Birthday

It is my daughter's 7th birthday today. So, firstly, a couple of pictures. Her birthday cake, lovingly hand-crafted by me (it's a butterfly of course, just in case you can't tell!):


And the felt cakes I made for her as part of her birthday present (the one with pink icing) and my son as an 'unbirthday' present (the blue icing):

Birthdays are a strange thing - stressful and exciting and unsettling in equal measures, even when the birthday is not your own. Of course, the birthday of a child brings to mind thoughts of the pregnancy with that child and of the day they were born. It reminds us of time passing and of how much the child has changed and learned and developed into their own person.

It also makes me think of how much I have learned as a parent since my daughter (my eldest child) was born, and makes me wonder if I could do it all better if I were to do it all over again. Which I am not going to.

And then there's all the social pressure associated with children's birthdays. I'm lucky, as my children are home educated there hasn't been any peer pressure on them to request big, expensive parties with every person in there class and junk food, party bags and lots of consuming of plastic tat. Or maybe it's just their personalities anyway. Either way, it's been lovely to have a relaxing but fun day with visits by various grandparents, uncles and aunts throughout the day, a homemade cake with all organic ingredients and no colourings, homemade pizza for tea, and fairly low-key presents, such as books and craft kits.

It's just made me wonder why we have to wait for a birthday or special occasion to gather everyone together. Hmm, one to ponder on. How to get all the family together in a similar relaxed fashion more often?

So, now all there is to do is to pop the wrapping paper into the kids' craft box for re-use in art masterpieces, look forward to my son's 5th birthday in 2.5 weeks, and have an evening in a very weird head-space thinking about birth and pregnancy and fertility and the passage of time and parenting skills.

Equinox

Well, the equinox and, predictably, I am thinking about balance. Last night's Home Ed Group Adult Social Evening went really well and it was so nice to get out and about in the evening to chat to othert adults. I felt a part of my life which had been dormant for a while start to wake up again, which was nice.

But this morning I feel all cross and crotchety despite having the Not Back To School Picnic to look forward to later. This could be due to waking to a big tantrum from my son, who hardly ever has tantrums, about something silly, but really because he hadn't eaten breakfast. Well, apparently this is the rteason for my crotchets, but really I think it is the feeling of transition which is responsible for both my grumpiness and my son's. The wheel of the year is turning towards the winter and, while I'm looking forward to colder mornings and that crisp autumn feeling, I'm also nervous of the winter - it has such power over my mood that it's truly something to respect in a way I never feel about the summer.

Tuning into the feeling of transition in the season, there are also changes afoot in my personal life - my husband has an interview for a teaching job, the Home Ed Group is really taking off and becoming a large part of our lives ( leading me to worry if this is a good thing? Am I relying too much on one aspect of my life?), the Transition Group I'm involved in isn't going so well and I feel it's draining me to no good purpose (which is very disappointing), I've started writing a new novel (young adult this time) and feel quite positive about it.

After all this pointless musing, I'll leave you with a picture of our Equinox Biscuits (half dark, half light, get it?):

Octopuses and jam!

What an odd week we've had! Well, we've made *much* jam in the last few weeks, here's some of it:

And we've also made octopuses - or should that be octopi? Whatever, we've made them, out of wool of course!
And there has been much time spent in making dens as the weather has started to turn slightly cooler:


And we've had a slight finger-knitting craze. No pictures yet, but my daughter has really taken to it and it's suprisingly relaxing. Let's hope that calmness descends on our house with the autumn weather. I can't wait!

It feels really good...

... to eat our own produce for tea! So far, we've had strawberries for pudding, a lasagne made with our own onions and our own courgettes, had roast potatoes which were our own potatoes with our own rosemary. I now have 2 strings of onions hanging up in the kitchen (although the first string is much depleted as we use onions so much. I think I'll have to plant even more next year now that I've worked out how to dry and store them properly!) and another lot of onions that I'm drying to dry out before I hang. Though the rain the last few days has somewhat scuppered me.

It has just been announced that our town is starting its own Transition Movement, which is great and something I had been hoping for. So, even though I am somewhat busy at the moment with setting up the Home Ed Group, doing my course, the allotment (not to mention the kids), I *have* to get involved. I totally think the Transition Towns things is a good idea, even though I'm not sure how exactly I can help. Maybe we'll become another Totnes with our own town 'money' and a plethora of locally-sourced food. Ah, I can dream!

What Mothers Do

Having been to a La Leche League meeting today in which people were kind enough to compliment my mothering skills and my children, and remembering from What Mothers Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing how easy it is to underestimate all the stuff you do as a parent, I thought I'd revisit the goals I set for our family life in January and see how we're doing.

• Succeeding at making at least 80% of the family's bread, cakes, biscuits and other such products.
• Succeeding in keeping the Home Education Group I helped set up last summer going from strength to strength.
• Succeeding in keeping on top of our allotment plot and garden - and have in fact planted 3 varieties of potatoes, carrots, parsnips, beetroots, leeks and Jerusalem Artichokes at the allotment, and strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, herbs, apples, pears, cobnuts, tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and French beans at home.
• Succeeding in keeping my part-time work going and contributing a useful amount to the household income.
• Succeeding in supporting my husband through his career change and re-training.
• Still attempting to decide on what I want to re-train as.
• Currently sorting out some submissions to agents of my recently-completed novel.
• My daughter is now reading fluently, my son starting to read and we're keeping up making special times of the day to read longer books to them both.
• Succeeding in branching out in our day-trips out to further afield and longer days - even though my son is slightly struggling with this as it really tires him out.
• Succeeding in cutting the food and household budget while still providing nutritious meals mainly cooked from scratch.

The trouble is that as soon as you achieve a goal it becomes the normal thing you do, so you end up doing more and more without realising how much you do, and then wonder why you feel tired, have no spare time, and haven't added any new goals in a while. So this is a totally boastful post to remind myself of how much I actually do! Hurray for mum everywhere!

4th birthday!

So, it was my son's 4th birthday today which went as well as could be expected. He got loads of great presents, nothing hideous, and saw lots of family. It all got too much for him and my daughter once each during the course of the day, which was pretty much as expected, and he's asleep now, exhausted from the day, while Daddy's putting our daughter to bed. Then we can relax!
As promised, a picture of the train cake, made this time by my own fair hands, based on a design from a Jane Asher cake book:

It is very difficult to get the balance right with a birthday cake. We don't usually go overboard on sugar and they never have sweets, but for a one-off I didn't want to be a spoilsport. I left out the food colouring completely (the original Jane Asher cake was green!) as I didn't think that added anything to the enjoyment factor, and toned down the use of sweets to decorate quite considerably. It is tricky to make fun-shaped cakes without colouring and decoration though.
And so I'm musing on my son's birth and how different it was to my daughter's. One of the things which sticks in my mind the most is how lovely it was to be in bed half an hour after he was born, with him in the crook of one arm, feeding, while eating beans on toast with the other hand. It was the first meal I had actually enjoyed for 9 months and the first time I hadn't felt nauseous in that same time and it was heavenly! I can recommend a homebirth wholeheartedly.

Food

I'm struggling to find inspiration for cooking at the moment. There's so many things to think of - obviously the nutritional value of the food, the variety of dishes cooked, what the children will and won't eat, what suits the weather (been too hot for anything heavy this week) and trying to stick to a budget. And that's before you consider the organic, fair-trade, local, seasonal and wholesomeness aspect of it all. I find that trying new recipes often results in waste when the children reject part of it and also adds to the cost of the weekly shop due to having to buy specific new items. I have been trying to cut our costs and increase our nutritional benefit by finding recipes for things we often buy ready-made such as tortilla wraps and making them instead. This sometimes works out well and sometimes doesn't - the wraps went down very well and they're quick and easy to make but home-made hummus has never really worked out and I'm not sure why. Even I can taste that it doesn't taste like shop-bought hummus and while home-made things are usually better, somehow my hummus, no matter whch recipe I use, just isn't as nice and the children won't eat it.

I need some new ideas or else some children who aren't quite so picky. It's not fair, they used to eat anything when they were tiny. In fact, up to the age of about 2 and half, both of them would eat exactly what we had but gradually both of them got pickier about certain aspects of food - having things separate and not mixed, no sauces are the main things, but they mean no stews, soups, hotpots, lasagnes etc which makes things tricky. They do eat healthy food just not a very big variety of it and no mixed dishes. Well-meaning people say I should just serve what we're having and if they don't it then they go hungry, but I think this is rather draconian and probably counter-productive. I remember people trying to force me to eat things I didn't like as a child and it never actually made me eat them, it just created tension around meal-times and food issues in general which I'm not going to do for my children. Meal-times should be a relaxed, social occasion. Also, knowing my children, they'll just not eat, be hungry and then throw massive tantrums because they're hungry until I have to get them some food. That strikes me as a situation in which everyone loses. And tryign to starve a child into submission is pretty much tantamount to child abuse I think and certainly the opposite of respectful. I'm hoping this is one of those phases that they'll gradually grow out of.

Another thing people say to me is that if you breastfeed and then do child-led weaning, the child will grow up eating anything and be a great eater. Well, I'm here to tell you that 'it ain't necessarily so'! We did all that with both of them and both of them are picky, in their own different ways, of course, so don't try to tell me it's something I did to them!