Yarn Along: book love, and hanging on

Oh goodness, well, you know, my level of coherance this week isn't up to deliberately taking pictures of the tiny bits of the many projects that speak to me - or picking just one, in fact.  I posted off another commission, though, and am dyeing more yarn this week.  I'm not really passionate about anything I'm actually working on, it's killing time until something grabs me, or until I get time to do a big gloriously colourful dye session.  I'm looking forwards to starting my next commission though: I've been asked to knit Jupiter.  :)  The yarn is drying as I type.

I *did* start The Night Circus.  I didn't have any knitting that was particularly portable to take to the park.  Once I got past the first three pages, I was hooked, and I devoured half of it in one sitting (and the other half the next day).  It is a beautiful haunting perfection of a book: gothic and playful and bizarre and bitter and addictive and soothing and rich and transporting and clever.

It turned out to be one of those books that I could live in.  And need to re-read straight away.  I adore this book.  It has been a while since I could really rave about something.

I didn't think it would click; the introduction just didn't seem to promise all that much.  Maybe I was in such a funk that nothing *could* click.  I'm not exactly feeling lighter, but I'm functioning again (and reading again, which is quite possibly the same thing where I'm concerned).  I'm so very glad I didn't put this book down before giving it a proper chance.

Weekending: park and pets

Ash came on Saturday, she heard that hubby was working all day so she offered to pay for a taxi to take us all to the arboretum (taxi means I can take masses of bags of stuff and not have to come home because one child is too hot/cold/wet/bored/hungry/thirsty).  I packed towels and swim gear for the water park too.


It was gorgeous all day, sunny and bright and breezy and fresh and SO GREEN.











On Sunday, Tali had been up all night so Martin made the executive decision to let sleeping mamas lie. I didn't wake til 10am, to a suspiciously quiet house.  They were all downstairs watching Mythbusters! Too late for Church, we instead headed for the pet store to get Jenna the promised fishies.  Talia was very suspicious about the Chinchillas...


Then Chad park for the traditional Sunday afternoon play time (and chips from the community cafe).  It was a much greyer day, still bakingly hot most of the time we were out, but heading towards rainy by the early evening.






Talia adores being flung around and put on the play equipment by her siblings.  Her laugh is just perfect.




And Jenna's new pets are safely installed.  Thanks to Ashleigh for the wonderful birthday present (the great big tank!).  They are called Rosemary and Lily.  I don't know why.  The children keep trying to get them to come when called.

Welcome, welcome, to another week.  So many plans and a to-do list that won't stop growing, and hardly any energy to do it all, but we're all still here.  :)

Seven Days of...

Finding the joy...


















1. First blackberries
2. Worksheets and folders
3. What happens when Rowan has stickers
4. What happens when Martin gets up early
5. A little girl in my wedding dress
6. In the pet shop
7. A finished Christmas present
8. Games at breakfast time on the (finally clear) dining table
9. Picnic and park peacefulness

A Very Waldorf Home-y Post

I have been a crazy busy mama this week.  One of my regular solutions to feeling rubbish is to have a good clear-out of accumulated rubbish, sort the house out, make my spaces beautiful and useable.  It's the large-scale equivalent of banging pots and pans about in the kitchen after a row.  Whole Life scale wobbles require Whole House scale chaos.  So I came up with a plan.

You know all those times I've talked about Waldorf Perfect, and how I'm not and not even aiming for it?  Still not.  :)  Still Imperfect.  Still Complicated.  Still the rainbow mad-house overflowing with clothes and books and wellies and art projects.  Still resisting categorisation.

And when Martin came home from work one evening, he found that I'd done this to the hall way:

Yup, I Lazure painted our house.  In rainbow colours.  With murals of angels all up the stairs.  I know.  Believe me, I know.

Husband actually says he loves it.  (He says that after so many years here, the house feels like it's actually OURS!)  But his face was a picture, well, I'm guessing it was a shock...  I can imagine how it looked - rainbow hall, wife sitting on the top step with baby in arms, painting a mural, with paint in her hair (mine, not the baby's).  He's a very tolerant husband.





The Plan also included a whole day of indigo dyeing...  My mum took the three olders out for the day while we did that, though.  See: magic...  Still green...


And now it's blue!


We even dyed the gloves.


If I don't feel exactly cheery, I at least feel tired-in-a-good-way.  I have lovely organic yarn drying on my line, and some neglected areas of the house are clean and tidy and newly painted.  I have new pegs in the hall and the sling storage has been sorted out.  There are fresh flowers in my living room, the dining table is clear, most of the laundry is away, and there is new artwork on the walls.  I feel a little more... empty.  A bit less complicated and messy.


That's not perfect, but it's a good deal better.

Unschooling Stuff

School-y updates from the house of interest-led randomness.  :)  The last week or so has been a weird one for me, somehow late summer triggers something in my children and they clamour for worksheets and new topics to explore, new places to go, new things to try.

Morgan's alphabet book is up to I:


A new interest in Victorian Britain:

Jenna made a lot of Victorian-inspired paper dolls, watched the old version of Oliver Twist, and hunted out books at the library all by herself.  She's still working on a book about Ancient Greece, and my instinct is to push her to go at things "in the right order" and not investigate two different periods of history at the same time "in case it's confusing".  I'm trying to squash down my schooled ideas about what she can and can't do.

She's into Ruby Gloom at the moment, and drew this for her friend:

She sat and wrote a letter too, without me hanging over her, and it's so interesting to how her spelling is coming on.

A couple of days ago Jenna sat at the laptop looking at cell structures (after I made a silly comment about her picture of a cooked breakfast) and when I glanced at the screen she was doing a test at A level and getting about half of the questions right.  I was shocked - not shocked that she got some right, because she's bright, and it was multiple choice - but that she was happily doing an online test at all, given how she usually avoids any possibility of anything that looks like testing!  If you were to try to ask her how to spell CAT she would get upset and confused and refuse to do it, but she writes much more difficult words in her journals *all* the time.

Morgan doing maths:

Morgan is reallly into numbers all of a sudden.  Adding them up, counting in twos, telling me how many there are of different things, patterns.  I ask her to check her answers herself, and don't yet tell her if I get a different answer.  With Jenna I usually do, now, and ask her how she can find out which answer is right.

I have always thought of Morgan as needing far more protection from too much too soon, because she is more inward-looking and has taken much longer to come to things like drawing representational pictures and so on.  Yet here she is, reading, writing, and understanding number processes, at a similar age to when Jenna did those things.  Just... differently.

Fingerprint creatures:


As usual, most of the "educational" things we are doing can be listed under two headings: being out of doors, and reading (a LOT of reading).




At Attenborough Jenna and Morgan were pretending to be Victorian ladies all the way round.  They cracked us up curtseying to all the cyclists.


Last month with Jenna I was reading Anne of Green Gables.  Now we're reading Truckers.  It's awesome being able to share more complex books with her as she gets older.  I'm still not so much reading chapter books to Morgan, but it's on my list of new things to introduce.  Morgan's favourites to bring to me at the moment are still endless Mr Men books.

French board game:


Basically, we are just free range!  Reading, running about, and finding out about things that interest us. And for once, I'm not anxious about the whole process.

Mama's Dress