And I note once again I forgot to mention we were going.

A night in a really very good indeed service station hotel (Annandale Water: anyone heading north I highly recommend it. A proper-hotel-quality room – with a big bed a medium-sized bed and a small bed to please any 3-year-olds in the party - and glorious views of a sunshine-glazed lake (ducks, geese, herons) to accompany breakfast); 2 nights in Drymen; then across to Fife for a few nights with Cameron’s parents.

Drymen is (apparently) The Gateway to Loch Lomond, where we had fun eating icecream, cruising the Loch, becoming midge-fodder and feeding cygnets. Made M walk a bit and befriended a fellow hippy mum at a playground; giggled sympathetically at the woman who dropped her mobile phone through the jetty; felt like the Pied Piper in the return boat journey as all the small girls on board came to chat up Tamsin; tried hard (but not very hard) to not succumb to stereotypes as all the ageing Glaswegians in the boat party had a pint before lunch. (I had a coffee.)

Pittenweem was hosting its annual art festival, which we enjoyed as usual while Maggie bossed her grandparents about and demanded (and received) the 110% attention that is her due. Tamsin has come back a different baby: when we left, small toys and hot drinks could safely be left on the coffee table – no chance now, she’s up! Up and grabbing at whatever she can get. I’ve told M she has to move her playpeople onto the kitchen table instead.

Maggie was 8 months and a bit the first time I went out and left her for an evening – I was absolutely ready to do so and had a fabulous time. Tamsin is 8 1/2 months (already!) and, although I have yet to have a lovely dinner out, I am starting to feel like me again. I’m sure all women have their own recovery period: 8 months, give or take, seems to be it for me. I’m reading again; I’m starting to think a haircut might be a good idea; I “need” some clothes; and I am at (very) long last starting to sort out the house. Items that were assigned temporary homes when we moved in over a year ago are slowly being allocated more appropriate locations, and I am even keeping on top of the tidying (mostly). I’m still spending more time online than is strictly sane but hey, baby steps.

Actually: I wonder if I am just feeling better for 3 days with hardly any rain? SAD in July was bad news.

In other news, had a lovely weekend with The Girls, all of whom (plus offspring) squeezed into my house on Saturday. There were people sleeping on almost every available surface while Cameron, Maggie, Tamsin and I occupied the front dorm. For a child who likes to visit at 1 am and again at 6ish, Maggie was strangely unimpressed with being put in our bed.

Gah! This weather! Feels even worse because we had two reasonably nice days this week, on one of which there were no showers at all. Astounding. We walked to a castle and down by a river and, OK, wellies were quite welcome but still. Nil precipitation. My washing dried.

This weekend is back to normal: I failed to leave the house yesterday then today we zipped around the zoo, dashing for shelter every time the rain came back on – but I am really not complaining too hard as we saw some different animals. Our usual zoo route, led by Maggie, goes elephants, monkeys optional, bats optional, giraffes, okapi, chimps, orangutans*, flamingoes, penguins, sealions, play. Tigers, Lions, marmots, home. Today we saw rhinos! Meerkats! Lots of antelopey things and wildy horses! And managed to end up at the posh ice-cream stand at the appropriate time (as opposed to the cheapo Nestle stuff that we are usually forced into). 

Of course I’ve been reading a bit of Harry too. Not page by breathless page, as I’ve consumed the others – one just doesn’t get stretches of uninterrupted time any more – but zipping through it nonetheless. The postie handed it to Cameron yesterday morning with a cheery “Harry Potter” (I imagine he had a fair few to deliver), confusing Cameron somewhat. He’s not a fan. He has, however, read the last couple of pages.

Oh, and we finished season 3 of Lost. What the …?!

*Anybody in the vicinity of Chester Zoo: the new orangutan house is fantastic. I recommend.

Tamsin’s naming ceremony went really well: the sun shone (for only the second day this summer) – we even managed a barbeque in the evening without needing the emergency gazebo I’d bought – the children behaved impeccably*, the registrar was jolly, the flowers pretty and the afternoon tea delicious. Everybody looked very nice (though in an ideal world my hairdryer might not have broken down 10 minutes before we needed to leave the house – lucky I had a baby to distract people with, eh!). There are some photos here.

We had three lovely readings, read by Tamsin’s three lovely ungodlyparents (or whatever one is supposed to call them):  

Children, from The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran)

And he said:
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; for even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

A piece by Francis Thompson and William Blake

Know you what it is to be a child? … It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, – for each child has a fairy god-mother in his/her own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and count yourself the king/queen of infinite space; it is:
To see the World in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

A wish for my children (Evangeline Paterson)

On this doorstep I stand
year after year
to watch you going

and think: May you not
skin your knees. May you
not catch your fingers
in car doors. May
your hearts not break.

May tide and weather
wait for your coming

and may you grow strong
to break
all webs of my weaving

*Apart from Maggie and Mia having a wee nibble of the cake icing, but who could blame them when it had such beautiful flowers on!

Poor Tamsin now has the pox, and far worse than Maggie did (breastfeeding schmestfeeding: so much for a milder dose). She’s completely covered in spots, has a temperature and is just miserable. Wearing a nappy over the spots can’t be very nice, and calpol makes her sick. Fortunately we’ve got M in for an extra session at preschool – after 2 days at home she was climbing the walls a bit and all the people-free places we might have gone (the back garden, the cycle path) are impossible in this weather. And a kind man from the garage came and collected my car for today’s MOT/service*, saving me from having to drag the children into town and swap carseats around in the middle of the forecourt then do it all in reverse this afternoon.

Currently quiet on my knee. She keep dropping off for a few minutes then waking for a scream, poor little thing. And she’s going to be all scabby for her naming ceremony in a fortnight: I’d better learn photoshop!

*It never rains but it pours. Ha ha ha.

Just a few teeny baby spuds and some minute broad beans (I was too impatient to wait while they grew) and some very peppery radishes, but how exciting! The potatoes were fantastic: Maggie went mmmmmmmm and kept asking for more (no, because I only dug up a few) and even Tamsin polished hers off! Growing your own is fantastic. Even if I did have to extract them from a sort of muddy soup rather than digging in the true sense of the word. It’s soggy up there.

I pulled the garlic last week, too, because it was rusty and getting rotten: not an unmitigated success, but I’m drying them out in the kitchen and some will be fine bulbs to be proud of. (The rest will become compost.) I’d intended putting the PSB in its place but I (blush) left it up there in small pots while we had a mini-heatwave and they all dessicated along with a tray of lettuces – had it been this week, they’d have drowned – and slugs ate the artichokes. I do feel a little like King Canute holding back the tide (of weeds) at the moment but I understand that is normal for veg gardening in June – and my modest aim at the beginning of this first year was that I wanted to get out more than I put in.

Thanks to you all for your good wishes: M is now almost completely recovered if quite unsightly. (Old ladies still recoil in horror but as they are the same old ladies who unfailingly tell Tamsin she’s a lovely little man, I don’t care.) She returned to preschool today, thus preventing me from using my planned title based on the fact that it was the longest day ever, groan groan.

We are heading south tomorrow for our trip to Ascot: my outfit is assembled even if I have failed to try the whole lot on simultaneously. No point now as I can’t go shopping again so it will just have to do. There’s enough champagne flowing at these occasions that I will look lovely through everybody’s soft-focus eyes by lunchtime anyway.

M has chickenpox so we are in quarantine until next week. She’s not poorly but full of beans if tending a bit towards the whiny voice.

T has a horrible chesty rattly cough, a runny nose and is Definitely* teething.

10 o’clock this morning, the power went off. No telly. No computer!** No electrician until Monday.*** I’ve managed to get most things back on but no power to most of the sockets and no hot water.

*Bearing in mind that teething is something you can never be sure about until it has happened.

**At 5 in the evening I realised that I could get a really long extension cable and plug it in to the kitchen, the power to which I managed to persuade to come back on.

***I want “our” electrician not an emergency one, because it’s an old house and wires don’t always go where one might expect them to. Switches don’t always operate what you might expect them to. Some do nothing at all, as far as we know. He said he could come if I could swear hand on heart that it was an emergency as he’d have to leave a house half-wired. Fond (addicted) of the web as I am – and desperate for cbeebies as I feel - I could not honestly claim it was life or death.

Congratulations to: Helen and Simon on the arrival of baby Sophie, a sister to Charlotte; Heather and Jack on baby Margaret – great choice of name! – a sister for Rebecca; and Caroline and Pete on baby Imogen, a sister for Charlotte. Anyone who’s anyone has two girls, you know.

Tamsin is fast approaching 6 months and, given that she has taken to swiping at my food and tries at least once every mealtime to actually pick up and chew my plate (plus having all the other signs of readiness), we are starting to think it might be time to wean. I am absolutely not messing about with purees again – I spent months making lovely bright-coloured mushes for Maggie, freezing them in baby-sized cubes, defrosting them, poking at them with a spoon, sometimes smearing them about a bit…then throwing them away (the only puree-type thing she really enjoyed was a horrible green pond-slime like substance from a jar. Spinach and potato, I believe). Baby-led weaning is the way forward in this house.

Her highchair has arrived (it’s still in pieces – we so love flatpack) and tomorrow I am going to treat her to some new dishes and bibs as Maggie won’t want to share the former and the latter are frankly not fit for use. Then it will be all systems go!

I’ve already given her a few bits and pieces in the interests of being allowed to eat myself (I already eat chocolate in secret* but I do draw the line at consuming entire meals that way). Just what we were having anyway. She had a floret of cauliflower which she found very interesting until it made her sick. (This was perhaps not a very sensible starting point – whenever I eat cauli or broccoli it gives her a tummyache.) She did rather well with sticks of steamed courgette – sucked the soft seeds from the centre – and licked a soft carrot stick for ages. This morning, after extensive research and consultation with Karen, who I have appointed my BLW guru, she had a bit of my buttered crumpet, which was very tasty indeed. I don’t think she actually injested very much but it was thoroughly sucked and mushed and de-buttered.

I then decided that we should move away from food beginning with C (my mum thought I was following some sort of wacko new baby guru’s alphabetical weaning method) so when we had our dinner tonight she sucked some bits of pasta and a few slices of cooked apple – some of which disappeared so I assume she ate them! I can see the main problem is going to be providing enough food (or keeping my floor more sanitary): so much got dropped and had to be replaced – quickly, else she cried. Perhaps assembling the highchair will help with that.

*A couple of nights ago I went up to tuck M back into bed. I gave her a kiss and she said hmm….that smells of…chocolate! Caught in the act.

But all in all much better than anticipated given that Maggie has been A Horror (capitals warranted) this weekend and that we were all, not unrelatedly, awake well before 6 this morning. It started rather well: I was pleased and justifiably smug to be at the allotment by 9.30, hoeing and planting spuds, having already dropped M off at preschool and been to the post office. An utterly glorious spring morning (but all that warm and wet last week has fair brought the weeds on). Home for coffee and another low as I dropped a large and very heavy pyrex jug onto my toe (probably a good thing she was at preschool and didn’t hear the language).

Picked her up: drove straight to Mothercare on the pretext that both girls needed shorts for the summer – actually I just wanted a bit of a drive so that M might have an afternoon nap and start to recover some equilibrium. Bought shorts then Maggie ran away from me in the carpark: she only wanted to help me strap Tamsin in but running away in carparks is one of my Things, so I got very cross. Was manhandling her into her carseat (Tamsin still sitting in the sling so effectively in one arm), bag, keys and M’s favourite cuddly, Weebee, on the floor behind me. A helpful woman picked up Weebee and passed it to me – I did say thank you but given stressy situation (kicking and screaming – Maggie not me I promise) was not terribly gracious and did rather grab it and mutter. I acknowledge that I could have been more polite but I don’t think I deserved a torrent of sweary abuse. Anyone with half a brain would have realised I was under pressure. Came home feeling really rubbish, but M has been great ever since (she did have a sleep in the end).

Last bad thing was soaking the bulghar wheat for tea in plenty of time, going to drain it to add to the salad and realising I’d selected the wrong jar and had still-hard barley instead. Bah.

Hey ho. Tomorrow’s another day.