pores and stuff (probably contributes to the whole 'bad skin' thing)...but hey, at least I wash it off every night before bed! :))

This morning I only had about 15 mins to do my make-up for church, so it's not the best job, but I took a couple of photos. Now I'm really wishing I had stopped to check them because they are not in the least bit flattering!! But hey, we're all women here....maybe...so what the heck. No shame.

After the foundation I put my first concealer spots on. Not sure if you can really see them from this angle. Yes....I really do need to deal with my eyebrows...   And I don't know what sort of expression I was trying to pull :

After the mid-way pat. The spots are a little less obvious now (at least that's the idea! :P) Normally it's best to have time to do this a few times. Still don't know what's up with that expression :

Finished. Did a bit of a final smooth of the spots and put powder on. At least this time my smile isn't so creepy.. :

I guess the fact that I had earrings in and was dressed in real clothes instead of daggies in this photo helps also :)

I know I didn't show you a before photo of my skin. I'm willing to put some hideous photos up here, but not that hideous :)

Anywho, so that's that. Happy pimple covering :)

Why I Loved Living In Sydney

(Guest post by Bethany.  Thank you Bethy! :)

In our first year of marriage, 2011, my husband and I lived in Sydney. He was in the Navy and posted there at the beginning of the year.

I did not want to move to Sydney. I am very close to my family, and I had lived in the same house for as long as I could remember, been to the same school from Pre-school to year 12, ordered the same thing every time from Subway or KFC or Kebabs or any other kind of take out food.

I didn't like change. I wasn't used to change and I had no interest in building a relationship with it.  And to move to the enemy state!?  Where everything would be blue come State of Origin series?  Incomprehensible.  Add to that that at the time we didn't know we would be there just for a year (thought it would be for at least several) so I was a little dreading it.

But move I did. And you know what? I loved our year there! Yes, I missed my family and the goings on and I got so excited at the chance to see them, but I really am grateful that we got to have that experience. We made some awesome friends, I had a job that I loved, and we had a lovely apartment.

I think what made the difference between our time there being amazing or possibly not so, was the location where we were living.

Thanks to the navy (Robbie was posted at Balmoral base) we had an apartment in Mosman, which is a suburb about 10 mins from the city, and about 3 mins from several different bays. It  was also about 10 mins from my work, 3 mins from Robbie's work, and 5 mins to church. It was a massive blessing that we got to live in Mosman. Very limited defense housing in that area (it's extremely expensive!) and even his friends in the Navy envied Robbie for being able to live there.

Some of my favourite places -

1. Balmoral Bay

My favourite place to go while we were in Sydney was Balmoral Bay. Bamoral was only a few minutes from us and it is beautiful. We would go there a lot. Robbie's base was right on the bay so sometimes I'd drop him off at work and just sit and read there for a while. Sooo relaxing and sweet :)

My absolute favourite view of the bay was driving down the road to it, which is a very steep hill, and suddenly the scene opens up and you can see the blue, blue water, with a headland on one side and a cliff with a lighthouse on the other. This photo doesn't do it justice but I just loved it:

Balmoral is a really family friendly beach and has a lot of great parkland too. It was a perfect place to go for a swim during summer, go for a walk along the sand, or sit on the rocks and enjoy the late afternoon sun. 

This is a picnic spot Robbie and I liked on one of the hills:

I loved this gorgeous gazebo at Balmoral Bay. Sometimes they'd have plays there and people would put their towels down and eat fish and chips. We were there when a theatre group performed 'Shakespeare by the Sea', which we got bored of quickly so we left (after we'd finished out fish and chips) but it was a cool concept and felt really cool to be a part of!

2. Georges Head. 

Georges Head is a gorgeous lookout with about a 250 degree uninterrupted view of Sydney Harbour. You can see the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, Sydney Tower, Balmoral and other bays, and nearby Manly. Absolutely gorgeous on a sunny day with dozens of sailboats on the water. No photos can do it justice. It's also cool because it's the site of the old Georges Head Battery which was built in 1871 and was one of the three forts in the area that were built for the purpose of defending the outer harbour.

I couldn't find a suitable photo of us at this lookout so I've put up one of some friends (hope they don't mind! :P) 

3. Bradleys Head. 

Bradleys Head has this fabulous amphitheater that we happened to stumble across one day. It has large grass spaces and a jetty and you can literally walk into the water of Sydney Harbour. The Harbour Bridge and the Opera House are so close you almost feel like you can touch them. You can also see Sydney Tower and the city. It's such an awesome place to have a picnic! It's enclosed by trees so it feels  like you're in your own private little piece of paradise :)

Please excuse this photo (I was pregnant, a legitimate excuse! Not a good looking time I'm afraid...) but don't you just feel like you're practically in the water?? I remember Robbie did try to push me in.....

And what a cool place to have a wedding!!

4. Being on the Harbour


I went on two Harbour cruises while I was in Sydney, both courtesy of Tammy :)  And though I only have photos of one of them, which was unfortunately a rainy day, the harbour is incredible magical when the sun is out. This is something I would recommend!

SO, if you're ever visiting Sydney, these are some gorgeous places if you love views and the water :)

What to Expect As A New Mother - 5 Things That Took Me By Surprise!

(Our guest post today is by beautiful Bethany, one of the sweetest and nicest people we know!  Thank you Bethany! :)

I have a 9 month old daughter, Hallie, who is just the cutest thing (in my very biased opinion :P) in the whole entire world!!

She is our first so I guess you could say I'm still relatively new at the whole Mother thing.
I often get asked by people "Is motherhood what you expected?"
I find those sort of questions difficult to answer because I'm not the sort of person who generally thinks things through beforehand or has expectations.  ...I realise that makes me sound like a bimbo! Lol. But what I mean is that I try not to over think things that I have no control over; that way I'm not disappointed if things turn out differently than I anticipated.
Having said that, there are things about being a new mother that I totally expected. I expected that I would love my child like crazy, I expected that I would have a huge amount of pride in her, I expected that life would change etc.
But thinking about it, there are also things that took me a little by surprise...


1. I didn't expect that my baby would cry SO much!

My daughter, Hallie, had colic. It started getting better when she was about 14 weeks old, but those first 3.5 months were a bit hard. She cried and screamed all. day. long.
From when she woke up in the morning to when she finally conked out at about 11pm (with no daytime naps in between) she was screaming. Quite loudly as well. The poor little thing. We found that the only thing that calmed her, besides feeding, was to bounce her up and down (some medical reason about the bouncing motion helping things move through her stomach better..). From that, the gym ball in our house became our best friend :) We could sit and bounce in semi comfort .
My husband would come home to find me still in my PJs just sitting on this big blue bouncy ball with Hallie. No I hadn't cleaned my teeth. No I hadn't eaten any proper meals besides a piece of bread or chocolate here and there (chocolate - the ultimate comfort). And yes, I could tell him everything that had happened that day on Dr. Phil, Ellen, Jag, the Doctors, Friends, the News updates, and whatever else had been on TV in the last 12 hrs.
Robbie would come and relieve me of bouncing duties so that I could have a shower and then throughout the evening we'd take turns bouncing and eating our dinner etc.

Before I'd had the baby people had told us that babies just slept and ate, so I guess I'd come to expect that.
Not true.
I'm absolutely astounded when I see a newborn baby that just sleeps and eats!


2. I didn't expect to be quite so anxious
One thing that would really get to me is when we'd be driving in the car and Hallie would be crying because she was hungry. I'd start to get really antsy. If she was crying because she was tired, it wasn't so bad because I knew that sooner or later, she'd fall asleep.
But if they were hunger cries ringing out from the back seat, it'd kill me. Because that's my job, to feed her, and it meant that I was somehow not fulfilling my Mother role properly. If I was the one driving, my driving would start to get erratic and quite frankly a little dangerous. If  Robbie was the one driving, I'd start to get really snippy and want him to drive faster, faster, faster! Whether driving or not I'd find myself fidgeting and tapping my foot.
Now I know that reason says we'll be home in 5 mins and she's not going to waste away, and getting edgy and driving dangerous or being snappy with Robbie helps nothing. But in those moments, reason didn't really count. I only wanted to be out of that car, inside our house and fulfilling my baby's needs.
I didn't expect to be so anxious about things like that. I thought I'd be quite mellow at such times :P


3. I didn't expect to be quite so doting
I grew up with a mother who has always been 100% loving, but very steady and firm in her discipline or expectations. I worked in a day care center with 18 two year olds each day and I loved them to pieces, but could always easily put on my serious face and remove them from an activity if need be.
I thought it would be easy for me to do the same with my daughter. But sometimes, when she's purposely doing something she knows is cheeky (like spitting food into my face during a meal or throwing toys around and tantrum-ing when she's meant to be sleeping) it's all I can do sometimes to not laugh, pick her up and just shower her with cuddles and kisses. Sometimes it takes all my own discipline to simply keep my face semi-straight and calmly tell her what she needs to do.
I used to think I'd be fine in the discipline area. Now I worry that maybe this little girl who can melt my heart with just the smallest glance will crumble all my careful plans to pieces.

4. I didn't expect to be quite so obsessive
I really didn't. But there's no other word for what I am sometimes. After Hallie's colic started getting better, we had the problem of a little girl who was not used to going to sleep any way but by being bounced, and who was excessively over-tired. I did not want to teach her that she could be bounced, patted or cuddled to sleep, but at the same time I didn't want to put her down on her own if she was in pain (which still seemed to come and go). I spent hours upon hours listening outside her door as she cried, debating with Robbie or myself (there's an interesting conversation to see) about whether or not she was ok.
Do you think she's in pain? Or is that just a tired cry? It's not stopping, and the book says that's a pained or hungry cry if the pitch hasn't changed and it's constant... I'm going to go get her...oh, wait....she paused....now she's going again - so does that mean it's a protest cry? Pauses mean protest cries right? .....I'm going to get that book out again.     Do you think she's too cold? Too hot maybe? Am I doing the right thing? Why isn't she sleeping? Everyone else on those online pages say their babies didn't even take half this long. I'm going to google again....
Call mum again.
Call my sisters again.
And not just about the crying thing (turns out we have a very strong willed little machine on our hands, she can go for AGES if she wants. Thankfully, she's in a good pattern now :) ....6 months later :P), I'm sure my mother can attest to countless phone calls about whether I'm doing something right, what would she do in my situation? etc etc. Nappy rashes, foods to feed her (how much, what consistency, what times), breastfeeding issues, cradle cap, whatever!
I also call to say, She's sitting! She's crawling! She's playing with this! She's doing that! She's learned how to...! and so on.
Clearly, I'm one of THOSE mums. *Sigh* So sue me, I don't think I can change :P

(She sleeps now :))

ANYWAY, so those are just a few of the things that if I think about it, I didn't expect. And I might also add that while I fully expected to love her will all my heart...


5. I didn't expect I could love her SOOO much!!!
She truly just makes my heart swell with every good feeling :) And I've been blessed with such a happy, sweet little girl!

To conclude, I just Love being a mother.

Guest Post From Rani - Kids' Art

We are so happy to welcome Rani again today as a guest Blogger!  I've been to Rani's house and love the way she has displayed her children's art in their home.  Are all children this talented?  Yes or no, there is something about the way a child draws and paints that seems impossible for us to replicate when we are older.  So - we ought to take advantage of it while they are young, and that is what Rani does so well!  You can read more from Rani here, here and on her Blog here.

Thank you Rani! :)

In grade 12, I painted a large canvas for an Art class assessment. What started off as an ‘abstract’ soon changed into a hibiscus flower, then somewhere along the way it turned into a waterfall. The thickly textured waterfall cascaded off a rocky cliff, with palms and shrubbery here and there, and the piece de resistance was a peachy colored sky accenting the yellow sun setting behind the top off the fall...

I hated that painting.

Oh, how I hated it! I was so utterly disappointed at how it had turned out, I was humiliated when I was forced to hand it in for my final end of year assessment. But what made it worse was that, to my horror, my mum thought it was great! And she hung it up in our house! *Shame!* Every time I walked past it, I only saw the agony and stress I poured over it and all the mistakes glaring back at me, mocking.  But mum loved it. She loved the colors, the textures, and the grand size of it. And somehow, despite the humiliation of having it displayed in our home for everyone to see as they walked toward the bathroom, I actually liked that my mum loved it so much. Even though it would never be a family heirloom, I liked that my mum found pleasure in it (nevertheless there were no tears shed when she moved house and it safely hung in the spare room…phew!)

Well now, it’s my turn. I display my children’s artwork all over my house. I just love it.  For a while there I was finding it frustrating competing with the kids’ toys and furniture, and found myself wondering how to incorporate my own grown-up interior design style with my kids’ junk things. It started when my oldest daughter was old enough to hold a crayon. I framed her first scribble. I was in love with her work. Of course, to everyone else they were just messy lines on a scrunched up piece of paper, but to me they were priceless.

Over the years, especially once my oldest daughter went to kindergarten, the paintings, collages and drawings came in droves. I wanted a better place to put them than hidden away in a box or on the kitchen bench for a day before they went into the bin. And so I bought more frames. And now, many rooms in my house display kiddy art.

I also made an Art Wall using two pieces of skirting board. I spray painted them black, attached bulldog clips using small screws, and I have the perfect place to hang up all my kids’ work. The best part is that I can alternate as more art comes in. Since I have them displayed for often weeks at a time, I find that I don’t feel bad when it comes to throwing some of them away. However, there are some favorites I keep up all the time, and one day will probably frame them too. We use it to display Family Home Evening art, photos, and this Christmas we used it to display cards and other decorations. 

I feel happy that I have found a unique style in displaying my kids’ art. I look around my house and I feel that I not only have my own personality in furniture, cushions, chairs, rugs, and decoration, but it’s a house where you know kids live and they are welcome to be themselves. The artwork makes it very colorful and bright and, despite loving many different looks and interior designs, I’m embracing this right now. I’m sure it won’t always look this way, but for now I love my house because I am surrounded by beautiful paintings and drawings of our family and things my girls love at this precious stage in their life.

(Rani hangs her frames using  removable 3M hooks, which you can read more about here.)

Guest Post - Lauren's Gingerbread Recipe

Today's guest post is from Lauren, one of the nicest people you could ever meet!  As well as being an especially lovely person, Lauren is a talented cook.  (You might remember that she made the owl cup-cakes and Halloween cookies at Tammy's Halloween birthday party?)  You can find more from Lauren on her own Blog here.)

Hello lovely readers of Patches of Heaven! I blog over at Living Loved!  This recipe is one of my favourite things to bake and is always a hit at Christmas, so when I was asked to write a post I knew that this is what I wanted to share!

Gingerbread: 125g butter 1/2 cup treacle (golden syrup will do if you don't have treacle) 1/2 cup lightly packed brown sugar 1 egg yolk 1 tablespoon ground ginger 2 teaspoons mixed spice 1 teaspoon bi-carb soda 2 1/2 cups self  raising flour, sifted Icing 11/3 icing sugar 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 egg white 1. Preheat oven to 180/160 degrees fan forced.. 2. Combine butter, treacle and brown sugar in a small pan and melt. Remove to a bowl and cool. 3. Stir in egg yolk and remaining dry ingredients to form a soft dough. 4. Turn onto plastic wrap and press into a flat disc. Rest in fridge for an hour. 5. Roll dough to 7-8mm thick on a lightly floured surface and cut gingerbread with cookie cutter of your choice. 6. Place on baking paper-lined tray and bake for 7-10mins until firm. 7. Stand on tray for 5 mins then remove to a wire rack to cool completely. 8. Decorate as desired!   Quick tip for you: Gingerbread is all about it's time in the oven, so while I've outlined a time, play around with it when making your first batch and you can decide what works best for you!

Quick tip for you: Gingerbread is all about it's time in the oven, so while I've outlined a time, play around with it when making your first batch and you can decide what works best for you!

Guest Post by Ally - Joy School

This is Ally's first ever Blog post!  Ally is a speech pathologist who now works at home as a busy full-time mother to her three beautiful girls.   We are very grateful that she has written for us about Joy School :)  With Ally's permission I have added some photos of her and the girls that were recently taken by Jessima.

This is my first EVER blog entry. 20 minutes at the keyboard, and I've lost count of the number of times I've hit the Backspace button just writing my first line. That's because I have that annoying problem of wanting everything I do to be just right. Thankfully, I get to write about Joy School. When it comes to this ingenious program, everything feels just right.

http://joyschoolco.blogspot.com.au/

Joy School was created by parenting gurus Linda and Richard Eyre. It's a curriculum for 3-5 year old kiddies, and from what I can gather, parents all around the world have been teaching its lessons for decades! As the name suggests, this program is all about helping kids to experience joy in all its forms. When I first read this, I cynically thought "What does joy have to do with learning? Doesn't it just happen on its own?". But what I'm quickly discovering is that when you focus on teaching joy, the learning of other concepts is what happens on its own. I won't go too much more into what Joy School has to offer because these 2 amazing sites here and here will tell you all about it.

What I want to share is the little gems of joy that I have experienced in becoming a teacher-mum alongside my friend Jessima. She and I take turns teaching the lesson. We hold it every Thursday morning. The curriculum suggests doing 2 lessons a week, but life is too busy for Jessima and I to manage that. That is one of the wonderful things about Joy School - it gives the parents the freedom to decide what works best for them. We started almost 2 months ago and have done 7 lessons which have been predominantly about the Joy of the Body. The concepts we've covered are amazingly simple, so simple in fact, that you wouldn't think you could get a 2 and a half hour lesson out of it. And yet, I almost always run out of time when I'm teaching, because the lesson content is so diverse and rich. To give you an idea, when we covered the 5 senses, we made a smelling collage with different aromatic herbs and spices and we listened to pre-recorded sounds that the kids had to try to identify.

When we talked about body parts, we compared our joints to hinges on different doors around the house. Eating and living healthy was our topic last week, and we had an enormous amount of fun discussing different vegetables and how they grow, before cutting them up and turning them into vegetable soup. But every week, no matter what we cover, the underlying message has always been that we are so lucky to have our bodies, and we are lucky that they do all that they do. If I was to just blurt that message out to my kids in the car or at the dinner table, my kids would politely smile and nod and then look at each other bemused with a look that said "that was pretty random...". Thanks to Joy School, my kids don't think I'm as kooky as I would otherwise seem AND they are actually learning what it means to enjoy their bodies.

One of the things that leave me most satisfied is when my 3 year olds comes out with something like, "Hey mum, I'm using my sense of smell!" as they sniff a flower, or they tell me what month we're in (it's sooo cute watching a toddler try to get their mouth around the word "November"). Inside, I victoriously claim: "There you go ABC 4 Kids - you don't teach my kids everything they know!!!"

Jessima's and my older children are charismatic, but strong-willed little girls. It has been amazing watching their friendship develop during Joy School. This is especially rewarding for us as their mums, because on the first day that they properly met, Jessima and I could hardly hold a conversation due to having to referee their constant arguments. lol

Thankfully, to help with the moments when a child decides to misbehave during the lesson (the older children are, not surprisingly, the usual perpetrators hehe), we have the Joy School House. It is this quaint little cardboard cut-out that works magic! When the kids arrive at Joy School, they each open up their window to reveal a photo of their smiling faces. Later on, if someone decides to be disruptive we simply say "oh, it doesn't sound like you're ready to be in Joy School today. We'd better close your window". Whenever I've had to say that to my munchkin, within 20 seconds she has this cheesy forced smile on her face and she's opening her window back open. She then manages to sit quietly for about ooooohhhhh 30 seconds before she's wriggling again, but she's at least a lot less disruptive right throughout the rest of the lesson.

I could go on an on about what I love about Joy School. It IS hard work, and requires more committment than I had initially realised, but it is incredibly rewarding because it's not just a source of joy for my kids, but for me too. It's nice to know that 20 years from now, I can look past the fighting, the whinging, the scrambled egg dinners, and the excessive amount of time my kids spent in front of the TV, and I'll be able to reassure myself that I definitely did some things right... Joy School being one of them.

Guest Post - The Seasons of London

(Today's guest post is by Stace, who you can read more from at her Blog here.  She has the most wonderful photos and stories of their time and travels in England and parts of Europe posted there.  You'll feel like you've taken a holiday just reading it - or, more likely really, you'll seriously want to go on holiday there!  Thank you, Stace!! :)

I love the Patches of Heaven blog and am a dedicated reader... so thanks to the awesome ladies at Patches of Heaven for the opportunity to guest post!

My husband and I lived in London for 3.5 years. Each year a bunch of friends would celebrate Thanksgiving together. After the amazing feast, we would each take it in turns around the table to say what we were thankful for. The first year my turn came, and I'm pretty sure I said that I was thankful for my husband... but then I remember saying that I was really thankful to have experienced real seasons. Growing up in Brisbane my whole life I had never seen snow. I had never experienced the leaves all changing colour and the trees losing their leaves. That first year in London experiencing the seasons was really special to me. There's something really magical about the changing of the seasons.

Summer

Summer in London is crazy short. You wait for it all year, and then feel that it never really came. But those few weeks of the year where it really heats up, where you can go outside without a cardigan and you find yourself 'dying' at 25 degrees...it's pretty exciting. The British really know how to enjoy good weather. The sun comes out, the temperature rises, and everyone goes outside to soak it up. The parks are packed, people sunbaking on the grass, everyone out walking. It's an incredible feeling. And with daylight savings, there are more 'bright' hours in the day to enjoy!

Autumn

Autumn comes a little too quickly. You've still been holding out for a longer Summer and all of a sudden the nights are cool and the leaves are changing colour. London parks are so gorgeous in Autumn. I loved walking through them and seeing all the leaves. Daylight savings ends and the clocks change back and the days start to seem shorter.

Winter

The first half of Winter in London is exciting. The temperatures drop, Christmas decorations are everywhere, Winter Wonderland Festival in Hyde Park starts, everyone's in coats and boots... I loved it! Every year we were there it snowed. I remember hanging out in our tiny apartment one Saturday in December, listening to Christmas carols, and the first snow of the year started falling. We sat there and watched it snow while listening to songs like Winter Wonderland and Let it Snow, let it Snow. Christmas carols took on a whole new meaning for me. It was so magical to listen to them while watching it snow. Christmas comes and goes... New Years comes and goes.. and then you're left with the second half of Winter. Everyone's heads are down... and everyone is just hanging out for Spring!

Spring

London in the Spring is so beautiful. Daylight savings kicks in...The flowers in the parks start to bloom, the temperature is warmer, the air is fresh, there are more blue skies, the squirrels are everywhere, people are smiling once again! :)

Thanksgiving has just passed and I didn't get a chance to celebrate it this year. But I often think of the seasons at Thanksgiving now and I'm so grateful for the beautiful world that we live in and how amazing the seasons come and go and bring such a different beauty with each.