Highlights of the week (and a half)...

Well, it has been quite a full week. I'm still feeling out of sorts, but the kids are happy and busy and as crazy as ever. There has been painting and insect spotting and belly dance and stories, laughter and tree climbing and sleep overs and high tea with grandma. A lot of toys on the floor, a lot of dirty laundry, and just enough cups of tea.




(Yup, there is a sister under there, "being a seed".)





"Camping" in the play room. Aww don't they look peaceful?





"We can see Wollaton hall from here!"







Out for dinner with the extended family, and my favourite accidentally-funny-baby-expression of the week:










And all in all, not quite enough sleep for all these hijinks!

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.

Yarn Along - Stripes, Fairytales, Sleep (lack thereof), and Sick Days

Knitting: these blue organic hand dye scraps were begging to be used for something lovely. I turned them into a Little Coffee Bean cardigan and am now on the hunt for the perfect buttons.

Another Coffee Bean required casting on right away to make a cardigan for Talia in some lovely pink, turquoise, and mint green, dyed just for the purpose. I won't be striping this next one, as I just wanted an extremely easy no-brain-power-required piece of aran weight car knitting for a jaunt to the seaside! How could I have left it so long before knitting this cardigan again? I'm starting to realise that between patterns I want to knit someday and patterns I love and know I want to knit again, I may never finish all of my imagined future projects in one lifetime.

Reading: Some Kind of Fairy Tale. Well, wow. I finished this today and it was another intense, lyrical, resonant, dark story with a lot to say about family and love, and the nature of the mind, and human kindness. I wouldn't say I *liked* this book all that much, but I found it compelling and it left me feeling satisfied and uncomfortable at the same time. More adult than The Book of Lost Things, but similar in themes. Similar to the Golem and the Djinni in the ambiguous but pleasing resolution in the final chapters. More positive and affirming than The Magicians, but more believeably nuanced and shadowed. (I am on a distopian fantasy binge... Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is next on the list!)

Shall I write another, "I am so darn tired," post for you all? No? Go ahead and fill in all that with your vivid imaginations, empathy based on your own parenting experiences, and randomly chosen phrases from previous posts whinges mmkay? ;) Oh, also, we're ill again. So you can imagine some whining about that, too, if you like. I'm starting to feel a little better today, so throw in a little something meaningful about life still being sparkly even when we don't feel so much like noticing.

Aw, thanks, look at that - you practically wrote the rest of my blog post for today for me, in your head. :) Here's an illustration of my day, in the form of Morgan with a cold pack on her hot little head (this seven year old spent almost the entire day asleep).



I think while this illness plays out I might get a lot more knitting done...

Joining in with Ginny and friends to share another glimpse into our current knitting and reading.

Bluebell Woods (and unrelated words)

The year is really flying. The words are coming slowly, mind like treacle, the tiredness constant. So much *everything*. I want to write about the changing seasons and the garden, projects and ideas, the children and how they are growing, everything. Perhaps I'm just too busy living it - or perhaps more that the wakeful toddler is getting past the point of "just a phase" and on to a new level of maternal sleep deprivation. Breathe. Follow the joy. Love. Repeat.

Seven Days - light and dark

1. Roisin and Morgan frightening the shoppers in town!
2. Tired eyes
3. Jars of ponies
4. Stories for Talia
5. Rainbow sock yarn
6. First of several birthday celebrations
7. A sea pig - sort of!

Yarn Along - when exhausted from 2am wakings

Plodding on with the improvised shawl. So so tired. Remind me, toddlers do eventually sleep, right?

New books - always a highlight. The Book of Lost Things is brilliant, quirky dark fairytale, I seem to be working my way through a pretty similarly-themed list here.

*yawn* This too shall pass, this too shall pass. And in the meantime, I have books and knitting.

Joining in with Ginny and friends.

Yarn Along - some solid coloured merino knits, for a change

So, on an otherwise pretty stressful day earlier in the week (grumpy toddler induced), I finished the black garter stitch slouchy. :)


And then cast on chevrons (fingerless mittens, without much of a plan except to enjoy using some bright solids, and to evade the horribly delayed second Low Tide which I'm still procrastinating over):


I am also desperately looking forwards to a peaceful few minutes when I can finally make a start on my new book! So far this week I haven't been getting much reading time (but in the evenings Martin and I have managed to watch a couple of the Avengers movies since we're SO behind). We're starting to get some evening time together, and Talia is sleeping longer - but still getting up crazily early of course. *yawn*

Joining in with Ginny and friends again (early, for tomorrow!), for a weekly round up of our knitting and reading. :)

Yarn Along (still without any new books)

My scrap shawl is finished! :)







I gave it the lace border from Oaklet, which needs blocking but is really rather beautiful, and I decided where it's going to be gifted too. I love the sparkle, and the colours. It has been the absolute perfect distraction project, just knitting back and forth without much thought required. I am still struggling with a great grey weight of tiredness, and the grounding stitch after stitch is so healing. I have a feeling I'll be casting on another shawl before long, for those lulls when I can't think or spare energy for elaborate projects, but I can soothe myself with the rhythm of simply creating.

Joining in with Ginny and friends for another week's round up of knitting and reading!

Brilliant Books (plus storms, shows, and sewing)

Today has been one of the most changeable days.

Mum told us that our favourite book shop was in the process of closing down and had reduced everything to £1, so apart from the sadness of it no longer being there after today we obviously all wanted cheap books. We came home with an amazing haul, thanks to my mum offering to buy!



(That isn't even all of it. We totally took advantage of her generosity.)

Rowan was a bit unhappy in the shop, as grandma had said she was buying books not toys. Rowan moped a bit before choosing a sewing kit which just about met the criteria of "not toy". Martin and I were so busy looking at books we didn't really notice just how cross and fed up Roo was getting until we got out of the book shop and Rowan erupted in to full on meltdown about wanting a toy and needing to go to the toy shop next door. With just enough money for parking, we said no. Martin carried Rowan, who was shouting, "I WANT TO GET A TOY!" back to the car, where she started screaming, "I DROPPED MY SEWING KIT!" Martin retraced our steps. Someone had picked it up and taken it home with them.

At that point it all came flooding out. She had wanted a toy "because I can't read yet!" and she was cross with us for ignoring her in the shop and she just wanted her sewing things back. I apologised for not listening, and she readily forgave me (which generally makes me feel more guilty than if she'd stayed mad at me).

So much up and down (and shouting) in the first part of our morning often leads to a generally fed-up-with-each-other day, but this popped in to my head: "the next moment is a whole new chance at something good"! [Su Penn via - and paraphrasing - Sandra Dodd] And it was. We read some of our new stories. I made her up a new sewing kit from felt and yarn I already had in the house. 


We watched the most incredible storm. Rowan and I spent a happy half hour looking through months of Sunday Sweets on Cake Wrecks. :)



We went to see Jenna's drama group show, and I packed all the fun snacks I could find in the house.



So now we're watching Spongebob and winding down for the night, the two youngest babies snuggled up falling asleep on our laps under the rainbow crochet blanket. Today has been filled with really wonderful moments (and Jenna was such a lively happy little star along with the rest of the children's chorus). :)

Random snippets, ordinary days, unschooling randomness

Yup, my rainbow babies at it again with the random outfits. Talia is totally obsessed with holding hands at the moment, preferably with a sister rather than me!



Things I found in a bag Rowan was carrying around. Any time I empty anyone's pockets around here I find strange collections - recently I bumped against Rowan as we walked along and found that her pocket was surprisingly heavy. It was absolutely *stuffed* with sticks. Plain, ordinary, stubby, heavy, slightly muddy, sticks.

Question: how does the contents of the bookcase end up on the floor Every Single Day? Answer: this little pickle did it, gleefully, and then ran away when I asked her to put them back! :)


When the children had a friend round for the day we did some baking. Ugly, but delicious, macaroons. A first for us! They were fiddly, but worth it. Next time, I'm going to remember not to put them so close together on the baking sheet...


Jenna bean, spinning. At eleven at night.

The time of evening at which she heads to bed is so variable. It's interesting how different they are, and how their needs change as they get older. Rowan has recently started asking to be taken up to bed much earlier than she used to, and Morgan often goes up at the same time. Jenna sometimes reads in bed, especially if Martin and I are watching a film she isn't interested in. Sometimes she needs time without sisters around, especially when they haven't been getting on so well or if she has had a very busy outdoor-type day.

How she spends her evenings surprises me a great deal. She doesn't usually want the computer (which she often uses for long periods during the day) and tends to be very creative in the evening, or pick up a book. Right now she's past halfway in A Series of Unfortunate Events, and just finished re-reading Coraline. We're reading The Deathly Hallows together, and we're so closed to the end, it will be the end of an era when we're done with that series (we might have to start over again)!


Lots of fort/den building has been the order of the day while I've been so so tired (not enough sleep for mama!) and Rowan has been full of beans with lots of ideas she wants to explore and projects she wants help with.






Evidence of the constant Minecrafting - this week Jenna has been looking at ways of mapping contours and representing different biomes in her own sketches, and she's started keeping a square-ruled design notebook for her ideas for block creations. It's entirely normal in my house right now for discussions to quickly skip from programming commands, to grid references, to birthstones, to engineering "floating" structures in real life.



Yep... This is a picture of my children sitting on the shed roof. The neighbours are horrified. Sorry, neighbours. They love to climb.


Museum session creations (and a cheeky grin).


Jenna introducing Talia to The Clangers. Additions to Talia's vocabulary: "Soop Gag-gn" [Soup Dragon], "Canger", and "scary"! (She constantly asks Jenna, "Canger sad? Canger funny? Canger scary?" I think she wants to know what they are saying to each other!)




Almost two weeks of randomness. :) Facilitating the craziness isn't getting any less like juggling, just now. And tiredness is leaving me a little cranky and generally not very up for getting out and about as often as usual. Sleep will happen eventually. In the meantime, I'm trying to go with the flow and let the chaos just happen around me! :)