The Girls

Our girls arrived on Saturday evening, along with their super-swanky new ark and run!

Lady Macbeth is keeping her eye on them:

It's good to have them at last, after lots of dithering and uncertainty. Strangely it feels like quite a lot of responsibility to take care of the four new members of the family, and in particular I've been worried about foxes, but for now we have decided to keep the girls in their run and not to let them free-range in the garden. At night they are safely shut in the coop, and it is unlikely that- as in a dream I had last night- foxes will be utilising trampolines to spring into our garden (!).

In actual fact they are no trouble at all, they like a bit of corn and a chat now and then, clean water and drink, and scraping the poo out, but in return for very little effort they are providing us with the most beautiful brown eggs. That seems like a good deal to me!

Green Johanna!

I'm ridiculously excited that my Green Johanna composter has arrived and is sitting in a corner of the garden awaiting lots of garden waste and kitchen scraps. I'll take a photo of it tomorrow to post (I'm getting really cross with myself for never taking my camera out with me anymore). This weekend I am also planning to plant some seedlings indoors and to plan out the space for my raised beds. I am also thinking of stalking the local allotments to see if some kind souls can impart some gardening wisdom to me!

Have a good weekend everyone!

Seafront walk

Photographs by Daddy

Help me discover some green fingers!

This is our new garden, and I don't know where to begin!

I think we are going to put our chicken ark somewhere near the decking towards the front of the photo, and I am planning to put in a couple of raised beds alongside the fence to grow vegetables.

I also want to grow something along the fence, not necessarily to cover it up but to make it not look so bare and fence-like. Any suggestions?

How did you begin to learn how to make a garden? I feel intimidated and I don't know where to start...

Monkey's re-vamped chest of drawers

So Christmas with us was a bit of a stressful time with the Monkey seemingly going on hunger-strike for three weeks and then finally coming down with chickenpox. But as the New Year arrived I felt the need to complete at least one small project: freshening up a tatty old chest of drawers that lives in the Monkey's nursery. Here it is before:

Excuse the chocolate-milk-splattered Monkey!

And here it is after a coat of paint. We used a lavender satinwood for the body and tester pots of emulsion for the drawer fronts. I think it looks really cute. Now just have to pull my finger out and get a second coat of paint on, as the babe's clothes have been strewn around the room for week's now!

Still here! (and some snow pics)

Long time no blogging, eh? Have you missed us? We've still been reading our favourite blogs, and Twittering and Facebooking- although I must confess that my Twitter addiction and my absence from blogging are probably connected. I've been having a very fallow period in terms of creativity, and so far this winter there hasn't been a single stitch knitted or a novel read. A good magazine is about as much as I can manage (and I'm really enjoying 'Red' magazine and 'Olive' at the moment).

Life by the seaside is going very well. After a busy first couple of weeks in the new house we have settled in and established new routines. Dave is commuting into London each day, so Monkey and I are on our own for much of the week. I work on Tuesday mornings and the babe goes to a good childminder we have found locally, and on Wednesdays I go to work near our old house and my Mum looks after her. It works out well and I enjoy having a day away from home. I don't find it easy going from 'mama' to 'therapist' at the moment, being a mama is such an all-encompassing job and I seldom feel there is much of me left for my clients.

We are going though another difficult patch with the Monkey's eating. She had been doing fairly well with the new food supplements prescribed by the dietician but this last week has been dreadful and very stressful. I *think* it's another tooth coming through, but it's always a worry when she stops eating. We are also continuing to have frequent breath-holding spells with full-on passing-out, I think this is just something we will have to live with as we progress through toddlerhood.

So that was just a little update from us, and some photos we took of the Monkey enjoying her first snow today. I will try to pop back in soon but if I don't, Merry Christmas or season's greetings to you!

Calm

I was going to come on here and rant about the Monkey's weight and food problems, and about the upsetting appointment we had at the paediatrician the other week. I *might* still do the ranting but right now, for the first time in a couple of days, I feel the beginnings of a sense of peace and acceptance, there is calm in the storm that has been raging around here. A couple of things have helped: reading this piece from India Knight about her daughter's open-heart surgery (it's an old article but I follow India on Twitter and like her writing, I was just randomly flicking through some things she'd written). Also, thinking about friends of ours whose 6-week old baby died last year. So here's the thing, yes, our little girl is tiny, petite, she may even be unhealthily underweight (I don't know) and she has these breath-holding spells which are currently a huge challenge... but... she is here, she is not chronically ill, she is strong and characterful and she has shiny hair and eyes. Those who know her say she is thriving, and she is doing the right things at the right time. There may be some underlying reason for her smallness, or this might just be how she is. This evening it just struck me that we have a lot to be grateful for.