Seven Days of Very Busy (and Sunny)

1: Sushi
2: Lavender Bunny
3: Newly dyed hair
4: Museum lift awkward loveliness
5: Big and Small beams
6: Park smile
7: Skating
8: Litter picking in the brook

Here Comes the Sun

February and March have been sunshine and snow, adventures, flu, small quiet everyday beauty, and an endless barking cough. When we haven't been snowed in, we've had a series of illnesses that have cancelled most of our plans and disrupted my newfound sense of the world opening up to us again. 

Yet in a lot of ways it has been like a second babymoon. We're glorying in this new tiny sibling, and enjoying quiet crafts in our cosy, comfortable, ridiculously messy, nest. 

Our sapling is a week shy of four months old. Exactly a year ago I was starting to get sick, and thinking it would probably be a short-lived blip. I'm gradually mourning those lost months less. I'm also incredibly, ludicrously grateful for every cuddle with Alder. Every expression, every quirk, every little chat.

Four months has gone in the blink of an eye.

(Titled for Alder's favourite song.)

Another month on

1: Accidentally coordinating outfits.
2: Making paints with berries and flowers.
3: Cat love. (Yes, Morgan is obsessed with those dungarees.)
4: We *could* be making bird feeders. Orrr, the peanut butter is nice for sticky sensory play...
5: Gloop, arts festival with friends.
6: Painting in the Silk Mill.
7: Birthday arcade.
8: Bunny child loves sweetcorn.
9: Gorse, heather, bump.
10: View from the sofa, on another day when I just couldn't.
11: Leaf.

(Still here. Still hanging on by a thread. Martin has had his hernia surgery and is slowly slowly in less pain. I am pretty low on coping, but trying to find the bright moments.)

Sometimes we go outside

1: Cuddles with Roo
2: Ice cream
3: Middle kids ready for a boat trip
4: If she can borrow a baby, she will
5: Park community gardening
6: Very rained-on coffee stop

Fourteen (?) days of this ordinary chaos, projects, and family

1: Living room bubble wrap stomping loveliness
2: Light table sorting and stacking
3: Glue plus little flower sprinkles
4: Lego marble maze
5: Rowan is always climbing things!
6: Mud pie kitchen and loose parts building in the garden (oh thank goodness for this sunshine!)
7: Anniversary Yo Sushi. Thirteen years.
8: Jenna reading everywhere, this week I've rarely seen her without her head in her book
9: Lemon cake (Talia told me very sweetly how much she LOVES baking with me so of course we had to immediately make a cake)
10: A hilltop climb with Ashleigh, a little adventure without the family again
11: Rowan conversing earnestly and politely with a bee! It made her week that it bumped her cheek as it flew away.

I've been horribly ill for most of the last couple of weeks, so we've been quite quiet. Fresh air and sunshine, sitting in the garden, and drinking lots of water, is all helping a bit.