Breath of Spring

I'm likely to ramble terribly today.  Somehow there seems a lot to say, and I can't grasp hold of enough logic to order it into something meaningful and considered.


Perhaps it's the warm sleepy weight of baby, heavy in my arms, slowing me to pace myself to her heartbeat and soft breaths on my shoulder.  She is so very present, and once I slow myself to tune in to her the words come slowly.  This is the trick of mothering babies, I think, to accept and welcome the shift to their rhythm.

The older girls and I have been stuck in a rut lately, doing almost nothing in the afternoons and finding it increasingly boring and frustrating.  It isn't that there aren't lots of things to do, just that we've all been tired and screen time has taken over as the easy option.  I asked them all a couple of days ago whether they aren't finding the afternoons drag on rather at the moment, and whether they would like to do more together when Daddy is at work.  They leapt at my question with a torrent of ideas and enthusiasm.  Can we do this, can we make that?  It seems to me like they were just waiting for me to look up from my work for long enough to ask them what they wanted help with.  I felt a moment of guilt before jumping right in to their enthusiasm.


We made a plan - starting over with Spring Circle time and making space for project time in the afternoon.  The list of things they want to try and make and do and explore runs to two pages!  We've made a good start, this week.


Rowan is totally sea-life obsessed, and learning a rapidly increasing level of detail about her beloved oceans. She has been talking endlessly about orcas this week.  Although she does insist that seals eat them, rather than the other way around...  (The model is a dolphin, by the way!)




It might be just my tortured imagination, but I *think* the baby may be sleeping better since we started having more interesting afternoons...  Yeah, probably just wishful thinking.  She has been waking at silly o'clock in the morning for months.  I'm not a morning person.


Today, we just had to get outside for a couple of hours.  The sun has been beaming down, gloriously warm and comforting.  The breeze is fresh, and smells deliciously of Spring.  All day I have been almost humming to myself with it - Spring is almost here!  The promise of it is on the wind, and in the warm baked brick of the neighbourhood, and the cool fresh aliveness of the brown soil.


Morgan found our first daisy of the year.  :)






The girls all have such an affection for this little patch of park that is our nearest green space.  It isn't much.  It's often grey and bare, and so much of the nature in it has been pruned and weed sprayed and boarded.  The colourful graffiti is around the court where the bigger ones learned to cycle.

As if to prove to me that I'd better enjoy holding her close while she still allows it, this little Tali person walked there and back, and ran around on the park squeaking her disgruntlement that her sisters run too fast for her to keep up.  Oh she has grown so fast...


And already, we are heading into the Spring warmth and rebirth of this year!