Daisy, daisy...

I was up before my alarm this morning and out the shower before it had even gone off.  Go me!  :-)

I've had a productive morning cleaning and disinfecting 125 year old roof slates from our roof.  They are now gessoed and will be ready to paint on in 24 hours time.  These are slates from two years ago when we replaced the roof.  I'm not randomly removing roof tiles from our current roof :-)

I have five slate paintings pending.  Three for our Skye friends - one with the name of their new house and one each for the girls' saying Anna's Garden and Faith's Garden.  I will paint daisies and bluebells and strawberries on theirs (they grow amazing strawberries :-)  Then I need to paint one for baby Orla as Esme already has one, and finally one for myself.

Beautiful day here and I really should be outside, but I am enjoying the sun from the garden room with the fan blowing to keep me cool.  Blipping early as I really want to get my journal up to date and I have to back blip the week our Skye friends were here in July.  Shouldn't take long as I won't remember any details!  

It's Alan's birthday on Friday and we are having the usual struggle over what to buy him.  He'll get some vouchers as he loves going shopping for clothes and stuff, but I always like to get him something to open.  Not sure why as he's not fussed either way!  

He will be 29.  The same age we were when we had him.  That blows my mind!  I've said before that his birthday is a bittersweet time for me as I can't help my mind wandering to the life he could have been living, and all the things he will never get to do.....but that way lies madness and I get very angry with myself for entertaining such thoughts.  

I think as parents all we ever want for our children is for them to be happy, and he truly is.  He has a great life, surrounded by people who love him and want the best for him.  He may be limited physically and mentally but he has control over what he does and where he goes and his days are spent in love and laughter.  That brings me immense joy.  

In other news I've been chatting with my lovely blip pal Treshnish and she has sent me some gorgeous photos of her herd of Herdwicks for me to use as inspiration for some sheep painting.  They really are the Golden Retrievers of the sheep world :-)))  I am hoping to have a go at painting them when on our holiday to Harris and Lewis.  I have a vision of sitting on the decking of the holiday cottage overlooking Uig Bay, G&T to hand and painting these beautiful creatures.  Can't wait!

After prepping the slates and before cleaning my watercolour paint palette I used some of the paint to make this little daisy sketch.  I hate wasting paint and now it's my blip. Two birds, one stone :-))