January so far: domestic, healthy, and full of good intentions

Ah, January. Month of cold nights, chilly days, root vegetables, diets, abstinence, wool and good intentions. 

I have such an affinity with new starts, with plans and goals, but I do also feel that January is a weird month, containing so much overlap from the year before. We are trying to be healthier after the Christmas indulgences, we are trying to get our houses in order after all the decorations and new gifts to find room for, and we are trying to learn from our past troubles and mistakes to 'do better' this year.

 

Our January so far has been a mix of the domestic and the January spruce up. There's been a lot of cleaning (domestic drudge) and sorting out (January tradition). 

I've been trying to eat more healthily after the December crescendo, by which time a whole box of chocolates in an evening had moved beyond the craving category and into the standard diet one. Just look at that smug lunch above! 

We've tried to make our regular weekly date night more romantic, descending as it had in December into 'where are we with the present buying' catch-ups, punctuated by the munching of way too many crisps. 

But the usual jobs of motherhood have continued to roll on. Yes, I am referring to the picture bottom-right. Yes, those are the feet of the Tiny One, now three-and-a-half, and attempting to hide under our lounge coffee table. Yes, that is said table covered by biro scribbles - wait for it - after I had attempted to clean them off. He stayed under the table throughout the cross cleaning, sensible lad. Thank goodness it was a decade-old Ikea cheapy.

And through it all I'm still sewing. This morning, when I should've been working but I needed an easier route into the week, I quickly sewed up a doorstop for the sewing room door. The door that slowly closes while my back is turned and I'm leaning over my cutting table, until it nudges my back teasing "Stop me!" So I did. I don't use the word cute much but it truly is a cute little doorstop.

Wondering: In which I tell you how I'm rebuilding my blog

What do I want this blog to be? What do I want to build?

I think this is what hampered my blogging in 2014. Not knowing the answer to that question. Seeing so many other blogs out there that inspired me and finding, as often happens, that the influence of others clouds the truths of yourself. I am so drawn to bloggers whose clothes and style I love, but I've never felt comfortable showing myself online. I love DIYs and tutorials but did I really want to commit to all the hard work and time involved in doing that myself? I love to write above all else but the blogs I am drawn to and hooked by are those with the beautiful pictures using fabulous cameras that I cannot achieve. Do I want to strive to become a well-known, monetised blogger in such a saturated market? Do I even want to view my blog in market terms? I'm not sure I even know the answers to these questions now.

And then I realised that my answers are in what I thought my blog would be the day I started writing it. There were six words I attached to it: making, baking, wandering, wondering, sewing, mothering. Those are the things I wanted to share and document. Combined, they are who I am, they are the touches of domesticity that feel like home to me. And so they are what this blog is and will be again. 

I am part of a community of women in the UK and further afield that feel it is not a contradiction to value intelligence and yet want to focus their lives on their homes and family. To be ambitious and yet content. To be interested in serious and important things yet also love simple and beautiful things. You can be interested in both fashion and world affairs. You can be ordered and yet free. You can be all the things our foremothers fought for in the feminist movements of the past century while being happy, fulfilled and worthwhile wearing a pinny, baking a cake, kids round your feet, crayons all over the table, haphazard twigs from your walk in a vase on your table, and muddy footprints by the back door. And so that is what you're going to get from me.

(And, slightly unrelated, but on the subject of building something, my middle boy built that fabulous tower in the even more fabulous Clore Art Studio at Manchester Art Gallery. If you're in the area, you really should go.)

Catching up again

 

This was the view out of my kitchen this week and last. It is June, people. We've passed the longest day. But that sluggish North Atlantic Drift, watered down and warmed up, is not sending us much summer any more. Still, the garden looks kind of beautiful in the wet. Droplets of water hang from plants like jewellery, and the garden furniture has the sheen of night-out clothes to it. I quite like its rain-adorned finery.

I am wearing my winter cardigan but other than that, all is good. The Tiny One recovers from tonsillitis (again) and is experimenting with the extent and the power of his will. The Little One feels the brunt of it, but mostly they are playing nicely together and usually it is the Little One causing the tears anyway. The Little One is heading to Big School for try-outs once a week. It's an adjustment for all of us, but less than the one from the hiding place of my skirts to braving nursery school. I am proud of him.

The Big One is taller than me. His feet are bigger than my husband's. His ears are being ruined by too-loud music and his eyes ruined by too-much Minecraft playing. But he occasionally sees the outdoors, breathes in fresh air, talks to us, and evolves. The angry transition from boy to teenager is over and now we see the gentler maturing from teenager to man before our eyes. He was my little chum once, my four-year-old best friend. It's a strange thing for a mother to see - wonderful but distant.

The sewing is slow. In the evenings I am tired. In the days I am diverted. But starting to appear on the horizon is the time when the youngest will both be old enough to spend at least some of the week away from me in nursery or school, though still a year away. Rather than something intangible, it is now something of my imagination. With the view of the horizon, I can live happily in the present. It has meant I can more kindly set the sewing aside as the days require, and can revel in my children unencumbered. These days are numbered. They are precious and, as I remember from the days when the Big One was four instead of fourteen, they are bliss. It sounds a bit silly to say it, but though my vocation is sat at my sewing machine, my heart is now full with my two very best, very favourite little friends.

The Tiny One has been awake since 5.30. I am surprisingly not that tired - after nearly a week of early starts, perhaps my body has accepted it. It is time to go and wake the Little One, get us all dressed, and get his very precise breakfast made. I have nursery to drop off at, toddler group to go to, stories to read to the group and a music session to lead. A hurried lunch, and no sewing again today as we have friends over tonight. That means a house to hurriedly clean, a cheesecake to make, a stew to prepare, and if they're lucky, eight pm will arrive with me serene, prepared and all hostessy (yes you can laugh too - ridiculous notion!)

I'm blogging less because I'm living more, and somehow when the present is accepted with less questions, I find I have less to say. But as I write now, oh goodness, how I love stitching these words together. I should write here more, don't you think?

The view from the cell

Perhaps the title is a little melodramatic? But this is the view from our back garden today. A glorious, crisp winter day. There is frost everywhere that the sun has yet to touch. The air is clear and inviting. It is the perfect day for a walk.

Yet I am stuck indoors potty training the Little One. It is not going well. I started writing this post at 11.30 this morning and we were onto the ninth pair of pants by then. We are still averaging a new pair every half hour (we have given up on trousers, and besides - there are no clean, dry ones left). I stopped counting once we got past ten.

Who is the person who said now was the time to start? Me. Who said he was ready? I did. Who said he's such a clever little fellow and he's ticking all the boxes of the 'is he ready' list? Yes, that would be me too. We are on day three of potty training and still there is no sign of any moisture of any sort in any potty. I'm surprised the spiders haven't set up home in them yet. I can't go outside, or change my mind. I have to keep plodding on so he knows there's no way out. But he's stubborn. And I'm FED UP!

PS In my defence, I have been remarkably good natured, patient and kind about it all up to this point. But there is only so much goodness in a parent and mine seems to have gone in the wash along with twelve pairs of pants and every pair of trousers the Little One owns. I think my marbles might be in there too.

Special things

I wrote once, quite a while ago, of the dream I had of my life before I got to live it. This year I slowly sewed that dream together. Then I ripped the stitches apart, or the sewing machine broke; I'm not sure what analogy fits best. Now I am stitching again.

And here is a little scene from my domestic dream made real. The beautiful flowers were from a lovely friend, but due to my pause-from-life kidney infection no one watered them. They are now crisp as a, well, crisp. But they live on in this picture! And here is the kitchen table with the highchair, just as I imagined it (though not, sadly, old and oak). And, most importantly of all, the drawing being made by my yellow-obsessed (notice the drink) Little One.

He is two-and-a-half now. Babyhood behind, and at the moment the two littlest ones are in the grips of a nasty cold. But this picture reminds me of a happier time, just a few weeks ago. His drawings are nothing remarkable, but to me they look so clever, so beautiful. I loved to draw as a child, and I hope that love will make it through to my littlest boys.

Right now, the domesticity has to be eschewed for the domestic: the tumble drier is beeping insistently at me. Bottles need sterilising. Bed is calling. Floors need quickly clearing. But I thought I would write this first and remember that moment. Perhaps we will live it again tomorrow or, at least, when the stinking colds go away.

The week that was...

I haven't posted in a week or so. Instead I've been using my free time to wallow in Nigella books! Can't seem to put them down. Must be some kind of nesting, domestic goddessing instinct or something. Anyway, here's what you've missed...

• Baking highlights: Nigella's 'Individual Apple Pies' from Feast- I turned it into a whole apple pie, added a pear & cooking apple, spiced it as she said and it tasted of a childhood you never quite had but nostalgically imagine existed. Having said that, my mum is a bit of a pudding queen so my childhood wasn't far off! Best pastry I've ever made, but I'm not sure if that was because it was the first time I'd used a processor to make it, or because it used cream cheese (in either case, I can't take the credit). Interestingly the pre-fridged dough was wetter than how I would make it by hand, and when I make it it falls apart. Lesson there?
• Baking lowlights: The lovely husband has put a stop to the baking as we've been having too many sweet treats, apparently. Can a 39-weeks pregnant woman eat too many cakes? Unfortunately my Nigella 'Domestic Goddess' reading is stirring a strong baking itch and I think only a long-keeping, ground-almondy loaf cake is going to fix it.
• Spring: You should've seen it outside this week. Warmth that persuades you to remove not only coat but cardi too, like the parable predicts. Daffodils in lines as far as you can see. Birds singing like they'd had too much caffeine, laughing at the weather and dispatching their cares. Sitting in the play park for an hour longer than we intended, twice, chatting to friends, eating oranges and watching the Little One come out of himself (just like those daffodils). Invading the neighbour's garden in the evenings so the children could play together and clearly prefer that to coming in for dinner. Woozy bees, woken a little early and looking to burrow in amongst the grass. Sunshine and blue skies that could be summer, were it not for the leafless branches framing the view above. I have been in heaven.
• The nest: My lovely husband cleaned and vacuumed after the first week of the loft conversion! A lovely break for me, and a timely one as the number of Braxton Hicks I was having suggested any exertion would encourage an early baby. And the loft conversion (now two-weeks in and half-way or more) is going well- considerate, hard-working builders; glorious views from the veluxes; glitches fixed; mess/dust/noise not as bad as anticipated. Meanwhile I have been nesting with Nigella and trying to channel my easy-going mother who would let a loft-conversion, even in the last days of pregnancy (am I mad?!) slide over her like water on a duck's back.
• Sewing: None! I have had a little break, and my lovely husband has been photographing my recent crafting (more on that another time). But I shouldn't have had a break: the Big One told me his school bag was breaking and I needed to sew the straps back. I put it off. They have now broken and are beyond repair. Trip to the shops in the last week of pregnancy, joy.
• Cooking highlights: Jamie's ragu from 'Italy'- consistently yummy, several hours of putt-putting away with no effort from me, easy to make, and the double part of the quantity is now perched in the freezer awaiting post-baby-no.3 iron-rich comfort feeding. Nigella's 'Slow-cooked Lamb with Beans' from Feast- oh my, that meat fell off the bones and melted in our mouths, even the Little One could manage it, and the rest of us went back for more & more. It's in the Easter section. Go make!
• Cooking lowlights: Nigella's 'Sweetcorn Fritters', made as a treat for the boys and I, and nothing special. And I forgot to soak the beans for the bean & barley soup I was going to make. Something of a habit - should I be setting phone reminders for bean soaking do you think?
• Odds & ends: Lovely chats on the phone with friends and family. No visitors this weekend for a change (hooray!). Bought a caterpillar tunnel for the Toddler Group May Queen walking float (we are the Hungry Caterpillar!). And Nigella's 'Kitchen' arrived in the post. Which was the start of all this nesting and domesticating this week, the seed for my Nigella book-binge diet, and the reason for not posting here at all.

A little movie

Since I was much younger I've had a little movie in my mind of my perfect future. It looks like this: I am in the kitchen, a large kitchen, with a big farmhouse table. There are children drawing at the table and a baby in a highchair. I have an apron on and I am smiling. As you walk past the oven, it smells of baking, of pie for dinner. If you walk to the open kitchen doors, the evening sunlight from the garden is warm and like honey as it softens the room. Around the door, honeysuckle or mock orange is growing, heady-scented in the evening warmth. There are china jugs on the table with haphazard garden flowers. My apron has flour dust on it. There is a lot of smiling. And my husband comes home, kisses the children, the baby and me. And I am feeling, 'here I am', living in what I once dreamt of, emotionally satiated and complete.

I used to think I was wrong for dreaming of this. That I was betraying feminism, or I had left my intellectual potential unfulfilled. Now I don't think that at all. Now I think, if that dream showed me who I was and what I wanted, then what is more feminist than to give myself the opportunities to make it real? And why can't I have an enquiring, challenged mind within that life? Here I am trying to live it and to write about it too, and my mind is flying higher and more free than it has in years.

Spring & the beginning

Today is the first of March, the first month in the trio of spring months and it seems as apt a day as any to take the plunge and start writing something.

At the weekend the very first spring colour appeared in our garden. Yesterday my husband took a picture for me and today, in chilly but promising sunshine the crocus has opened to say hello. Thus so shall I!

I have been searching for the things that make me happy and fulfilled, for the life I want to live, and for a way to make it a vocation (hopefully). This Christmas gone I finally felt I had found my answers:

• My family: loving them, nurturing them, learning from them, being with them.
• Domesticity: cooking, baking, sewing, making, and all the things that make this house feel like a home and these days feel like a life. Being a homemaker is not a default, a leftover or a bottom rung. It is the way you wrap your family in your arms every day, and let them fly away when they need to.
• Nature: the birds, animals, flora and fauna, and all the weather and seasons that frame them. The first daffodil of spring brings enough joy to almost knock me over. I hope I never get cynical or jaded enough to stop noticing it.

So I have set myself the challenge of living the life I dream of this year, and I hope for the years to come. I made a list! (I am one of life's list makers; can't decide if that's embarrassing or something to be proud of!)

This is the year that I will:

-        learn to sew and buy a sewing machine

-        keep cooking and bake more

-        make a quilt bedspread for the little one's bed

-        spend more time outside in nature, and bring it inside with me

-        make all my cards myself

-        ditto for presents, as much as possible

-        learn to decorate fairy cakes

-        embrace the domestic life, for nothing else fulfils me more

-        nurture my two - maybe three (one month to go til baby #3 lands) - lovely boys

-        try not to drown in the early weeks of new motherhood, but accept I probably will!

-        try to have a bit of a babymoon

-        live with the seasons, and revel in the year's celebrations of them

-        find more time for my boys

-        ... and more time for me

-        write, write, write

-        finally read a book again!

-        make cushions for the house

-        always have a vase of flowers or foliage in the house, ideally found not bought

-        appreciate the simple joys in life

-        and with all this, be happy.