(a la Earthenwitch). Right now I am:

cuddling a sad and bruised youngest daughter and wondering where all the blood came from (update: she’s fine, just got a huge fat lip. Teeth all intact.)

Packing. And fretting. We appear to have extremely nervous buyers who have now sent three surveyors round (and the third, this morning, warned me that a fourth might be forthcoming). Fortunately I have surveyor-charming skills and have made them all tell me what they find (I’m not supposed to tell you but). Seriously: they are buying a 110-year-old house, it is going to have, ahem, quirks. Features. Oddly, their solicitor does not seem to know they are doing all this. On which note…

waiting for our solicitor to call me back. Nothing so far has led me to believe the poor woman knows how to operate a telephone.

reading umpteen magazines (crafty homey ones, mostly) while resolving to kick the expensive, pointless magazine habit.

trying to get a reading group off the ground: who’d have thought it would be so difficult to get more than two people together in the same place, with books, at the same time.

making (a mess, ha ha) – lazy-days skirts. Flowers for M and hungry-caterpillar circles for T.

editing some nonsense about dogs

using up the contents of fridge/freezer/cupboard with weird and unpredictable results.

Or, an excuse for a great big whinge about trivial annoyances (from Sluiter Nation)

1. Cameron being away all the time. It’s either feast or famine here; we are in a famine just now. My ideal would be for him to be away one or maybe two nights a week (if he’s here all the time I never get to watch “my programmes” – currently Glee, Lewis and Baking Made Easy – and I never spend an evening reading in peace. If he’s away all the time the house gradually goes to pieces and I go with it.) Actually, my ideal is for him to get home from work nice and early, be here until the children are all in bed, and then go out. A couple of times a week.

2. Cameron visiting interesting and exotic places and staying in lovely hotels where nobody (I assume!) wakes him up four times a night, demands to have their covers put back on, wants a drink of water, or sneaks in and warms their feet on him. And yes I know about the jetlag and the meetings and the public speaking and the flights and the airports and and and, and yes this one is pure envy. But I haven’t been anywhere for 5 years.

3. School runs in any weather apart from pleasantly warm, blue skies, light breeze.

4. Trial by ballet on a Wednesday.

5. Tedious manuscripts.

6. Dog owners who don’t pick up after their dogs (I am going to have to go and wash Tamsin’s scooter when I have typed this).

7. Trying to sell the house.

8. Clearing under the highchair after every single meal

9. Tamsin and Jenny playing a plastic saxophone/recorder duet behind me as I try to deal with #5.

10. Sleepless nights.

I’m all about the memes just now – so am joining in with the “for the love of blogging” week-long project (probably: you know me, am unlikely to manage all week) hosted at Sluiter Nation. Which means that, ahem, yesterday I was supposed to introduce myself.
I can’t believe a soul will read this who doesn’t already know me: how blogging has changed since those halcyon days of blogrolls and webrings! I’ve been here and previously here since 2002, on and off. Very on to  begin with: I was child-poor time-rich and we were living abroad. I got tired of writing variations on the same emails to lots of different people (yes we had email in those days, cheeky – but not skype, no) so I had a bit of a look about to see if I could figure out a way to share our adventures online. And discovered blogs.
We’ve been back in Blighty since the end of 2004 and in the interim years have become child-rich time-poor; also and sadly it must be said that Chester, nice as it is, is significantly less exciting than Tokyo so I don’t find myself with daily adventures to share. I still like my blog but I don’t have a niche these days: I can’t be a mummy blogger because everybody else does that better (plus I have no Philosophy beyond doing what has to be done) – yet frankly, what else do I do. So sporadic wittering is what it is all about. The archives are fun though, I promise 🙂
This .me.uk site has been a work in progress for several years now but what can I say – see note above about time. I do have one other linked page up and running, which is my reading list.

That Earthenwitch is at it again. Of November’s intentions, I did survive sanity intact thanks mainly to some very good friends, both local and very old, my crack team of babysitters, and rather a lot of wine. Tamsin’s birthday went off very well; she was overheard singing “I’m four I’m four happy four I  used to be three but now I am four” from which one deduces that she enjoyed her special day – a few photos here. Shoes to go with my Dress were located at the back of my wardrobe, which is always nice. Jenny’s naming day was fabulously cold, crisp and clear: the humanist ceremony was just lovely, then we had a wee tramp around the zoo (the baby giraffe!), then back for warm winter pimms and afternoon tea. Even my mass catering efforts over the weekend went reasonably well, with the more senior members of the family being astonished by nachos. I like to astonish.

None of the other intentions were realised, which allows me to add them to December’s list, as follows:

-finish making the pressies that are nearly done; felt a couple more stars to go with the lonely one and make it look like a theme not an accident; open some of the children’s Christmas craft sets and do something with them.

-list of presents is made so next I must purchase.

-cards! Must not miss last posting date for abroad this year.

-J’s birthday

-sad tomato plants still in garden, currently under an inch of snow (just the one)

-muck out playroom, get rid of too-small baby clothes yadda yadda yadda

-find next-size-up clothes for J and figure out if she needs things

-get roof fixed, carpet cleaned, etc

All those formative years of sharpened pencils and shiny shoes at the start of September have left me feeling all new-yeary now, as the mornings develop a nip (is it too soon for a winter duvet?) and the alarm is once again pressed into service after 6 blissful weeks of getting up when we wake up. Or not, if you are a baby who wakes around 6, in which case you are ignored until a more seemly hour. It’s ok to get up at dawn if you can slope back off to bed around 9.

I am toying with re-starting the blog; the trouble with not being excitingly ex-pat with every day an adventure is there is little to write about. And, you know, blogs have moved on: people have facebook. The world is full of mummy blogs and frankly they are all a million times more interesting than my got up, got the kids up, loaded the dishwasher had a lovely coffee mundanity. We will see. But Max does have a new adventure, which is probably nothing to do with his having recently turned 40, and a new blog to boot: he is newly expat in Kyrgyzstan, which reminds me I really must find a map and work out where the hell that is: I visualise steppes and camels and things but am almost certainly wrong.

All sorts of lapsed bloggers have been crawling out from the woodwork and behind stones this Christmas period. I feel inspired to join. If anybody out there isn’t on FB/my text list/the grapevine and is thus unaware, baby Jenny joined us on December 20th (just: 1.11 am). I may be a biased and rose-tinted mum – and it may be early days – but she’s a pretty perfect baby and her big sisters are thrilled. More photos can be found here, including one of M&T dragged from their beds to meet the new arrival, and for those of you who enjoy such entertainment her birth story will follow just as soon as I can bear to put her down for long enough (and as soon as I find time without a babe-in-arms that isn’t immediately claimed by another child or some essential household task. Or sleep.) All I will say for now is that independent midwives rock, and are worth every single penny.

Her first couple of days of life were spent on the sofa snoozing and feeding (she is a champ and has gained a lb already, at 10 days old) and generally getting over the whole pushing out a baby at way past one’s bedtime thing (didn’t get to bed until after 3 the night she arrived). My favourite event was surprising Sara, in whose house we had been at 5 pm on Saturday (no baby): her face was a picture when she walked into our living room at 10 am on Sunday to find a whole new human being had arrived overnight! On day 3, we finally managed to put up the Christmas tree and were visited by a different midwife; this one had wondered the day before J arrived if it would be worth trying a wee bit of homeopathy: we had discussed whether it would work if you didn’t believe in it. She maintains it clearly does (I think she’d have arrived regardless). Day 4 my milk arrived – I need say no more for anybody who has been through it – as did my parents.

A pleasant if necessarily quiet Christmas: mum and dad came and cooked goose and trimmings (and now they have gone I can put selected leftovers in the bin but shh don’t tell!) and occupied M & T with games and crafts. They (the girls) had clearly absorbed all the propaganda about santa not coming if one didn’t go straight to sleep: when I went up to tuck them in and fill their stockings, I found two girls lying perfectly straight under completely undisturbed duvets, clearly neither of whom had twitched a single muscle since bedtime. Both slept until 745 which was quite a present for us, too. [Aside: at a week old I find it hard to evaluate whether J is “good”, but I am getting a lot more sleep now than when I was pregnant, which probably means she is. I was asked today whether she was sleeping through, which struck me as a bit nuts.]

J and I had our first outing yesterday – her first ever trip outside the house, my first venture beyond the garden shed for 10 days. Lovely to get walking not waddling and I so enjoyed getting the baby sling back out. Today was busy with the health visitor (a profession of which I have not been given cause to revise my opinion), a trip to the hospital for J’s hearing test (all clear) and a new tumbledryer as mine picked the perfect time to break down. J has experienced three short car rides so far and has screamed through them all which does not bode well for next week when we must go to Surrey.

and has helped me fix this so in principle FB should now see a link to my website with a summary, rather than reams and reams and reams of writing; I hope people will now leave comments at turquoise rather than on FB where they are ephemeral like the wind not carved in stone to haunt you forever more.

Let’s see if it works with this long and convoluted test post.

Also, Torchwood is on.

I appear to have upgraded wordpress all by myself. This is by way of a test post to see if it works…fingers crossed…clicking publish….5…4…3…2…1

BANG

There’s a distinct whiff of spring in the air today, as evidenced by this picture of the children outside without a million layers of clothing. It’s half term, too, so the afternoon was of a sensible length and conformation, without the very annoying school run that usually bisects any activity of interest. Thought I’d just pop in and say hello, still alive, back when I think of something to say. Are you missing me?

January was busy, with my birthday swiftly followed by Cameron’s significant birthday plus party, with my grandmother’s funeral thrown in somewhere between the two for good measure. February has so far been remedially peaceful.