More Sunshiny Ordinary Days

Well, the weather has taken us outside for a lot of our time. I had a couple of days of illness, which I was relieved to find were not followed by any sick children! I've read a lot, and helped with Minecraft tech support, and done some baking with the kidlets. They have spent hours hanging off the swing frame and climbing the willow tree to admire a large colony of green caterpillars living up there.

I also managed to not procrastinate about spending money on myself this week (for once) and bought a decent summer dress for my friend's wedding. Yay! (Thank you Ashleigh for nagging me about it when she found I was worrying about what the children would wear and hadn't even thought about what *I* would wear!)



Jenna and I have both had hormonal shouty (her) and weepy (me) episodes. Toddler person boosted my post-illness milk supply by ever-so-kindly keeping me up all night again (every time I think she is sleeping more, we have another few all-night feeds)! What else? Oh, Tibs also cut a chunk out of her fringe. Lighting fires and toasting marshmallows have joined the list of current obsessions. The chickens are now producing five eggs a day, and spending many a happy hour dust bathing.















The same few precious, beautiful, new-every-morning blessings crop up on my gratitude list over and over. Family, friends, this beautiful crazy world, our health, so much freedom, time for creativity, food, laughter. The way the sleeping small imprints her blonde curls on my warm arm. The daily shout of "spider!" as they disturb a new specimen in the garden which I just *have* to go and see. Cups of tea. Sharing stories and ideas with the wonderful and inspiring people who live inside my computer (hi!). Colour. Light. Grace, every day, to try again and learn and live just a little more in love.

Outside

Spring walks in various parks and woodlands are such a joy. This week we had chance to take a meander with my mum and her dogs, including lots of daisy chain making and running around. Also including me trying to get the extremely elderly dog out of the lake. Thank goodness she managed to get out again, as she's almost blind and quite frail. Given the split second decision to catch the baby or the dog, mum saved Talia, and was then quite insistent that I not go in after the silly fur-baby.



Good memories and bad ones all together. Isn't that just the way?



I can barely believe that we planted that little stringy cutting from my mum's willow tree when Jenna was just a baby. When we moved in to this house we planted it from its big pot into the garden, and now it stands as tall as the house. I remember speculating as to how old she would be before she had a tree large enough to climb, and yet even by the time she was three it was sturdy enough for her first brave attempts. It has grown up with her, with all of them.





The garden is such a blessing. The grass is still patchy (as in, there are actually some small patches of grass in places), and the bushes are leggy and unpruned. It's a wild space, mostly. But there is the promise of fruit in the pink on the apple tree, and so much laughter out there every day.

Sunny Picnic Afternoon

The sun has been shining down from blue skies this weekend. We took our house guests to the park for a picnic, and Martin and Ashleigh and I all got significant baby-squishing time with little Violet. Talia calls all our visitors by each others' names, indiscriminately. She also pronounces "Leanne" rather like "Jane". Extra confusion - especially when I manage to call Cerys "Rowan" as I did this morning!


(Yup, my toddler has a bubble-mix-and-sand mustache in that picture!)



Rowan was removed from the very edge of the duck pond no less than seven times before she succeeded in her apparent aim, and fell in.

She also discovered that there is a nice echo in the toilet area.
"Mummy! It sounds like there are lots of you!"
"It does! What would you do with lots of mummies, Roo?"
"I'd find out which one was you and then I'd either kill or drown the rest."
O-kaayy. Adorable and rather creepy.



We didn't walk far, just around the science garden areas, and then back to the car. My dad came and picked up enough of us that we could get home easily in one run. Picnic salad left overs were turned in to stir fry for a late tea, as we settled our crowds of children down for the night.





I am so hoping for more sun this week, for the back door to be perpetually open for garden games and outdoor meals. There are six children and three adults in this little house right now, and it's wonderful, but we all prefer to not be cooped up for long!

Much like the chickens... Talia is daily setting them free to range unsupervised, and I am daily chasing them and rounding them up. I think the fuss and chaos is the most entertaining thing my monkey toddler can imagine!

Seven Days - Rainbows and Visits

1. Rainbow
2. Gymnastics
3. Lots of eggs!
4. Sister-wearing
5. Roo writing notes
6. Cerys meeting the chickens
7. Rainbow visitors

A Garden/Chicken Post

It's that time of year again already - my willow tree is fuzzy around the edges with softest green budding leaves. :)


Our garden flock is very happy and settled, there is less squabbling already, and they are laying around three eggs a day on average between the five of them in this warmer spell. June lays almost every day, as does Cinnamon. The youngest two Legbars seem to take it in turns. Bluebell lays about twice a week. We just started on our second bag of chicken feed (already). So our home-produced eggs were costing £2.60 per dozen at first, now down to more like £2.10 per dozen as the laying picks up (and as we have moved the feed bag to the top of the cupboards, so that the children can't keep sprinkling it all over the garden)!

(The pastel blue-green eggs are from the Legbars, Cinnamon's are usually slightly pointier and greener in colour. The huge pink one top left is from Bluebell!)

They've very soothing, and amusing, to watch. I only seem to get pictures of them in the run, and then half of my shots are always of June trying to peck the camera. They go a bit crazy when I let them out to free range, but they run back in here when something frightens them (like their rain canopy flapping too much, or a dog barking a couple of houses away).


Talia watches the chickens from as close as she can get, often with her nose poking through the bars. She comes back in saying, "Duck, nose, me!" and giggling, clutching her nose. I thought she'd soon figure out that it was better NOT to get pecked in the face, but alas. We learned by the end of the first week that we have to cable tie the large easy-access door closed, because it's just too tempting for the youngest three to let the chickens roam, and I'm determined to protect my vegetable garden!


Between the nutty children and the nutty chickens, there are daily cries of "help! help!" from the garden, and it's always a toss-up between it being a child stuck in the willow tree, one sibling chasing another with assorted toy weaponry, or a chicken loose. It's always when I'm right in the middle of something - like the housing inspection (which went really well, and they're now officially leaving us alone again for another year), or when I'm up to my elbows in washing up, or lifting a huge batch of yarn out of the dye vat. I need to replace my bench so I can sit outside with my knitting a bit more, I guess! (Such a hard life, haha.)



Maybe this year will be the year I manage to grow vegetables for more than one season. Maybe this year I will not kill half of everything I plant. Maybe this year I will finally buy a new bench. Maybe this year I will succeed in saving seeds from my veggie plants instead of buying more every year. I am nothing if not ambitious. So far at least is IS the year that I order from Real Seeds, and start off my first batch of seedlings in time. And it IS the year we finally get chickens again. And it IS the year that I plant some more soft fruit bushes.

Yeah, we'll get there. :)

Spring is Sprung!

(But the grass is not Riz - alas, the lawn is still pretty much bare soil from the huge assault course the children built during the Winter.)

Still, we're enjoying the garden. Bare and unkempt though it is! :)



(Pepper having a dust bath.)




(Jenna realised I was taking her picture *just* as I took this, hence the slightly drunk expression!)

Seven Days

1. Klimt-style tree
2. Walk to the post office
3. Blue skies
4. Minecraft
5. Peanut butter chocolate cake (again)
6. What happens when Connor and Rowan find the chocolate spread...
7. Space Centre trip
8. Our new flock!

So, well, lots of ordinary busy peaceful days, and a very mad weekend! And yes, we have chickens again. I have missed their homely chatter and silly feather-brained exploits. The run is still sort of half-built, but for now they are secure and comfortable and we have plenty of time to get the arrangement right as they settle in. They are quite a flock of characters!

And Talia calls them all "duck".

Unschooling on a Low Tide day

Every time I record a busy-school-y-academic sort of day-in-the-life, I promise myself that I will write another on one of the other kinds of day. Not a bad day, nor a stressful one. Not an exceptional day, not a more (or less) "educational" day, just... a different kind of atmosphere, different priorities.

Today we meandered from one thing to another. We didn't have a plan, or a project. We didn't focus on a subject, or drag out a load of interesting reference books, or set up an activity. It's days like today that lead me, when people ask whether we have "school holidays" to joke that we're always on holiday. Well, we are!

We tidied up a bit and Rowan helped me clean the bathroom (she loves spraying the tiles with water). Morgan drew a clock face and explained to me how she knows what time it is (I had no idea she knew how to tell the time). We made smoothies and I froze the left overs in ice lolly pots - I'm fairly sure this is the first year we have managed to find an actual set of these from the previous year! Jenna played a new level on her playstation game, then decided to do some painting and took a watercolour box into the garden and left it out there. Meanwhile Morgan wanted muffins, so she and Roo helped me make some.

Morgan did some wool winding with me, and Jenna did some gymnastics on the almost-totally-broken swing frame. When she got fed up with that she came inside and helped me price up new swings for if (when) we get some of last year's tax back. Then she read one of her library books, one of those choose-your-ending mysteries, which she kept exclaiming was "really annoying" because she kept choosing options that led to stories she didn't like.

Rowan asked about a billion times if the ice lollies would be ready yet. Every time I said they weren't, she had to go and open the freezer and poke them to check.

My father in law and sister in law came over to borrow one of our car seats from in the attic for a visiting family member. They offered to take us out for lunch; the children voted for MacDonalds and I didn't moan or roll my eyes. ;) We got glared at a bit, as is fairly usual as a large family out and about during school hours. The children chatted to grandad non-stop, fed the baby their chips, and helped clear up when we were finished.

Morgan and Rowan pretended to be superheroes as we walked home.


Everyone then played in the garden for a couple of hours, mostly putting on a series of pantomimes using an old pallet as a stage. I picked up a whole bag worth of general rubbish from the patio area, broken plant pots and bits of tile (one blew off the roof last week), part of a chicken feed dispenser from years ago (I still miss having chickens), a few small toys missed in previous tidying sessions (all thankfully salvageable). We watched ants going to and from a small apple core for a few minutes.

I came in to start making tea, and when the children followed me a few minutes later they had painted each other's faces with green watercolour "to be Shrek's babies", so I bathed them before food. There was lively discussion about which soap they like best.

So: we tidied, played, read, chatted, smiled, and walked. And we were learning and exploring in just the way we needed to be. And it was good.

Catching up

It has been a busy couple of weeks, happy and normal and busy. The computer stopped talking to each device in turn, starting with the keyboard, so we had a week of being able to only read and not respond, and then eventually not read either. And, well, it hasn't been terrible for us to be away from the screen... Though I've missed you all! My garden is my favorite place at this time of year, first harvests and potatoes coming up and strawberries flowering and pea shoots and unmitigated joy. And mess, everywhere the mess!We made dragons for St George's day, and a maypole and wreaths for May Day, and nearly had a bonfire until the pouring rain soaked everything thoroughly! We started making daily green juice and being a bit more proactive about eating again (the meal planner is being used properly for the first time in a month or more).Painting the shed and fence was Jenna's idea, and after an initial grown-up desire to say "no" I said "why not" instead, and we did.This is the day that the chicken shed finally came down. And up. Onto the roof of our shed, as Martin and Chris struggled to get it down the passageway. Eventually it had to be taken over next-door's fence. And then they found they had to dismantle it to get in the car anyway. Never mind, boys.This is the day that the shed was rebuilt in its new location, as a brand new home for Emma and Chris's flock!My beautiful big girl baby.Craziness, crochet, tidy toy shelves and eating out with Emma, Chris and Connor.

A meal out in town with my mum and brother.Nettle soup, green juice, and dandylion oil.Another trip to Leicester, museums and the Space Centre. I may find doing the recording work frustrating and tiring, but I love being payed to visit somewhere so easy to explore with children. As you can see, we all had an amazing day!Such a lot to update!