Bits and pieces

As you have come to expect from me, complete with too much punctuation due to general enthusiasm. ;)

No, I haven't managed to sort out the pictures from our weekend away yet. It was glorious, bitterly cold, wet, sleepless, full of sharing and joy and naked babies and breastfeeding and common room chaos and giant wooden brick towers.

We also got to visit Ashleigh in Bristol on the way home (so exciting to finally see where you live!) and have some lunch together. And borrow dry socks and shoes.

On the way home I started shaking uncontrollably. I am always too hot and can't travel in cars without the windows down, yet I was still freezing with all the heaters on and windows up. I was swimming with visions and bright lights and I have never ever felt so ill. I had a moment or two of thinking I was actually dying. (Sometimes I think my five year old is dramatic. She has nothing on me in a crisis, in spite of me always having been so careful not to panic her.)

It took nearly two days to stop shaking and to feel like I can be up and about without danger of falling over. I've had minor versions of the dizziness and feeling hot and cold simply from lack of sleep, but I just can't believe all of this was just from three nights of less than two hours total rest... It couldn't be, could it?

By the way, if you're all putting two and two together and coming up with five, I'm not. I tested. I'm really not. But for a moment, feeling sick and panicky and dizzy, I thought I might be. Having another baby once more feels more like a when than an if, but asides from planning a longer wait this time I can only hope and pray that I really don't have to do hyperemesis again in the same unhappy fashion.

I did brave falling down (we can count it a success since Martin wore the smallest pickle without her complaint at lack of milk, and I sat down before falling down at several junctures) to see some Shakespeare yesterday.

A Tempest, performed in child friendly yet non-patronising style by the Krazy Kat Theater Company. The whole set, all of the technical stuff, the very physical style and beautiful unaccompanied singing... Wow. It's such a joy to share something I love so much with my daughters and see it growing in them and filling their imaginations with possibility and colour. All of it was also BSL interpreted, though that sells it short, it was more BSL *integrated* as the cast either signed all of their lines very naturally as they spoke them, or another signed beside them if hands were required for props (or to interpret for Ariel who variously appeared as a spangly bundle of silvery blue playsilks or a series of differently sized and animated puppets). It was amazing in every possible way, and the baby was spellbound. She wouldn't even nurse, the stage was just too interesting to risk a momentary glance back at Mumma.

Back at our nest we are feeling pretty contented. It's good to call somewhere home, especially somewhere where the rug is purple again for the first time in years and the toys are tidied away at the end of each day for the first time, well, ever! This is my current homemaker energy rush (don't be to scared, they never last long enough to be a nuisance). There are so many adventures to be found, places to rediscover even after only a weekend. I feel so alive today, after days of sleeping and shaking and never being warm!

At home I also have a little mite who is definitely now of the cruising kind. Not even seven months old. I'm scared. I say that a lot, even though I love the toddler stage. It seems so soon to bid farewell to even the tiniest bit of her babyhood, and now that I come to write that I feel the first tinge of sadness. There is nothing truly lasting about any of this; excepting only love.