a rather random catch-up

Been a while huh?

I've been slowly making things inbetween children things and the endless moving of stuff round the house from one place to another in some sort of effort of tidying which seems futile at best. This is the latest piece, which I'm pleased with: I wanted to call it something like sunshine dancing through the flowers but that seemed a bit too silly. It's definitely a joyful, happy piece though!

This is a poorly photographed pic of another birthday gift I recently made which again, was fun to do, and I've sort of adopted it as a business logo for my yet-to-be-a-reality ChloeQuilts project. More on that another time.

Lots has been slowly going on. The girls are growing fast and summer has all-too-briefly shown her colours and today we are back to rain.

Tula is doing brilliantly and I've been having fun catching photos of her with my new toy in the pauses between walking around with her endlessly...

The biggest news however is that unexpectedly I have found myself pregnant with number four. As Tula has her rare genetic condition, this poses some questions regarding this newest little creation. Yesterday I had chorionic villus sampling, an invasive test that is performed between ten and twelve weeks antenatally, to determine the DNA of the baby. Luckily, the placenta was well placed so the consultant was able to access it easily and take some of it to be tested. The whole process took about ten minutes and was uncomfortable rather than painful. I feel OK, just a bit cautious with my body and Jude did everything for me yesterday, which was fantastic and I forced myself to properly rest and take lots of Arnica. However it has been back to normal today and thankfully I still feel fine. It usually takes 48 hours to fully recover. There is between 1-2% chance of miscarriage with this procedure, although I was assured that the hospital I was in was proudly 10% less chance than this - my maths not being great I reckon that means like .9-1.9% but that is kind of gibberish to me. Small, anyhow, but there nonetheless.

Obviously most people who have this test then have to make a decision based upon the results as to whether to continue with the pregnancy. I am confident that whatever we do will be right for our family, but this is not an easy time, and we will still have to wait up to a month for the full results to come through.

This is my very favourite photo taken so far with my camera: it reminds me of everything I love about photography; the colours, the familiar object made unfamiliar by canny composition - due to luck more than skill I have to say, but then most of my best shots have always been like that.

In the meantime, I am very slowly preparing for my birthday party in a couple of weeks' time, a Mad Hatter's Tea Party to celebrate my 39½ unBirthday (my real birthday is in winter - definitely not the time for a garden party!) which will be great fun, but right now feels like more work than I can really handle. I'll post again with my party creations thus far. Come back sunshine!

Enjoy your week xxx