Evenings full of beans

It is hot and light and upstairs in our house there is a kind of quiet, languid, settled sleeplessness until late into the evening. Mytle is covering her floor with cutting and sticking (who gave her the scissors and sellotape and glue for her bedroom?No one can remember..) and producing strange mytle-sculptures and finger puppets that eat each other by fitting together like Russian dolls. C creates elaborate battle formations. We (vegetarian pacifist bedtime loving parents) are bemused by these developments, a little nostalgic about guaranteed adult time when children were asleep by 7, but deeply understanding and celebrating the need to relax with books and paper and scissors and glue (and little plastic soldiers? well maybe a little more foxed by that one..) To muse on a plan all day and wait until there is quiet and time alone to make it real, this I understand and I suspect somehow may be a seed of happiness for a time far in the future. My daytime plans today; turning allotment broad beans into a pasta sauce with garlic, sundried tomato paste, glugs of olive oil, the juice of a lemon, black pepper, dill (don't leave this out), marjoram (it grows outside the kitchen door so it ends up in most of what I cook; I have no stronger opinion about it than that) feta cheese, chopped fresh tomatos and black pepper. It was eaten to the sound of Just William on Myrtle's CD player and interrupted once by Myrtle with a puppet show and her Christmas list "just checking if I can ask Father Christmas for a real dog and stuff to make a birds nest with"

Home

A day of trying to reunite puzzle pieces, packs of playing cards and sets of cups and wooden peg games; strangely delighted by settling flowers in and out of the garden and finally finding my lovely fruit crates a job. Mo sat on the blue sofa in between his big brother and sister unsorting sorted sets of many things and looking at books, very pleased with himself. Order visits my world so rarely these days; this weekend I am attempting to celebrate it fully especially as I have managed to do all this and resist moving any furniture. I did toy with the idea of single handedly loading a large armchair into the back of the car and taking it to the dump but managed to distract myself by resurrecting the sand pit and bringing 6 bags of play sand into the garden. Calm requires such herculean efforts.

Surreal

c is in the living room twirling a bow (as in and arrow) around his head then aiming it Jedi style.

Me: Are you a Jedi?

C (continuing Jedi Majorette moves) Well, the Jedi do do this.

Me: You look a bit like the squirrel on Ice Age. Ninja Jedi

C: (Earnest face) Actually I am the most gymnastic boy in my class.

Me (silent. I strongly suspect this is not true)

C: well anyway I am more than J. J can't even do this (drops down to touch the back of his feet through his bent legs)

Me: Why would you want to do that?

C: Mrs H said we had to pretend to be a bean because we are doing Jack and the beanstalk. This is what I did (in role as bean. creeps earnestly along the floor then begins to grow) Then she said 'freeze' (He freezes in a contorted beanstalk position)

I sigh. It has been a long day. Myrtle is on roller skates in the kitchen throughout this exchange. Mo looks from one to the other riveted, then falls backwards on the floor and puts his legs in the air. I know how he feels.

Saving up.

C (we can't agree, he and I, on his blog name so he must remain an initial) still can't cut into his lovely tissue paper collage so it is complete, like stained glass, on his window for the evening sun to shine through. I know how he feels. On the rare occasions that I buy new dresses they hang in my wardrobe for months waiting for me to take a deep breath and wear them, and beautiful fabric matures gently behind the glass of my sewing cupboard . But brave Myrtle made a fish template, drew around it in thick black pen on her precious creation and cut it out, so bright fishes are dancing on our kitchen windows held in place with blu-tack eyes. The scraps became wings for a flying scarecrow entered for this weekends competition at the last minute . It turns out we have been making a scarecrow all year, though we didn't know it. Saved treasures came together quickly once we had dreamed him up; a papier mache head, made with C while I was pregnant with Mo has been waiting bodiless, home made clothes have been languishing on forgotten dolls, torn sheeting has been lying at the bottom of a rag bag. He flew above our gate in the rain under a large yellow umbrella. The chocolates we won for him (third prize!) are in the cupboard awaiting their moment.

Morning cherries

Comforting ourselves with cherries while Mr B is away. A smiley breakfast, especially as Mo slept all the way to 5.30am- cause for celebration indeed..

Pots!

A fat little bird jug for warming porridge milk and a heavy, wobbly, stripy mug for peppermint tea. The best treasures are always the things you make yourself for tiny but special jobs (even if they turn out far from perfect!)

Stitching

I rapidly and wonkily pieced this just so I could stitch onto it aimlessly for a few days. Its strange embroidered shapes look something like beach treasures or sea creatures, I'm not sure. I thought somewhere near the start that it might be a bag for treasure collecting, especially at the beach, but now I am wondering if it might be the (first?) page of a cloth book and have had a lovely hour sketching next pages of clouds and ponds and trees.The arrival of this book has me thinking that I can indulge rather than fight my love of the wonky and imperfect. A good guiding principle for life in general at the moment..

Going on without us..

Choosing..Sticking..

Drying..

Hanging..

Loving transformations as I do, as much the ones that happen like magic while I get on with other things as the ones I stand over and create, I often use the early morning to get something on the go. There was nothing rising or baking or washing while we played elsewhere today but the thought that this early morning tissue paper collage was drying in the hazy sunshine made the picnic in the park all the nicer. We made it with the idea of cutting out fishes and sticking them to the window in an undersea scene but now that we've hung them up we can't quite bring ourselves to cut them..maybe tomorrow. And speaking of things working while we are elsewhere, we think our elusive hedgehog, who made himself a winter nest under some tin foil (and a pink doll's blanket my grandmother made!) and has not been sighted since, is eating the scraps that fall from Mo's outside highchair. I leave the kind of scene that makes my heart sink and by the morning it is all licked clean. This is the kind of help I need.