Flow

Spot huge red peppers in the greengrocers. Bring them home in favourite bag. Unpack peppers. Chop them and roast with tomatos and garlic. Add garlic, zest and juice of half an orange and blitz (but wait until garlic has cooled down before trying to squeeze it into sauce- ouch)

Add cream to some and use as pasta sauce for baby (leave out cream for self if contemplating attempting to squeeze post natal body into last years summer clothes imminently) Add fresh chopped basil and spread some over pizza base with cheese for children. Add chopped chillies and pour over protein (fish? mixed beans?) for hungry husband. Could we eat this everyday do you think?

Emerging

This winter has been beautiful in many ways but long and, at times, so challenging I couldn't see the way ahead clearly. This weekend things began to feel gentler; a visit from lovely E, rainy shopping, a sunny walk, Mo really crawling. Today I hung out a wash for the first time in a while, invented a green vegetable sauce for tea, found a Monday

rhythm. Hope it stays with us a while.

Battles

Whenever Mr Bird is away I suddenly feel the need to transform something. Perhaps just to prove that I can still do impossible things, perhaps just because I want to say "look at what I made!". The dressing up box often moves floors, whole rooms have been rearranged in the past. Sometimes I choose something less physical like a problem we've been trying to solve. I nearly applied myself to Mo's tendency to wake at 4 in the morning. I imagined myself saying " Oh, while you were away I persuaded our baby to sleep through the night. " I chose smaller battles. This time a fence went up in the garden so we can dream up a climbing garden in our tiny space, rare new toys appeared to create some play not based on films, and the high chair Mo endlessly threatens to escape from disappeared into the cellar. Sometimes I have twinges of jealousy when Mr Bird is out in the world making things happen. But not when what he calls the 'permanent revolution' in our house shows me that I still have the power to change things in the part of the world that matters most to me right now. (oh, and not when playing peepo or doing paper mache!) Round here, the queen is out in front.

Mothers Day

Motherhood is feeling pretty overwhelming for me at the moment. The pictures in my book help me every day. I can't remember a time when I didnt keep a book like this full of collages that inspire me. Its full of torn magazine pages, scribbled lists, telephone numbers, recipes and usually bulging with bits and pieces in the cover pockets that belong nowhere yet. The pages seem to make a kind of sense when I've finished them. It is a place for my treasures and so important to me that I made one for my mum too. A patchworked cover with pockets for pens and glue and a bird button for the ribbon closure. For me there were chocolates for breakfast, homemade cards and a lovely 'crazy daisy' salad bowl to add to my kitchen treasures!

Slow Morning...

...displaying treasures from the week, playing with colours, thinking of granny...

Life on wheels

Lately life with a baby has been running more smoothly outside. A buggy, a bike and roller skates; all of us moving at our own pace, enjoying a journey together with no particular destination. But this week I've been noticing some moments of calm creeping back into our indoor life.

Vegetables from our box, on wheels made long ago, taking a little weight off me and moving us forward.

5 minutes

If I think in old units of time, the kind of time I once had, before children, then I never have enough to do anything any more. And yet the things I love and have always loved are still in my life in ways that constantly surprise me. I knit, sew, cook, play even more than ever. Time has a new currency now. I seize it in tiny pieces that somehow do add up to something that satisfies. I make tiny five minute baskets full of materials that I can gaze at and play with when an unexpected moment arrives. They are everywhere in our house and offer just enough to knit a row, crochet a circle, play with some colours dream up an idea. Eventually, even if I don't know what they are as I hold them briefly, they become something.

This 'Fish Pond' blanket came together this week from many such moments playing with scraps of wool. I had just enough time to put it together last night to send to a friend's newborn baby. Just enough...

Home

" When I was writing a column for 'Family Circle' I had planned one in praise of shabbiness. A house that does not have one worn comfy chair in it is soulless..one does not need to show off a house, only live in it, to make a true shelter and nurturing place for human needs. And that means not so much efficiency as life enhancement: a cat sitting on a table to look out, a bowl of flowering bulbs, books scattered about." May Sarton 'Journal of a Solitude'.

These words have been rolling around my head this week, as I smoothed half finished quilts over the backs of chairs, piled books we are reading on tables around us, stepped over toys, pinned paintings on our board. However much I long for more time to make our home tidy, I know that I want it to be a place where things are never really finished, where there is always the kind of excitement that comes from a game or project in process. I need this blog to help me treasure the disorder that living with two children and a baby brings and to help me dream more fully what nurture and shelter looks like.