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

Nine

Oh, Rowan. Nine times around the sun, and still such a small pixie creature.

This past year has been such a tough one for you. You often retreat into being a cat right now when the world is too frustrating. It's okay to get scared and sad. You aren't broken. You are strong and brave, and kind, and so smart.

We're half way through your extremely elaborate birthday plans now. You couldn't decide which of All The Things you wanted to do most, so because of a home ed group and some tentative plans we already had with Connor you are doing trampolining AND swimming AND rollerskating this year. And getting both sushi and curry, though on different days.

Your favourite things are still sea creatures (or in fact pretty much any animal at all). You really want a rabbit. Or a dog. You like to have your hair stroked when you are sad or tired. Your favourite colour is apparently pale pink (you told me a couple of days ago) but if there is a choice of coloured items you almost always want blue or purple. You love making potions and are really proud of mixing your own salve for your eczema. You have a huge shell collection. You're learning piano, and play scales constantly.

I will sort of miss the eight-year-old-you, though I'm already proud of a delighted by the nine-year-old-you. I am so very much looking forwards to this trip around the sun with you, and more adventures and sparkle.

Thirteen

The ways in which you drive me frantic with worry and frustration are all the same things I deeply admire and respect in you. You've never not been a spark, little wildfire. And now you're almost adult sized and articulate enough to pass for older than your years. There's no taming you, only my attempts at ensuring you think through which consequences you can quite handle. There's no stopping you, only my reminders to look before you leap.

Honestly the next couple of years scare me a bit. If the proof is in the pudding, has my mothering been spent wisely?

You're brave and you know yourself. You're caring. You have boundaries and you know how to stand your ground. You're so filled with passion and wonder and life. I don't want the world to squish you.

Happy birthday, Bean. I hope I can be the person you need for these last precious years of your childhood.

Postcards from hyperemesis land

1: Being patient with a little who wants to play the big kid board games but doesn't want to follow the rules is harder when feeling nauseous
2: Rowan turned eight, somehow
3: Tali overcame her terror of the walls. I only threw up three times at the climbing centre.
4: Attention seeking cat
5: Pumpkin seedlings
6: Museum visit to catch up with cousins
7: Leaving the children behind for a walk along the river
8: And now they all have chicken pox, which is pretty good timing really before Jenna hits her teens and while I'm unable to venture anywhere without another adult thanks to hyperemesis...

Ten

Morgan celebrated ten years yesterday. She has recently grown up so much and looking at her through milestone-primed eyes was a disturbing experience. I mean, look at her! Where have ten years gone?

Ten years ago I wrote her birth story. Nine years ago I secretly wondered if her adorable little elf ears would ever be even. Eight years ago I laughed at her pixie antics. Seven years ago I quaked at the depth of her determination. Six years ago I worried she might never really connect with other children apart from her worshipped older sister. Five years ago I enjoyed taking the slow route with her every time. Four years ago I marveled at how she went from never even having drawn a human-like figure to writing her name on the bathroom wall almost overnight. Three years ago I loved her happy dreamy little bubble. Two years ago I rejoiced with her as she started making real friendships. A year ago I wished fiercely that I could be more, for her, have more hours in my day just for quiet with her.

She's a dreamy little mouse, and she's immovable when she does finally fix on something she wants. She's accommodating and she's stubborn and loud when she has been pushed too far. She's thoughtful and yet cannot ever look where she's going. She's scarily smart and analytical, and she falls over her words (and her own feet). She's like a much younger child in some ways, and yet look how far she has come from a child who seemed always so alone and so unaware of anything outside her bubble!

Her current style is really quite punk, with elements of the floral layers she used to wear so often. Punk with lightness and pastel pink. Hippy with an edge of huge boots and black leather jacket. Her favourite things are prime numbers, red lipstick, board games, tacos, Pentatonix, Lego, and notebooks with plain paper inside.

Little starlight baby born under the Christmas tree, tall and strong and brave and bright.

Seven Days during which I have a birthday and feel sort of lonely and quietly desperate

1: Gradients, because yarn makes things better (always)
2: Changed over Winter decorations in a fit of pique at it being rainy and bitterly cold, having a sick kid on a day I wanted to see people, and generally feeling blue
3: Stacking things
4: Birthday walk
5: The lights in town, photographed by a giddy Jenna
6: Snuggly not-a-baby excited about stickers
7: There's this Christmas fayre we go to every year which I loved as a child and tolerate as an adult. The children adore it, of course. Compensation in the form of vintage tea set.
8: Basically after two huge meltdowns this week (mine) I gave up and we decorated on the first Sunday in Advent. It worked. Prettying things and familiar traditions helped a lot.

I need a calmer week.

Beneath everything this week has been huge painful anxiety about Morgan. She was ill on Monday and better on Tuesday, but continued to refuse any solid food all week. Eventually I told her she had to have a bite of food every hour and her appetite gradually returned. I can't accurately describe the heartbroken sobbing every time I stood over her and insisted she ate something, but goodness, she was so floppy and listless. I'm not yet really able to sort it out into words. And I feel like a failure for coercing her AND for not coercing her sooner. But also so grateful she's perky again and asking for food.

What a week.

Twelve

Twelve years ago a complicated and stressful two days in labour had retreated smoothly like an evening tide, depositing a tiny baby at the strandline and washing gently away leaving my life quietly divided into before and after.

When the last person finally left the room and turned off the lights, I cradled the future skin to skin and began to sing.

The night was deep blue, and perfectly still. The earlier storms that had flooded part of the hospital corridor vanished without a trace. My nineteen year old self, singing in the dark, had not the first idea what the next years of our lives together would be.

Today we celebrated twelve turns around the sun, madly whirling, frequently clueless and stumbling. She's becoming a woman before my eyes, that little strandline storm baby, that little china doll of a girl who is such a bold fearless creative wild climbing creature. She wasn't ever as breakable as I first feared, yet I still very much fear not being good enough, not giving her something she might later need. Do we ever know we didn't mess it all up? Do my parents know I'm broken and whole and happy and anxious and *right where I always wanted to be, even when I didn't know what I wanted at all*?

And today we laughed and cuddled and swam and made home made pizzas - and ate carrot cake just now, at 9pm, by the dim orange light from the kitchen. My heart is still singing, still a happysad song of true love and this is what it looks like, messy and raw and real and hopeful.

This one and I

Probably everyone reading at this point have known this fella here through my writing for many years. He's not very articulate or very tech-inclined, so you've seen from my perspective as we adjust to parenting, heard my words as we hurt each other and come close to splitting up, seen through my eyes his reactions to our losses, and known what I share of our happy, silly, domestic, affectionate, ridiculous lives.

It's his birthday today and all I have to say is this:
Thanks, Martin. You're a good man and a kind one. You make me smile every day, and I'm outrageously grateful for everything. Happy Birthday, love.

Birthdaying: Rowan is seven

I think my head is perpetually stuck at around four years ago. I find it hard to remember that it's actually four and a half years since Talia was born, that Jenna now wears black eyeliner, that Morgan has lilac hair, and that Rowan is not a little chatty toddler following me around asking for "up". But nope, Rowan's seventh birthday arrived and I had that little half-mournful reality check.

The decorations change, but the fact of the birthday breakfast table remains. I almost forgot to set one up for her until she informed me firmly that she wanted pink and purple candles, and "science things". She's forever rearranging these water molecules, which they built a couple of months ago, to show me water vapour, water, ice, and back again.

I have no problem at all with getting a request for my favourite cake as a birthday cake... (Nigella's Easter Nest cake.) All she wanted to do for the day was go to the kitty cafe, which we ruled out on the grounds of it being so very expensive, but then I had an order for some playsilks so...

We also ended up with a meltdown because she wanted to see her best friend and we had somehow managed not to anticipate that. Getting back home involved some frayed tempers and an exhausted birthday child whose dreams hadn't quite perfectly lived up to her high expectations. When we got home it was to a parcel of science toys and a message from her best friend to say we would be welcome to visit, which cheered her right up.

(Yes, that's Morgan with the magnets, because all of the pictures of Rowan came out as one bright rainbow blur!)

Writing this I'm having another moment... Seven! My little thirdborn parcel of excited bounce and sweet empathy! Seven journeys around the sun. Seven years of hugging it out and listening to jokes that don't have a punch line (okay, only four years of that latter). Several years of soft breathy squealing over all animals and small things. Seven years of Rowan.