life

What We Read This Week 05/07/2025

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What a week of reading it has been! It’s been the first week of winter holidays for C and, unlike previous holidays where I have been working and she has done *some* craft/painting/colouring in, mostly while watching shows, this time I put my foot down a bit more. Admittedly, it really helped that Glenn had days off coinciding with some of those days so they did things together and she still had a fair bit of iPad time but really not so much as she used to. She has read quite a few books. I mean, chapter books like the Penny Draws series. One of those takes her a couple of days, but other books like the Ella at Eden series seem to be finished within a day.

E is really, really into reading right now, too. She’s at the level of interest of wanting me to point to each word as I read it, and of being picky about which Beauty and the Beast or Snow White story I read to her. C also read The Book With No Pictures to her, so there’s another bedtime battle for you. If that is a new one for you, another way to say that is it is far too hilarious to be read at bedtime. On account of all the scream laughing and sudden toilet requirements. That said, hearing C reading it to E was fantastic.

S has been found several times in front of the bookshelf, silently turning pages of books. Or insisting on taking The Ugly Duckling to read in the stroller on the way to the park. E and S are both insistent I tell them the name of the ugly duckling so any appropriate duckling/cygnet names welcome. One of my favourite things right now is hearing S reading a story. It is incredibly sweet and heartwarming, so much so that I have even had a braincell wake up and I’ve videoed it a couple of times.

Actually, today’s video of S “reading” Elepop out loud – yes, sure, describing the pictures but with the inflection of story and the occasional speech element – was taken just after I took a picture of all three girls. This is one of those photos that speaks volumes to me, and most people will be fairly meh about. My girls have loved watching iPad. I have let them watch way more iPad than is good for them. This is changing. I am changing. They are changing. So to catch a photo of all three of them in their room before lunch, before I had managed to put fresh sheets on beds, with E waiting on C to finish her book for the library game that suddenly sprang up, is special. 

Yesterday, we also had my brother and sister-in-law over for a play and dinner. They are big fans of reading, and while I gave S a bath and got her to sleep, books were read. I had to go out to them twice to calm it down because The Diary of a Wombat is hilarious, as is The Book With No Pictures. 

They were also delighted to hear about what C and I have been reading, and very impressed that we are reading Little Women. Every time C mentions this to someone, Beth toasting a shoe gets a mention because C thinks this is the funniest thing in the world. We now have a policy though, that when C doesn’t understand something, she puts up her hand and I explain it to her. Every few pages I will be needing to explain something, which isn’t too bad, I think, but does demonstrate that maybe we need to start maybe watching some of the good Pride and Prejudice. Just maybe.

Fish

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It’s been a long time coming, but we are finally a pet-owning family. Three little fishies now swim happily in a fish tank next to the dining table/craft area. I keep watching them now as I write this. Now that they have survived for two weeks with us, as well as meeting Auntie Jackie and (via Facetime) my parents, it’s time. Meet our fish. C’s is the black one, E has the golden one, and S’s is spotty.

How did we get here? I’m glad you asked. When C was 4, we started talking about maybe getting a fish for her. Responsibility. Staving off those Can I have a cat/dog/guinea pig/pony questions. It was always in the pile of Soon. Soon, we will email the real estate to see if we’re allowed. Soon, we will have some space in which to have a tank. Then C’s class had pets this term. Ducklings, and hermit crabs, and pinhead crickets. Asking for fish was a multiple-times-a-day occurrence. Eventually, one afternoon I handed her my phone and asked her to write what she would write to the real estate. It was … rather blunt, which is fair enough as she is 7 and has zero experience of this. I greased it up a bit, checked it with Glenn, and sent it off. A reply came within hours: “Of course you can have a fish!” C, as you might imagine, was over the moon.

An aquarium was purchased. Glenn did allllllll the heavy lifting on this. We followed instructions, had a family trip to buy fishies, and came home with 3 fish – Mei, Goldie, and Fish Tank which was renamed Flowy – and three off-the-walls-with-excitment girls. The next night, Mei (C’s) was…. You know. By midday the day after that, Goldie (E’s) and Flowy had also … you know. The girls were sad, but took it fairly well. We researched, and figured we had put fish in too soon, despite instructions. We had another family trip, this time with water for testing. Water testing showed that no way could we have fish survive in that. C had already by now picked out her next fish so that was a tough trip home. Thankfully, the pet store person put a sign up that her pick of fish was on hold.

For the next two – maybe three? – weeks, Glenn was diligent in putting the drops of stuff into the water. On the second visit after that, we were given the all clear. Phew. He came home with three lovely fishies.

C named hers Grace. S has a spotty fish so, in true literal S fashion, hers is Spotty. E started calling her golden fish Goldie but that apparently didn’t feel right, so suddenly she informed us that her fish is called – wait for it – Fish-A-Pond. For real life.

Turns are taken to feed the fish. Glenn cleans the tank once a week on a day off. The excitement of the changing lights in the aquarium has, thankfully, lessened now so we don’t have girls clamouring to touch buttons for a light show. The greatest part of Wednesday for C was helping Glenn clean the tank.

Nearly every feed, S will watch with utter delight as the fish swim as fast as they can to get some food, and then declare “Spotty’s going for it! Fish-A-Pond got one! Grace is going for it!” It’s like she’s commentating a sporting event. C will pull up a chair and watch them after her bath. E will walk by and chat with them. 

There you have it. Three happy fishies. Three happy girls. Two happy parents. Hopefully there won’t be a “then there were …” post anytime soon.

Meal Prep Monday (30/06/2025)

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Last weekend, I felt like a kitchen superstar. I baked SO much. In fact, the whole weekend was so exhausting I didn’t manage to post about it so I have photos just sitting in my phone, reminding me of the achievements if I scroll through looking for something. Sleeping girls, girls outside, random short videos of the tablecloth, work info, girls in pinafores for daycare photo day, row after row of a child’s forehead – pretty sure it’s E – closeup pics of the corner of the sofa, food, food, girls outside, food.

This weekend, I was not a superstar. At all. In any sense. For anything. If you set the bar low – really low – then yay! I did some things. I had all 3 girls dressed and respectable to go to a birthday party on Saturday morning at a not-very-close park. They were well-behaved. There was a present, wrapped in paper coloured in by my girls. We got there and back safely. Pause here while I think. Um. Nope. That was pretty much my achievement. 

But wait. I made pizza on Friday night, with dough made by me. (C asked for this a few weeks ago and it is how I used to always do it and now it is her new favourite way of pizza). This pizza – one (1) pizza – has fed us Friday night, and was added to Saturday dinner, and was lunch today for C because we had no bread and neither of us wanted to go to the shops on the holidays, and there’s still a bit more.

But wait. I made a lemony chicken and vegetable tray bake for dinner for Saturday night, which all the girls ate, and leftovers were my lunch today as well as incorporated into dinner tonight and I think there’s still a bit left for a half-lunch tomorrow. 

But wait. I made pancakes for Sunday breakfast, and because when they were mostly cooked, E came in and scrunched her face and told me she did NOT want pancakes, she wants an eggy – no, TWO eggies – she scored eggs for breakfast and not all the pancakes were eaten so C and I had morning tea pancakes today. They were my favourite recipe (using the Greek yoghurt waffle recipe here), and cooked in the love heart fry pan. A bit of a whim purchase, that pan, but my goodness me it saves mealtimes. S helped me make these, and C had a go at turning them which is rather tricky, I must say, but she did wonderfully. And because there are four hearts and four of us (Glenn had an early, early start), I could cater to all requests prior to the pancake-refusal-in-favour-of-eggs. Plain. Chocolate chip. Blueberry. Blueberry AND chocolate chip. And E ate some after she had demolished her eggs, too, actually. 

To be fair, this week and next are school holidays. We have Anzac biscuits in the jar from last weekend. Still some Everything Balls (I still don’t know what to call them), which are also stopping me delving into chocolate stores in the evening. I mean, not an actual store full of chocolate, like a chocolate shop, or a cellar of chocolate, but … mmm. Wait. Chocolate supply. That’s a better word. We still have carrot oatmeal slice. We still have carrot sultana muffins in the freezer. We still have cottage cheese brownies in the freezer. Our freezer could do with being slightly less full. Ooh, and pizza muffins in there too. So you see, for all my not at all a kitchen superstar thoughts, it was enough. I have to remember that. Enough. 

What We Read This Week (28/06/2025)

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Surprise! I suddenly had a braincell wake up last week and say, uh, the books post… you know it doesn’t have to be Sunday night…? Yeah. When I started this blog 4 years ago, C was 3 and E was a little tiny baby (S was “invisible”, or still a dream). There were piles of books that would form all over the place – sofa arms, coffee table, bedside tables – and I would aim to tidy them on Sunday evenings. A logical time to do a post about what books we had read that week was after I had tidied them all at the end of the week.

Fast forward to now, and for about a year now I have changed girls’ sheets and done a bedroom tidy and clean on Fridays. Fridays, because there had been too many occasions on Saturdays when I had gone in to change sheets and found a full-blown cubby in the making and if I needed to remove a quilt cover then that would mean full dismantling of the cubby and there would be tears so I wouldn’t change the sheets that day and so it became a Friday thing. E and S won’t build cubbies without C, who is at school on Fridays. So I have been cleaning and changing sheets and tidying away books and making notes of which books I am putting back on the bookshelf, but things can change. 

Yesterday, I did what I used to do. I took a photo of the books we had read, that were strewn across the floor, then put them on the bookshelf. Simple. Here they are.

Friends of the Unicorns, which came with the two main characters as toys. Ten Minutes to Bed: Where’s Father Christmas?, which is rather annoyingly missing its last flap with words. Goldilocks. Peppa Meets the Queen (groan – still). Where Did All The Dragons Go?, which is on an extended loan from neighbours who used to live in the house next door. I love this one. It definitely feels like an older book – think 80s or 90s, so “older” compared to this century – and has good rhyme and repetition that doesn’t go overboard or force the issue.

Then, Disney. The Misadventures of Heihei is one that was in an Advent calendar of books that the girls had a couple of years ago. Honestly, a wonderful buy. 24 books, all with substantial stories of what feels like outtakes of Disney movies. This one is a favourite of C, who will laugh so much she needs the toilet again. E chose it this week and her 4yo brain couldn’t follow and imagine quite so fully as C’s 7yo brain, so there were frequent fingers stopping the page turning and “Wait. Mummy. Go back”, followed by a question or 6. And the Ultimate Princess Treasury – see the benefits of a photo? Now I can tell the correct, actual title of “the big princess book” – has been a definite favourite this week. At least once a day – usually when I think she should be asleep but she has clearly missed a sleep train, but this has also happened at other times – I will find her on her bunk, leafing through the whole 250+ pages, intently checking illustrations. I have read each story to her at least once this week, too, and her questions are developing more into questions about character and reasons for doing things and personality.

C and I finished The Secret Garden on Monday night. This has been such a good book for us to read. Next book: Little Women. We are not far in, obviously, but already C has laughed and laughed and also been quite thoughtful as she takes in the situation. I am curious to see how she responds as the book develops. Not to mention, keen to reread this one as I think I was in early high school (or late primary school) when I read it. It’s been a while. Ahem.

What We Read This Week (22/06/2025)

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One of my favourite things from today was listening to C read to E, and listening to E be read to by C. It reminded me of the first day E was home from the hospital and, in the middle of the upheaval of a new person and visiting grandparents and new furniture to accommodate new person, I found C leaning over the side of the bassinet, “reading” (reciting as she knew it so well) Goldilocks quietly to E. This evening, E literally pulled up a chair to where C was, and C read The Book With No Pictures, and E let loose on her best laughs. They are loud, and joyful, and I will need to find better words to describe them but they are glorious. Then, as I nixed any further readings of THAT book as it was time for bath and bed and S was nearly asleep, C read a Rescue Princess book to E on the toilet. As you do. So S fell asleep listening to the calming sound of C reading quietly, which was rather nice, I must say. 

This week, I have also read (groan) Peppa Meets the Queen (groan) more times than I would like. Which, admittedly, means more than once or better yet, none, but still. Nightly seems to be the go. The book is nearly as annoying as the shows. So far E has remarked that the Queen is a person – which does actually seem odd in that animal universe – but has not yet commented on the placement of a fish tank on top of the TV. That gets me every time. Goldilocks has also been on high request rotation, and has been part of E’s calm down routine. Not the best-written version, but I can deal. 

I have also read Sleeping Beauty way more times than expected. Surprise! E seems to love this one. I love hearing my slightly-lispy 4-year-old have a crack at saying “Maleficent” multiple times in a 15-minute timeframe. This is one that I feel would not make it past the higher-ups these days. An arranged marriage plus waiting for a prince feels so old-fashioned. That said, every time it is mentioned that the princess is due to marry the prince on her 16th birthday, I comment about how young that is, and you never know. It might provoke some good conversations soon about child marriage and choices.

I have been steadily trying to make our place a bit nicer, and that resulted in a more obvious bookshelf. Seeing girls in front of it, contemplating, pulling out a book, sitting down and reading it, are all things that make my mummy heart happy. S spent rather a long time in the last few days just sitting and reading. Bluey books, mostly, so absolutely no complaints here.

C and I are sooo nearly finished The Secret Garden. I wasn’t expecting this when we started it, but it is helping us off screens. Not from the whole book reading instead of iPad time angle, but more from the content of the book, with children getting healthy from digging in the garden and spending their lives in the fresh air. 

Meanwhile, C’s preferred book to read before sleeping is (drumroll) … The Dictionary. For real. Which, honestly, is a great choice. No staying up to find out what happens next. No potentially scary plot points Just. Words. Best Christmas present ever, thank you very much.

Meal Prep Monday (16/06/2025)

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Friday and Saturday were fairly light on in the food preparation department. Cornflake cookies were made, which are apparently for me now. C, it turns out, doesn’t like the flavour of cornflakes, and E bit into a crunchy bit and hurt her mouth so apparently is never eating cornflakes or cookies ever again. Sigh. S has eaten some for me, but unless she spies the cookie jar, it will be Milo cereal for her. (Seriously. How do toddlers and preschoolers do this? She seems to eat nothing but Milo cereal and occasionally yoghurt. E had about 2 months when she was nearly 2 when I swear she just ate peanut butter and blackberries. That was an expensive time). To make up for the apparent cookie fail, on Sunday I made nut butter cookies and added chocolate chips to the tops and, guess what, nobody wants to eat them either. Make them without the chocolate chips and half the batch is scoffed as soon as fingers have braved the hot-from-the-oven cookie trays. It looks like I will be living on cookies this week.

Friday I also made a very healthy chocolate mousse then made it less healthy to make it more dessert-y and edible for girls. Thankfully, they had filled up on pizza dinner so I have chocolate hits ready to go in the fridge. Score.

Saturday was yet another flop which I will chalk up as future snacks. E was really wanting doughnuts so I finally made the (ultra healthy) jammy blueberry doughnuts from Jamie’s superfoods book for breakfast. It was a frustrating experience because I had neglected to soak our ordinary, not-expensive-Medjool, dates overnight, and also because we have a mere chopper and not a glorious food processor. I am debating whether I cave and buy one now in the sales or if I wait until the chopper dies then replace it. Hm. Decisions. It is definitely becoming more necessary. Anyway, there were leftovers. I have snacks.

Sunday was spent making the fail nut butter cookies, as well as doing hard boiled eggs, sandwiches, carrot oat slice, and what I think of as “Everything Balls”, or “Use it up slice”. This started off as the Eat This My Friend muesli bars and then I went crazy a few weeks ago and added a bunch of things that were needing to be used. You know. The 1/4 cup of almond meal. Tablespoon of walnuts. Slightly less than 1/3 cup chia seeds. The dregs of 4 different nut butter jars. Some sneaky powders of super greens or berry immunity. I mean, I started with the basic recipe and just embellished a bit. Squashed some into the mini muffin holes. Rolled some into balls. I thought for sure this would be a mummy-only treat, but before I knew it, S had demolished 4 balls. I kept meaning to cover them in chocolate but after not very long there didn’t seem to be much point. This weekend, though, I made sure to get the chocolate hit happening, so the minis are covered in a blob of chocolate and the balls are mostly half-covered, with a few glorious pieces entirely covered.

Delay in posting due to the futility of taking photos after 10pm. I’m glad I did this post, though, as I had totally forgotten about the doughnut snack option. I see there is a slight delay in work starting soooo first snack for the day is going to be a purple doughnut. 

Meal Prep Monday (09/06/2025)

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Three days. Three kids. Husband working. How much can I do.

The whole having kids and having a husband who works retail (so, weekends) has really hampered me getting into a lot of meal prep. All these people who post about their one hour on a Sunday when the dad takes to the kids to the park and the mum gets to meal prep and do the whole look at how much I made in an hour with no kids around and no distractions. Yeah. Good for you. Another factor is that Glenn loves to cook, so me not meal prepping much is fine because then what is he going to cook? Cooking is part of his destress and who am I to interfere with that.

This weekend I felt like I achieved a great deal. But I also felt that I was on my feet the entire time, and the one tiny bit of something for me that I wanted to do when the girls were playing – to sew two tiny bits on my skirt to secure the elastic at the waist – was ruined. I mean, I had to remove the needle and the foot and then do a deep extraction on the material, all because of girls fighting. The fighting that needs a grownup to intervene so we don’t have the kind of chaos and hospital trip that has the authorities involved and asking, where was the responsible adult in this. Ahem.

That said, much of what I did on Sunday – where we didn’t go to church because S was getting to the level of Snot Monster again and clearly needed a rest day – was accompanied by S sitting quietly on the kitchen floor next to me, pulling out the Christmas cupcake cups, lining them up, returning them to the tube, repeating. Or playing with the magnets on the fridge. It was very calming, if a little tripping hazard.

In my chocolate chip cookie post, I said to start it as early as possible. I started my mix last weekend and couldn’t progress with them until Friday. That is, I think, the longest between start and finish for me so far. We also had a three spotty bananas in the fruit bowl, and Glenn and I both held out on buying more bananas while there were spotty bananas. Three bananas is perfect for my new favourite snack, “4 ingredient” peanut butter banana cups. Which, despite the presence of a topping of chocolate chips, are apparently unappealing to my girls so they are all mine. Score. Also on Friday I made a batch of veggie pizza muffins, mostly for me for lunches. Italian herb seasoning has resulted in a very faint suggestion of spiciness so that’s a guaranteed return with grumpy face if I try to pack it in C’s lunchbox. 

Saturday morning I had a dinner panic. I wasn’t taking girls to the shops. We were meeting Glenn at his work in the afternoon and planning a little trip to South Bank.  The South Bank bit didn’t eventuate because everyone was exhausted but still, I knew we would be out and then home needing dinner and I had no idea what to feed girls. I found a recipe for chickpea nuggets. Perfect. Of course, when they were done and cooled and I was looking for a spot for them in the fridge, I found what would be a much better dinner option – chicken drumsticks and rice leftover from a recent dinner hit. Nuggets are destined for the freezer and an emergency meal. 

A new loaf of bread meant a new batch of sandwiches for the freezer, cut into love heart shapes because I love her and she maybe needs to have more reminders of that. And at 2am I remembered that I hadn’t prepped overnight oats so yes, I did that at 2am while everybody else slept, thank goodness. There was so much I didn’t get to do, but seeing all of this really does boost my sense of achievement. 

Top left: chocolate chip cookies. Top right: veggie pizza muffins (large and small). Bottom left: chickpea nuggets. Bottom right: love heart peanut butter sandwiches.

Meal Prep Monday (02/06/2025)

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I am inspired. One of my Facebook friends shares, it seems, everything that she makes for lunches and treats and dinners, and every single photo is terrible and unappetising. A page I follow, on the other hand, shares what she eats and what she makes for healthy everything, and everything looks fantastic and healthy and an Anna Thing To Eat. In my “I can do that, too” mentality, and with the amount of food prep that actually happens Friday-Sunday (usually), I now plan to do a roundup of that on Mondays for you. You’re welcome. Actually it’s also part of me reminding myself of achievements. If I feel like I’ve just been opening yoghurt pouches and doing the washing and chopping up oranges and doing the washing and separating squabbling children and doing the washing and sorting the washing and doing more washing, noting the other things really helps. Yes, I did all those other things too, but now I also have a record of the snacks and other things prepared. Lots of them include chocolate chips.

Friday normally gets me baking something but we had stuff to do so, no. Saturday morning, though, I baked sweet potato and apple oatmeal, sweet potato and banana chocolate chip bread, and “4 ingredient peanut butter banana bars”. That’s in quotes because, as is so often the case with recipes with a small number of ingredients, whoever did the recipe didn’t actually count. Out of bananas, peanut butter, vanilla, oats, salt, baking powder and chocolate chips, some of those are clearly more special than others. I am not, however, game to omit any. And also, I couldn’t find the silicone loaf pan I wanted so as the recipe makes 6-8 bars, I used a 6-hole silicone muffin pan and I will be making these again. New favourite, despite the lack of accountability (ha pun).

You may have noticed a theme with both bananas and sweet potato. We suddenly had a glut of 12 very ripe (black) bananas. Although I love Our Go-To Banana Bread, I had made it recently as bread and muffins and mini muffins and there was only so much I could take. With recent baking and Saturday’s baking, I cleared the build-up just in time for a fresh bunch to start going spotty. Good times. The sweet potato was from our farm box. Not the most recent one. The one a fortnight before that. I didn’t weigh it, but it was about the size of a toddler’s torso. Glenn used some in a couple of meals. I reserved some for baked oatmeal and then had enough to try this bread as well. The bread is fantastic and will be made again.

Less exciting meal prep but very necessary meal prep happens on Sunday evening. If we have eggs, I hard boil four of them. C and I both enjoy them during the day. Everyone else does, too, but E and S are not so adept at peeling or biting without the egg bouncing away. I also do a batch of overnight oats which will do me for three breakfasts. I did not do either of those things for a few weekends in a row and I was really feeling it. Mornings were a bit more rushed. Snacks were a little less varied and less protein-rich. I’m back on track now, though, and much relieved.

Top left: Sweet potato and apple baked oatmeal https://thenaturalnurturer.com/baked-apple-sweet-potato-oatmeal/

Top right: Sweet potato and banana bread https://thenaturalnurturer.com/sweet-potato-banana-bread/

Bottom left: “4 ingredient peanut butter banana bars” https://sammibrondo.com/peanut-butter-banana-bars/

Bottom right: hard boiled eggs. I draw on them so we know they’re boiled and not not-boiled. I am not good at drawing flowers.

What We Read This Week (01/06/2025)

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This week was a bit of magic. 

S’s choice to look at in her cot before sleep was (drumroll)… the dictionary. Yup. My First Dictionary that we gave to C for Christmas sits on the bookshelf next to S’s cot. One night S was clearly done with Pig Out (although, this was wasn’t Monday night so let’s add that one to the list again) and she pulled off the shelves and into her cot a bunch of C’s chapter books. They were all leafed through with the attitude of someone who has actually read these all before and they’re just looking for a favourite part or something, then she pulled down the dictionary. She was set. It has more pictures than a grownup dictionary, of course, but also no narrative contained within those pictures. Maybe she liked feeling like a big girl. Maybe seeing lots of words was soothing for her. Maybe the different feel of the pages and the sound they made when she turned them gave her a bit of a sensory hit. Whatever it was, that was her preferred nighttime reading. 

E’s top choice for the week was The Magic Beach by Alison Lester. Given to C a few years ago, it’s never made it to the favourite-story-please-read-it-every-night-for-two-months stage. I love it, though, and am delighted that E chose it one evening. And totally quizzed me over one of the imagination pictures and where are the mum and dad are they the king and queen where are they are they down there what are they doing down there are they drowning? These questions, of course, are asked for this particular page every single time now.

I also got it into my head yesterday that my three girls who all love mermaids hadn’t read Three Little Mermaids for a while. As Glenn had been using AI and technology to make the girls into mermaids and then messaged me the videos of each of them turning into a mermaid, my morning had a large chunk of it taken up by me playing said videos to girls. I started to look for the book, which meant a teensy bit of reorganisation of the kids’ bookshelf in the living area, which meant other books were rediscovered and read as I was searching. S had a bit of time looking and flinging books in my pile. E had a couple of moments of “Here it is!” So I also read her Good Night, Sleep Tight by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek – which was one of those above favourite category books for a while, and for good reason, and yesterday I read the horse riding part multiple times for E and an insistent S – as well as (groan) Peppa Pig Meets the Queen. Yes. We have a Peppa Pig book. Yes. I admit (cringe) that I even bought it for the family. Yes. The books are just as annoying as the show. No. I “forgot” to read it to her again at bedtime.

Then Three Little Mermaids was found and read and gathered around and oohed and ahhhhed over and “wait mummy go back” and “which mermaid is me” declared. Three Little Mermaids is in that special category of book. There’s rhyme – not forced rhyme, but lovely rhyme – and there’s repetition. There’s adventure. There’s a little bit of sea creature education. There’s the chance for grownups in the book to get frustrated at misbehaving children. There are – maybe I should have led with this – beautiful illustrations, that happen to be by someone Glenn knows. Whenever I come across a Lisa Stewart illustrated book, it’s an instant Yes for buying it. This one, however, Lisa sent to our girls specially with a beautiful inscription for them.

Further to the magic has been C reading Disney Princess Stories to E at bedtime tonight. So much magic in Disney! And Disney stories don’t skimp. If you are asked to read a Disney story, you are in for a lot of words. Which is great. And if the listener is familiar with the movie version, then don’t even think about skipping a few pages. It. Won’t. Work. Thankfully, C was happy reading stories to E tonight so I could do things like … type this. 

C and I are about halfway through The Secret Garden now, and C is in the stage of getting so excited about what happens in the story, and what is suggested might be coming soon, that she will kick her legs or jump like a frog or an excited kitten. We’ve also had a look at pictures of some fancy estates in England to give her an idea of the sort of neat and ordered garden is in this setting. As she is telling me how she is imagining some of the characters, I will be holding off on showing her any Pride and Prejudice until we have finished the book. I don’t want to ruin any magic.

Busy

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I have been busy. Things I have wanted to maintain have slipped a little. I have five or six posts begun but not continued. Sometimes they are begun and then I don’t get to the checking it stage before it really is too late to post it. Sometimes they are begun and I just don’t get to continue.

There has been a lot more work. This is good. This is also maybe slightly less good. Good because it reduces the financial stress considerably. Pay for me is dependent on how many words I type, so this work is not necessarily necessary but it definitely helps a lot. Pay rate for me is also assessed and reevaluated every four months, and word count is a part of that. As I only work four days, the extra work I’m getting kind of equates to an almost extra day and so bumps up my ranking. 

Extra work is maybe slightly less good, though, because I am now working a lot. C taking foorrrreeevvvvvveerrrrr to go to bed at night makes it harder, and I don’t want to keep saying “I have work to do” for her to be convinced to go to bed. Not that what I want or need makes any difference to her willingness to go to bed, of course, but language is important, and I don’t want the soundtrack of her childhood to be “I have to work”. I’m not keen for “We can’t afford that”, either, but I’ll work on phrases. More work also means less time to think and to write for this blog and to sew and to crochet. Right now the balance is in favour of work in order to relieve the financial stress but it is on the cusp.

Another big factor in reduction of my writing is children. Yes. Children. I wake at 5 for this (or work). S has been waking often just after 4 and insisting I sleep on the floor in their room which is fine but then I wake just before 5 and want to be in my bed for a bit and then I sleep right through the 5am alarm and then there’s the 5.30 alarm and E is then wanting me to hold her hand and then we’re kind of at 6am and I might have made my cup of tea by then but now E is up and wanting to either be on me and help or wanting to watch something which is lovely but distracting and often S is needing something around this time too so I am left with a full cold cup of tea and needing to go on a walk but it now has to be a short walk and should I even bother or should I try for a kettlebell workout later on. If work is due or if I have a lot of it to do, then that will win over any writing or exercise. 

Still, there is always hope. The last two weeks I have not really done any work Thursday night or Friday or Saturday and then Sunday night has been the first for some extra work and then I have slogged it out until Thursday morning. This week will be different. Small portions creates more balance. I plan on having some time not working – Thursday night was free, and Friday morning and most likely Friday night. The weekend, though, will have just a little bit in the mornings and evenings in order to keep this as a bit instead of taking over my life for four days. That’s the hope. 

Right. Where’s that kettlebell.