Taking An Unfortunate Break - My Mother Sadly Loosing Her Battle.

To all my dear readers and anyone new that discovers "Lee Caroline - A World of Inspiration". I'm unfortunately unable to post at the moment as sadly my mother is finally loosing her battle with cancer. As you can imagine I cannot focus properly and feel physically and emotionally drained. My beautiful mum has been fighting metastatic breast cancer for two and a half years, I hope you forgive me but PLEASE do not leave me I will be back as soon as I can and meanwhile if I have moments of being able to hold myself together I will try to post.

Thank you for your patience, thank you for your lovely comments on my posts. If you want to read a little about my mums story and how I ended up back in New Zealand, please read this post which I wrote last year on "Love".

 My beautiful mother and my father the way my mum would want my readers to see her. This photo was taken when when she was 30.

Thank you for your patience. I will be back as soon as it is possible.

Lee oxo

Savannah: One Last Summer Visit

With school starting in a few short weeks (say it isn’t so!), we’re making one last trip down to Savannah for the summer.  After practicing for hours on end in the car, the PCP was absolutely giddy to get to historic Leopold’s Ice Cream Parlor to participate in the “I Pledge” program where children are rewarded with a free ice cream cone for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance from memory. 

I was beaming with pride as he confidently and passionately recanted “I pledge allegiance … and to the Publix for which it stands … ONE nation under God in-da-is-iv-vis-able with … for aaaaaaaaaalllllll”  We are loyal Publix shoppers through the ranks of this family, but that takes it to a whole ‘nother level!

After he devoured his tutti-frutti (“it’s healthy with all that fruit”) and Cookie went to town on his chocolate chocolate chip (“healthy? I don’t know no healthy!”), we had grand plans to hit Forsyth Park and the sprayground right when the afternoon thunderstorm rolled in.  So, we laughed ourselves silly in Ice Age 3: Continental Drift and sang “we are family!  we are ham and cheese!” the whole way home.

 

The littles went down surprisingly easy for our first night at Mimi and Ampa’s house, so I stuffed my gullet on Daddy-O’s homemade tacos and am about to snuggle up with Mary Kay Andrews’ new read!!

 

Nighty night!

xoxo

The Tree Swing and Photography Questions

One of the things I think I will miss the most about Moose Mountain (what we started off jokingly calling my parents house years ago and it stuck) will be this tree swing. It has always been a favorite spot of ours and was even where Josh proposed to Jamie several years ago!  Fortunately we have lots and lots of photos of the tree swing, including Jamie and Josh's engagment shots and some of Jamie on her wedding day with us bridesmaids. I wanted to take one final set of photos here before my parents moved and was excited that this year Lillie was actually able to swing on it all by herself! 

Let me apologize in advance for the VERY picture heavy post! =) 

If you have any photography questions just scroll to the bottom!

 

Okay, enough pictures, Mom!

And what was Lola doing all this time? Just filling her stroller with rocks and dirt!

I took all of these using my new camera. My next post is going to be a Q and A type photography one based on the questions we regularly get asked in e-mails. If you have any photography related questions feel free to ask them in the comment section of this post. I may not directly answer them in the comment section (although I normally do) but will try my best to answer them all in the next post as best I can.

Vintage Milk Bucket

Hey my friends!

How are you?  Me…I am great!

Getting ready to start school up within the next week or so.  For those of you who don’t already know, we homeschool, and we love it!

You all know that I love flea marketing and have really found some cool things this summer at the Nashville flea. 

I have shown you several things already, but also wanted to show you a great old DeLaval milk can that I found. 

I knew I loved this old bucket as soon as I saw it.

It seemed that a lot of people liked my  bucket that day because everywhere I walked with it, people stopped me to tell me a story about using one similar to milk with when they were a child.

That’s just one more reason that I love vintage pieces.

I have had the old wooden dairy crate for a couple of years.  I love these two pieces together.

Hey, do you see the burlap pillow there on the bistro chair? 

The pillow was a birthday gift from a sweet friend of mine.  My friend’s sister-in-law made it for me.  As a matter of fact, she has made me several beautiful pillows now and I love them all.  She is a very talented lady and her name is Kim.

The cool thing is that Kim has just opened up an etsy shop and is filling it with a variety of pillows and other things.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Because…later on this week or weekend, I will be hosting a giveaway for Kim.  She has graciously offered a gift certificate to be used in her new shop.  I am not going to send you to her shop yet because she is still trying to get a few more things made for it so you will have more choices. 

When I host the giveaway, I will show you the pillows she has made for our home and show you where I have used them.

This is such fun!!!

Okay…enough for now.   I hope you all have a great week and I will see you in a few days.

I hope you will come back for another visit very soon.

Blessings all.

Linking up at Cedar Hill Ranch and Faded Charm and Sunny Simple Life

Modern homes beautiful single storey designs ideas.

modern homes beautiful single storey designs ideas.

Modern homes beautiful single storey designs ideas.

modern homes beautiful single storey designs ideas.

How to "Fake" A Fancy Dessert

I don't know about you, but I love dessert and I like for it to look pretty (if possible), but I really don't like to spend hours and hours in the kitchen. Well, last week Jamie and I were craving another dessert but didn't have time to make it. It requires several steps and we were looking for something quick and here is what we came up with:

I had seen several links on Pinterest for making chocolate bowls using balloons that were dipped in melted chocolate. After reading quite a few stories on how some of the balloons burst and chocolate went everywhere I got a little nervous to try them. If I were back in VA I would have given it a try but seeing how we are still at my parents house, I was pretty sure my dad would die if he walked in to find balloons bursting with melted chocolate spraying all over his kitchen! I had seen somewhere where a person had made a chocolate bowl with cupcake liners so I figured I would play around with that and give that a try. Well, they were a lot of fun and super easy!

First we got one of those bags of chocolate candy that you can find pretty much anywhere. We got ours at Michael's. I am pretty sure you could just melt chocolate chips too, though if you wanted. We just put ours in a bowl and popped it in the microwave for about 25 seconds then stirred it, then 25 more seconds, then stirred, and so on until it was nicely melted.

 (Yes, that is a paint brush next to the spoon - I will explain that in a minute.)

   

Now plop a nice big spoonful into the cupcake liner.

Now use the brush and kind of tilt the cupcake liner to the side and "paint" the sides. You want it to be pretty thick. And don't worry - this isn't a yucky old paintbrush! =) I bought this little brush in the baking aisle at Michael's.

Now set them in a muffin/cupcake tin and pop them in the freezer.

After about 30 minutes or so you can pull them out and just peel off the paper.

Now for the mousse! I just used a mix - I told you this was easy!

I followed the directions on the box and mixed it up.

Now you could just spoon it like that into the chocolate bowls but I wanted to have a little fun with mine. Seeing how I had purchased this little set for the chocolate rosette cake I made I figured I might as well use it for this as well!

I added the mousse to the bag and then just piped it into the chocolate bowl (with some help from Lillie so it's not perfect!) =) and then added a few chocolate shavings and that was it!

We made a few with whipped cream on top too! Not exactly the most nutritious treat, but it was easy and sure was yummy!

I hope you all are having a great week so far!