Posts Tagged "summer"
Contentment
I have had two days full of peace.
It started with an out-of-the-blue phone call from someone very special to me sharing good news, which is probably the best kind of out-of-the-blue phone call you can get, followed by a long, lazy day sat in the sunshine, once the smallest one had been waved off to enjoy a day of paddling pools at his Dad’s. I sat, I giggled at the irony of knitting a thermal winter hat for my friend in Oz on what felt like one of the hottest days of the year, and I lay on my back watching the clouds, thinking they looked like islands in a Pacific Sea, and imagining that it was me drifting above them, suspended in orbit. I could feel sun easing the deep aches and pain that seem determined to dog me at the moment, and as I started to doze off, I retreated inside, taking off my thin sun dress to crawl under cold white sheets to sleep and sleep.
Seasons’ Turn
Here’s to a full turn of the seasons since I discovered photography. And to many, many more.
This post was written for Week 34 of the Gallery
The theme this week was Seasons
Summer Essentials
Today I am taking part in Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop for the first time. Lovely Kat sets up some writing prompts and prompts us to umm…write!
So I’ve chosen #5 - List your 7 most favourite summer items.
Now before I start let me just add how much I have enjoyed other people’s accounts of their favourite summer items. Air conditioning, industrial power fans, sunblock, sexy bathing suits. Feel like rubbing it in some more? For here in the UK our summer for the last month has looked like this…
So now I’ve set the mood and without further ado, here are my top 7 essential items for surviving our pathetic British excuse for a summer:
1. Umbrella-ella-ella OH
Or even better…
…to keep your hands free for frantic power walking around the streets with the pushchair in an effort to get your poor cabin-fevered child to nap, screaming at the lights to change to red in time so you don’t have to stop and inevitably wake him up.
2. Funky Wellies
For puddle splashing and surviving random flash-floods in Sainsbury’s supermarket carpark.
3. At least 10 indoor clothes airers
To dry the mountain of washing accumulating in your bathroom that has been hung outside to dry, got wetter and been brought back in again at least half a dozen times. Usually I’m quite Zen about my washing getting caught in the rain. It began wet…it has returned to wetness… I have lost nothing – that sort of thing. I’d usually just leave it out till it dried again but as using that strategy may mean a single load of washing takes about, oh I don’t know, two months to dry, I’ve had to resort to turning my house into a 1930′s Chinese Laundry.
NOTE: Extremely beautiful new nappies!!! Which thankfully dry very quickly and are absolutely my new favourite thing…ever! Expect a gushing evangelical blog post about them very soon.
4. Laptop
My ultimate surviving rainy days stuck indoors must have item (along with #5). To be kept on to allow ‘tweeting to stay sane’ therapy and sneaky blog writing whenever the baby is distracted (see #6) or temporarily trapped in his ‘den’ under the dining table.
5. Chocolate
‘Nuff said.
6. Toys encouraging obsessive, repetitive and absorbing play
(to allow more time for #4 & 5)
Most notably this toy:
Kai will happily play with this for HOURS. Put the rings on. Take the rings off. Throw rings at mummy. Push rings under sofa and into other irretrievable places while mummy is paying absolute full attention and not nodding off. Honest.
Other rainy day obsessive Kai games include: balancing the pig on the tractor game (don’t ask me why – it’s always the pig), devil jigsaw and Kai’s all time favourite, the take-things-out-of-a-container-and-put-them-back-in-again game.
7. A Watch
To count down the hours until the husband gets home from work and I can meet him at the door with a whiney, peanut butter covered baby…
…and run.
Bliss Is…
… Lying cheek-to-cheek on the grass under a tree in the park with my almost-toddler, one week before his first birthday.
Looking up at the blue, blue sky peeping through the branches, and watching the leaves dance and shake in the wind, and said almost-toddler pointing and pointing at the patterns and turning his face to grin at me and give me kisses. Telling me the secrets of the universe through noncensical words of two syllables, laden with meaning and expression and delight.
My bright, vivacious, exhausting, miraculous boy. Let me see you grow and change and flourish and ripen. But please, please, please stay exactly as you are. Smiling at the clouds and smelling of strawberrys.
