(from Daisy Yellow)

What is on your reading list for 2011? Dear me, I don’t make a reading list. I have rooms of unread books. I have decided, by way of a not-new-year-resolution, to stop buying or borrowing from the library (with the exception of non-fiction which is allowed) until I have made some inroads on the pile.

What was the best fiction book you read in 2010? Important artifacts and personal property from the collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, including books, street fashion and jewelry, by Leanna Shapton. It was a weird one.
What book was the biggest let down in 2010? A tiny bit marvellous, by Dawn French. A funny lady but the characters were unbelievable and the plot vaguely nonexistant.
Do you remember the first short story you wrote as a kid? What was it about? I remember writing “the cat who wanted to do everything” about a cat who, well, wanted to do stuff. I remember “talkabout mummy”, based on the ladybird talkabout books. The, slightly older, I produced a series of books about walking talking fruit.
Do you keep track of the books you read? Yes, here. All the way back to 2002!
How many books are on your TO READ list? Loads.
Where is your favorite reading spot? On the sofa in peace and quiet. I hate reading in bed!
How many books (fiction + non-fiction) did you read in 2010? 31
Do you read more than one book at once? Yes always – usually one novel, a bath book and at least one non-fiction.
Do you read more fiction or non-fiction? Fiction: I am never without a novel on the go

I got a sewing machine for Christmas. I did ask for it, it wasn’t santa gone mad, but me! I was the child who sewed her dolly’s dress to her skirt aged 7. Looking back I find it astonishing that in my lifetime – I am really not that old – Friday afternoons at school were sewing for girls/football for boys/no exceptions to the rule; my main recollection, bar the teacher sighing as she cut things off my pinafore, was using the needle to gouge a hole in my finger so Amanda Wellings and I could be blood sisters and best friends forever*. Fast forward to secondary school, via a few frustrating sessions with my paternal Grandmother, whose good intentions to help me make something were scuppered by her perfectionist tendencies: I watched, always polite but inwardly frustrated, while she used my kits to produce lovely cuddly toys, paper flowers, and so forth. She was very skillful, it must be said. But. She did attempt to show me how to embroider on more than one occasion but my fingers, once presented with a needle, come over all of a wobble and refuse to line up stitches nicely next to one another, rather they straggle all over. All very abstract but not quite the thing.

So – secondary school. I was strongly encouraged to take up music for the “art” option after a term of textiles saw me shedding (quite literally) blood and tears over a padded shell-shaped thing; I was never permitted to touch the sewing machines but had to keep my cack-handedness away where I could not break them. (Proper art left me bemused at the idea of drawing my own hand; woodwork was, if only unofficially, for the boys, as the girls sat at the back sniggering over a dogeared copy of Lace and singing the songs from Grease. What can I say, it was 1988.)

All these years later, I decide to conquer my fears. And do you know what? I still can’t sew on a button in earshot of my children, and I pay people good money to make my trousers the correct length, but machine sewing bears no resemblance! It makes lovely neat stitches all by itself, all I have to do is push down with one foot (I can drive, that’s not too difficult) and make sure it is pointing in a straight line. And keep it far away from my skirt. Maths I am good at, so measuring geometric shapes on fabric and cutting them out is not beyond me. Moreover, it provides near-instant gratification in the way that knitting really does not. (I knit slow. And I have little time.) I have already cut out and made the whole front side of a blankety quilty thing for Jenny. (Maggie has a cot quilt that her very properly talented Grandma, my mother-in-law, made when she was a baby; Tamsin has a panda quilt we bought at the Great Wall of China; Jenny should not be left out, should she.) Now I am feeling a little nervous as I prepare to go off-piste; the instructions say to just sew some fleece to the back of it but I want to cleverly combine with the next pattern in the book which involves batting and quilting in the ditch. Eek! What is the worst that can happen – I can always unpick if it is a disaster, right?

Photos to follow if and when I manage.

*It didn’t work, she’s not even on my facebook!

That Earthenwitch is at it again. Of November’s intentions, I did survive sanity intact thanks mainly to some very good friends, both local and very old, my crack team of babysitters, and rather a lot of wine. Tamsin’s birthday went off very well; she was overheard singing “I’m four I’m four happy four I  used to be three but now I am four” from which one deduces that she enjoyed her special day – a few photos here. Shoes to go with my Dress were located at the back of my wardrobe, which is always nice. Jenny’s naming day was fabulously cold, crisp and clear: the humanist ceremony was just lovely, then we had a wee tramp around the zoo (the baby giraffe!), then back for warm winter pimms and afternoon tea. Even my mass catering efforts over the weekend went reasonably well, with the more senior members of the family being astonished by nachos. I like to astonish.

None of the other intentions were realised, which allows me to add them to December’s list, as follows:

-finish making the pressies that are nearly done; felt a couple more stars to go with the lonely one and make it look like a theme not an accident; open some of the children’s Christmas craft sets and do something with them.

-list of presents is made so next I must purchase.

-cards! Must not miss last posting date for abroad this year.

-J’s birthday

-sad tomato plants still in garden, currently under an inch of snow (just the one)

-muck out playroom, get rid of too-small baby clothes yadda yadda yadda

-find next-size-up clothes for J and figure out if she needs things

-get roof fixed, carpet cleaned, etc

Shamelessly ripped off from Earthenwitch:

– My main aim this month has to be Retaining My Sanity while Doing It All Alone. Cameron has four – four! – overseas trips lined up, totalling an estimated* 16 or so nights away, interrupting three weekends and let’s not even talk about how rubbishly jetlagged and knackered he’ll be in between.

Given that, the rest of my list is fairly low-key:

– I seem to have taken my eye off the ball and accidentally gone back to work. While this is a very gentle few-hours-a-week, these few hours have to come from somewhere and I haven’t yet quite figured out where that might be.
– find Shoes to go with my Dress (and preferably without having to visit every single shoeshop in Cheshire)
– T’s birthday (including parties etc); J’s naming ceremony
– make a few little pressies for a few little people, mostly Christmas-related
– buy or at least decide upon the rest. Oh, and provide various family members with great ideas for me, Cameron and the girls without, of course, giving away the best ideas and leaving me nothing to get people.
– find out who is going to be here for Christmas; people are being irritatingly coy about it. I need to plan meals!
– make something festive along the lines of pudding or cake or mincemeat. I am not very big on celebrating the birth of our lord through the medium of dried fruit, mainly because I can always find something else I would rather eat (apart from sprouts), but it is trad.
– make stollen, which is entirely different and freezes divinely
– clear away old sad tomato plants
– muck out the playroom including all the way to the bottom of the huge toy box
– get rid of outgrown baby clothes.

* he hasn’t shared the details of the last one yet but given that it is to India, unlikely to be an overnighter.

– Why can a “Y” pretend to be a vowel?
– Do brown-skinned people have more blood cells than pale-skinned people?
– Can your eyes get bigger? What about your mouth?

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Mostly, having three is great. Apart from never quite feeling like you have your eye on the ball (which is probably a good thing from their point of view), it has much to recommend it. It all goes to pieces, however, when one’s husband is about as far away as he can possibly get (I got a middle-of-the-night text “in Sydney on harbour cruise”); I am half-expecting him to announce his entry to NASA’s astronaut-training programme in a bid to get even further. When one has put the baby to bed at midday mere minutes before the school rings to say the 6-year-old has been sick and is very pale and can I come to get her please. I managed that, even persuading the baby back to bed on our return, but the collection of the 3-year-old from nursery was just beyond me. Fortunately we live in a Village with a Village Ethos and my very lovely friend not only went and collected her, and collected another friend’s little boy from school who I had been supposed to be looking after, but gave them tea and kept them until bedtime. And picked her up this morning for preschool. And brought her back again afterwards! Meanwhile, I have been trying to cuddle the poorly one as much as she wants, although 9-month-old babies are not entirely understanding of that. So it’s been cuddles during baby naps and pop her up to bed for some peace in between; I have consumed much cake in compensation for the two flights of stairs and can feel the cabin fever mounting. She is much better today, so I haven’t felt I have to check her quite so often – her breathing was scary yesterday and she wasn’t keeping anything down, not even a sip of water. I couldn’t have a medicinal glass of wine last night because I was slightly concerned I might end up driving to A&E, though by the time I went to bed she was relatively peaceful and her chest sounded rattly rather than wheezy. And she has eaten a bit of toast and a bowl of my smugly medicinal home-made chicken and fennel soup.

Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love –
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn’t, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull –
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

All those formative years of sharpened pencils and shiny shoes at the start of September have left me feeling all new-yeary now, as the mornings develop a nip (is it too soon for a winter duvet?) and the alarm is once again pressed into service after 6 blissful weeks of getting up when we wake up. Or not, if you are a baby who wakes around 6, in which case you are ignored until a more seemly hour. It’s ok to get up at dawn if you can slope back off to bed around 9.

I am toying with re-starting the blog; the trouble with not being excitingly ex-pat with every day an adventure is there is little to write about. And, you know, blogs have moved on: people have facebook. The world is full of mummy blogs and frankly they are all a million times more interesting than my got up, got the kids up, loaded the dishwasher had a lovely coffee mundanity. We will see. But Max does have a new adventure, which is probably nothing to do with his having recently turned 40, and a new blog to boot: he is newly expat in Kyrgyzstan, which reminds me I really must find a map and work out where the hell that is: I visualise steppes and camels and things but am almost certainly wrong.