More resting and rattiness

Still all out of sorts over here, but we made some bath stuff yesterday and generally managed to avoid getting too fraught with each other - as usual resorting to craft and planned activities is keeping us sane (ish).

They were still pretty hyper, but far less yelling and generally childish behaviour from me lol. Ths picture provided courtesy of Jenna. ;)
Today (again!) we needed fresh air, so out for a walk.


Unfortunately it ended up being a very long walk, and for about half of it Morgan threw a total paddy and the only way to calm her was to wear her on my front. So now I ache ALL OVER and my bump especially feels very strained. :( It just seemed easier than standing at the roadside for another half hour with a toddler screaming blue murder... But now I feel like I've been hit by a ton of bricks and hve struggled the rest of the day to not become control-freak mummy against a tide of happy (but noisy) messy play.

Again, crafting kind of helped. Thanks to Claire for the felt-patch-making inspiration!

And now, as we've only just managed to get the house so that you can walk across one room without stepping on something horrible, we are going out for tea. We got paid today. I just wish an evening off could be, like, a week off. Ideally in fact I'd much prefer to just be allowed to sleep through the next three weeks and wake up in labour, but no such luck. ;)

One ratty mummy, two ratty children

Jenna is fine today by the way, no more throwing up (yay) but sadly she has gone that one step beyond perky that small children do when they've spent an entire day sleeping and have to make up for it. Morgan, being Morgan, is all up for THAT kind of fun.

Wether ratty mummy or ratty children happened first is a matter for debate. I woke up pretty tired and noise intollerant, anyway. And then got jumped on by two VERY lively children who keep demanding that I join in their game/fix their broken project/find them a snack/fetch drinks/pick up something they threw etc. After ten minutes of this, I decided that it was either get some fresh air or find someone willing to adopt them.

We spent an hour on the park (yes, before breakfast) and then I was feeling tired and crampy and STILL ratty (although they were much more subdued and I was even able to smile at Morgan rolling down the hill and getting covered in grass stains). Rather than head home, we went into town to find something to do. Sadly this meant that we ended up eating Macdonald's for breakfast. Which was somehow exactly what I wanted at the time, but made me feel very sick afterwards. Pancakes and something that CANNOT really be sausage and little bottles of milk seemed to make the girls very happy though lol. And not as hyper as I expected...

Then we played in a few charity shops of the sort that don't tick the children off for "testing" the toys. And went to a few of our normal favorite places. Anyway, we came home with fabric dye, organic fairtrade cocoa butter (from our highstreet!), vegan soap flakes, and organic apple juice concentrate. Now we're going to paint something... And make a massage bar. I think. :)

We're still all a bit out of sorts (and I'm still feeling all-over shattered) but I'm not about to start screaming. I hope.

Pancakes!

The children don't actually eat them really. But ah well, it's all fun. And Jenna was up to eating at least a bit of ice-cream and some tinned apricots.


By the way, cooking pancakes in our OWN HOME MADE butter; a very very cool feeling. :)

Fighting the fear

I realised last night that this week has taken its toll in other ways than the total exhaustion. I'm suddenly tearful and scared again, not all the time, but far more than a week ago. I feel vulnerable, timid, waiting to be told that it's OK...

It isn't exactly fear for the baby's safety, I know it's doing fine in there now; it's back to moving around a lot and usual patterns (ie that funny thing they do where any time someone wants to feel a kick they go very very still, going crazy in the bath, and turning over at night a second or two after I change position...). It's more a loss of confidence in what my body is doing, can do, that hard-won feeling of invincable Warrior Woman has gone.

I just don't know how to get back where I was. I hate the idea of going into labour still feeling vulnerable and lacking that trust in my partnership with my baby; if I were to get to term still in this state and someone even IMPLIED that something might be amiss I'd be in hospital like a shot, asking the NHS to do ANYTHING, "just let my baby be OK". :S Not a way of thinking I'm used to in myself I have to say. ;)

How to feel strong again? *sigh* I wish I knew. I've spent a lot of this pregnancy feeling like my body is broken and useless, and I don't want to try to give birth still acting and thinking that way. :(

News for the day: Jenna is throwing up everywhere and has a temperature. She hasn't eaten anything unusual or had a bump, so I'm assuming she has a tummy bug - we've all had so many colds on and off that it doesn't surprise me at all actually. Poor little thing, she's just dozing on and off on a chair with a sippy of water in one hand and a big sick bowl in the other.
In between fetching tissues, clean sick bowl, more water, headband to keep hair off sticky face, I have managed to make this (I still need to stitch in the last couple of loose threads as you can see). I'm quite impressed though.
It's far too big for teeny Morgan of course! Still, it will be even more cute when she grows into it...

Inspiration from... Pancakes Pancakes! by Eric Carle

Another great book for this time of year - and a well-loved theme around here normally anyway. The Little Red Hen is probably Morgan's favorite story and we often tell stories of our own invention when baking or cooking, about where our ingredients grew and how they were picked and how they got to us. :)
Making our own butter; the jar has about six small smooth clean pebbles added to agitate the cream. Be careful not to bash it on anything if you use a glass jar, and don't get too enthusiastic in the last stage (which is pretty hard work, I had to do the last ten minutes or so myself) or the bottom might well drop out of your jar... Um, yes, from experience. ;)

This is the first time we have tried this and I think we underestimated how long it would take, but the children were happy to keep coming back to it, sitting for a while, and then going off to something else before taking another turn. It took us over an hour's actual work I think, but this is what we ended up with...
Practising flipping skills!
Our first pancake of the year...

Another lovely morning's work! More pancakes tomorrow, no doubt... Yum.

Outdoor play on a beautiful day

Wollaton Hall for a nice long run-around. :)












I spent a lot of time sitting on benches watching the action lol. And, well, of COURSE I got to play on the swings. :)

More Weasel-work

So after my claims yesterday that Jenna only draws hundreds and hundreds of flowers... A chalk-board monster!

And, from Morgan, lots and lots of lines in crayon. I forgot this, something she also has recently started doing obsessively - drawing around her hands!

Evidence!

Spring IS here!

Instant satisfaction crafts

Aka things that can be done from the sofa in between being sick (yes, still), coughing until I feel even more sick (again), and having contractions...

An embroidered bunny pillow.
Babylegs - made by cutting the feet off a pair of adult knee-socks.
Tiny green silk baby fairy wings on an orange-red tie-dye vest.
And a felt badge for Morgan.
Yes I know, I know... This is me "resting".

What you don't see from those pictures? My house is about four times messier than those photos the other day. My children have been eating quite a lot of crisps. Cbeebies or children's DVDs have been on for probably more than four hours a day the last two or three days. And we had fish and chips for lunch one day! *blushes*

The contractions are still not too bad, and go off if I lie down. And I'm not actually in pain now. Strangely, since the antibiotics I am also sleeping properly again and feeling far more normal than I have in the past few weeks. So I guess I really should have known something was actually wrong. :S

Anyway, sewing and reading and trying to relax and keep my feet up as much as possible. :)

One poor little bumped head...

...magically restored to happy smiles. :)
I love nursing her so much! In spite of the frustrations and niggles, and lines of tooth-marks when she's not positioned right, mummy milk is magical stuff. :) See the little tear-stained face, adoring eyes, bruised forehead, and little hand resting on my bump? Delicious!

Then of course, there are always cookies to make, vegetables to cut for soup, stories to read, mud to bring into the house, and pictures to draw...

It's hard to be an unhappy toddler for very long when the world is so full of things to explore!


This is typical of Morgan's art at the moment. She loves pencils and biro (basically, what she sees me writing with, rather than coloured pens or crayons), and spends a lot of time happily poking holes in the paper!

Jenna, concentrating HARD at the "weasel". Mostly, Jenna is drawing her little stylised flowers at the moment, often with sunshines, and sometimes with people, fairies, or animals. But other features are ALWAYS secondary to the flowers. She especially likes to colour in each petal a different colour, and gets very upset if any colour gets outside of the lines or if Morgan comes to "help"!

And who do I blame?

Well, you DID tell me I should be resting!

Simple Pleasures

Especially for Kat at Slugs on the Refrigerator. :)

Watching my children playing and learning together, co-operating and negotiating (yes and sometimes squabbling as well). Building a tent from a blanket and chairs, taking over my living room, hiding under an umbrella ("lella" says Morgan).

Laughing at the antics of our crazy kitten-brained cat.
A lovely pile of clean washing. And my new absolute favorite nappies (I love muslins anyway) - aren't these Ikea textiles so CUTE?!
Simple Foodie Pleasures. "I'm hungry, can I have a snack now please?" Jenna is *always* hungry. Thankfully our veg box arrived nice and early this morning, and she could help herself to all the lovely fairtrade fruit. I love love love these boxes, each one a surprise and full of lovely fresh ingredients for the week.
Another gift from nature, our dish garden growing greener and needing a "haircut". Jenna noticed this morning that the grass bends towards the window, and suggested that we turn it around the other way to make the grass straight again. Unschooling science in action.
And more child-related small pleasures, those rare moments when they are both playing quietly and independantly and NOT TOUCHING each other and therefore not complaining ("Nenna URT my!" says Morgan a moment later, "Mummy Morgan is being a PEST!" says Jenna).

Admiring my children's endless creativity and joy in life.
Lunch on the water at Attenborough nature reserve. :) (Honestly, I just walked from mum's car to the centre and back again; no long treks for me today!)

Feeding the ducks with my mum...


Playing on the computers in the education centre...
And finding the BIGGEST puddles to splash in.
And the best simple pleasure of the day?

Knowing that my tiny one is still tucked up safely inside. Because in spite of another show today, I'm not having so many contractions and am feeling generally less unwell. :) Feeling this baby kick, when yesterday I was so full of fear for it, that can hardly count as a simple pleasure. It is the most *profound* relief and comfort.