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. ...

The run up to Christmas might not seem the ideal time to get the decorators in.  Over the summer we flirted with the idea of moving house.  We found something that we liked which doesn't happen all that often because this place is a place we love.  But it didn't come together and, with something like relief, we have committed ourselves to this house again for another little while.  We won't live here forever.  With a house and a holiday cottage and six outbuildings, two greenhouses and a couple of acres of land, it is not a house in which to grow properly old.  But for now we will happily stay here and as part of falling back in love with the house I wanted to reconnect with it which means giving it some time and attention. So first of all we had our bedroom and the landing where we keep our books (well some of them) redecorated.  It is quite extraordinary how much stuff we have and how emptying a room makes the whole house overflow with things!...

Well that was good.  First before Christmas a visit from older son, his fiance and our older grandson with older daughter and her three year old flying through to see them.  Older grandson has decorated the Christmas cake with Santa and two reindeer and carrots, possibly as well as I would have done. A quiet Christmas Day with Ian and my father in law, although with a full trimmings turkey dinner, followed by three full and busy days as younger daughter, younger daughter's dog, older daughter and her husband and three year old son, and younger daughter's boyfriend all arrived.  The house was full, the cottage was full.  The house was so full that the big kitchen table was the only place where we could all sit down on chairs. Henry the beautiful ginger cat demonstrated his only character flaw: an unstoppable tendency to attack dogs, even one as beautiful and generally unthreatening to the human eye as younger daughter's labrador.  To cope with this Henry goes...