Workspace/WIP Wednesday (Sprites & Mice?!)

My work table today...

You'll have to excuse the appalling lighting: it's an abysmal "summer's" day here.

 

One Moment In Time...

"A ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember."

 ( Inspired by Soulemama )

Fourteen years ago today, my life was irrevocably changed - for the better, I hasten to add. Fourteen years ago today, The Girl and I rescued a tiny little bundle of disdainful black and white fluff (so tiny that his entire body could fit into the palm of my actually quite small hand) and brought him into our home.

And we called him Carma.

It's been a while...

... and a lot has happened. I'm not even sure why I fell off the blogging wheel, only that I think events and life caught up to me. Eh.

Where have we been, what have we been doing, and what else has been happening?

Well, let's see now. Amongst other things, I've...

Scenes From A Week...

It's been a hectic week, filled with traveling from one end of the county to the other, more paperwork than I suspect I could shake a stick at, children who have surprised me in more ways than one, and structural changes to our home which lasted all of six hours before going disastrously wrong (although that has - fingers crossed; touch wood - been remedied for the time being!). It has also been a week filled with introspective contemplation as I've hurtled from one place to another in my beloved car, 'Daniel'... but perhaps more on that when I've reached a decision one way or the other.

Perhaps.

Most importantly - to me, anyway - this week has been the realisation that my children are growing up. The Boy, who will turn 8 in November, lost his first tooth on Friday morning. It had been wobbly for almost a month, but he'd been warned that if he prematurely yanked it out 'The Tooth Fairy' would not leave him the one pound coin he'd been coveting since first discovering it was loose in its socket, so he left it as alone as any normal little boy possibly could... When it came out, unlike his sister in previous years, he did not cry, he did not wail, he did not almost faint at the sight of blood dripping down his chin (because there wasn't any... yes; The Girl was a premature yanker of loose teeth!). The loss of his first tooth marks a rite of passage though; my youngest child is no longer my baby (although he always will be...) and I may have sighed a little over this fact when he'd been safely delivered to school and I was waiting in traffic...

Lessons Learned... and someone who taught them to me.

April is never a good month in my book – for some reason it seems to be the month in which people I love die. Today, for example, is the 25^th anniversary of the death of one of major influences in my life, so consequently, she has been very much on my mind for the last few days.

My Aunty Doll... although she was actually my maternal grandmother's Aunt (which makes her my great-great aunt), Aunty Doll was – and always shall be – known as my Aunty (weird, but true, my maternal great-great-grandmother - her son married Aunty Doll's sister - is known as Aunty Rose... dysfunctional doesn't even start to describe my family!). Aunty Doll was my great-grandmother's younger sister, the only one of seven sisters (nine children in total; Uncle Bill and Uncle Jack both died in World War I) who didn't marry or raise a family, and she lived in a 16^th century cottage next to the one inhabited by my grandparents in a small market town where everyone – it seemed – knew my mother and judged me on her escapades when she was a child/teenager. Aunty Doll, I suppose, was what might be termed “the black sheep of the family” - she smoked like a chimney (taught my mother how to when she was a toddler, or so the family legend goes), drank whiskey like tea and had a mouth on her like the proverbial sailor... but she was also one of the nicest, most genuine people I have ever met in my entire life. I spent an awful lot of time in her cottage, sitting in front of the fire, peering through the gloom of the main living area (Aunty Doll had inherited my great-great-great-grandparents dining table and not only did it dominate the downstairs room, she also had to keep the curtains drawn across the windows in order to prevent it from fading in sunlight...) as she told me stories about when she was a child, what my mother was like as a child (apparently a complete nightmare... and this comes from several family members and childhood friends of my mother, mind!), and why I shouldn't listen to anyone or anything but myself and my own heart...

Sewn-Up-Saturday

It's been a weird few days here... although I am enjoying returning to the research of a site I was part of the excavation team during 1998/9, and cannot wait to take The Girl and The Boy to have a gander at it, I've also been knitting and sewing my fingers to the bone in order to have enough Easter Bunnies (constructed out of two separate patterns I amalgamated by the wonderfully talented Flutterby Patch)and egg-cups to provide my Godchildren and The Offspring's step-siblings and younger cousins with this year.

Add in a nasty cat bite to my dominant thumb (literally through the digit, barely missing the first distal phalange (or phalanx, if you're American!) and I've been ever-so-slightly crankier than I normally am. (And no, it wasn't Carma who bit me, thus proving the name of this blog, but my son's cat, Merlin, who has early-onset feline dementia and panicked whilst I was trying to give him the medicine our local vet prescribed for him).

But anyway... onto the cute: 

 These bunnies, who all have names (l-r, Violet, Scooter, Blue and Jasmine), are for the step-sibs (K and P) and the cousins (E and N) and were made to The Boy's specific instructions. (The assorted Godchildren's ones were all either handed to the specific child or posted at the start of the week... apparently all loved them, although my 19 year old Eldest Godson was a little bemused by his!) Not only did I use pyrography to initial their egg-cup seats, but they have those plastic eggs which you can put a chocolate treat inside their jumpers. They step-sibs and cousins all 3 years old and younger, so I didn't want to give them *too* much chocolate...

Within Walking Distance...

... of our home, there is a plethora of open land which, whilst undoubtedly not designed with the objective of keeping small boys and their canine companions occupied and entertained, certainly manages to do both. Right behind our house, we're very fortunate to have this...

An Iron Age hill-fort whose presence in the landscape has dominated the vast majority of my life. When I was a child, I would be taken on long dog walks up to its summit, when I was a teenager I would hike up there by myself with my own dogs in tow and now that I have a child, a teenager and a dog who (on days like yesterday) all require copious amounts of fresh air and exercise? 

Sewn-Up-Saturday & Other Stuff...

In this post I made on Wednesday, there were several items of unfinished knitting...one of which I labelled as being a Very, Very, *Very* Important Project Indeed, given that I was making a decoration for The Boy's Easter Bonnet Parade at The Village school he attends.

Well, it turned out that he was still too poorly to attend the school's parade - which I thought he might be, but didn't want to risk the chance of him not having a bonnet if he was, indeed, fit and raring to go back to school (he's distraught at not being able to go back now until April 16th... although I suspect that may have more to do with the fact that he's exhausted the contents of the box I keep for when he's got, say, an Inset Day or something of that ilk. There are apparently only so many games of Draughts and Hangman one seven year old boy is willing to play with a mother who refuses to allow either of her offspring to beat her unless they actually do so of their own accord). So, I sat up most of Wednesday night diligently working on Hopper, the lilac Easter Bunny and the daffodil that The Boy had decreed should be toted in his arms, until both were finished, sewn together and completed.

Hopper & daffodil

 I was going to post this as a Finished Object Friday yesterday, but ended up without enough time to do so given that The Offspring and I ended up in the Cotswolds over-exerting ourselves with discussions as to rhino bottoms and soil depth (we lead such fascinating lives...), so thought I'd have my very own Sewn-Up-Saturday instead.

It's my blog, and I can deviate if I want to, after all.

Originally, Hopper was intended to be sewn onto the top of The Boy's straw hat, but because he was poorly, we decided to *not* perform thread through bottom surgery and leave it free as a... toy?... ornament?... thing to be toted around until the novelty wears off? Take your pick. Because it'll end up as one of those three things, I can assure you!

Then, yesterday...

Yarn Along 03

Today, I'm joining in with

again.

In every parents Top 10 of nightmares...

… would be the one in which their child catches head lice. Nits. Those little parasites that plague our playgrounds and our nurseries, tormenting us all with itchy scalps and whining children when we, their doting parents, regress evolutionarily until we resemble lowland gorillas as we search frantically through the hair of our young.

Until yesterday, it was a niggling fear that I'd allowed to be pushed into the back of my mind. Something that I've not had to deal with for 8 years – not since The Boy was a baby and his older sister came home with them. A not so nice gift of furtive scratching and woeful blue eyes turned on me as she confided that one of her friends at school had nits and kept running around placing her head by all of the other children in their class that day. Deliberately. Mm. But yesterday? It returned into my sphere of life with full vengeance.

See... The Boy knows a boy whom I not-so-fondly refer to as Demon Child.