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

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.)

Seven Days of all the usual music, art, and technology

1: Jenna and Tali ukulele session
2: Crayon drawing by Rowan, "Seaside", pocket contents by Talia
3: Pastel drawing by Morgan (I love that she and Rowan have a really similar style right now!) - "Art Gallery"
4: Cat plus piano plus veg box
5: Engineering open day, a Rube Goldberg machine, historical engine running, and lots to do with friends
6: Marble run construction
7: Butterfly paintings (without pants, of course)

Seven Days of mainly creative stuff

1: Knitted blanks waiting to dye
2: Anonymous surprise penguins
3: Spring silks
4: CAD/CAM at the Silk Mill with friends
5: Post-board-game-day dancing in the dark
6: Very Hungry Caterpillar

Seven ish days of adventures and these big kids

1: Morgan, outside the William Morris Gallery in London (weekend road trip including a snowball fight with internet friends, and playing in the rain with a cousin).
2: I've been trying to capture more of the children using technology, because blogworld can reflect an oddly skewed picture of just the prettiest moments (here Jenna is writing fanfiction).
3: Sarcasm face outside the cinema, walking up there to see Moana with a crowd of friends.
4: Morgan is the boat girl. Our friend has a little canal boat and Morgan has gradually learned every task she can, from operating the engine to tying knots, from reblacking the little wood stove to doing the pre-journey checks. She has a lovely calm confidence about her out on the water.

Seven Days of interestingly random happenings

1: Carcassonne with Morgan
2: Slime Happens
3: A luminous sky
4: Apparently this is comfortable when you're four
5: Sometimes they play together marvellously
6: A new stage, here; at ten Morgan is now confident enough (having been reading easy novels for three years on her own) to read aloud!
7: Waiting for Martin to get home, with our little friend A

Nottingham Contemporary, rambling, art day, shattered

We took the train to Nottingham today. Connor wanted to show his dad the exhibits here and I'd promised the children we'd see these ones again before they finished if we could. Five kids, and two mutually supportive adults with anxiety disorders, what could possibly go wrong?

Even an anxious extra adult is a huge help and motivation for me to get up and out and refuse to let the anxiety beat me. Plus a whole day of art? I was enthusiastically on board, even if now at the end of a long busy day I can poke wry fun at myself for thinking it would all totally go to plan.

Pump House, by Michael Beutler, is an interactive series of rooms made from basically junk. It's beautiful, and chaotic, and the children are absolutely in love with the giant weaving they are allowed to walk and play on barefoot. I knew Connor's dad would love this exhibit too, because some of his own artwork is based around similar themes and using the same techniques. It was fun to watch the children in such a huge strange colourful labyrinthine environment again.

The other exhibition showing at the Contemporary right now is Yelena Popova's After Image. Huge abstract canvases with barely discernable shapes in subdued colours. Rowan loved getting close, stepping back, getting close again. Seeing faint shadows make an image and disappear again as perspective changed the contrast. I love the wooden pieces in this gallery. Strange bone-like shapes leaning against the scattered pictures.

There's a room of sound, too. Walking between four speakers to enjoy the shifting tones and voices.

I still had castle tickets from the last Nottingham trip so we thought we'd chance the tired kids on a visit there too. As soon as we got into the building I remembered the Da Vinci exhibition I hadn't been able to see due to melty tired kids! Excitement! First, extended role play in the Robin Hood gallery and some drawing in the big hall.

Rowan and Talia were no longer exactly at their most helpful/happy, and I was starting to think perhaps I'd bitten off more than I could chew. I half-whispered a lecture to one of them about being respectful of other people's work and the folks we were sharing the space with. Sat for a while and gazed up at a beautiful seascape and tried to remember how to breathe deeply and steadily. That's when the children all suddebly went absolutely quiet and focussed, and I exhaled stress and worry and saw the miracle of all five children engaged and peaceably *discussing art with each other*. I almost did a happy dance on my bench, honestly, after an hour of gradually rising blood pressure!

And in the end I did manage another fifteen minutes of peace and cooperation, on top of that magical gallery interlude, to indulge my fangirl fascination. Whining caused an early retreat, and a short but exhausting walk straight back to the train homewards, but oh it was totally worth it.

Totally, totally worth it.