welsh hills again

Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post.  I am feeling so much better now!  The consensus from the medical types in the family is that it was a viral infection (and how often have we heard that about the otherwise unexplained!?).  Whatever it was it has gone and I am back to normal and very thankful for it. Nerines.  Can you ever have enough? It is a good thing to be back on form because last week was a rush around week.  It began with a trip down to Devon for the christening of younger son's two younger children.  Addy who is three and nine month old Daniel both behaved impeccably while having water on their foreheads and being handled by someone they do not know.  Actually that is probably not quite true for the three year old.  Chris and his wife are churchgoers so I imagine that Addy knew the minister who was christening her. There were a few minutes before the ceremony when she decided she might like to take her shoes off b...

This is nearly two thirds of the way through!  That is amazing! Today younger daughter and her two children were here for the morning and for lunch.  As usual in the summer we spent a lot of time outside, feeding chickens, collecting eggs, swinging, throwing balls for the dog, hiding balls for the dog, going up to the farm to see the calves and then pretending I was the dog as Grace made me sit and wait and hid the ball for me to find.  All, as you can see, good fun but not what you might call relaxing.  It is lovely to be able to do it, for myself to build the relationship with the children and for our daughter to ease, just a tiny little bit, the relentless pressure of mothering two small children.  She handles this pressure with enormous patience, good humour and grace but it is still a hard job.  In fact both our daughters and both our daughters in law seem to mother small children far more easily and cheerily than I ever did.  I wonder if I woul...

Today I knew we would wake up in Manchester, at our older son's house, because we had been babysitting grandson number three, aged three, while his parents had a tiny well earned break.  And today contained a lunch with younger daughter and her family postponed from Easter Sunday when I was ill in bed.  So finding a way of doing something in the garden for day 5 of the 100 day project was going to be a bit of a challenge I thought.  And yet, astonishingly, three things got done today and none of them by me although I am claiming that both my presence and my focus on the project caused or inspired the things to be done. The first was the thing I had planned.  Grandaughter number two, aged two and seven months, loves to help in the garden and in life generally.  I thought I could encourage her to do some watering of my scented leaf geraniums which are in the wooden greenhouse, looking dead and sad but quite possibly still alive.  By the time we got t...

Well somehow I didn't manage to post December's extract from the year of being sixty two, principally because I didn't write it!  Somehow the coming of Christmas, trying to keep up with my Spanish and the upheaval of house redecorating just squeezed my writing time into non existence.  I had been intending to spend a chapter looking at the upsides of ageing.  From the volume of stuff you read about "anti-ageing" you might suppose that there aren't any upsides, but that's not true.  My mother used to tell me in her forties, fifties and sixties that she would not want to go back, that she was genuinely happy to be where she was in her life.  She would I suspect have stopped the clock before my father began to be ill but even that would have taken them both well into their seventies.  I never totally understood why she was so content with the age she was when we had those conversations but I could see that it was true.   Knowing that has given me a sense,...

Bursting with news here!  The most important first.  There is another new baby in the family.  I know, I know.  My cup runneth over.  How delightful.  The family is full of babies.  Younger son and his wife had their second child ten days ago, another little girl.  She arrived in haste and was delivered by her father, fortunately a doctor, in a layby on the A38 as they were driving to the hospital.  We will be meeting the new arrival on Sunday. I blogged here  about the arrival of their first baby.  Every time a grandchild arrives is different and every time it moves me profoundly.  This is the first time we have been out of the country when a baby has been born and that felt very strange but we were woken early in the morning in New York with a facetime call from the jubilant parents and had the chance to see their faces and the first sight of the new baby.  Since then pictures and calls have kept us in touch but I can'...

Today the newest member of our family, Grace Lois Joan, first child of younger daughter and her husband, is two weeks old.  Welcome to the world little girl. I have written before about the birth of a new grandchild.  They are all different and this one has made me very aware of something I have thought before and never tried to articulate.  It is one of the great pleasures of life to see your children parenting their own children.  I never realised this when I was younger and I haven't seen much written about it.  The pleasures of being a grandparent are widely celebrated, and they are very great, but the pleasures of seeing your adult children caring for their children have rather taken me by surprise.  I never expected them to be so great and so lasting. When my children were young I both dreaded and longed for the days when they would be grown and responsible for themselves.  I could not imagine them not needing me and not being at the centr...

Have you noticed how many passionate gardeners (myself included) are women whose children are grown?  It is as if we transfer our nurturing tendencies from children to plants.  I am sure I have read this theory elsewhere and although it is an interesting idea I am not sure that I buy it.  I was not a natural earth mother and, passionately although I loved my children from babyhood, I got better at mothering as they grew older.  I spent twenty years of my life climbing the corporate ladder so I didn't feel a void in my life when my children left home which could only be filled by propagating dogwoods and dividing snowdrops.  Somehow the garden ran alongside a frantic work and family life, taking its place after the immediate and pressing demands of family but always a sanity saver, always giving me a place to breathe and dream and find myself again without the pinging of the blackberry and the incessant call of the mobile phone. Up here now, with more time and ...

I can't tell you how much I wish that my children lived nearer to me, or I nearer to my children.  This would be difficult as we have one in Manchester, one in Derby, and two near Oxford.  When my children were young I used to look at my friends who had local family and wish that my parents were not so far away and now that older son and older daughter have children of their own I am once again very aware of how different life would be if we were nearer.  The ease with which you could slip in and out of daily life looks very different from long distance keeping in touch, travelling, staying, being wholeheartedly in or entirely out of the picture. This week I am with my older daughter in Oxford, helping her and the baby as they readjust to life back at home after three weeks in Japan.  It is odd to be in a rural place so different from mine.  The fields are big here, not flat like those in East Anglia but still open and mainly level, stretching away under crops...