I happened to be back at the dentist yesterday and the poor state of my poor mouth is rather taking up all the emotional space in my life. I am now on an antibiotic with all kinds of warning labels all over it and I have a tiny special paper explaining where and at what time I am expected to present myself to the Very Special Person who does Root Canals.‘There is life after a root canal,’ said my dentist... Read more
The dog is asleep on his back with his feet in the air and his teeth all out there. Also, he is on my lap. There is one baby upstairs asleep but the other one is jammed up against me snoring. Alouicious and Elphine are ‘trying to earn back their allowance’ by cleaning the kitchen, but really they are goofing off and talking. Romulus and Gladys are ‘cleaning the sunroom’. All around me are piles of laundry I imagined I... Read more
oneI happen to be reading Exodus and Romans at the same time–not a bad combination. Boy I really do feel for Moses. His whole life sounds like one endless dinner hour with cranky kids. Yesterday my kids decided not to really eat their lunch and so by dinner the cry was, ‘I’m dying!’ Except that then when the dinner was served (my week at Shepherd’s Bowl so lentil curry a la kennedy) they found they were really only hungry for... Read more
Slowly.Slowly emerging.We had some lovely visitors. Stand Firm Family, as it were. All the lovely pictures are on Matt’s computer. And you know how it is. You have to go to that computer and sit down and turn it on and go to the Internet and laboriously send the pictures on email and then open them and so on and so forth…so I don’t have pictures, yet…And then we were all sick. Horribly and wretchedly sick. The tummy thing. The... Read more
Gladys wrote another poem this morning. She was irritating me a lot just at that moment, what with the complaining and whining and general sense of total dissatisfaction with reality. I thought maybe if I wrote it down for her she would stop with the whining, which turned out not to be the case. Basically the age of five I have never found to be awesome. Anyway, here is the text of the poem followed by the frame and picture... Read more
Yesterday the remains of last summer’s sun flowers in my back garden were pecked over by a couple of those lovely little fat birds that figure so romantically in all the Tasha Tudor books. Do you know, the three waves of guilt that tidal-ed themselves over me were, in order,Why can’t I remember the names of those little birds?!Why am I not calling a child over here to look at them!?AndWhy haven’t I pulled out the Tasha Tudor books? There... Read more
Well, here it is. Friday. And I haven’t blogged or done much of anything interesting exceptonecope with the laundry room. I mean, really really deal with actually doing the laundry, folding the clothes and putting stuff in bins that’s just in the way. twoStart to make sour dough bread again but this time fail so much as to actually end up throwing it away.threeTake three days off from school for six children to have the stomach bug. One after another... Read more
Can’t believe it’s nearly March. Can’t believe how unrelentingly grey and cold it is outside. Irritated that the children take off their coats when they get into the cold car because they are so afraid of being “too hot”. They wander around the house in t shirts and shorts and open the door wide open to see ‘how warm it is’. Matt, after asking me what the weather would be like all week and hearing that it would be largely... Read more
Being rather a creature of habit it takes an act of God, or the valiant shoving of a friend (not that those are necessarily different) to get me to do new or different things. In this case I have been making bread in exactly the same way for about 14 years–the precise way my dad showed me when I was at the point of wanting to make bread. Well, I mean, of course, I’ve made adjustments–mainly on the size of... Read more
So many sensible people are giving up Facebook and other Things Like That for Lent that I’ve been vaguely unsettled that it never occurred to me to pursue such a course. I do spend a fair amount of time online but its pretty concentrated to particular moments in the day and for particular purposes. I would never categorize myself as Needing To Give It Up. Anyway, my real guilt lies not in the amount of time online nor in the... Read more
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