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.

Ugly

I want to pour out words here about never feeling enough, about sabotaging good healthy friendships with this damn anxiety, about feeling like I'm always making excuses and ought to just "pull myself together"...

And every time I try to shape passages of real, raw, beautiful, healing, it comes out ugly and self pitying and dark.

Honestly things aren't actually all that dark. I'm as safe and supported as I've ever been, home and family are stable and healthy (bar Winter bugs). My mood has been better (I self-inventory, again, and worry that I'm thinking about it too much, again). 

Then, whahey, darkness from nowhere, petty triggers and insufficient sleep. And I lash out and hide, self protective and small, and what USE is it? I don't WANT small and safe. I want whole. I want to be kinder than I feel.

What does one do with this mess of darkness that clings and pushes and chokes?

I want it to be redemptive. I want to pour it into love and I fail at this over and over. I want it to mean something.

Seven Days during which I sort of start to kick anxiety's behind again

1: Doctor Who Club snuggles
2: Cinnamon playdough
3: Blue skies walking to an Into Film showing of Kubo and the Two Strings (following tears and anxiety getting out of the house)
4: Dissecting owl pellets with a friend
5: Knitting, Star Trek, general background adorableness
6: Board game cafe again, as an extra large extended family
7: Fireworks party

We saw friends every day this week, usually several friends a day. There has been much general Getting Out of the House. And it has been a lot of hard work. But after a fantastic and really busy Friday and then a restful evening, I woke up on Saturday feeling full of energy again. Just in time for monkey bread for breakfast at mum's, shopping with dad, and a huge fireworks party.

I do sometimes wonder if I genuinely just need to stop charting the ups and downs of my mental health. Where does noticing a pattern become reinforcing it? But then again, that could be the same old "it's your fault you are this way, you should snap out if it, you deserve to be depressed" that I can't remember ever not flinging at myself in some form. I don't believe my own inner monologue. It's not very reliable.

It's such a relief to wake up not feeling anxious though. To actually want to get out of bed and not think that things will probably be shit and pointless.

Yarn Along - actually casting something on

Lots of reading and not much knitting still but I have cast on a pilot cap for a sweet little toddler without procrastination which is something of a miracle.

Reading: Accidental Saints by Nadia Bolz-Webber which is funny, deep, challenging abd warm. Its theological standpoint (liberal but Lutheran) is somewhat different to mine (sort of Messianic nerdy-studious ultra-liberal Celtic-inspired mishmash), and to the one I grew up with (conservative but Evangelical), so it's interesting to explore. After a couple of years of, to be honest, barely identifying as Christian, I'm reading the Bible again and picking up the kinds of books I think are likely to challenge my views of what the Bible says and what it means to be a follower of Christ.

Aaand also I'm re-reading Hellblazer. Because Constantine.

Some days in which I didn't photograph much, again, but, life.

1. Quick creativity and cooold hands (heating on the blink)
2. New Science workbook
3. Legion

It has been an odd week. Lots of joyful peaceful ordinary. Some sadness. Some weird confusion about my younger kids fighting over workbooks and asking to do handwriting practice everyday and reading aloud to me. What the heck? All good fun though.

*free pixie hat pattern this weekend*

Just a quick note to say I've set my Leafy Pixie Hat pattern as a free gift on Ravelry until Monday night. If you add it to your cart it will show as completely free to download.

It's not much, I just wanted to spread some love because the world seems so horribly broken in ways I just can't do a thing about (and probably frequently participate in, no matter how hard I try to make things better).

Happy knitting, lovelies.

It's still Autumn until my birthday

The cold weather has floored me, a little. Our boiler has stopped working twice now for no real reason and I'm at the wearing-mittens-indoors stage of the year already. My mental health is like a pendulum. I'm sort of trying to ignore it, actually, the general anxiety increase from examining these fluctuations is worse than the unpredictability.

Still, it's Autumn until the end of November, the trees are still colourful, I'm not yet feeling dragged down by the greyness. It's not all that long until my birthday and the start of Advent. I have a good stack of books to read and cinnamon candles and so many more plans before the Christmas season.

I haven't been making very much. My knitting mojo has vanished and I'm just plodding on methodically with orders and not feeling enthused about any of the potential next cast-ons. I did tie some shiny bark leaves to some yarn for the window. This totally counts as crafting, and is sufficient adulting to negate the need to clean the windows. Right?

Seven Days of Very Seasonal Everything

1: Fog and a necklace of raindrops
2: Packing chip skeletons
3: Ugly but delicious toffee apples
4: Hedgehog bread
5: What happens when I say, "We don't really do workbooks!"
6: Undyed, dyed.
7: Fireworks walking, the perks of living in the middle of a council estate

Pumpkin everything and juggling anxieties

Sometimes it's a great week and a dreadful one rolled up together. I'm whiny when I have a cold, and always spend the first two days of my period thinking I'm useless and awful at everything. Add to that a broken boiler and the necessity of repair people in the house? I was a mess. I am still, really.

Anxiety is getting through an appointment and bursting into tears the moment the door closes.

All week the children have wanted to carve their pumpkins and all week the thought of the effort and mess has made me quake. Eventually the thought of the waste got the better of me and I realised the anxiety of NOT having done them would be longer-lived than the anxiety of dealing with it then and there.

Four pumpkins. Toasted seeds. Seed brittle. Pumpkin smoothie, pumpkin soup, and pumpkin curry.

I'd like to say I feel much better now and the anxiety has been kicked back into submission... but no. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week.

At least I feel like a productive emotional mess?

Seven Days of Autumnal nesting type stuff, mainly

1: Board games early in the morning with a fuzzy headed Morgan wearing a Christmas jumper
2: Leaf lanterns
3: Lucy dog, here all week while my mum is in Estonia
4: Art Gallery with friends
5: Making leafman pictures
6: Sneaking out on my own for board games with Ash and Sam
7: Halloween party

Seven Days of flowing beautifully and also of grieving

1: New shoes for Tali
2: Board game cafe
3: Poetry and flapjack
4: Babysitting Joshua
5: Accidental matching Christmas jumpers
6: Giant Orbeez
7: Being sent bedtime pictures from these cuties
8: Goodbye meal with my brother's family (and being asked by my mum to send pictures right after Paul and I have been hiding sobbing in the kitchen!)