happy crappy scrappy

Chopped my hair off this morning. Ha! Looks a bit silly, but feels so much better. First thing Jude said was 'So you going to the hairdressers now to sort it out?' Pregnant women shouldn't really be allowed near sharp scissors in a hair crisis.

Last of the sun-bleached tresses

Jessie was four on Wednesday and has been having great fun with her presents. My parents bought her a keyboard with hundreds of noises on it, so she loves that. We splashed out on a little camera for here which she is thrilled by, though she can't quite figure out that the pictures she takes is what shows on the screen....

She spends a lot of time just randomly pointing at things and clicking the button whilst looking elsewhere!

We've all been horribly ill lately - me especially, like I need anything else to make me grumpier - with a particularly vicious cold which has literally had me by the throat for the last few weeks. I sound quite like a less smiley Mariella Frostrup. I spent the whole of yesterday in bed (thanks Jude) so I feel slightly more human today.

Bought a new (old) car at the weekend. Jude is continuing his happy bachelor tradition of buying crappy old cars and scrapping them a few months later. He can't even remember how many he's been through, whereas I had my trusty Golf for years, though it was decidedly worse for wear by the end with more than a few dents and a mouse living in it - I kid you not.

The quilt is coming along - three squares pieced now:

I spent some time today scratching through my scraps as I was starting to worry about not having enough material.... I think I might have enough after all.

Though now I need to spend a few hours checking through it and ironing so I can see what's actually there. The squares inbetween the ladders will be plain white, but I had originally thought it'd be nice to applique old embroidery scraps onto these:

BUT after frisking the house I can't find the damn stash of old linens I had in mind.

Granny and Grandad are coming down tomorrow to celebrate Jess and Jude's birthdays so we'll all go out for a nice meal somewhere.

Hope you're having a lovely weekend :)

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.

:-)