time travel via the classic medium of blog posts

Phase One, the neurotic wedding/lifestyle blogging as a distraction from debilitating pain, fear and anxiety era. 

Leaving and Forgetting, Joshua Jensen-Nagle

2008 

Spiraling depression, anxiety, despair. Much hyperventilating and sobbing. A lot of shouting, impulsive creation of an unforeseeably tenacious blog. 

Some (fucking loads of) wedding planning. Quite a few meltdowns. Quite a lot of utterly pointless thinking about dresses and shoes and flowers and veils, EVEN AFTER I WAS MARRIED, potentially as distraction from the aforementioned anxiety and despair.  

A business started, a slow crawl out of chronic illness towards gainful employment, aided by millions of hours spent on wedding blogs (IT'S BUSINESS RESEARCH, HONESTLY).  

Rabbits. 

Eerily prescient dreams of a future that would take a decade to even begin to realise.  

Global excitement for the future of American politics (remember that? HA!)

Much time spent lusting after and posting about objects, things, stuff. So much time, so much stuff. 

Oh and a wedding. Which I remember writing a LOT about. I don't remember then deleting all of those posts but there you have it. 

2009 

A year of waiting. Of pointless medical appointments and of throwing ourselves into making a home and a life of just the two of us while getting through a frankly brutal medical regime of management of chronic pain and infertility. Fun! 

The confidence to try (and succeed) to sell my work.

Obsessing over our fucking wedding, STILL, and an eventual coming to peace with the whole thing.    

Gifts of magic through my letter box. 

A business blooming and flourishing, an invitation to New York City to photograph the wedding of maybe my single biggest internet crush. No biggie.

A devastating loss. 

This post. 

Waiting. 

2010

OOOH BOY. That was a year.  

It started with further distractions, cakes eaten, swaplets swapped (blogging magic happening all over). Then shit all got A BIT MUCH.

Probably because I'd been injecting hormones into myself and had my eggs harvested (not at all a horrifying terminology) and then after a little marinating had them put back in while a nurse held my hand and sang Susan Boyle (remember her?) at me and then I had TWO BABIES in me. It was a lot.  

Meanwhile the universe felt that a volcanic eruption might help things along. It didn't. But the trip to New York was rather nice, when we finally got there. 

The year progressed, I photographed a lot of weddings while pregnant. People stared.  

I finally started writing about the pain of getting to pregnant. It felt good. The comments still make me cry. (parts 2 and 3 of my endometriosis story)

The look of life changed. I had FEARS.  

My dear friend wrote probably the three most useful posts that have ever appeared here. 1, 2, 3.  

I gave birth twice in one morning. It was intense. Things didn't chill for quite a while. 

And that was that for the year everything changed.

ten years

Gris foncé 8 (2015), Katrine de Blauwer

Ten years ago I started a blog, it was this one. (I think that was clear but if ten years on the internet has taught me anything then it is to s.p.e.l.l. s.h.i.t. o.u.t.)  

This blog is ten years old, that is a decade people, a decade  (spelling it out.)  

There are some of you how have been here with me since the beginning (THANK YOU, and also probably don't read that post, it's written in the third person and is about wedding planning and refers to myself and Nye as 'the girl and the boy', as if any one of those three wasn't bad enough) and others who have joined me along the way, people who have seen this space's progression from neurotic wedding planning through pained wedding reflection, a dalliance with 'lifestyle blogging' as a distraction from the crippling misery of infertility and IVF, twin pregnancy and early parenthood and then as close to nothing as a blog can get and still be considered alive, just.  

That anyone has stuck with me and my haphazard ramblings for a decade is never not incredible to me.

That one small act of lonely desperation, that one 'create blog' click in the early hours of a sleepless February morning changed my life. From the very first it brought me purpose and community and distraction, it gave a place to hide from my terrors and a space in which to build a vision of myself and my future that might have felt entirely unachievable but was more fun to stare into than the abyss of hopelessness I was teetering above. 

It didn't take long before the blessings it sent me became increasingly tangible - emails of appreciation and encouragement, words of understanding and solidarity, links to things that would make me laugh, gifts of books and prints and beautiful things through my letterbox, friendship, support for our fledgling wedding photography business, actual work in exchange for actual money, actual money in exchange for my actual photography, requests to travel to far off places,  friendship. It is not an exaggeration to say that this blog, that the people who read it changed my life, changed my world. Without it I'm sure I would have found my way out of the fear and lonliness of chronic illness eventually, I don't doubt that we would have made something of our wedding photography business, but I struggle to believe for a moment that it would have been something so profoundly empowering and rich and nourishing , a foundation upon which to build a life. 

I have spent bloody ages considering how to mark this anniversary here. Over the last couple of  years I have struggled to see beyond the dwindling of this space, the slow decline (I lie, it wasn't slow) in enthusiasm and energy that I had for it. It has been hard to feel anything other than disappointment in myself for my inability to maintain this blog as it once was. But as my thoughts recently hovered over the switch that would end the life support that I've imagined keeping the site alive it occurred to me that I didn't have to define this place by its past, by its 'heyday', that what it is now doesn't have to feel like a disappointment, that instead of wishing for an output I can never achieve I can embrace the pace, the quietude, the slow and gentle cataloging of a life being lived (as with blogging so it is with life).

Because as I've read back over the blog in the last few days - reminiscing, cringing, welling up - it's the testimony to the last ten years of my life that I have found myself unexpectedly appreciative of. This space has borne witness to a decade's worth of dreams, despair, changes and growth, cataloged a third of my life (I really should back this shit up) and that feels kind of amazing. 

Over the next few days I'm going to do a little time traveling, a little reflecting, on what has been and gone, what has stayed and grown, through the classic medium of blog posts revisited. I apologise in advance. 

Five, Ella.

A grin of tiny pearly teeth and a glint of pure, wild mischief flash from behind her overgrown golden fringe and she leaps straight at me. From the ground she is in my arms in the time it takes me to open my mouth, my 'what are you doing?' never getting it's chance to taste air. Her legs snap around my waist like magnets and with her arms waving in the air like a hippy at Glastonbury she is in my arms, my spider monkey - as light and as easy as her namesake. 

If her sister did that to me (and she's tried) she would knock me to the ground, give me a black eye and put my back out for a week. Ella is only a kilo lighter, has only ever been at most, a kilo lighter and yet she carries herself with such ease, flying just above the surface of the waves, that she feels little heavier now than she ever has. In my lap she settles in, curled like a cat and no more obtrusive. Sometimes an arm or leg goes awry and I get punched in the face but it's not clumsiness, more a case of limbs too long to control, jumps a little too ambitious to pull off, momentary forgetfulness that she can not in fact fly and I am not in fact an immovable object.

'You're not a snuggler like your sister' people tell her, but they've got it wrong, she is, she just takes her time to suss out who to trust, her need for an audience is minimal to non-existent in comparison to her twin's.
When I lie on my side to watch telly, with my knees bent up towards my hips – the only way I can fit onto our little two person sofa – she climbs into the triangular gap between my legs and the back cushions, resting her head on my bum and tucking her knees up to her chest. We fit together perfectly, one large and one little piece of a jigsaw, a jigsaw that builds the picture that is our family. The dog tries to climb in too, she doesn't fit but somehow Ella squeezes her in, wrapping her arms around her neck and loving her fiercely. 

Running off ahead on a still and perfectly crisp winter morning, the sun backlights her and with all of her height she looks both tiny, too small to be allowed out of my reach, and like that's it, she's off, see you later. Today she needs space, tomorrow perhaps she won't let you out of her sight. My independent, curious, ephemeral wanderer. 

Not that she isn't also batshit crazy at times, point a camera at her and her eyes will cross, her tongue will stick out at a wonky angle and an inhuman noise will emanate from her contorted face - it's not cool, whatever she might think. When the music comes on she dances like a wild thing, spinning moves from a break-dancing video we watched once, eighteen months ago. Her memory is a steel trap - when we need reminded where we were when that thing happened, when need the dog's lead un-lost or the way out of the woods pointed we ask Ella, she knows where shit is. Of course sometimes she gets confused, she is only five, although it's easy to forget - she was born older, with a look in her eye and a quiet fire burning steadily in her soul. 

I can't help but wonder what age she will reach when the world feels more comfortable to her, what age it is that her heart was born. Will she have to wait until she's thirty like I did, for her life to catch up with her soul? We can only wait and see and that - watching this spider monkey grow into and then beyond her world - is a prospect that thrills me.

A story about a story.

The brief was to take photos that told a story, a narrative. The thought of taking any photos that didn't tell a story was ridiculous to me but I played along anyway, there were plenty of people at art school who thought narrative was over.

The visiting lecturer was young and female which instantly lent her opinions more value to me than those of the old men who held our captive audience each week, imparting their Great World View under the guise of teaching.

She showed us a range of work by established artists exploring storytelling, both traditional and experimental. One set of slides that jumped across the projector was work by a Japanese photographer, black and white photos taken from a bus window as she traveled home from the city to see her family. I don't remember the specifics of her situation but it was moving, emotional, artist's statementy. I do remember the pictures though; deep blacks and murky greys, reflections on the dirty windows of public transport, fragments of other passengers creeping into the frame, flocks of jet black crows scattering over fields. Crows were a recurring theme, she saw them a lot as she traveled home and they seemed to symbolise something ominous, heavy. (When have crows ever symbolised anything else?)

The tutor went round the class asking us what our thoughts on the project were, where our ideas were going. The Japanese photographer has inspired me, photos through car windows having stirred something in me ever since the opening scene of Lost in Translation. The layers and the distractions, your eye flirting between subject, glass, reflections, questioning which layer exactly is he subject.

When the tutor reached me I mentioned that I was interested in the Japanese piece, that I frequently traveled between Edinburgh and Glasgow and was inspired to tell the story of that journey in black and white, through moving windows. 

'Well' she snorted without even taking a pause, 'that was a very emotional journey, very meaningful' as if that fact might have escaped my notice. 'I don't think your journey would quite have the same impact. Ok, who's next.'

Embarrassed, I turned back to my sketchbook, crossed out 'bus journey' and started scanning the other notes I had made for new ideas. I don't remember what I handed in for that project but I do remember the feeling of being dismissed out of hand, as a silly little girl who imagined herself more interesting than she really was. I also don't remember when my embarrassment turned into anger, when I started bristling at the power that that woman had held to encourage me, to listen to my ideas and help me tell my story. She didn't know why I was travelling between the two cities, she didn't know because she didn't even bloody ask. I could have had a dying parent, a secret child, a desperate unrealised love that had turned my heart to an over filled balloon of quivering liquid and my every move through this world a hallucination of watery sun straining though threatening clouds out of which menaces of crows burst . . . theoretically speaking. Ahem.

I don't feel ashamed that I let myself be dismissed and I don't berate myself for not thinking 'well fuck you' and doing that project anyway, I was 18, and I was a student in the cult of the mythical Artist Tutor, and it was that woman's job to teach and encourage me and she totally, utterly failed. Sometimes the lesson people need to hear isn't 'stand up for yourself, take no shit, ignore the haters', it's 'don't be a dick'. Listening to people's stories isn't hard, it just takes a little bit of time. Almost everyone is more interesting than they first seem (some people are less interesting than they first seem, you can usually find those people at art school.)

These photos are not the art project I never made, that can't be recreated and these weren't taken under the influence of any great well of emotion (they were taken under the influence of boredom and a couple of those tiny bottles of supermarket wine), but every time I take a photo through a moving window I remember this story and today I wanted to share it with you. Thanks for listening. 

The melancholy and promise of April in the garden.

Things are looking up in the garden. For a while there it was all brown and grey and really quite grim - not just in our garden, everywhere - and I was beginning to wonder (as I do every year) quite why we are living in the god awful country. Although I do try to remember that we used to have it worse. At least here while it was brown and grey and wet and grim I was not also continuously freezing my tits off. We've been back to Scotland a couple of times over the winter and I spent almost all of the first trip with a boob in each hand, in a desperate effort to keep my both my hands and my boobs from freezing and dying right there and then. The second time I took three jumpers with me and I wore them all. 

It was a ridiculously mild winter here. There was no frost, none, which apparently means that this will be The Year of the Slug. The little fuckers are already decimating our lettuces and our courgettes. The surface reason for us not having done anything about them is that we're 'organic gardeners (man). We don't believe in like, chemicals and shit.' But the truth (as it so often is) is that we are crippled by indecision. There are too many products and techniques and opinions out there. So I know! Let's not do anything and see what happens! (Our plants will get eaten, I have a feeling that is what will happen.) We have a flock of magpies though and I watch them from the kitchen window, hopping up onto the wall with gigantic snails clutched in their beaks and I smile. I can't bring myself to kill snails but I'm more than happy to watch the local bird life do it. 

We are still landscaping the garden and the design is ever-evolving. We laid out the initial shapes before we had even moved south of the border, measuring the garden using google earth and a ruler, and although we have stuck with the general shapes filling in the blanks has been a continuous process. What we thought was going to be a lawn is about to become a deck with a structure floating above it, what we thought would be the deck is going to become a secluded nook, boxed in with bamboos (Sophie called it a 'shagging corner'. Glaswegian.) 

The state of flux and the continuously shifting plans hurt my brain but the garden is teaching me to have patience, to trust that what looks like a shitty piece of rocky earth right now is going to look like the garden of Eden in a couple of months, with or without my plans. I feel like even if you have no interest in gardening, if plants bore you and mud makes you nervous, you should probably try to grow stuff for a year or two just to teach you All The Lessons about patience and faith and the triumph of life over death and the inevitability that some of your much loved work is going to get eaten by maleficent shell-less terrestrial gatropod molluscs, but more will survive. 

When we started planning our garden the initial conversation about our hopes and plans went something like this:

Nye: I want to grow loads and loads of fruit. I want apples and plums and cherries. Loads of them
Me: (with somewhat less conviction) But flowers, I want to grow flowers too. I like flowers.
Nye: We need fruit. 

He bought fruit trees, so many fruit trees, and they're bloody everywhere. From the three cherry trees we are set to have six cherries this year. Six. Which is five more than we had last year and six more than we managed to eat last year.  The apple trees are doing magnificently though and the blossom was utterly, unbearably beautiful and probably what heaven smells like. Before we started gardening I did not know that flowers turn into fruit. Let me lay it out for you; Flowers (the pretty things with the petals and the fluffy yellow bits in the middle) turn into Fruit (the edible stuff that you get in plastic bags at the supermarket and that makes both snack and pudding.) The petals fall off the flowers and the whole thing sort of turns inside out before swelling rapidly into apple, pear, plum etc. I didn't know. I had never really considered how trees made fruit before I started gardening but if pressed I would have offered up something about maybe nubbins? Tree nubbins? That swell? 

We're gradually learning about the plants we have bought that aren't fruit trees (there's not a lot of learning to be done about fruit trees if you've been researching them since before you started looking for a house with a garde.) and this year feels like less of a shot in the dark than last. We have been going to Columbia Road Flower Market, which is by far the cheapest place in London to buy plants, and coming back with some things we know and some things we don't. 

I bought six pots of the Muscari below (N: 'what's that blue thing?' C: 'Either muscari or grape hyacinth'. So much time lost to confusion over the many different names that exist for the same bloody plants) for £2, because they were about to 'go over' (die back for the year). But they should come back next year and there should be about twice as many of them as I bought.

The eucayptus tree was another Columbia Road bargain - £5 and it has the most beautiful silver foliage and delicate sweet little buds of fresh growth. Sadly the guy who sold it to Nye was a lying git and it does not in fact stop growing at 8ft; given half the chance it would keep growing to around 50, dwarfing our house and shading in our garden and potentially breaking through the foundations of ours and the neighbours' properties. Ha! What a jolly joke you played on us Mr Columbia Road! Luckily we know of this thing called google, so when we found out we quickly contained the beast in a pot and it may or may not grow much bigger at all without access to the ground but at least we buy some time while we learn about pruning it. Or killing it, if need be. 

And then there are bulbs. We are not good at planting bulbs. 

The thing about bulbs is that they need to be planted in the winter if you want them to flower in the spring and you don't have to have been reading here long to know that I am Not Good at winter. The winter is cold and wet and dark and I generally don't want to be awake let alone outdoors, so getting planting done really is asking too much. Which is a shame because spring flowers are an almost perfect antidote to SAD, a blazing reminder that winter is over and spring is coming and that you survived another hibernation. It's just not much good if you're too bloody depressed to plant them. 

One red tulip that I planted last year came back but it was weedy and tiny and a little bit pathetic. That didn't stop me from sitting beside it throughout April, gazing into its petals is if they were the flames of a fire and whispering 'hello my beautiful'. Next year, next year I will plant more. I really will. (I probably won't. Monty Don writes beautifully about seasonal depression and its subsequent affect on bulb planting in his memoir The Jewel Garden. When I switched on Gardener's World and in the second episode he mentioned that he hadn't planted any tulips this year I chuckled to myself and thought 'that's because you were too busy crying and eating cheese, wasn't it my melancholy friend? I was right there with you.')

Tulips are just kind of a ball ache though, aren't they? Gouging holes in icy cold clay that doesn't want to be gouged is tolerable for 5-10 minutes. But in 5-10 minutes you can plant 5-10 bulbs and 5-10 flowers might look nice in a pot but they look a bit pathetic in a 50ft garden. And then the fuckers don't even come back the following year. (According to some gardeners. Others say they do. In our experience they mostly don't, except for the one that did and it came back a quarter of the size.) At some point in March Nye found the one bag of tulip bulbs I had bought in a fit of January enthusiasm, they were growing there and then in a plastic packet in the kitchen. Shrugging and not expecting much planted them in a semi-ritualistic circle around the base of a bamboo pot. To everyone's surprise most of them flowered. Next year I will buy more bulbs, I'm just going to wait until the ground is soft and warm to plant them. 

Clearly from the photos, we managed to do some. Ella and I planted 30 daffodils and 15 alliums, they both felt worth it as they will not only come back next year, they will multiply. That's like free plants. We planted little daffs, the cheapest ones in the garden centre (tête-a -tête, I believe), and I loved them. They're not fancy, they're not big, they're just tiny and yellow and to my surprise each bulb shot out 5-8 flowers. Tiny yellow daffodils with many flowers are Pure Joy. 

Top left is a camelia that we found in a pot behind the shed when we moved in. The shed is gone and the plant looked dead but this year, although the bush is still knee high, it rewarded us for moving it into the light with an abundance of leathery leaves and creamy delicious flowers that could double as roses to the unfamiliar. Next to it is a black sambuca (like the drink!). A darker cousin of the common elderflower, with deep purpley black leaves and lilac plates of tiny flowers. It is currently weighed down with a plague of black aphids which we don't know how to deal with. We have sprayed them with soapy water and they wither and die quite pleasingly but the people on gardening forums who say that the shriveled corpses will act as a deterrent to new infestations are either having a laugh or haven't encountered South London aphids, who are totally nails (innit.)

The fluffy white flower is a pulsatilla, which is a crap name and a fairly inoffensive flower. It's real charm is the seed heads it produces (see next month's installment of Garden Chat, due spring 2015) and beside it is this kind of ugly variegated shrub that is about 12 ft tall and for two weeks a year sprouts tiny purple flowers, the appearance of which has the whole bush buzzing with eager, hungry, recently-awoken bees. 

After the grey of winter the green of April glows, at certain times and on certain plants with the dangerous throb of kryptonite, the cool assurance of jade, the burning acid of a lime slush puppy. 

(Heuchera, Hellebore, Astilbe, Dill -or maybe Fennel. Who can tell? I've taken to thinking of them as Fill and Dennel, because they're both the bloody same aren't they?)

Here we have; 

the rhubarb rock maroon of fresh peony shoots,

the pistachio ice cream flecked with raspberry of Japonica Firelight,

the burnished rust of the smallest, babiest of Chinese Red Birch,

the coal black of our final and most expensive attempt at phylloscatus nigra (which keeps bloody dying. You're not supposed to be able to kill it even under your best efforts. WHY do ours keep biting the dust?) 

Early spring is the time in the greenhouse that I love the most. It is warmer than it is outside but being in there doesn't yet feel like being the bug victim of a 7 year old with a magnifying glass. It smells warm and damp, of that time and place between life and death, where things could go either way . There is still room for a seat, before all of the shelves are filled and the seed trays spill onto the floor. The strawberries - commercial varieties this year, on the advice of a friend who grows fruits the size of your fist that taste like childhood and summer and 10pm sunsets- are waking up, their tiny perfect flowers promising so much, if only you remember to water them this year. The tomatoes are but two-leaved shoots, the sweet peas reaching for the skies. Tiny spiders hatch and crawl over the plants, pollinating the strawberries but not yet big enough to crisscross the doorway with webs at head height that will wrap around your face and make you scream every damn day of the summer. 

The crab apple tree in the neighbouring and abandoned orchard  is drenched, laden with blossom, blossom that by the end of the summer will have lost its petals, turned inside out, swollen into fruits and fallen from the tree into the overgrown grass. We will stand at the upstairs windows staring at the carpet of rotting apples, cursing both the owners of this quarter acre of promise and our own inability to find a way in. 

Things, thoughts.

Hello. It is March. I don't know how that happened. I took these photos in January and February, they're all old old old now. I've written three blog posts this year which is a new low. I blame instagram; no one blogs any more, no one hardly even tweets any more. (That was the most hideous sentence I've ever written, I want you to know that I know that.) 

I started a writing class in the hope that it might prompt me to write more, it didn't. I asked Nye for a film camera for my birthday in the hope that it might prompt me to photograph more, it didn't. It did not help that he bought me a film camera but no film. Remember the Christmases when you would get a battery operated toys but no batteries and there were no shops open that sold batteries on Christmas day, so instead of playing with your new toy you spent a lot of the day picking it up and looking at it from different angles, testing the buttons to see if maybe they would do something anyway, trying hard to look grateful for your new - temporarily useless - toy?

It's okay though, my aim for this year was to do not a lot of anything and while that has only really been a success in regards to writing and taking photos (the very things that I was making space in my life to do more of) everything else feels less pressured when my general philosophy is one of Do Very Little and when the work and the meetings and the family commitments are brief interludes to the eating and the sitting and the listening to the radio. 

I'm gradually settling into the weirdness that is W&P being at pre-school and Nye and I having time to ourselves. We are mostly getting on with business in this new way that means we can both work at the same time and that we have to share an office (THE HORROR) but there is also gardening and lunching and childless trips to ikea and Nye preparing to take part in a week long  mountain bike race in the Alps and me preparing to go to New York all by myself in the Autumn. A year ago both being left alone with W&P for a week or leaving N alone with them would have been unthinkable, now it seems eminently doable. I call that progress. 

W&P love pre-school, P bursts through the door in the morning with her arms spread wide and announces to the room "I'M HERE!", W smiles secretively at the end of the day when I ask her what she's done and says nothing. They adore their teachers, one in particular whom P assures me 'does good look aftering'. 

We are lucky that it has worked out so well, we weren't exactly proactive when it came to choosing an educational establishment. Our technique was thus: search nearest pre-schools on google maps, peer through the fence of the closest, see incredibly beautiful outdoor play area, download application forms, leave application forms sitting on desk for three months, send them in in a panic a few days before the deadline. W&P's first day was the first time we had seen further than the front desk and we were prepared to admit that we'd made a stupid, lazy mistake and to start looking for somewhere new. Amazingly, we didn't need to; laziness, last-minute panic and a total lack of research served us pretty well. (Relief sighed). 

The thing about sending my children somewhere else for half of the week is that I enjoy the other half that I spend with them so much more. Or I do now that they have settled the fuck down. They were really quite horrible for a few weeks there and I was genuinely worried that pre-school had broken them. They went from enjoying each other's company and disappearing to play together for hours a day to fighting (both physically and verbally) from the second they woke up in the morning until the minute I switched the light off in the evening. The moments that they weren't brawling they spent either shitting in their pants or whining 'what are we going to dooooooooooooooooo mummy?' with absolutely nothing but 'go to nursery' deemed by either of them to be an adequate response. 

They seem to have finally settled to the fact that at home no one is willing to give them a bag of flour, a bowl of water and a wooden spoon, or to let them loose with a litre of green paint and 8 feet of paper. They are accepting that home is boring and that that is okay because in a day or two they will get to go back to that magical place where they can do pretty much whatever the hell they want and someone else will clean up after them. 

I'm trying to be better about playing with them, but the thing is; I don't really like playing. (There, I admitted it. Call social services.) I like watching them play but I do not want to play myself; I want to get shit done or do nothing and three year olds (TWO three year olds) are conducive to neither. Yesterday I let them help me fill up seed trays with compost in preparation for sowing. I gave them a couple of teaspoons and a bag of really expensive seed compost and I only snapped 'stop spilling it on the grass' three times in the space of an hour. Yes, it took an hour. Everything takes 16 times longer than it should when you let three year olds help. The rest of that hour I spent saying in the sort of voice that you would use to talk someone off the ledge of a tall building 'slowly, calmly, gently', ostensibly to W&P but I think everyone knew that I was talking to myself. (Apropos).  I find myself appreciating my own mother and the hours that she spent sitting on a bench in the play park or traipsing around the Museum of Scotland behind me. She hated both the play park and the museum but significant portions of my childhood memories take place in one or the other and I don't remember her complaining until I was old enough for the appeal of both to have worn off. Cheers mum. 

As deeply boring as I find 'play', I love spending time with W&P reading and chatting. Those kids crack me up and my mother in law confirms my suspicion that they are in fact significantly funnier than most children. I have no particular feelings beyond wonder about their intelligence, beauty or developmental pace but my pride in their sense of humour goes for miles. I couldn't have had un-funny children, it just wouldn't have done.

I'm sure that there were other things I've been meaning to write here. At least once a day I compose a new and different blog post in my head. Sadly thinking about doing things isn't the same as actually doing them. This is a notion that I struggle with a lot; I am only just recently, after two years of gym-going, accepting that thinking about running does not have the same physiological benefits as actually running.  Similarly; knitting, writing, blogging, conversing with people. It's really quite unfair.

For now though, I'm off to pick up W&P. Every time I want to burst through the door, throw my arms wide and yell "I'M HERE!", just to see what it feels like. But I cannot conceive of a world in which I have the sense of presence, confidence and abandon that my three year old does.