Lately...

...I have had another madly busy week.  Days when I have felt like I have met myself coming back.  My head is full of lists of food for meals that I won't even cook.  My car is sat waiting on the drive packed with enough food to feed 22 people for four days, poised to be dropped off later today.  Once again my time is being given to volunteering and this week has confirmed to me that a decision I made a few weeks back is absolutely the right one.  I have been tasked with sorting out the food for a group attending a week long, international Scout camp.  I myself will be going for the second half of the week and will take another car load of food for those days.  By the time I do go I know that I will have had enough of shopping it is my least favourite activity at the best of times especially when I have to to into shops I wouldn't normally, but six hours of food shopping is enough to tip anyone over the edge, right?

My busy week has been interspersed with quiet days.  Days when I had so many offers I could have visited four or five different families.  Offers that I, sadly, had to turn down knowing that if we did too much we all be tired and crabby and that would not be good for me or anyone else.  It is hard, this saying no business but it is the right thing to do.  Honesty is a good policy.  There was a time when I would have felt that I couldn't say no as I would damage my relationships or there would be no more offers in the future and I always had those memories of my early days of home edding in my head when we didn't see anyone from one week to the next.

Being at home a little more this week has meant that the radio has been on more than usual.  I have forced myself to sit still to relax and rest, and do a bit of knitting, oh how I have missed that these past few months.  But the radio has not been relaxing these past few days, or weeks when I have listened for that matter.  There is much conflict in the world, conflict that we don't always hear about that rumbles on continuously and then it gets much worse and it makes it into the news.  News that is difficult to stomach and hard to comprehend when you live in a country that is at peace and has been for a very long time.  Fingers are pointed, trust has all but gone, fingers are pointed and blame is apportioned before evidence has been gained, it makes for very difficult listening.

My own conflicts that I have wrestled with these past few months are not over yet.  The decision I mentioned before may have been made but my commitments are not over yet, one next week, one at the end of the month and another in October.  The time they take is time I am not spending with my children, and theirs and my friends but it will end, unlike the conflicts elsewhere.  So whilst I look a the detritus littering my hall, bits of food labelled and ready to be taken with me next week, shoes in abundance, a folded laundry box, my knitting, it is the same in the rest of the house, I know that this time will pass.

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Blogger has informed me that is my 600th post!  Can't quite believe it :)

Words

I have so many words in my head right now.  They are a jumbled mass keeping me awake at night jostling around in brownian motion.  There are snippets of conversations, emails I have received or written in my head but never sent, information that I form together to make conclusions that may be completely wrong.  I wrangle with these thoughts and eventually come out the other side with a clear head and some decisions.

For the past ten years, no longer than that, I have been a volunteer.  Giving freely of my time to young people in my area who are part of the Scout Association.  I have watched children grow from young children through to adulthood and when I bump into them as adults it always gives me great pleasure to hear what they are doing with themselves.  The time I have given has changed over time, stopping completely when my children were babies.  Lately it has increased, I have not been pushed into this, it has been my choice and I have been happy with this for the most part.  Until I start getting emails from a parent which are frankly, rude.

I worked for ten years with volunteers, I managed them and paid staff.  I had a team of over eight hundred of them (and three paid staff).  Almost all the contact was by letter, phone calls or emails with the odd occasion face to face.  It was so important to use the correct language, as it is in contact with anyone, but with volunteers it doesn't mater how irritating or rude they are you must ensure that they always feel valued and included.  The data protection act meant that anything your wrote about them they could ask to look at we had to keep our opinions to ourself and never write them down!  The emails I have recently received would have been totally unacceptable in that organisation, I would not have lost my job but, there would have been serious repercussions.

So I need to make a decision, as added to this I am feeling somewhat taken advantage of.  I had been asked to organise something by one of the Leaders who it now transpires will not be present and has known for weeks they wouldn't be.  I am happy to organise stuff but I am not happy with the fact they have waited until this week to inform me, they had led me to believe they would be there and the rude email is as a direct result of their interfering with incorrect information with something I had already sorted out.  I have now made my decision and I know it will be unexpected, it is to me too, but I am happy with it and feeling very relieved.

It's easy to not notice small changes.  Children change every month, sometimes every week or even by day.  If we look away we miss them.  There are so many distractions to keep our attention elsewhere but when these distractions increase slowly they can become so absorbed into our lives that we don't notice.  It is as if it has always been so.  I am too distracted at the moment and my precious time with my children feels like it is shoehorned in between organising things for others.  I have decided no more.  My children and my family come first.  Saying no is hard, it can make us feel bad about it, we are letting people down.  But if I continue to say yes I know that I am letting my children down and that is not what I want.

Now I just need to sort out some of the words that have been said to me by friends and make sense of the pictures they have given me and stop the dancing going on in my head......

Slow Living.....

It is always lovely to look back and reflect on what you have done over the previous weeks or months, taking stock, observing changes and celebrating achievements.  Even better if you can join together and see what others have been doing too in their part of the world, blogging is a wonderful way of making the world a smaller place.  Christine over a Slow Living Essentials hosts a monthly link up of reflections here are mine for April....

...nourish as we enter fully into Spring in my part of the world it is a time of warming up and a green haze blooming.  It is a gradual awakening and this had also bought a change each week to our veg bag.  Slowly the root vegetables of the last months have been replaced with new veg which is so exciting!  We have been enjoying spring greens, asparagus, purple sprouting broccoli and salad leaves.  Each week when I get a list of what will be in my bag, I sit down with my recipe books and plan a menu, each week there is something new to cook with.  Much as I love the root vegetables of the autumn and winter I am always ready for the change that spring brings.

...prepare the greening of our hedgerows has meant that we have been out doing a wee spot of foraging.  We have been picking the beautifully pale hawthorn leaves for our salads, nettle for cups of tea and wild garlic to make into pesto using this recipe I have frozen most of what we made as it was a huge quantity.  I last made this two years ago and we are just finishing up that batch!

...reduce after fourteen years of continual use, including over four years of nappies, our washing machine died this month.  My husband opened the machine up to establish whether or not it could be repaired, sadly it was beyond that it was completely worn out.  Rather than send the whole machine to the tip, my husband strip it down completely making piles of bits, some for recycling, some for reusing, some which had to go to the tip.  The drum we are keeping to make into a fire pit.

...green out of necessity I make nearly all the toiletries and cleaning products we use in our house.  Although I was forced down this road I would not go back to buying them even if they were ok for my skin.  This month I made another batch of deodorant.  I can't find a record of making this last year but I know I did, two years ago I made some in May.  I think this batch probably lasts for a year as I know I don't make it that often!  The quantity I make fills two old deodorant sticks that I kept and keep refilling.

...grow apart from both my children having massive growth spurts lately our garden is also blooming too.  We have sown and chitted potatoes, the latter of which will need planting out in the next week or so.  We have also sown many seeds all of which are now wee seedlings sitting happily in their seed trays and pots on the staging in the polytunnel.  It is always interesting that seeds sown on the same day grow at completely different rates.  As well as the seeds I have also started some onion sets off in trays, we have such a short growing season where I live that this gives them the head start they need to grow to a decent size, otherwise I end up with a crop of onions the size of golf balls!

The seedlings are being kept insulated by some horticultural fleece as an over blanket and some leftover carpet underlay underneath them. We had some carpets laid a month or so ago and the carpet layers left us the off cuts. One piece is a perfect fit for our staging. Despite having a polytunnel the temperatures in there still drop really low most nights this extra insulation is an attempt to keep the temperature slightly more constant and it seems to work as most seeds do germinate.

...create I have been doing huge amounts of sewing this month for the many birthdays of children of friends and my family.   I have rustled up an owl storysack, a wee gnome, two rainbow balls, a play cape and a couple of pairs of slouchy/pyjama type trousers.  I created a Mother Earth for our seasonal table.  My knitting needles have been a little quieter this month, I have finished the body of a cardigan for myself and now need to work on the sleeves, I have blocked and sewn up a cardigan for my eldest which now needs a hood adding and I have cast on a new project and knitted a few rows.

...discover with all the sewing I have been doing I have reading a lot about different techniques and words used in the world of sewing.  I am totally self taught and rarely use patterns but I am making use of one to make something for my youngest.  The pattern directions are a bit scant for me so I have been looking lots up to try and make sense of what I need to do!

...enhance I have been doing lots of different things with my local Explorer Scout unit this month including a trip to the theatre with some of them, it has been a very long time since I visited a theatre.  We are entering a busy period for our unit so I have lots of preparation to do for the coming months.

...enjoy the warmer weather has meant that we have dusted off, literally it is kept in the garage and was covered in sawdust, our canoe and taken it out on several trips.  I love going out canoeing on day trips and overnight or longer journeys.  The weather was beautiful on both occasions although the wind made sailing, we have a small sail for our canoe, rather hairy at the end of one of the days.

Moments...

It is the beginning of the month so, once again, I have a slightly different Moments post.  This is a reflection on the month using the goals suggested over on Slow Living Essentials, so here are mine for February and head on over to see what others have been up to.

...nourish we are moving towards warmer longer days in my part of the world.  Despite the fact that it hasn't been that cold, it feels like we have been through a very long winter, grey and wet for weeks on end.  We are now looking forward to the change in the vegetables that the change in the weather will bring, much as we love our root veg you can have too much of a good thing.  Right now we are enjoying the odd salad, thrown together with whatever ingredients we have in our weekly veg bag and in the garden.  This has included a new recipe for us, remoulade, a crunchy and delicious salad made with carrot and celeriac, a great way to use up root veg on a warmer day.  I would usually make stew or soup with celeriac which is not what we want to eat right now!  We had our remoulade with broccoli fritters.

...prepare now that our days are getting warmer (think this is going to be a theme.......) we are having more time out and about which means more picnics.  So that I can throw one together at a moments notice I make sure I always have homemade rolls and bread in the freezer.  I have been making these up during this month and now have a good store ready for those lazy days outside.

...reduce my eldest does not own many pairs of trousers/pants, depending on where you live, and the ones he does own often have holes in the knees.  I have been busy patching a few pairs this month using material from a pair he has grown out of ( and which had a hole in both knees!).  We have also acquired a few old pallets which we have been busy chopping up for kindling ready for next winter, you can never have too much kindling!

...green a couple of years ago I spend much of the year suffering from the symptoms of what I now know is urticaria (hives) and eczema on my hands.  It took me ages to work out what it actually was and what could be triggering it.  There are several triggers which I have now removed some food and some external.  The external triggers meant that overnight I could not use a single item of household cleaning or toiletry products in the house.  They were all carefully chosen to be low impact on the environment and humans but still they contained an ingredient my body found intolerable, Limonene, an essential oil added to all of the products we were using.  So I had to, very quickly, come up with my own.  Two years on we are still using all those 'products' which we make ourselves, only buying toothpaste and washing up liquid neither of which we have been able to satisfactorily make ourselves.  We had several bottles of our original products in the house each containing a small amount which we have slowly been using up, either my husband using them, or me with rubber gloves when my hands are good.  What we have noticed is the smell.  Even though the smell is more natural than most products, they smell really strong to us, my children even commenting 'What is that funny smell' when I was washing the kitchen floor with some of these 'leftovers' this month!

...grow there is not a huge amount growing in my garden as yet, despite the warmer weather during the day we had heavy frosts overnight most nights last month.  I usually wait until April to sow my seeds otherwise the seedlings die of the cold, even in the polytunnel!  I have chitted potatoes, pruned and tidied the garden this month in readiness for sowing.  We are still harvesting last years crops, we have had cabbages, kale and purple sprouting broccoli and in the polytunnel some self seeded, hardy salad leaves, red mustard, corn salad and greens in snow.

...create I have been doing a lot of sewing this month.  A daisy headband for a friend's daughter recovering from major surgery, a purple bag and a fabric bucket there is a tutorial in the post if you wish to make one for yourself. I have also been knitting.  A cardigan which I frogged more stitches than I knitted and a fulled/fellted bowl depending on your take on such things.

...discover I read a wonderful book this month Kith by Jay Griffiths which was an affirmation to me that some of the decisions we have made for our children have been good ones, even though they ver far from the mainstream.  She also talks in this book about having a strong desire, sometimes from a young age, to follow a particular path in life.  This might be the career that you choose or a skill that you can hone and excel at.  Again I feel that she is right and I have been pondering what this has meant to me and the way I have lived my life thus far.  This book, unlike so many on children and parenting, is not lecturing in its tone.  It is an essay, the authors opinion which you can take or leave depending on your own opinion.  It is a book I would recommend all parents to read.

...enhance a couple of months ago I mentioned a dilemma I was pondering over the Scouts in my area.  I have now decided to concentrate on my local Explorer pack and have been much more involved with them since then.  I really enjoy all my time I spend in the company of these wonderful teenagers, it troubles me that they get such a bad press.  Perhaps if those that say such things were to spend more time around teenagers they wouldn't be so negative.  In any section of society there is always those who break the law or who are difficult to get along with but the whole group  are not tarred with that brush.  Teenagers are at a bridge in their lives a transition from childhood to adulthood they need supporting not persecuting.

...enjoy this has to be the warmer, drier days which have enabled us to have some wonderful days out, walking, cycling and bird watching.  Our rhythm has changed with the transition in the season.

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....and continuing from my usual moments posts....

...reading Awakening by William Horwood, All About the Bullerby Children by Astrid Lindgren, and these picture books* you can read a short review of them here. 93. The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning, 94. Rats and Mice by Honor Head, 95. The Princess and the Pea by Lauren Child, 96. No Place Like Home by Jonathan Emmett, 97. The Pirates Next Door  by Jonny Duddle, 98. Rita and Whatsit go on a Picnic by 

Jean-Philippe Arrou-Vignod, 99. The Bear in the Cave by Michael Rosen, 100. Boom, Baby, Boom Boom by Margaret Mahy, 101. The Knight, the Princess and the Dragon by Helen Craig, 102. The Talkative Tortoise by Andrew Fusek Peters, 103. This Old Man by Pam Adams, 104. What the Ladybird Heard by Julia Donaldson

*Joining in with 300 Picture Book Challenge

Busyness

Is that a word?  Whether it is or not it describes me to a t at the moment.  I am not in a manic state of running around, meeting myself coming back,  just busy with stuff and no time for blogging.  We have just had a week away from home enjoying a music festival sandwiched between a few days with friends.  It took a few days to cook and pack everything we needed.

We arrived home late on Tuesday and have spent the last two days unpacking, repacking and buying a huge amount of food.  The car is loaded up again and we are off to help out on an Explorer Scout camp for five days.  We always have a great time but I shall be glad to home again.

I have been away a lot in August and am looking forward to spending some quieter days at home in September.  My garden has been busy whilst I have been away, I have found the time to tend to it  in between my comings and goings and this has definitely paid off.  Despite returning home to an empty fridge and no fruit or veg the garden has provided all we have needed for meals these last two days.  The photo above was the harvesting for a delicious stir fry.

I will return again in September!

Weekending

I am a few days late with the weekly round up, I had a very full weekend and had no brain space to write it.

We started the week with our usual trip into town for shopping and a library visit.  I found a book on knitting stitches to give some inspiration for a project that I would like to put together in the future.  I have really enjoyed doing do much knitting recently as I make Christmas presents.  I don't want to get to Christmas and have no knitting.  So I am thinking about post Christmas present knitting, a project for myself of my own design.

We spent time with out home edding friends on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  Catching up after time away, visiting a new house for the first time, eating lunches together,  drinking tea whilst the children played.  They had, as they always do, a great time.  It doesn't matter what time we arrive they never want to leave!

On Friday I spent the morning writing a shopping list and cooking tea and most of the afternoon shopping!  Many months ago a good friend of mine had asked if I would cook for a weekend camp to celebrate 10 years of Explorer Scouts in our area and I agreed.  The numbers were approximate at that stage but ended up being about forty five.  I had to provide a supper meal (hot drink and cake) on Friday, all meals on Saturday and up to lunch on Sunday.  The shopping filled the boot of my car and my boot is very big!  After emptying the food out the car into the kitchen of the village hall we were using I travelled up the road to our friends where we were sleeping for the weekend, most others were camping in the grounds of the hall.  After sorting out tea I headed back to the hall to meet everyone and get myself organised.

Saturday was a very long day, up at six at the hall for half past breakfast ready for seven.  I provided cereal, tea, coffee and hot chocolate and bacon roll or vegetarian sausage roll.  I also had to put out ingredients for everyone to make sandwiches and bits to make up a packed lunch.  By ten we had cleared and washed up and had a break before starting on tea, shepherds pie.  I had someone helping without which I would never have got everything done.  We peeled 12 and a half kilos of potatoes and made up a large pan of sauce with mince, veg and herbs, it took nearly hour to put together the six large pies sauce at the base with mashed potato on top.  I also made a vegetarian version.  I also put together a vegetable soup as a starter.

They were having a party in the evening so I put together party food late in the afternoon ready for the evening.  Some of this was provided by the young people themselves some from the shopping I had done.  I made mini pizzas using english muffins cut in half, cooked sausage rolls, made dips, cut up bits to dip and emptied crisps into bowls.  By the end of the cooked meal, there was plenty of food phew I was starting to feel tired.  I cleared up with help and got the party food out before heading up the road to our friends house for a much needed bath.

Up early again on Sunday for a slightly later breakfast, cereal and toast.  Lunch was to be all the leftovers from the previous day plus more soup which I needed to make.  We had to be out of the hall just after lunch so it was all hands on deck to clear and wash up and clean the hall.  By the time I got home I was exhausted and missing my children.  I had hardly seen them all weekend.  They had been out canoeing and driving a power boat on the Saturday with their dad and a friend and headed home after breakfast on Sunday.  It was an interesting experience not one that I would want to do regularly but good fun!

Gratitudes

I am joining in with Taryn for her heartfelt Sunday tradition.

A time to slow down., to reflect, to be grateful.

This week I have been grateful for......

...the kindness of strangers helping me when laden with shopping and trying to hold children's hands!

...a morning cup of tea in bed.

...my children smiling at me each morning when they wake, a beautiful start to the day.

...my friends who welcome me into their homes and feed me with wonderful food for lunch.

...my comfortable bed after a long day on my feet on Saturday.

...my eldest taking his sister's hand when they had to leave me again, and go off with their dad, he sensed she needed comfort.

...the heartfelt thanks after cooking for forty five people for the weekend.

...being able to enjoy a gorgeous sunrise.

Teenagers

I have just spent a weekend in the company of eight teenagers.  My family and two friends took this little group to Derbyshire to camp and do some climbing.  We had a wonderful time and as always the young people were engaging company.  I know that my own children are a long way off being teenagers themselves, but I do like being around them.  

These young people are part of a local Explorer Scout unit.  They join at fourteen and leave at eighteen.  It is great to see the changes in them over this time, how they grow to be comfortable in their own skin. How they blossom and become more confident.  Teenagers these days, as always, get a bad press.  There seems to be little positive writing about this crucial time in life, when we are changing and getting ready to move on in the world to pastures new.  Well I think they are great and will continue to volunteer my time.