welsh hills again

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...

Ten days ago my son and his wife had their first baby, just a few days early.  It was a long labour.  C rang me on the evening of the day K went into hospital having had some bleeding.  I went to bed but all night long I kept finding myself awake, looking into the darkness, wondering what time it was.  Why had I woken?  Oh yes, the baby.  Was it born yet?  How were they? He rang again the following morning.  No, nothing, not yet, just tiredness and contractions.  They would induce her.  Again in the evening.  Things were happening but still painfully slowly.  Another night of drifting in and out of sleep.  It is not a rational thing.  You know perfectly well that it makes no difference whether you sleep or wake.  But still that primitive tie, that tug of blood, keeps pulling at you, tugging you out of sleep into dark wakefulness. On the following morning their daughter was born, our first granddaughter, as ou...

My friend (I hope I can use this word about a relationship in its early tentative real stages but further along perhaps in virtual life) Friko has inspired me with her miscellany blog so I hope she won't mind my pinching the idea. What has touched me, meant something to me, this week, large and small? Last Tuesday I went to a service of thanksgiving for the life of a blogging friend who died far too young.  She was one who had made the leap from virtual to real friend.  A group of us living on the borders between England and Wales (she on the English side, I on the Welsh) met  a couple of years ago and found a mass of things in common.  She had struggled for years with serious ill health but was the liveliest, sparkiest, least self pitying person you could find, looking outward when she could have been forgiven for looking in, fascinated by the world and by people, the kind of person who is quietly, consistently kind.  We gathered in a tiny c...

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....

On Wednesday my daughter had her first baby, a little boy. He was two weeks early and delivered eventually, after a long labour, by caesarean section. They are both fine and still in hospital, with E longing to go home! It has been quite a journey for her with a pregnancy plagued by sickness. As always she has been her mainly cheerful and stoical self. She has always been like this, not one to fuss, not one to seek sympathy. As a two year old she had whooping cough. Even then, her face flaming and streaked with tears and her little body shaking with the spasms, as soon as the coughing stopped she would shake herself, blow her nose and say firmly "I'm all right Mummy." I have admired her so much as she has gone through this pregnancy, exhausted, sick, trying to hold down a difficult job, but, just as soon as the nausea faded, back to herself, strong and calm and without self pity. She is quite a girl, or a woman now I suppose. And her husband has been fantastic too: shoppi...