Coping with emotional children and broken gadgets

I read a great article this morning which made a load of sense to me, as right now Jess is really pushing us both all the time, and Jude and I find it really hard to stay calm with her. She fights with Milly all the time, over anything at all, and unless one of us sits with them both to act as mediator and go-between, it can go on all day. So, if I'm cooking or trying to do anything else, all I hear is screaming from them - "Mine, mine!" "No, Mil, NOOOOO!!!! MINE!" etc, which just makes me roar at both of them, which then results in Jess bursting into tears. Clearly we can't go on like this, as it's not teaching them how to control their emotions if all they see is Mummy losing it whenever they're cross....

She also hits Jude a lot, and laughs at him if he reacts to it in any way, especially if he's really hurt. Even when I've tried to talk to her about her behaviour when she's calm, it doesn't change, and she is often quite hysterically abusive, hitting and laughing, then crying if she's stopped. It's really hard to understand her at the moment.

So, I'm glad to have found the article and I'm hoping to put it into practice so I can be calmer and help Jess, in particular, deal with her own feelings.

My camera is busted, I foolishly left it in the funbus and little fingers got into the lens yesterday and well, that's it for the Coolpix.... luckily I have a back-up which seems to be working OK. Phew. Unfortunately on the same day Jude sat on his phone and cracked the screen, so now we both have broken phones as well. Not a good day for gadgets.

The white project is proceeding in it's own fashion: I've now got going on the fourth section, which has a big satiny moon on it, and is slightly more landscape inspired. I'm starting to get more of a sense of how it will look as a whole, though I'm still not totally confident about stitching it all together.... I kind of like how it's all a little wonky, I'm glad straight lines defeat me so easily, it makes it look a little richer somehow.

Some wildflowers collected a couple of days ago from the fields around us: I picked them knowing that the farmer will be killing them all on the next rotation when he sows the next crop and adds weedkiller.

The ones I've identified so far are tufted vetch (you can see the pretty paired leaves in the bottom pic), along with two I didn't know before: charlock (the yellow flower above right) and common fumitory on the left. The seeds and young shoots of charlock are both edible, but it is detested by farmers as the seeds can survive for half a century.

:-)

Bring on the booze! hic

Here's an awful blurry pic of Jude (he says he looks like 'a piggy version of Tom Waits') bottling up Blackcurrant wine which he started fermenting in June. He's also got Blackberry & Elderberry and Red & Whitecurrant on the go...  but sadly we'll have to wait a year for both of them to be drinkable (yeah right). We're talking 70-100 bottles of each kind so there's a helluva shedful out there already, and more to make. The freezer is still full of gooseberries, plums, blackcurrants & blackberries and more elderberries so he'll have plenty to be getting on with over Winter (whilst he's glugging back the Blackcurrant). Chin chin.

Note to self: Be kinder to myself

I just read a great post on Authentic Parenting about the emotional journey of pregnancy and how it can bring out lots of deeper feelings and emotions that maybe haven't been consciously dealt with, and it just hit a nerve with me as I've been feeling pretty crappy today. It's easy to blame moods on hormones and pass them off as of no more consequence than a chemical imbalance in the brain, but often there is something calling out for attention from deeper within the psyche. I've realised my inner child has been in a pretty bad way today and actually needs a bit of nurturing after all the tantrums she's had, trying to get my attention.

On a plus note, there's an excellent book giveaway on the same blog which is about night-weaning, a subject I dimly recollect struggling with when Milly was a little younger - it's amazing how fast our brains erase the awful bits of parenting, isn't it? Even now, although it's a long time since she was waking for feeds, she wakes at least once a night and needs me to put her back under the covers, so I don't know how much sleep I'm going to get (if any) once new baby appears next March.... I think I'll need all the help I can get by then!

Warning: boob shot!

My first home-made marmalade!

So here is the result of several hours of peeling, slicing, boiling.... six and a half jars of wonderful Green Tomato Marmalade! Yum. I added a little crystallised ginger to it which gives a lovely bite to the sweetness of the tomatoes.  I'm still not entirely confident about getting the setting point right with jam-making, but it'll still taste good even if it is a bit runny. In fact, one of my favourite creations this summer was Apple and Blackberry Jellyish which, whilst not having the ideal jelly texture I had intended, is absolutely fab dribbled over Greek yoghurt.

And more good news - our newly acquired hens have finally started laying!! Hooray! Nearly a month ago we took two ex-battery hens and a little bantam from a couple who didn't want to keep them any more and we've been waiting ever since for them to lay. The ex-batteries were in quite a state still, with missing feathers, and as they were totally unused to being completely free-range it took them a long time to adjust to having a quarter of an acre to roam about in: they didn't seem to know what to do with themselves and spent most of their day hiding under the whitecurrant bushes. We treated them with some red mite powder last week even though we couldn't really see any evidence of infestation (apart from the feathers dropping out & lack of eggs), and it seems to have made a big difference, as they look much healthier. The little pointy ones at the top are from the bantam and the enormous pale ones are from the batteries. None of them have names yet, unlike our original girls, Nellie & Gertie. Suggestions welcome!

Green Tomatoes

This is the last but one crop of tomatoes from the greenhouse. They seem to be taking forever to ripen up (I'm guessing that's due to lack of sunshine) so I've had enough and plan to turn them into Green Tomato Marmalade, which can be found here. I have to leave it all overnight to 'macerate' apparently, so I'll let you know how it goes. This year I grew plum tomatoes, two kinds of cherry toms, marmandes (the lumpy-looking one middle left in the basket) and tigerellas (stripey). Next year I'm not sure I'll do as many if I grow any at all. As nice as fresh toms are, they're very hungry and time-consuming to grow, so with baby no. 3 due in March I don't think I'll have time.


macerate |ˈmasəˌrāt|
verb [ trans. ]1 soften or break up (something, esp. food) by soaking in a liquid.• [ intrans. ] become softened or broken up by soaking.2 archaic cause to grow thinner or waste away, esp. by fasting.

Last night I started composing the third piece of the white quilt, but it hasn't come together as easily as the first two, so I'm wondering if it's a sign I need to be getting on with something else for a bit instead. Sometimes I think it's a good idea to just let a project sit for a while so that you can come back to it with a fresh brain. I do have plenty of other things I keep meaning to finish, and of course there is still the allotment which needs to be dealt with before winter sets in for good. There is one last window for sowing seeds in the Autumn before the big wait until Spring (which will be a busy time anyway) and I've already run out of time for a few things I had wanted to do, so I have to get going with peas and beans for a nice early Spring crop.

This morning I sorted out all the girls clothes into boxes to put into the cupboard in Jess's room, which Jude has built new shelves for at last, which was very satisfying. I always collect stacks of clothes for when they're older (as well as keeping everything no. 1 has worn to pass down) and every now and then it just needs a good sort out so I can actually get to them when they're needed. My lovely friend passes on anything she can't use as well so it all usually ends up just piled up any old how, so it's a real relief to have some order to it all. At the end of the day there is WAY too much - more than they could ever wear - but I can't bear to donate it Just In Case. Left to my own devices I'm a terrible hoarder anyway, so it's even worse with a family.

So - on with the curtains! Gosh, my life's exciting ;)

A spot of sunshine

It never stops amazing me just how much difference a bit of sunshine can make. We've had glorious weather here for the last couple of days and as a result have spent most of the time at the beach, the nearest one to us being about 20 minutes away. We've had a lovely time! It should set us up nicely for the dark days ahead.... I do wish we lived in a more temperate climate, and whilst I could never cope with the incessant sunshine of say, California, just a few months of real summer would make us all happy.

Jude hasn't heard back from his last job interview, so I'm guessing he didn't get it. I don't mind, it's so nice having him at home, though he, I know, would prefer to be earning. The new car we bought for £600 seems to be OK apart from an odd suspension-y noise and a little smoke. The girls think it's great - it's our funbus! - and they love just playing in it on the drive, so if it does turn out to be a lemon, we'll just park it up in the allotment and they can play in it up there!

I've been meaning to make some curtains for our front room for a while now, especially as the nights are starting to draw in. I've had some lengths of fabric which I made when I was first given my sewing machine earlier this year just sitting around waiting to be put together but haven't got round to doing anything more with them, so any day now I fully intend to get cracking with it... but I've been feeling so lazy lately, that sitting and handsewing seems a much easier propositon. I still have loads of things I need to do in the allotment - it's such a mess up there - but again, it seems like hard work at the moment!

Current project is all white

This is the latest project I've started, which I'm hoping will end up being a sort of lap-quilt, which could just sit on top of a bed more as decoration than of practical purpose. I've made it with a view of giving it to my MIL for Christmas: whether it'll be anywhere near complete by then I've no idea! It's made up of lots of little scraps of lace and various fabric, including a little bit of knitted mohair on the right, which is all stitched together on a plain backing. The idea is to have lots of layers, some more visible than others and maybe to incorporate some kind of text somewhere within it all. I like the idea of having a piece of work that can take hours of looking at and still give. This is the first time I've tried to make anything like this, even though I've been collecting pieces for it for ever, it seems! It's also the first piece of proper embroidery I've attempted, so I've learnt a lot of stitches already - fly stitch, fancy buttonhole, fern, blanket. As I get more confident, I may put some bolder stitching over the top, but the priority so far has been just to fix the pieces together.

Edit: I have to say, I am totally indebted to the lovely Karen Turner at Stitching Life, whose beautiful work never fails to inspire me, for getting started on this, despite it having been simmering in my brain for years... as without having seen her work I would never have got going. Ta! :)