From Granny and Grandpa, with love

My parents have given each of our children their first teddy bear.  They started the tradition with Isaac; actually, he got two bears, a traditional brown bear and a modern Kaloo bear, now referred to as crocodile bear.  They came to stay with us the day after Isaac was born and drove into town especially to buy his first bear.  So it was just natural that they'd bring a teddy for Anna and Samuel when they arrived.

Isaac's teddy wears a fireman outfit these days and has recently been to school because they're looking at bears this term.  Anna's teddy is supposed to wear a jaunty little necktie but you're more likely to find it around Isaac's neck than teddy's.  Samuel's teddy sits in the corner of his cot and gets chewed on regularly.

I still have my first teddy bear; he's a bit thread-bare now but he sits on the top of my bed and gets mauled occasionally by well-meaning children.  He sat on a bookshelf above my bunkbed at home then moved to university with me.  He has no name but he's so precious to me.  He has always had a place in our bedroom and I think he always will.

I'm glad that my children have their own family heirlooms and I'm looking forward to hearing them tell their stories to their own children one day.

At the start

I feel like this day should be more momentous. Tomorrow you start school; for the next 13 years, God willing, you will be a schoolchild. This is our last day together without a time limit hanging over us. There'll be holidays, of course, but our normal will be school, five days a week.
I hope we've chosen well. Your school seems like an environment where you'll thrive. Your EYFS teacher is exactly what I'd choose if I got to design her just for you. This is the start of a long relationship; unless we move, Anna and Samuel will go through this school too. It's reassuring that the other parents are all so positive about their experience of the school.
If I'm honest, I'm worried about how it will go. I know you're excited and you're looking forward to it. I know you'll walk into the room confidently and enjoy your first days with your class. But you're a 4 year old boy and you're impatient, energetic and impulsive. I want other people to see the kind, clever, independent boy I love so much.

I hope we've loved you enough in the last four years to help you stand firm in the sea you're about to enter. The waves of culture and peer pressure are strong ones and there are hidden currents that can knock you off your feet.



Until now, I've stood between you and the world but tomorrow you're starting a journey of your own. I will be a cheerleader and a coach but it's your life to live. I've said it before, parenthood is a journey in the direction of apart. My main purpose is to enable you to live a life that's more and more independent from my own. I can't fight your battles for you, I just have to trust the One who's always watching over you.



And isn't that what we've always been doing? God gave you to us to be our firstborn, much beloved son. For all the love and care we offer, there's always been a gap we can't fill. My mum repeats an old saying; "you do your best and God does the rest".



Every now and again I catch glimpses of the man you might become. He's strong and independent, kind and loving, funny and sweet. I love you so much, my baby boy. You made me a mother and you make me a better person day-by-day. I'm more patient, more forgiving, more joyful because I have you. I know you're going to have fun tomorrow, I know you're going to fly. It seems like an age since you were my baby, it seems like no time at all.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

In the albums

I haven't blogged about project life for more than a year and I've had a bit of a change of approach in that time.  I'm still completing a single side for each week, highlighting small moments and events from our daily lives.  I subscribed to the Studio Calico Project Life kits for about six months but they didn't quite fit with my style.  More recently, I've been getting the Gossamer Blue Life Pages monthly kits and they're great.  I love that I don't have to search my stash for ages to put co-ordinating supplies together.  The kits have tended to go quite well with each other; there's always something I can carry over to the next month's pages.  Changing up my supplies every 4 or 5 weeks keeps things interesting as well.

These are my pages from May, made with the May Gossamer Blue kit.  I love the bright colours and the little stickers.  One of the things I like most about the kits is that they also come with a free co-ordinating printable, full of small icons, labels and journalling blocks.

A lovely weekend at my parents' home, celebrating my Dad's 60th birthday.  For special occasions such as this, I usually include an insert for extra photos and stories.  This combination of single sided weeks and occasional inserts works really well for me, capturing the memories I don't want to forget without producing mountains of albums every year.

Another insert to capture our first overnight camping trip with the children and our new (inflatable) tent!

I'm storing all my regular pages alongside my project life spreads in one set of albums for each year.  I just add the regular pages in roughly the right places chronologically.  It's a nice way to highlight special photos or add some more details for holidays or events that have multiple pictures.

For the love of giving

I got my first blanket commission a couple of months ago; a friend asked me to make a blanket like Samuel's to co-ordinate with her friends' nursery.  They chose the Snoozie Safari collection from Mothercare so after a quick reccie, I selected these colours of Stylecraft Special DK;

I used the dark green in the end, it just seemed to go better when I went to Mothercare to check out the collection in real life.  I tend to make these squares in stages; all the middles first, then the second round, then the third and finally the white outside rounds.  It's easier to ensure I'm getting a mix and balance of colours in the squares.

I completed twenty-five squares and joined them into a blanket using Little Tin Bird's technique.  I'm not a fan of square blankets, they seem to be less useful to me so I added another two rows (or ten squares) to oblong it out a bit.  Joining these squares is quite a quick process and very satisfying.

After joining, I added a round of white double crochet and then three rounds in half double crochet in saffron, meadow and lipstick.  It looks lovely and feels so squishy now it's all done.  And here it is all parcelled up, ready to go to its new home.

In the three month bubble

My brain is finally starting to come out of its postpartum fog.  The first clue was when I started thinking about next week's meal plan while still planning this week's.  It's difficult to understand the psychological and cognitive changes that happen after having a baby.  Almost everyone is familiar with the physical and emotional consequences of such a massive, life-changing event but the effects on your mind and thinking aren't quite as obvious.  It's easy to think that you ought to be able to get back to a normal level of functioning relatively quickly but after having three babies, I've realised that it takes me about three months to start to rejoin the world.

Initially following the arrival of a new baby, I feel like I've crawled into a little hole.  It's a cosy, comfy little hole, full of cushions and knitted blankets.  I can watch the world passing by up above but I don't quite feel part of it, a sort of dream-like quality.  Getting to know the new arrival and remolding our life around them takes a lot of time and energy.  Not to mention the tiredness that comes from sleep-deprivation and recovering from the physical exertion of delivery (however you deliver, it's still a massive undertaking; a Caesarean is a major abdominal operation).  Your hormones are raging, causing all sorts of emotional upset.  Plus your life has changed indescribably, whether it's your first baby or your third (I can't talk from personal experience past three, but I can imagine).  Add to that the change in your relationship with your partner, who's also trying to adjust to the baby, and helping any other children to integrate and accept the new addition, and you can start to understand the emotional toll.  Is it any wonder that your plate feels full by this point?!

After the first three months, I start to become comfortable psychologically venturing out of the house.  You might have seen my physical being out and about but I wouldn't want to guarantee that my brain was present too!  The cognitive difficulties still persist though.  This is just selection of the issues that I'm still encountering, more than six months after the birth of my third child;

• Vocabulary - I just cannot find the words these days.  When I was going back to work after Isaac, I was really concerned that I wouldn't be able to remember the word in an emergency.  As it happened, I didn't struggle at all.  I couldn't remember the word for the "cold cupboard" in the kitchen but I never had that problem at work, go figure!
• Names - I think this might be a side effect of having so many children but I can't keep them straight anymore.  I owe my mum an apology for all the times I complained about being called by the cat's name growing up!
• Forward planning - seeing to the end of the week is getting easier, starting to plan for next week... well that's another matter.
• Complex thinking - actually formulating something with more than one stage in my head?  Yeah right!  Give me twice as long to think about it!!
• Distractions - I'm starting to think about getting my hearing checked because if there's more than one conversation going on at once around me, I just can't concentrate.  I can't multi-task, I have to focus solely on what I'm doing, so don't you dare ask me a question while I'm trying to put a vest on a wriggling baby!
• Slow change - you want to move on in our conversation?  Change the subject to something else?  Give me another couple of minutes, announce the change, give it another couple of minutes and then I might be ready to talk about something else.

Things do get better; like I said, I'm moving out of the fog these days.  I have a few ideas of ways to cope and keep functioning during this time.

• First, and this is the hardest step I think, take it easy.  Be kind to yourself.  Recognise that you've been through a lot (pregnancy is no picnic, let alone labour and delivery) and are still going through a lot.  Think about what you would tell a friend in these same circumstances and then tell yourself the same.  Far too often we look around us at how everyone else is managing their perfect lives with their perfect children and feel inferior.  The answer seems to be to just try harder, work harder, be more when actually there are seasons in life that require rest and recuperation.  Enjoy the first months with a new baby, you'll never get them back.  I promise you that the only person judging you is you, everyone else is too busy cooing at the baby!
• Write it down, don't expect your brain to be able to hold on to all the important things whizzing round in there these days.  So lists and calendars are your friend, with the added bonus that you can buy a pretty notebook to keep those lists in!
• Don't underestimate the importance of routines.  When you do something in the same way on a regular basis, you develop a sort of muscle memory and you don't need to engage the thinking bit of your brain in quite the same way.  Think of it as a rest for your brain.  It's like driving or playing an instrument; when you first start, you have to think about every individual action (mirror, signal, manoeuvre) but as time goes on, they get grouped together into action sets (turn the corner) and require less thought.  Doing the same thing at the same time each week, e.g. every Monday I go grocery shopping, reduces the decision-making element of the action, making it less of a challenge.
• Don't be afraid to ask for help from those around you.  And if someone offers to do something, at least think about it before you automatically say no.  Maybe an hour off while someone else walks your older children to the park and back will be the difference between sanity and the other thing.
• Decide what's important to you and stop trying to do it all.  I do not clean.  Literally, I've said this before, I vacuum when my carpet is crunchy, I clean my mirrors when I can't see myself in them anymore.  It just doesn't bother me that much, I have better things to do with my time.  It is impossible to do everything you need to, everything you think you ought to and everything you want to in every day.  You'll only exhaust yourself trying.