Spring in the air

The snowdrops in the churchyard are in full flower, as we take the narrow alley to the park on a Sunday afternoon.

Tali is pretty tired after Church, and would prefer to go home, but she puts up with nursing outside in the cold so the others can play.

The skies are so BLUE.




Yep, I really feel like Spring is here!

Seven Days

Aha! I have pictures of this week! Though as usual I'm more or less *un*successful at choosing one a day... Still, I'll make up the rules as I go along eh? ;)

Last Sunday on the park after church...

We sometimes get some very funny looks (and even outright panic) from strangers seeing a newborn carried around by siblings... I am so confident that they are trustworthy and that babies are pretty robust little creatures, and I know it's an unusual sight in our culture, but I wish people would panic quietly and not startle the children with it...

Jenna and friends back at the same park on Wednesday before swimming...

Tali on her tummy, trying to propel herself, then pushing up to look at me...

A first meeting with a great-grandma...

Coming back from the last day of the holiday club Jenna went to...

Tali is totally covered in that picture by a teddy bear her great grandma gave us - Jenna just *keeps on* putting it on her, but she just pushes it off with the normal small baby disinterest in anything that isn't a person. (She does love mirrors though; watching her trying to out-beam her own reflection gives me hours of amusement!)

And four sweet girlies late on Saturday night after a trip to see Jenna's friend Jeremy in the pantomime. :)

Another week gone in the blink of an eye!

Now

How often I sit down to write and just don't know where to start. Which stories to include, which days to list off here as typical of my life right now, which pictures. So much is missed out. I could talk about yesterday and how very long it felt - how Morgan and Jenna bickered over every little thing, how they all kept waking Talia just as she got off to sleep, how I shouted and longed for Martin to get home from work.

I could tell about all of the fun days out in the past two weeks. Bowling (Ashleigh treated us) and Cinema (we treated Ashleigh)... The Muppet Movie was AWESOME and Tali actually sat up looking at the screen and at us, grinning and chatting quietly, instead of feeding through it like I expected her to. We've been swimming twice, to the museum again and *still* not got pictures of the new exhibition, and we've taken some lovely walks in the increasingly warm weather. And through all of this, the camera has been a nuisance and stopped communicating with the laptop.

Talia is less and less colicky, which is so soon and I am SO grateful. She is so very sociable, a baby who doesn't like being in the sling unless she's asleep, and actively asks to be passed to people. She beams constantly at everyone, charming checkout assistants and librarians, cooing and grinning and flapping her arms at everyone we meet. She made an elderly gentleman at Derby City Mission cry, incredulous that she could like him "old and broken" as he described himself.

She loves water. She stayed in the pool for almost an hour when we went for a swim two days ago. Little blue hands, yet still beaming away and pulling funny raised-eyebrows faces at the shimmering surface of the water. She was in the bath for an hour this morning, too, nursing a little then letting go to beam at me. I love it when they do that.

And now my observations are cut short, haha. I am needed again. But life is good. :)

Love

Tidy

This is the room I love to be in, love to spend much of my at-home time in. The room some of the most important events of my life have taken place in, even the births of three of my children. It is so bright, so light-filled and busy. It's never going to be the perfect Waldorf home, but it's perfect for us.

But it just *does not* stay like this. (And this is as tidy as it EVER gets. EVER.)

Hoovered twice a day or twice a week, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Likewise with tidying up toys, papers, etc. And I am horrendously bad at putting things away (not as bad as the children, but they have the excuse of being relatively inexperienced with the consequences). I just don't learn.

I put things to one side "to deal with when I have a minute" and before I realise time is passing it's six months later and I'm astounded to realise that YET AGAIN I have a stack of *undated* mixed papers (scrapbooking supplies, blank worksheets, finished schooly stuff, pictures by the children, correspondance) and I have to set about filing it all and have no idea where to begin.

So when our shelf of art supplies and current projects looks like this, it's a big achievement. Next week it won't be recognisable. I'm resigned to the fact that I am neither naturally organised OR tidy. Ah well. I can write a poem, field a billion questions without flagging (much), just about keep up with the laundry, find time for fun stuff, know most of the spells from the Harry Potter books, tell amazing stories, AND I bake fantastic cake. I reckon my kids will survive. ;)

Catch up: Climbing

How can we have not discovered AlterRock before? We only live a couple of streets away! And it's AWESOME! :)

My whole family went, for my mum's birthday, though of all the children only Jenna could climb without a parent first doing a training course. The others didn't mind (and got a little turn at the end anyway, because the instructors made time for them especially).

The disused church building is gorgeous.

As I saw Jenna do this, through my lens, I rushed out a "FEET DOWN NOW!" and thankfully she did. This is NOT what a traversing wall is for...

She is like a little spider, I swear.

We took a list of prices home, and can go again pretty cheaply, so we are really excited to go again. It was a wonderful day.

(And yesterday's whine? Well, I'm not feeling much better to be honest - about colic, toddler night-waking, or my abilities as a mother - but I did clean the heck out of my living room last night before bed and that provided its usual odd kind of solace. I really do believe that it will get better. In fact, I'm clinging on to that like it was the life belt and I a drowning woman.)

She hates me

Or at least, that's what goes through my head in those long evening crying sessions. There are days when it just feels personal. When I think this precious beautiful baby is actually deliberately torturing me. When I feel down to my bones that I am a failure as a mother and am specifically failing to meet those very real very present very pressing needs.

I am tired. Right now. Exhausted. Just two or three really broken nights will do that. Tali wakes up a few times a night and requires me to hold the breast for her to latch on easily (sigh), but that doesn't wake me fully - far far worse is Rowan's night waking.

All week Roo has been waking up in the middle of the night, taken her nappy off, peed in her bed, and screamed hysterically because the urine stings her skin. I have prodded Martin out of bed to put a towel down for her and wash her skin with a wet cloth. Then she cries in his arms for an hour. That length of full-on toddler crying from the next room has me lying there in bed nursing Tali and literally feeling like my brain is going to crawl out of my ears.

Then at about 5am, it starts again. Rowan wakes up, takes herself to the toilet, goes back to bed, realises she is wide awake on her own, and starts howling again. I prod Martin awake.

The disturbance with Roo, every single night, has turned me into a zombie. Martin would sleep through it if allowed by me and Tali ;) but the crying from the next room *always* wakes the baby, and then she feeds, and I lie there hearing crying I can't do a thing for.

The horrible thing is, the more tired I get, the more I find it's Tali who gets the blame. Colic by itself, when I'm getting actual lengths of sleep, well, it's no fun but I can deal with it. When I'm tired it's just the worst torture. I walk up and down, with the baby in my arms, thinking that she's crying on purpose.

Remind me, colic does get better at some point? Doesn't it?

I am so tired. And so tired of feeling helpless, of being powerless to help - the one who is tiny and windy and wildly in pain, the other who is wetting the bed and clingy and red-raw itchy. This, this hard stuff, this is one of the lessons of motherhood. I can work hard to do everything, be so loving, work as a team with so many loving present people (we are blessed to have you all in our lives - my tribe), I can react "perfectly"... and sometimes still nothing will fix it.

(This too shall pass, this too shall pass, this too shall pass...)

Art

Ashleigh and I gave the girls a canvas each and a selection of acrylics and just stood back and watched the chaos ensue. I *love* how different their approaches were. Jenna started with a clear idea of what she wanted, got bored of that, and started just throwing paint at the canvas and making big bold sweeps of colour and texture. Her painting is called An Explosion of Colour. She keeps asking us if we think it's "good" and if we like the name she gave it.

Morgan was slow, meticulous, wanted every bit of canvas coloured. She worked on a small scale, carefully mixing colours and placing a shape here, a shape there. About halfway she saw the "big picture" in what she was doing, and started being more definite about what her picture was "of". Her painting is called Girl and Butterflies. (The girl, in gold, has a red bindhi on her forehead.)

Rowan wanted to mix colours on the canvas, and was very specific about which colours she wanted to use. She got terribly cross with me when I started being motherly and making "helpful" suggestions. She painted energetically and finished quickly. It was then more than tricky to keep her off her sisters' canvasses! Her picture is called Swirls. (She just told me, "Is called Swirls, because I maked swirls, all over, all purple. Lots of swirls.")

Simple things

Library, museum, swimming, the big blocks of time out and about in my week. We have had those. Busy things. High effort things. Logistical nightmares getting everyone safely in and out and all about. Trying on this Mama, and on Daddy too.

But we also have, always, the small, the everday, the little plain simple day-to-day. Friends coming to play. Time just chatting, reading, hanging out together.

Paper dolls.


Simple games with simple toys.


A girl finding a love of reading for the first time.

Time out of doors.


And indoors.


Shop-bought gingerbread from my mum.

Schooly things.

A new coat for Rowan, and red boots, because I could *not* resist them. Yes, that is ANOTHER week when I spent the money set aside to buy jeans that fit me on things the children don't really truly need. But it is so much easier to buy things for them than for me. And it is a fabulous warm waterproof coat.

And this:

Actually, this, this tiny human being, how I feel about her isn't simple or ordinary. When I look at any one of them, the feeling is so big it doesn't deserve trivialising by my poetry and prose.

Snow

It hit us, this week, and we made the most of the short time it was really crisp and thick and white and fluffy. :)





I'm glad we did actually get some snow this year, eventually. Though I'm also *slightly* secretly glad it didn't last too long, because it's so much easier to get about now it's off the pavements and roads... I'm starting to feel ready for it to be properly Spring now! :)

Knitting/Reading

At the library yesterday I found two authors I like, and came home with a big pile of books. :) I read one of the Michelle Paver Chronicles of Ancient Darkness books (awesome) in the afternoon, while Tali did her usual post-town nurse-in thing. :)

So, anyway, that was... um... a whole night ago... so now I'm reading this: Graceling by Kristin Cashore. It's *really* good solid interesting original fantasy. Yay! I have another book by her in my bag, so I'll let you know how that one works out. Happy happy happy!

As you can see, I have also been crocheting stars. I LOVE these, really fast and bright and fun. I'm going to block them and put them on a string to hang somewhere in my rainbow house. :) And then, who knows? I'd like to make a string of granny stars for the small bedroom, a pixie hat for Tali that will take forever because it's ultra-thin merino yarn, a couple of little crochet bags, a granny-square hat in something light and cotton... Too much choice, so little time! Yay, lots more projects and inspiration. :)

These are the things, the little in-between stolen down-time moments, that make me feel like *me*. Not just a wife, mother, breastfeeder, homeschooler, any of my many daily roles... Just me. Reading, crafting, drawing, writing. Happy.

To Town

This is the way we walk to town. The middle two *have* to hold hands along the main road - I have found the only way I can take all of them out on my own is if I insist they either hold on to me or to each other. If they let go, I stand still and refuse to budge until they hold on again! I find town a bit scary and intimidating on my own still, and expect to for years yet.

We play a lot of "stop and go" still as well. They actually ask to play it - and we get such funny looks in town when I call out "stop" and even Rowan freezes in mid step.

Always time for a stop to jump in leaves! And here is where we most often head: to the library. :) The museum have a new gallery too, and another being worked on right now, and it's so exciting to rediscover somewhere so familiar - somewhere we go on average two or three times a month. They have worked so hard to make interesting accessible displays.

And this is what often happens before we head home... A stop at the Yaffle Cafe over the wholefoods shop, for herbal teas and vegan cupcakes. They are so tollerant of the children, it's such a friendly place to stop for a chat and a rest and a hot drink.

These pictures are from our time offline, but could be of just any week - the clothes change, the children's hair is more (or less) brushed, the weather (and coats and shoes) are different sometimes, but this is the same trip we make almost weekly. The years go on, and still we head off to the library. It's unbelievably reassuring that I can still manage it with four, now!