For Jenna

Sweet bright blossoming daughter, balancing twirling and dancing through the fine thin middle years of childhood with the stars in your hair... Taking in everything, love and conflict and busy mind-food, and giving back the pure song of your gorgeous spirit. Truly yourself in everything, unique and precious. I admire you, with uncritical eyes.

My precious child, though you feel childhood to be something shameful to flee as quickly as possible, please stay here a while with me. The world can wait for you, cocooned gently in hands that long to see you fly but know something bright and golden like honey - you and I need time yet to travel our paths together a little further, because there are so many lovely things still waiting for you in childhood.

I promise to fill these next six years with just as much affection and laughter, and probably some tears too, but they will be tears that shine as hard-won jewels. I promise to give you more space to grow up in your own way, and to keep my mind from wading in with all the reasons why not. I promise to make more messes and forget my dignity more often, and to remember that we need not stand on ceremony if we only treat each other with love and respect.

I promise to always see you like this, as this full glorious person scintillating through time and space with an earth-song on your lips and the stars tangled in your hair.

Party bits and pieces

No balloons (we have some compostable ones that we will use for her birthday morning, but I don't even actually miss things like that any more). Lots of bunting, a pleasure to behold, reuseable and zero ethical guilt. Thankyou so much to everyone who helped me get everything done on time, and with special mentions for Shell, Angie and Talie for their gorgeous crafting. :)

Food, and more food, with extra love stirred in. More sugar than last year I reckon, but the children mostly wanted the barely-sweet cornflake cakes above and beyond any sticky cakeyness. Anyhow, I'm rather proud that everything was home made and organic. The bread rolls were especially yummy (Jenna is one small Superstar Baker, I tell you) and the birthday cake got actual gasps of delight when she saw it (wonky bits and uneven icing matter not when there are actual SPARKLES)!
And all in all, it was a joy and a pleasure to share a day of celebration with so many lovely friends. Highlights include watercolour painting, board games, teaching a small boy to crochet, and lots of smiley babies underfoot.

What else? Well, a couple of the presents I managed to prise away from her long enough to take pictures of them...I had a very unstressful and lovely day, and can't wait for the rest of the birthday fun over the rest of the weekend and into next week. Her last day of being five, how quickly it has come around...

Baking Day

Thursday is our foodie day, meal planning, baking, that sort of thing. Our veg box comes first thing, and usually puts us in the right frame of mind for cooking something up. This week, well, we got a bit carried away. I decided I may as well try to get done in advance as much of the baking and making as possible for Jenna's party on Saturday. And, well, I did.

Brownies, cornflake cakes, flapjack...Yum!

Another yum, my happiest morning this week was discovering that the bag of lovely locally grown organic rocket leaves were starting to get a bit limp... Happy, because I just had to use them right away.Yum!

I'm going out with my mum later, taking the girls for a swim and then having Martin pick them up so I can stay on at the gym and do a couple of classes (dance and yoga). So I made tea for them in advance - mostly, to be honest, to use up fridge ingredients and make space! The lovely thing about this recipe is that you can throw almost ANYTHING in.

Simple Oven Roast Veggies (for pasta sauce or soup):

Slice tomatoes in half and lay face down on baking tray.
Add on chunks of ANY veg you like, including onion and garlic.
Drizzle with oil.
Roast in medium oven until tomato skins discolour and start to singe.
Leave to cool for a little while until you can handle the veg, then lift the tomato skins off (the fresher the tomatoes the more easily the skins come away, in my experience).
Blend down semi-smooth to use in recipes, or leave whole if you prefer to eat it as it is. :) If making soup, add stock and/or lots of tomato passatta. If using for pasta, add canned chopped tomatoes or a little bit of tomato passatta.And that leaves me with the task of ensuring the birthday cake is ready on time, and all will be well...

Wednesday Washday and Sling Meet

Well Wednesday is supposed to be dedicated to laundry and Montessori activities around here (goes well with the pegging out of washing etc, right?) but after enough clearing and washing to be able to see my kitchen floor, I decided that enough was enough and set off, determined to finally make a sling meet. As it turned out, we got rained on a LOT, so I would only have ended up frustratedly resorting to the dryer if I'd stayed home and finished. Happy little bit of justification... :)

Those of you who have not been to my house will look at this picture and say, "hmm, that floor needs a good cleaning". Anyone who HAS been to my house will say, "WOW! Where on earth has all the laundry gone?!" The thing is, that's where my washing usually lives. It is a kind of laziness (the kitchen is the first room off the garden, and contains the washing machine and dryer) but also a kind of motivational self-blackmail (if the clean washing goes in front of the freezer, I HAVE to move it eventually or I won't be able to cook anything).Sling meet was lovely. Mostly for the friends we met up with, but also for ice lollies, park, picnic, and sling love. :) Rowan took herself off on a little walk on her own, and sat in the middle of the field under a tree. A little dot of red in a sea of green. When I finally went to fetch her, she was sitting just picking up leaves and putting them down again, totally immersed in the experience. I almost didn't disturb her, but I missed her so much after nearly half an hour!
This tree has a spider's web in the middle branches - you'll have to zoom in to see it - but it was just sparkling with the collected raindrops and the bright sun through the leaves... Magical! It had been really hot, so when it started to rain so hard the concrete paths were giving off an eerie mist.

Resources Sharing

So, I have finished one of my recent new-to-me wonderful books. This one, Unschooling: a Lifestyle of Learning. And wow, I have found a lot of food for thought again.

(E-Prime kind of sticks itself in my head, though, so I'm afraid I may struggle to start talking and typing normally again - yeah, sorry to those who do, but I just see yet another "gentle" communication style that just allows lots of people to get needlessly stressed out about an outside-in perfectionism rather than genuinely considering motivation before the visible. For those of you who haven't met it, E Prime omits the verb "to be" and all its permutations. In the case of this book, it sounds sweetly lyrically simple, and I don't find it terribly annoying. Extending it to real life? No thanks.)

Anyway, um, the actual contents of the book. I have really found this non-preachy and positive, and dwelling lots on real life examples of her own family, and I "got" it. Including lots of stuff that felt like little jabby sticks about what I've been neglecting to do and habits I slip back into too easily etc. I thank the author muchly for this. I picked up just the book I needed to read - don't you love when that happens? :)

Today, Jenna wanted to use the computer. So I looked through some of the suggested online resources, and (understanding that many of you conciously avoid technology for various reasons) I found some real gems to share with those whose children do use technology!
Linky Love:
Starfall (learn to read resources)
Poisson Rouge (lots of amazing games of all kinds) Today on this site we did lots of pattern making and matching, some spatial skill games, letter and number recognition, and some French and Chinese!
Totlol (child-safe Youtube interface for a small fee)

So, although I felt very unproductive today (especially given the birthday party we are planning to host on Saturday!) Jenna has been up to a lot of new things. And she read to me all afternoon, since the Starfall stuff so boosted her confidence. *glowy feeling* I know, intellectually, that she may never really feel the need to read to an adult, but right now I am happy to bask in the feeling that she let me in somehow by choosing to do so today.

Much Farther to Go

Running through my head for weeks...And something I needed to read today:

"In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again."
~Barbara Kingsolver (via Daisy Yellow)

Baby

I call her "baby", as an endearment, every day. But oh she is hardly that any more!She is a funny, quirky, lively toddler. Little round belly, skinny bottom, sturdy little legs. HILARIOUS pout when things don't go her way (and a frown that gets blacker and blacker when I can't help but laugh, sweep her up, and kiss her at such times). Curls at the back. Long eyelashes. Chatter that starts the moment her blue eyes open in the morning (and doesn't always stop at night either, another sleep-talker)! And, oh, the cheekiest smile!

The new hoover (debated over but purchased anyway, in despair at ever otherwise having clean floors - or ever having clean floors in either case really) came in a large box which Roo adopted right away. Ah the things that bring them SUCH joy...

The new thing, though, is that talking. Even whole phrases, "where Nenna go?" (or sometimes "where Agan go?") and "where is it?" being the most common. Ba, Bo, Bu, are bag, box, and book respectively. And she signs too, odd words but mostly body language and little made up signs for the in-between bits. Like; gesture gesture POINT "bu", gesture prod "mi mi meep". Translation, pick me up, read this book, give me milk. (Shake head, frown, point, prod, "MI MI MEEP": no, not that side, this one mother!)

The conversations around here, at least with this one very tiny person, are almost always about milk and books. She brings me the same few back over and over, many times a day. Well, I'm not complaining.Rowan's favorite books:
Book of Sleep - Il Sung Na
Goodnight Moon - Margarent Wise Brown
I'll See You in the Morning - Mike Jolley
Listen Listen - Phillis Gershator

An Oasis

In a week of feeling really, mostly, out of my depth, we can make these little pauses, breathing spaces. Seeing Roland was hard, talk turned often to Nadia, and he seemed to find it hard not to have just space to talk to Martin. I felt like a spare part. Which I worked hard at not resenting, and tried to turn to an oportunity to make some memories with the girls.

Morgan borrowing Martin's coat.


Fairy feast, left at the corner where Jenna always leaves an offering for any passing fairies. She told me a bit further along, laughing, "I found a fairy playground, but I slipped in the mud, that's why they have their playground there though - they can just fly over the muddy bits but it puts grown-ups off."As well as all the usual wonders of such a great returned-to-nature habitat, we were impressed to find a large number of poisonous plants that we could identify, too! The children take a great deal of relish in being able to identify plants and their uses, even less helpful uses... We thought these fungi might be edible though, shame we didn't have a book with us to check.Still-fluffy babies.Swan feather fished from one of the flooded gravel pits.More blackberries.Jenna's favorite tree, the majestic and beautiful-in-all-seasons willow outside the visitor centre.

A place to stop, feed the ducks some bags of corn, and pop in to the visitor centre to eat a fantastic local salad (and some free-range egg sandwiches).
It was a wonderful day in the end, but by the end of it we were all very tired, and another night of Rowan wanting mostly comfort and milk and NOT sleep, I was ready to cry. But today turned itself around. I went back to bed when the children got up. I took a walk on my own. I henna'd my hair. I took a bath (on my own) and finished a hot cup of tea and a book (all events unheard of in the normal run of things). I refuelled. :)

Simple home-made goodness

The bigger projects are still awaiting a clean floor (sigh) and a bit more energy. But in the meantime, some more little things that have been Very Very Good about this week. :)

We made a new batch of our totally amazing arnica balm. I don't really measure anything, but it is cocoa butter, mango butter, jojoba oil (a splash), olive wax (a child's handful of pellets), arnica oil (a big splash) and a couple of favorite healing essential oils. This time frankinsence, chamomile and calendula.Jenna made jam out of the blackberries, and apples from our very own tree. :) She also made THE BEST BREAD EVER without weighing or measuring anything. Jealous.This lovely cardigan, Bombay Love, is my first in-one-stretch finished crochet in a while. I've been pulled away from the hooks a little by my rapidly developing knitting skills (eek)!My kitchen has been cleaned top to bottom, and I have been rediscovering my love of cooking. In preparation here, our favorite mediterranean casserole with lots and lots of lemon juice, served with taglietelle. :) I had to prepare about five times this many carrots, because the children kept walking through and pinching them!
And, of course, there is always the stream of art projects with the children. Rain pictures made in a huge thunder storm on Thursday, felt pen drawings held out in the rain for a minute each. :) And my personal favorite project of the week, some paper cutting in the style of Matisse. "Corals" by me."Mountains and The Sunshine" by Jenna."Park" by Morgan.Simple, in the midst of complexities. A middle way, perhaps. Just getting on with the goodness until my feelings catch up. :)

Stuff

In the last couple of weeks, so many things have gone wrong. Broken glasses x7. Broken hoover x1 (what WOULD the Health Visitor say?). Injured back (mine). Lots of minor injured knees and scratches from the cat and so on (all three children in turn have been in tears at the sight of blood this week). Clothes outgrown when there is so little money to go to sorting out more (with the accompanying dilemma of whether to wait and get what we want or buy cheap things now and regret it).

Tempers have been frayed and things have been thrown (by Morgan mostly) and doors have been slammed (by Jenna mostly). A favorite book got torn. A favorite doll got tomato on her and won't come quite clean. A mobile phone got put down the toilet by a certain exploring toddler...

The things that cheer me up are usually relational ones. Happy moments with the children, or even stressful moments in which I know I did the right thing, or spotted an unexpected glimmer of maturity from an unhappy or angry child who would normally have gone on the attack. The exact thing I needed to hear from a friend (in words, or more often not). Then there are the "cosmic" relational moments, joy in where I am, in prayer, in scripture, in understanding something about myself or the people around me.

However there are weeks when I will settle for the joy of a good second hand sale and some parcels through the door. It has been many years since I understood the pull of retail therapy - but let's call this the alternative equivalent.

New fabrics to make clothes for Jenna (Whipstitch on etsy - very speedy delivery and gorgeous fabrics).
Second hand non-matching glasses to replace the broken ones (more than replace, let's face it, but hey - 10p each). A new glass jug as the big one has a chip out of the rim. Some little bowls and non-matching dinner plates and a pair of tap shoes in Jenna's size. :)A book I have wanted for a while - 10p again!
And some gorgeous dresses for Jenna, just her size and just her style.A very naughty friend (you know who you are) replaced the broken mobile phone, too.

Oh yes, some things have gone right. And if life can't totally settle back to normal, at least some of the things that I feel I can do right, are, right now, as right as they can be.