Jasper's 1st birthday books

Cute animal flash cards by Eric Carle

Brian Wildsmith's fabulous animal illustrations in 'Animals to Count'

The little guy celebrates his first birthday!

Little Mr J celebrated his first birthday a few weeks ago (1 already.....where did that year go ?!) and he received some lovely illustrated books just for turning one! 

I love the set of Animal flash cards by Eric Carle - who is most famous for his 1969 book The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  The cards feature Eric Carle's simplistic, collage-style illustrations of animals on one side, with upper and lower-case letters on the reverse.  Whilst Mr J is still a little too young for learning his alphabet, it's fun showing him the animal pictures with their naive and quirky shapes, textures and colours.  (OK, I do also enjoy trying to impersonate some of the animals too.....anyone have any ideas for how an octopus / quetzal / buffalo or Jellyfish sound?!.....)

Brian Wildsmith's Animals to Count book is full of Wildsmith's very cute and lively animal illustrations - and this book might find it's way from the babies room onto my bookshelf!  It's only a very small A5 sized book, but I love the illustrative style of Brian Wildsmith and his animal depictions.  I've blogged about Brian Wildmith's work before with my book Python's Party and the Illustrated Children's Books.

Happy 1st Birthday little man! x x

My new town

Kyneton - we have arrived!

My studio in boxes 

The Jolly cat settles in amongst the piles of clothes and blankets 

Our first frost since living in England!  Brrr

It's been a while since I last blogged - due to our house move to Kyneton!  I wrote about Kyneton a few months ago and since then we've sold our house in Coburg and moved to the country!! 

It's been a crazy few months firstly with selling our house, and then packing up our whole life to relocate to a new area.  With little Mr Jasper around (and no grandparents in Australia for babysitting duties) it's been doubly hard finding the time to pack, move, unpack and get organised.

Last year I posted about a children's book I bought, called 'Town & Country'.  The book is about the difference between living in a big city and living in the country - and it summed up my dilemma about whether I wanted to be a city gal, or a country gal.  Both myself and Mr B grew up in small country villages in England, so we both loved the idea of moving to the country - but Melbourne is such a fabulous city that it was a big decision to up-sticks and move away. 

We've decided to rent for a while to see if we like living in the area before committing to buying another house.  On our first night here we had a frost overnight - it was very exciting to wake up in the morning to see 'Jack Frost' had visited and painted the landscape in a crisp white coating - I think it's the first big frost we've seen since living in England! 

Must get back to unpacking.....