Samhain activities part 3

So, the final part of our family seasonal celebrations found us making spooky Lady's Fingers for pudding:


And we made a bonfire - an inside one from paper and tissue paper due to my son's uncanny ability to injure himself:


And this is what it looked like when we placed the candles behind it:

Samhain activities part 2

The children's Samhain poems - this is my daughter's:

The Pumpkins Shine Bright

The lanterns are getting lit,
It gets really dark.
Firework Night is on its way,
The bonfires are lit soon.
The leaves are falling quickly.
People dress up and scare people.

And this is my son's (not quite so seasonal, but very definite):

Untitled

I like engines,
Especially blue engines.
I like engines a lot,
I like all engines.

So there you have it. Part 3 to follow...

I'm in The Mother!

It's always nice to get a nice thick brown envelope containing a good magazine, but it's doubly good when it's a magazine with an article you wrote in it!

Anyone who gets The Mother magazine, then check out my piece on page 12, The Birth of a Mother. Hope you like it!

Samhain activities part 1

So, we have bats made out of toilet rolls:





And masks:

A thrill runs through the allotment...

What could it be? The whsipers started early this week, knots of people in corners - 'have you heard?', 'when will it be?' 'maybe the weekend...' and today, the wonder arrived! A big pile of manure! And it was a like a festival at the allotment - more people than I've ever seen there before at one time and a kind of holiday atmosphere with everyone chatting, making manure jokes and mucking in (ahem!) to get it shovelled and onto plots. Isn't it strange what makes people happy?

Feeling more positive

I'm generally feeling a bit more positive about things this week, despite having a really really awful night last night which ended with everyone awake, both children screaming, me really cross and shouty, and my husband rather bemused about what on earth had happened to kick it all off!

Otherwise though, the allotment is finally starting to look like I had envisaged it would - ie, nicely dug, covered in leaf mulch and planted up with overwintering crops. I think about half to two thirds is like that now, but there's still a lot to do, mainly round the edges, and I would like to get it under control before the spring growing season makes all the weeds grow again!

I had a long discussion with my mum this week about how the kids are doing, in terms of their development, education, social skills etc and she was really encouraging. Given that she's a primary school teacher with over 20 years experience, I feel she is in a position to know that the children are not falling behind where they 'should' be and although I know I shouldn't care about where they 'should' be, I find I can't quite let this go. Especially in view of all the doom and gloom spreading in the HE community currently due to the latest guidelines proposal and the potential impact of Contactpoint.

Our new HE group moved to its winter venue today and it worked pretty well. We actually had the entire soft-play to ourselves and even met another He-er there who knew nothing of the group and had come that morning entirely by chance! There seems to be a hard-core of fairly regular attenders forming, and they're all nice and the kids get on well, so I'm feeling quite positive about that too.

The cat's stitches are due to come out tomorrow too and she seems generally to be healing really well. I hope she can go outside again soon as I'm getting fed up with my bad nights being added to by the cat hurling herself noisily against the back door at 2am in a fruitless attempt to get outside.

I have an optician's appointment tomorrow so all this positivity will probably soon be punctured by finding out that my eyes are worse and that it costs a king's ransom for new glasses.

Last of the harvest & board games

I've just dug up the last of our potatoes on the allotment and am fantastically proud of how many we've managed to produce despite all out set-backs and difficulties. I've also dug half of the carrots and they've grown really well, I'm so chuffed. Now I have a much better idea of what grows well and what doesn't and will be filling the allotment next year with potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, garlic and other root crops. I've just finished planting my overwintering onions and that half of the plot looks great, just like an allotment should! It's a shame about the other half, but we'll plod on with clearing that. Now that it's getting colder the slugs are finally leaving my pumpkin plant alone too and there are loads of flowers on it - we may yet get a few small pumpkins, though probably not in time for Samhain!

This afternoon I spent some time playing Rainforest Rescue (an eco-themed snakes & ladders game) with just my son, and it did make me laugh. He's only 3, so a little young to really get the hang of a dice-throwing game though he's very good at taking turns and counting along with his counter. But, he just couldn't understand why I thought he should slide down the waterfalls - his counter was a parrot and surely I knew that parrots can fly? So, I slid down them dutifully, as a tiger should, while he flew up waterfalls and won every game. He is so lovely.