Myriad Me

Poolside Musings

From birth your child grows.

Daily, weekly, monthly, the growth and changes unfurl in the many milestones reached and celebrated.

Parenthood is absorbing, at times consuming and all encompassing but like the seasons, time moves on and your utterly dependent child starts to stake out the corners of her life which are hers. Taking step after increasingly confident step towards independence.

With each new milestone and skill acquired there is a pang shadowing the excitement and pride, and I cast a glance back to what was. My baby toddler little girl grows. I still can't quite believe how fast the time has gone.

I want to raise a confident child. A child who knows herself, and trusts herself. Who, from a foundation of unconditional love can explore the world around her, and learn how to just be, in the way that is best and right for her.

I'll keep bundling all of the precious memories of times past together as I help her towards her future, celebrating each new skill and milestone with a quick glance at what was, and a warm smile at the joy that has been, is, and is still to come with my little love.

Moment in Time

On Saturday, November 5th, 2011, across the world:

Row 1, L-R: making strawberry jam in Perth; Abby by the wheat in Merredin Western Australia; Jung museum Seattle, Valerie's iPad crazy app portrait!

Row 2, L-R: Luke and Mara in the autumn leaves in Watford UK; making toffee apples in Copenhagen; Ed's 4th birthday party in London; autumn trees in Seattle.

Row 3, L-R: a dream made reality in Cumbria with little Amelie and Gabriel holding hands along a country lane; stormy skies over the wheatbelt in Merredin; Guy Fawkes fireworks in Cumbria; baking with eggs from my chickens.

Row 4, L-R: Seattle; more Merredin storms, Seattle streets, and a home-made lunch in Perth.

Thank you Beth, Kanami, Valerie, Sonya, Katherine, Sarah, Teresa and Su for your photos (I hope I got the details right!), and I promise I'll get the next Moment in Time up here in under 6 weeks from the date of the photos! I swear there is a time goblin stealing away hours of my life...

Christmas dreams

I think this might be the most magical Christmas yet...

A recipe for sunflowers

Take 5 sunflower seeds. Plant and water them well. Wait 6 days for them to sprout.

Pull up 6 paving slabs, remove half of the sand underneath and dig in compost and veggie scraps to enrich the earth.Transplant the little seedlings and tend them daily.

Watch as they grow from spindly, inch-high seedlings until they are the same height as your child.

Feed, water and love them until they are the same height as you, and are promising you an enormous sunny flower.

Keep feeding and watering them, harvest several courgettes from the plants next to them, keep watching them grow until you have to look up to see their just-opened blooms.

Study the wildlife that are drawn to the sturdy stems and flowers, for a nibble and a rest.

Watch the honey bees smother themselves in pollen, seemingly unable to resist burying their heads deep into the stamens and drenching themselves with tiny yellow specks.

Remember that you grew these from a seed. That with the right conditions, tender attention and care, and a touch of luck you can create beauty. Step back, and enjoy,

The Full Lunar Eclipse from Perth

In case you missed it, there was a full lunar eclipse last night and there won't be another one until 2014.

I've never taken night photos before and after a few false starts and some googling, I managed to (mostly) get the right settings:

I don't look skywards at night-time anywhere near often enough. There is an enormous velvety sky up there set with twinkling diamonds, and it is beautiful.

On the next clear night wherever you are, go outside and look up.

It's simply magnificent.

What comes first?

The chickens of course!

The eggs came 6 months later, and 3-4 eggs a day are still an absolute joy to collect each morning in our egg basket. There's always a 'thankyou ladies', a handful of corn and wheat (and strawberries several times a week) and a feathery cuddle in exchange.

The egg on the left is the same size as what you'd find in a shop-bought carton labelled 'large eggs' and comes from Speckles. The slightly larger egg in the middle comes from my one-egg-a-day-without-fail girl Yeti. And the egg on the right? Penny skips a day, then lays the most enormous eggs I've ever seen!

Those two orange yolks at the bottom are from a Penny-double-yolker extra-extra-large special. We bake, boil, fry, poach, grill and eat eggs every which way, savouring the fact that they are free-range and organic from our girls. Our chickens might have come first, but the eggs are equally loved and appreciated.

A place to dream

I found a place to dream, to be at the very beginning of all I am yet to create and live. Thoughts cascading and tumbling down into the quieting deep still ponds of peaceful reflection.

It's a good thing I like pictures.

I have a whole lot of emotion, but not many words.

Good thing I like pictures then.

Dear blog

Dear Blog,

I have missed you and am so sorry to have kept dropping you off my priority list, but the past few weeks have necessitated this absence. I have just downloaded over 600 photos which I hope to get to some time next week. We have been having some wonderful adventures and moments in our days that I'm looking forward to sharing.

Lots of love,
Me xxx

The Uthando Project

We live a privelleged life.

We have clean water on tap, abundant food, access to excellent health care, money to clothe, feed, entertain and luxuriate in, modern sanitation, heating and cooling - we are so very comfortable and then some, and my child does not know poverty from any personal experience.

The children of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa however do know extreme poverty. Sickness. Hunger. Death. Pain. Sadness. 1.5 million children are under the age of six, and two out of three live in poverty. One in five children has lost a parent to the AIDS pandemic.

We stumbled across the Uthando Project during the Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting weekend at a festival near the art gallery. Their goals for the children of KwaZulu-Natal are succint and precise: they want children to be able to play, to have the opportunity to use imaginative play to express themselves and to claim back, in however small a way, their childhood. And to that end they provide dolls to the children.

At the festival we were enticed to their stall by the basket of waiting-to-be-dressed dolls set on a picnic blanket, next to boxes of doll-sized knitted and sewn tops, dresses, knickers, shirts, trousers, skirts, bags, necklaces, everything that a doll could possibly wear was there.

And every single item had been hand made and donated. Every last one.

Sophia was invited to choose one doll and to dress her. We explained that she wouldn't be keeping the doll, and that she would be giving it to a child who had no toys and she looked solemn and nodded. Accepting the weight of the task at hand she spent the next 40 minutes selecting, discarding, selecting again and putting together an outfit for the doll that she had chosen, and then carefully writing her message to go around the dolls neck. It was her first foray into the concepts of social responsibility and a global community, and it won't be her last.

Uthando is the isiZulu word for love.

And what the Uthando Project do is tangible, real and achieveable. There are no greedy politicians lining their pockets as they sideline aid money instead of streaming it to the communities who need it. There's just the children, the dolls, and love.

If you'd like to make a doll, or doll's clothing and accessories you can download patterns and instructions here - http://www.uthandoproject.org/how-to-participate/

Dolls must be "made to withstand lots of handling and need strong hair and arms with a no flop head.  The dolls need to have brown skin, and the children love them when they are dressed in bright clothing, which, preferably, can be taken on and off easily by little hands".

A child somewhere is going to have a doll that we've made at home. We've got the pattern and ideas of how to dress her. It's a small thing, almost a token in the bigger picture of hunger and illness but it's something we can do.

I hope it's something you can do too.