Assortment

I just had a scary thought, organising pictures and finding myself starting a folder for September on our laptop... Two more new folders, and the one after will have new baby pictures in it. I'm in my seventh month. Where is the year going?!

This babyness is so big-girl-ness and people other than me understand her endless chatter about pretty much all the things that pass through her two year old brain. She loves foraging for berries, and chasing pidgeons and ducks and squirrels and basically any wild creature that comes too close.

Martin is still looking for work. Yet more rejections. Places seem to be interviewing literally hundereds of people - it feels like hard slog for him right now. My nesting has dropped off a bit and the surface of the big dining table is still not in sight (but my kitchen is very clean)! Our long-term guests are still here, and the house still feels manic.

We are getting outside a lot. We all need it.

I'm still making myself push on with Jenna's Autumn dress. I was bored of stockinette stitch after about row ten, but ah well, it's worth it because I know how much she will love it (and love wearing the wool that she dyed herself). :)

I feel more... settled... more like myself, since we got home from our trip. Less spinning-out-of-control, more energy for the people and activities I love. Pregnancy insomnia is irritating me - and I think I'm too much of a cynic for the hypnotherapy to work, I keep arguing with the helpful suggestions. ;)

I am however getting a bit caught up in the September Home-schooly planning thing - because all those lovely and useful Waldorf-y rhythms so easily give way to the easy slow pace of summer and the days pacing themselves with being outside and following our internal clocks. Now we're heading towards the cold months again I have got to get some healthy habits back, lest the darker shorter days leave me feeling all adrift again.

Jenna, too, has been feeling the change. Yesterday she asked for "proper school work" (meaning the neglected Story of the World) because her friends are starting back to school and it stings a little still, that voice telling her she is missing out.

She has a lot of questions now, the serious kind, about what school would be like if she started next year. Part of me wants to keep telling her, "maybe the year after" but I do think for the first time that she is actually ready to make that choice if that's where she feels called. Things are just so good for her at home, though. Even with siblings crowding. She just devours books (she is finally reading past picture book stage) and loves being free to run outside whenever she likes. :)

Where do the years go? The months, the days? They change before my eyes, these three people I am responsible to. And who is guiding who? Increasingly I feel I have not unlearned nearly enough to be useful to them. The shouting habit is a hard one to kill, for starters. Time to work on inner growth, time to slow into a quieter rhythm, time to find our way through the festival markers. And prepare for the one big change we know is coming this Winter!