welsh hills again

So many things crowding my mind as we come up to Christmas this year.  This little baby has joined our ever growing family, older daughter's second child, long awaited and much loved.  And within weeks there will be more babies, with daughter in law and younger daughter both due very soon after Christmas.  It is a total delight to have more babies coming into the world but I want to be everywhere at once, sharing the time with everyone, making sure everyone is ok.  This is daft, I recognise, as my presence won't make anyone any more ok but I have found before when babies are due that there is a part of me which doesn't settle until everything is done and I know everyone is ok and that I feel a powerful urge to see, in the flesh, to be there myself to assure myself that everyone is fine. How lovely it will be to have these cousins growing up so close in age and as part of the burgeoning family of cousins.  It is hard to express how very blessed I feel. ...

You may take for granted the daily round of hospital visiting, father in law's cheerful stoicism in the face of all that has been thrown at him, Ian's determination to do the best for him, the endless not knowing about what comes next. But life goes on too, oddly enough, and in other news.... Scaffolding has gone up in readiness for the roofing job on the house.  The house looks strange in its metal exo-skeleton and I must admit to being a bit daunted by the idea of no roof and no roof in November at that.  It's a good job we have a great builder or the phrase "a bit daunted" would be an understatement rather than the truth! A ginger cat turned up on Sunday and is doing a lot of sitting determinedly on the step.  I've had this before when we lived in cities.   I never used to feed a passing cat in order not to encourage it to leave home but it's hard to know where this one has come from.  Our only near neighbours are at the farm and they say it isn...

A few days down with my daughter and son in law and the new baby.  Sometimes time folds in on itself.  It feels simultaneously a long time since I was in a house with a very new baby and no time at all since that baby was mine.  This must be why mothers and mothers in law are famed for interfering and telling new parents how to do it.  It feels so fresh and recent.  You pick the baby up and he settles into your shoulder just like his mother did but this time you feel calm and confident, not desperate and all at sea as I did the first time round. But these new parents really don't need any telling what to do.  The house has become sleepy and milky and running to baby time, his feeds setting the pace and the shape of the day.  They look very at home shushing and settling him and changing his nappy, very unfazed when he is temporarily cranky, carefully noting down when he feeds and sleeps but in a matter of fact way, without panic or obsesssiveness....

Well here I am with another evening on my own and this time I am up here without a car. The wind has been battering the house all day so inside has been the only place to be and here by the woodburner the wind is blowing in the chimney and making the flames leap higher. All day the wind has shouted and shuddered and thrown great showers of rain at the house. Astonishingly the hens, who have been shut into the run all week while I have been away visiting my daughter, were so desperate to get out that they have spent the day being buffeted about the garden, their feathers blown inside out like a bad hair day, struggling against the wind and rain, hiding in the bottom of hedges but determinedly not going back into the henhouse until nightfall. I, by contrast, have been huddled by the fire, half watching the rugby and half reading the paper. I decided that a good use of a few hours being shut in against the weather would be to make my Christmas cake and Christmas pudding so all day the rai...