Shine/Life metaphor

The shine in the these photos is pretty obvious.

Obvious but beautiful.

I love how in the second photo the sun literally looks how a 7 year old would draw the sun.

A big yellow ball with glorious rays shining from it.

Perfect.

And on a cheesy note, I love how these photos can be a metaphor for life. 

Even through the thickness of the trees the sun is still shining.

Pretty brightly and beautifully I might add. 

Colours and a mind explosion

Source

I know that I've said before how I wonder about colour.

Specifically, I wonder if we all see the same colours or if we see different colours, but have been taught to recognise it as a certain colour.

I feel like that makes no sense.

Let me try to explain.

I'll use an example.

We all know that the grass is green.

We look at the grass and we think yes, green.

But what I wonder is do I look at the grass and think green and see green, when somebody else could look at the same grass and think green, but actually see a shade of purple that they've learnt to call green.

Doesn't thinking about that just absolutely boggle your mind.

Mine feels like it's about to explode.

The levels of mind boggling went to a new level for me today.

You know I doing a placement in a children's centre right?

Well all of the kiddies winks that I work with are pre-school age.

So basically that means they're under four.

One of the things that they're asked pretty obsessively by all adults that come into contact with is 

"what colour is this felt tip/flower/ball/pencil/blah blah blah?"

I was doing that today whilst I sat and drew cars with a group of kids and asked them what colour was the pen that I was holding.

They all said blue.

Which it was.

Then I picked up another felt tip that was a lighter shade of blue and asked what colour it was.

They all said blue again.

And then I thought...these kids are so young and they've been taught that this pen is blue.

They also know that the other pen is a darker shade of blue and if I would have held up any other shade of blue I'm sure they would have recognised that too.

But how do they know that all of these different shades are still the same colour?

Let the mind boggling commence.

I think that children must be much smarter than I ever imagined.

Scenes from a photo overload weekend

♥ PLEASANT.

I've been wanting to take this photo for a while. 

I drive past it all the time.

So seeing as we were going to the Pudsey 'carnival' I made Ross park up quite far away so we'd pass this sign as we walked in.

In Pudsey a carnival constitutes some travelling fairground rides, lots of tombola stalls and a big cornered of bit of grass where local dance troups rock out and men set their wives on fire.

♥ Some poor kid let go of Sponge Bob.

Crying shame.

Interesting fact in French they call Sponge Bob, Bob l'eponge carré, which literally means Bob the sponge squared.

♥ MASSIVE dog.

Check it.

This beast literally comes up to the chest of the woman in the background.

I'm pretty sure that if a child (or small adult) wanted to they could ride this monster like a horse.

♥ I wasn't joking when I said that a man set his wife on fire.

He did it for reals.

And then made her run 100 yards until he put the fire out.

♥ Oh, hi there handsome.

♥ My camera does't record videos, but honestly this big wheel was going so fast.

It was like a wheel of death.

♥ Shoes of choice.

Burberry high tops for him.

Cheapo leopard print for me.

♥ Basically I spent the whole of Saturday afternoon fiddling around with my camera,
I've had it for almost two years now and still don't really know how to use the manual settings.
I'm pretty sure this photo is the pictorial result of me doing something wrong.
I thought it was kinda cool though.

♥ Annie.
Miss Sociable.

♥ I have little to no musical talent so I didn't join in this little jammin sesh.
But there was a plethora (word of the day) of musical wizardry in the room so I just listened and took photos instead.

 ♥ Not sure which part of Leeds this is.
Rawdon maybe.

 ♥ When this picture was taken on Sunday, this bruise was coming up to being a week old.
So imagine how bad it was at first.
It was horrific actually.
I acquired this bad boy by falling into the slide set whilst I was holding a kid on my very first day of placement, but seeing as I didn't want to get told off for dropping a kid down the side of a slide set I bashed into with my knee and then balanced the boy on it instead.
Tragic.

 ♥ Will do.

 ♥ Not a clue.

♥ I love that in this picture that sun looks just like the kind of sun that a 7 year old would draw.

The little things

1. Dominos completely messed up our pizza order, but we got money off, so all is well.

2. Tomorrow is Friday.

3. I'm almost half way through my placement.

4. A little boy that I work with who has a great Polish accent and always says "this is not gooood" asked me if I would be back tomorrow and when I said yes I would and all next week too, he said "gooood because I would miss you." 

It's no wonder I get so attached to the little bubbas that I meet on placement.

5. The amazing names that they give to different shades of lipstick and nail varnish.

My current favourite lipsticks are mulled wine and showbiz. 

Can you tapas this and iris I was thinner are my nail varnish faves.

Iris I was thinner is possibly my favourite name ever.

And possibly going to become my new mantra.

6. Remembering random times in the sun with friends.

Times just like the ones in the photos.

7. The fact that I have a real life legitimate reason to go Costco tomorrow.

A real reason as apposed to my usual just wanting to go.

Why I will never have 13 children

Yesterday I started a placement in a children's centre in a pretty deprived area of Leeds.

I'm working in the pre-school room, with 13 kids, some of which don't speak English as their first language.

(I now know how to say toilet and drink in Polish. Thumbs up.)

Yesterday was a lot of fun. 

Basically I spent the entire day cutting & sticking, reading stories, kicking footballs, cuddling crying children, colouring, dressing up and playing at Princess'.

(Having a group of kids all chanting Princess Rebecca while running around you waving their arms is really something.)

Today was the same.

But all that fun, with 13 children is TIRING.

Last night I was asleep by 9:20pm.

Seriously.

And I slept right the way through until my alarm went off at 7am.

Seriously.

I'll probably do the same thing tonight.

Seriously.

Scenes from a Sheffield weekend

Actually, this post should really be called scenes from a Sheffield Saturday, because I didn't take a single picture on Friday or Sunday.
But weekend, whatever.


♥ Have you ever seen such gorgeous brown eyes on a little boy?

♥ An African guy was wearing the most incredible outfit at the wedding on Saturday.
I had to sneak up behind him really close to take this picture...

♥ Sheffield Peace Gardens.

Excellent place for wedding photos.

♥ I swear this photo was not blurred when I took it.

Anyway, there just happened to be about 1,000 Morris dancers in town on Saturday.

I have no idea why they were there, but I loved it.

♥ Other than the fact that Ross looks like a midget in this picture, I really love this.

♥ No words, just awesomeness.

♥ Some Morris dancer wearing lots of bells around his ankles was also parading around with this over his head.

A kid thought it was a dinosaur.

♥

♥ There is nothing that I don't love about this photo.
Awesome green outfit, check.
Morris dancers, check.
Super cute little girl in a coat that is approximately 70 sizes too big for her, check.

Good weekend.

History of Hair

Due to what I'm calling the blogger disaster of May 2011, which I pray never happens again, this post is actually one that I already wrote. 

And published.

But in blogger's moment of pure insanity, said post disappeared into the vast expanse that is the internet.

So here we go for take two.

Today I am lamenting.

Just a second, let me check what that word actually means.

That's right, today I am lamenting the loss of long gone long hair.

Let me just tell you the history of my hair. 

Don't worry, it's short. (The pun is very much intended here.)

Ever since I've had hair, which apparently was a good while after my first birthday (I looked like a boy in a dress for the first year of my existence) my Mom has kept my hair short.

Please observe...

Toddler Becky, short hair.

No front teeth Becky, short hair.

Becky in a school play, short hair.

So then when I got to being about 15 years old, I decided that enough was enough and I was going to grow my hair.

This hair growing rebellion was honestly about as rebellious as I ever got.

My Mom & Dad consider themselves to be very lucky.

Anyway, so I grew my hair.

Please observe....

Rebecca Northcott Photography

3Poppies Photography
I'm pretty sure that my wedding hair was my favourite hair ever, ever.

I'm convinced that my friend and bridesmaid Sophie has some kind of voodoo magic in her fingers because she made it look wonderful.

At least I think so.

My long hair years were happy years.

But then in a moment of insanity after a very hot week in Rome I decided to have my hair cut. 

So in one swift snip, the hairdresser cut off inches of my hair and probably sold the lot to a wig maker.

Please observe...

 

See how sad I am?
I don't think that I've even smiled since I had my hair cut.
Well now, that is both an exaggeration and a lie.
But I look sad in this photo as least and I have short hair here, so...

I think that the thing that I miss most of all about my long hair is that if I styled it properly and made an effort with it, it completed my outfit.

I definitely think that great hair can be the cherry on top of a great outfit.

(Did I just tip my toe into the world of fashion blogging? Weird.)

So now I'm going to stop wallowing about my hair and just wish and will it to grow long really quickly.

In the mean time, does anyone know how to make short hair look fabulous, because seeing as I'm stuck with it, I might as well make it look good.

I crave peri peri

I will not deny the fact that I have cravings.

Not pregnant cravings (mainly because I'm not pregnant), 

but I-know-what-I-like-and-I-want-some-now, kind of cravings.

You know what I mean, right? 

Right.

Well, one craving that I have pretty much constantly is for Nandos. 

Send some Nandos chicken (lemon and herb only please, I am a spice wimp, but it's what I love, so don't think less of me please) and chips with peri peri salt my way and I'm yours. 

Seriously.

Well, not seriously. 

I'm kinda already eternally with someone else.

But I would really appreciate it and we could be friends.

And a friendship based on a mutual love of Nandos is surely the best kind there is.


Ross decided that we needed more Nandos in our life yesterday, so we went and ate and it was gooood.
Let me share with some of the reasons why I love Nandos...


1). Erm...the food.
Obviously.
(You can tell that I didn't take this picture because the chips are peri-peri less and I would never order medium hot chicken.)

Source

2). They have awesome lights and paintings.
I'd like to have a light like this in my house one day.

3). They play music that makes me feel like I'm in a Zumba class.
And we've already spoken about how my hips don't lie.
Remember, I look like a young Shakira that's just eaten Beyonce but is still shakin it.
Ring any bells?

4). The stuff that it says on the uniforms & napkins (for the bits your tongue can't reach, anyone)
 and the Nando's story.

5). Nandos is a magical place and magical things happen there.
Otherwise, how could you explain this......

MAGIC.

A story involving windows and stupidity

This story has absolutely nothing to with my wedding dress or even my wedding day.

For the purpose of this story, you need to focus on the top windows in the background of this picture.

Take a good look and pay particular attention to how small they are.

________________________

It was a Saturday sometime last year. 

Before we were married, I'm pretty sure.

We were in Sheffield for the weekend with my famille, and we'd been to Costco.

We love Costco so much that when we go, we go as an entire family.

After Costco my Mom & Dad were going shopping somewhere else, and now that Ross & I had got out Costco fix, we were ready to go home.

So go home we did.

When we got there, we realised that I didn't have any keys. 

Massive oversight on my part. 

But not wanting to admit that I was stupid enough to have forgotten my keys I decided that I was somehow going to get into the house.

If I could anyway.

So we walked into the back garden and saw that one of the windows in the conservatory was open.

(If your a burglar reading this, windows are NEVER normally left open, this was a complete fluke.)

And in the conservatory only the top parts of the window open.

The very small bits at the top.

Now, you might look at the photo and think that a person could very easily fit through that top bit of window, but let's remember that I'm almost 5"10 and the window only opens so far, so the actually gap to fit through is much smaller than it looks.

But I wasn't going to to let those two minor details stop me from getting into my own house.

So, Ross boosted me up.

My head and shoulders fit through fine.

The boob area was more difficult, but I was still managing to squeeze through.

The difficult part was when my body was half and half of either side of the window.

My legs and feet were on one side of the window, being pushed and shoved by Ross and the upper half of my body was on the other side of the window, just hanging there, with nothing to hold or hang onto and nothing to support me.

So Ross just ended up pushing me through the window.

 I grazed my side and bashed my knee, because once he'd pushed my through the window I had nothing to land on other than the floor.

But got through the window I did. 

I even did a little victory dance.

It was right in the middle of the victory dance that I realised what an absolute fool I'd been.

The conservatory is obviously joined to the house, but it's separated by a set of French doors.

French doors which are always kept locked.

With the key on the house side of the door, not the conservatory side of the door.

So now I was trapped in my own conservatory, which in the summer (which it was) is like a sauna.

It gets seriously hot. 

There was no way that I was going to sit and wait for what surely would have been my death in that overheated conservatory, so my only choice was to go back through the window that I'd fought so hard to get through in the first place.

Tragic isn't it?

And getting back out of the conservatory was so much harder than getting in.

On the way in I could go head first, because Ross was there to pick me up and feed/force me through.

But I wasn't tall enough to get myself back through head first.

So I had to climb up on the window ledge, get one leg out of the window and then try and get the rest of my body through length ways.

That too ended up with me being stuck in the window, only this time the entire left side of my body was out of the conservatory and the entirety of the right side of my body was stuck inside.

I ended up with such a bruise right in the middle of my chest and long grazes from where Ross had to very forcibly pull my back through.

.......I don't think you need me to tell you what the moral of this story is.

Weekend Shmeekend

This weekend was a lot like a typical weekend from before Ross & I got married.

That basically means going to a party, dinner with friends and hanging out with a bunch of people playing random games in the park.

Normally now that we're married our weekends aren't full of as many...activities.

And normally nowadays they involve a lot more time with other married couples. 

Not this one though.

It was quite nice actually.

On with the pictures.

 This photo is in continuation of my current theme of taking a photo of myself and whoever I'm with in whatever reflective surface I can find.

Now I can tick microwave off the list.

I don't actually have a list though.

This is basically the pinnacle of my photographic efforts this weekend.

And to be honest, it's more of a posing effort than a photographic effort.

It's impressive though, right?

 I think this picture is beautiful.

Well, I think Clio is beautiful and this photo captures it.

The funny thing is, I took this photo to capture the crazy bit of hair that is pointing out to the side.

You hardly even notice it though.

 Ninja game that I could not get my head around enough to be able to play.

"I'm pretty sure that only us and the Amish would ever play this game."

Probably true.

Red vines. And lots of them.

For me, this photo represents happiness.

And I think happiness is a good place to end.