When we moved to this house we discovered more house than furniture. The biggest beast being the playroom, which is actually a double garage converted.

We knew that we needed something large, functional and that we didn't care about. Enter the sectional.

Shane and i went to a furniture warehouse, walked to a salesperson and said "we want the cheapest sectional you've got."

$300 later we walked out with this monstrosity. It is the centre of the universe that is our house. We watch television here, play trucks here, have the train table positioned right in front for easy access, it was recently home to a now dead mouse and it is where the dogs sleep (see doodle on the cookie monster chair?)

I hate it, but love it. I don't care what happens to it. It has perfect pillows for forts and it even sports the most uncomfortable pull-out bed ever - ensuring guests that we don't want to stay - don't.

The kids can spill silly putty, grape juice and spend fluish afternoons on it with nary a wince from me. I suspect it will be with us a long time. Money well spent.

Show and Tell is brought to you by the lovely and fabulous blackbird.

My street is beautiful, but, there is nothing to see but trees and green stuff. When you turn onto my street it is a one mile long loop. Each house has a two acre parcel. Our house backs onto parkland and a river, so it's more like ten acres. We have a well and a septic field. All of these things totally freaked me out when we moved here from our comfy urban dwelling.

Anyway, when you turn onto my street you see this. Our house is on the right over top of that hill.

This is my favourite house on the block. They have an outdoor swimming pool - my dream. You can barely make out the blue slide on the left.

This is my new neighbours future home. They are building the house from the trees they cut down on their property - plus a few of ours.

This is what you see on the other side of our driveway:

Show and Tell is brought to you by the lovely and fabulous blackbird.

Aaaahhh. The junk drawer. My philosophy for keeping my house somewhat tidy in the midst of four trinket loving, junk collecting kids is to stuff everything in to closets and drawers. As such i have three junk closets; one for art supplies, cleaning stuff and various sundries including 80 empty bottles leftover from our only attempt at home brew wine, then we have the way too many toys closet and, lastly, the closet full of shoes, coats, muddy buddies, snow suits, hats and mitts.

I have one real junk drawer, but one could argue that every drawer around here is a junk drawer.

Clockwise from 12:00 there is felt pads for chair legs, nightlight bulb, a toolset, emergency blanket for the kids earthquake kits at school, cover for the ear thermometer, "nonuttin" granola bar, penny wrappers, salbutamol for the nebulizer, batteries and screwdriver, pulmicort for the nebulizer, instruction manual for my camera, magnet sticker things, shane's back brace and water paints.

I'm sure there is much more under that top layer. But it's really just a mix of various things that i don't have anywhere else to put.

Show and Tell is brought to you by the lovely and fabulous blackbird.

Chocolate is one of my favourite things. Isn't it most peoples women's?

In our house it's a little more complicated because of eliza's peanut/tree nut allergy. We all know that the best chocolate has nuts in it.

For daytime and kid-friendly favourites we always turn to Vermont Nut Free Chocolates. The chocolate is very good. I order several times a year and keep plenty of their cocoa, chocolate chips and white chocolate chips on hand for baking.

At night shane and i often indulge in our favourite combo of red wine and chocolate. This week we are enjoying:

Look at all the nuts:

Yum. Show and Tell is brought to you by blackbird.