The summer holidays are here and unlike most mums I speak to I look forward to having all my children home for the holidays! We wake up, have breakfast watching cartoons, get dressed, play together, go to local parks. Maybe it's because my children have simple tastes? Maybe its because, unlike me and my siblings as children, my kids seem to actually genuinely like each other! They do squabble, but the fundamentally love playing together and their imagination and kindnesses are what makes each day of the summer holidays a delight! I've even found a way to schedule in some writing time, every morning after they get dressed they have 20 minutes of pen time, where they have to write or draw or colour in for 20 minutes. That gives me 20 minutes to knock out 600 words! Try it yourself- maybe you need 20 minutes to check emails or have some quiet alone time with a cup of tea, whatever you use it for it's an island of you time during the full on summer holidays!

Changing my life

I found myself 31 with 3 children and somehow lost. Let me rewind; I got married, moved 3 times, changed jobs 3 times and had three children in 6 years. Its not surprising that I felt I was lost, because my life had changed. Who I was in my twenties was the kind of person who emigrated on a whim- I literally booked plane tickets during a twenty minute phone conversation about how cool it would be to move to Norway (spoiler alert it was utterly awesome, and to be fair I had lived there before). Then somehow I had impossibly fallen in love, with a man, reproduced with him and ended up in the countryside. The view from my back window stretches out across fields and features cows, nesting waterfowl and various bird life. It is idyllic. But a very far cry from the coffee shops and bakeries and markets and vibrant loveliness of my youth. I felt like my life was not exactly my own. Not just because everything felt so nice, so normal and lovely that it was slightly surreal. But because this was not what I had dreamed. I had been expecting that my life was going to be hipster cool before there reallt were hipster, and a whole lot less straight. So I ticked along in my life, because I was happy and it was more than comfortable, even if it didn’t feel completely like my mine all the time. Then I had 3 week hospital stay. I was pretty sick, not imminent death sick, just pain and frustration and unpleasantness sick. But it helped me a lot. Not just because my health, which had been annoying at a niggle level for years suddenly began to improve exponentially when the cause was finally being treated. And not just because being away from my wonderful husband and our adorable funny perfect children had made me love them even more fiercely, and, to be trite, appreciate them so so much more. No, the most significant way it helped was it made me feel like my life really was my life after all. Which meant that the things that weren’t perfect, the things that bothered me, or made me sad, or frustrated me, they weren’t things I had to live with, they were things that I could change. More than that I had to change them. That was 3 months ago and some of those things have already altered beyond recognition. Some of them are still changing. But I’ve begun and that’s the most important step.

Santa sundays: Book edition

When I read Rivers of London on the Kindle I finished it in one sitting. Then I read it again, then I reluctantly let my husband read it, and then I read it again.  It is one of the best books I'd read in years.  I tell everyone I know who might enjoy it that this is one book they must read.
Smart, genre savvy, with a world populated by characters who are not just straight, white and male- something which is depressingly rare in fantasy, Rivers of London is my kind of book.
The series follows Peter Grant, a police officer and apprentice wizard in his education in the ways of London's other world. Lying somewhere between a police procedural and Terry Pratchett one of the things I liked most about the book was that it took place in a real physical place- much of the books are based in bloomsbury, soho and covent garden a part of London I know well and love.   Unlike many books set in a real place this series depicts it so accurately and the atmosphere and feeling of the district is so right.  No small feat in a fantasy novel.
 I am desperately looking forward to book four, Broken Homes coming out in June.  However if I have to wait til Christmas to get it I think I might cave and buy it myself!

The gym and self image

Today was my eldest child's third birthday.  Husband took the day off, but eldest was in playgroup this morning.  We had a whole morning with much less childcare than usual.  The sun was shinning.

So what did I do- I went and spent an hour at the gym, doing weights and running, rather than mooching into town for a coffee and some adult conversation with my one true love.

When I joined the gym a month ago it would safe to say that I had not seriously exercised in over a decade.  I'd made a few attempts to start running which had petered out after a little while.  But nothing else.  For along time I'd built my identity as someone who didn't exercise 

The truth was I don't like it when I'm not really good at something.  Brilliant in fact.  But I was pretty good at sports in school, on all the teams even.  But! I wasn't the best, so why would I bother?  And I didn't bother at all.

In the ten years that have passed since my secondary education I have gained several dress sizes and a few stone.  Which didn't bother me that much.  My father has become seriously ill with blood pressure and heart issues, which worried me a lot but didn't really motivate me to change anything.

Then I look at my children.  My wonderful children who love to move, who won't stop running and dancing and climbing and find such joy in it.  I thought about the example I wanted to give them as an adult and knew something had to change.

So I've joined the local council gym.  I was nervous about it.  Friends asked me if I was worried about all the "fit" people judging me, about looking stupid.  And I was, a little bit, but mostly I was worried about being bad at it!  I knew I wasn't going to be able to run at first, or lift as much weight as someone else or bend properly, or well anything.

But I went and did it anyway.  And found the pleasure in the endorphins a good workout will give you.  More importantly though I'm not good at it- I was certainly not any good the first time I went!  I've kept going anyway and I'm getting better and better.  Honestly I love it!  Even when my back is bad I want to go, actually want to!

I'm showing myself and my girls that it's ok to fail, to be wrong, that it's good to keep trying and learn to do better and better.  I've been limiting myself to things I can do without failing.  It's a lot healthier and braver to be failing and doing it anyway.

Santa Sundays: Chocolate from Monty Bojangles

It's been such a busy fortnight here that all the blogging I've managed is these santa sunday's posts.  But hopefully I have an exciting week of new posts ahead of me.
This weeks santa sunday is dedicated to chocolates, I'm not the biggest chocolate eater in the world but I love these have converted me from Monty Bojangles

They are absolutely heavenly  I was given a box by a friend as a house warming gift and was blown away by them- how chocolate ought to taste!
If you love them as much as I do- or just want a stack of excellent little gifts for emmergancies around the place then this pack of 8 Bojangles truffles from amazon is an excellent deal- 61p per pack saving on the rrp!  Just don't eat them all at once.

Santa Sundays: Bernard Green

I have a love, a love of linocut.
Linocut is a form of print making made using a sheet of lino, gouged out to form a relief.  And I love them.
So this is the biggest thing I want for Christmas. (Or as a group present for my big number birthday this year...)

Bernard Green: ‘Blue Wave With Gull’

This linocut captures the essence of a place- a place I love so so well.  The coast around newgale beach, the place I go to feel completely relaxed, like a breath of fresh air to my soul.   I love it.  And this picture, the lines of the waves, the colours, the idea of the sand in the foreground is so perfect.  

It is a little on the pricey side, but then the artist Bernard Green passed away in 1998 which obviously contributes to the cost, but it is beautiful and... well I have no justification- it's just gorgeous!

Santa Sundays: Yarn Bowl

So all year long I suggest things for my husband to buy me for Christmas  birthdays  anniversary.

And he usual makes a note then looses it.  So I've decided I'm going to blog the things I'd like for Christmas or to give someone for Christmas once a week.  Of course at the moment I don't think my husband has bothered to read my blog- he might get a surprise when he does.

This week I've chosen these beautiful bowls from Little Wren Pottery on folksy.

Image reproduced from Little Wren Pottery.  All rights theirs.

I have a real thing for hand made ceramics, ever since I did two terms of pottery as an activity during my IB. My own pots were nothing to write home about but it left me with a strong appreciation of work that goes into them.
I like my object d'art to conform to the principles of the arts and craft movement, if not its aesthetic   This bowl certainly complies!

I can just imagine sitting listening to the radio, crocheting with that bowl holding my yarn, bliss!