Tea With Me...

Hello, come in. Huddle close to the heater. I've the candles lit. (Clootie Dumpling candles anyone? - I've found a gorgeous place in Scotland that makes the most nostalgia-inducing, instantly cosy-fying candles.)

What would you like? Tea, coffee, hot chocolate?

With the start of the school holidays I've been making the kids decadent thick hot chocolate that verges on chocolate custard. You're welcome to some. (I'd be glad of the excuse to put another saucepan full on… the secret is the cornflour and constant stirring.) However there's also teas and coffee. (Although our coffee machine is broken - at the moment we're boiling the coffee in our copper teapot. It doesn't quite taste the same, but after our sleepless nights with the wee one it's caffeinated and that's what matters!)

Now, sit yourself down. (I don't think there's any play-doh on the seat, but do check! We made eucalyptus scented play-doh today and the kids have been re-creating themes from Frozen. Play-doh is scattered haphazardly throughout the house) There's a blanket for your knees if you're still a bit cold.

Do admire the little one - eight weeks this week, but she's needing a feed. (She's always needing a feed, and growing so quickly, the clever, guzzling one.)

 Oddly enough, with a newborn to savour and two little ones to run herd on, I decided to do a blogging course. It's run by the lovely Pip over at Meet me at Mikes. And strangely, it has all seemed to work well. Seeing everyone else in the course doing amazing things inspired me to make the change I've been meaning to make for awhile - find a real focus for my blog and redesign the layout … and change the name! Goodbye Mischief, Magic & Mayhem, hello A Wilder Magic.

Joining with the Meet me at Mikes cup of tea with me Linky… here are five things I'm loving…

My Littlest one - out of hospital, smiling and well. She came down with bronchiolitis and there was a fraught week - but she has recovered so quickly into her sunny, chubby self that no one could guess she was ill so recently. She is lying on my chest now, her feed finished. She stretched her little milk-drunk self and cuddled up in a warm little bundle, her mittened hands tucked under her chin, her sleeping face at just the right place to drop kisses on.

My wonderful sister-in-law is visiting from Queensland. It's so lovely to catch up, to see how much the kids enjoy her company. We're drinking copious amounts of rose and vanilla tea and have already gone on our first op-shopping expedition. We're talking about our up-coming trip to Europe and so many exciting future plans…

Sometimes, just sometimes I catch a tantalising scent of blossom in the air. I breath it in greedily. I always forget how much I love the smell, and then each year it strikes me anew. Now, in the midst of winter it's sweetness is such a gift.

My bulbs are coming up. The jonquils have speared the earth and each day I admire their growth - eager to see the first buds. It always strikes me as wonderful that little lumps of brown shoot greenery and then such sweet smelling flowers.

Winter inspiration - there's something about the brisk air of winter, the sound of the rain upon the roof, the mist surrounding, that seems to nourish writing ideas. Images and scenes for my more wintry manuscripts are rapidly growing. I just need to steal the time away to write them down…

And you - what are you loving?

moments

-Poppet on the train as we go into the city to pick up Aunty Bec.
-Hot Chocolate at Southern Cross Station.  I love the little candle warming the chocolate. I've been experimenting to make the same thick, rich hot chocolate and I think I've nearly found the recipe. The perfect hand-warmer for the bitter weather recently.
- Sprocket celebrating Aunty Bec's arrival throwing around Autumn leaves.
- snowdrops in mum & dad's garden.
- seed pods in rain. I love the colour and the velvety texture.
-my beautiful gap-toothed boy.
- Sprocket enjoys the long grass.
- over there. Sprocket and Poppet discuss matters.
- Littlest on our walk, undercover from the rain and well rugged up.

Joining with the lovely Em with moments from our week. 

Littlest (week seven)

Sunday 22 June (Written from hospital)

Littlest,

O my tiny darling, this has not been a good week for you. (And I'll have to come back to your sixth week, if indeed I ever remember it. Worry and stress and lack of sleep seem to have wiped a lot of things from my memory.)

As I type now we're in the hospital. I am sitting up in bed and you are sleeping wheezily on my chest, the gastro-nasal tube still in your nose - although you no longer need to use it, and the oxygen tubes finally taken from your nose. There's still a probe bandaged to your foot, attached to a machine that monitors your air saturation and heart rate. Every so often the machine attached to the probe starts beeping and flashing red, but now the beeping is being put down to you kicking and confusing the machine. This was not always the case.

We have been in the hospital since Thursday - three nights - and you are final becoming more like your own curious, inquisitive, happy self.

On Monday you had a cough, a bit of a sniffle and were unsettled in the evening.

On Tuesday your cough was worse and you were breathing a little fast. Your Daddy and I didn't really sleep Tuesday night as you didn't want to lie down and your breathing was so laboured. One or the other of us, and often both, sat up with you all of the night, holding you and listening to your exhales and inhales, your coughing and spluttering and checking the rate of your breathing and listening to your chest.

On Wednesday your breathing was worse - your Daddy stayed home from the hospital - which considering he only took a day and a half off for your birth shows how worried he was.

I was petrified about whooping cough as there was a case at your brother's school last week. Your Daddy thought bronchiolitis. I took you to the doctor and while in the waiting room I nearly got up and took you straight to emergency, your breathing seemed so unsteady, your colour so sallow. I should have. The doctor said you seemed to have a cold or flu and to keep up the fluids. He gave us saline drops.

I never had a winter baby in Victoria before. Your brother and sister were both tropical babies. The colds and flus of winter look so different in a newborn and I was unsure how to interpret them.

Watching you breathe terrified me, but maybe it was normal for a small baby with a cold?

I went home feeling foolish - your colour was bad, but so was your brother's and sister's. They've been coughing and either flushed or pale for weeks.

Thursday morning, after another sleepless night taking turns to hold you, after doing the school-run listening to one ragged breath after another, constantly getting the kids to check on you as we drove,  I took you to the maternal health and childcare nurse, and asked if I should take you to the hospital. I'd been reluctant  because of the long wait in the Emergency Ward. After the longest drive of my life, the fifteen minutes home to change you, (you'd just thrown up all over your clothes and most of mine) and then the drive to the hospital, just listening for each unsteady breath, I discovered there are worse things than waiting in ED.

There is going to the triage nurse and being led straight out the back. First into a little room where you were checked, and then into a room behind where you were put on oxygen. I phoned your Daddy and he arrived so fast I was afraid he must have sped the hour long trip. Luckily, the broken down car for once did not break down. As soon as a bed was free we were taken onto the paediatrics ward.

The nights and days blur together. Beeping machines and doctors and nurses and your little heaving chest and bobbing head and wheezing, expressing milk, and all the milk coming up again. Your brother and sister coming in for brief, manic visits, hyped on treats and running rings around your shattered Daddy and causing mayhem.

Looking out the window, it is the same view we had when you were born, only from a different angle. Beyond the little peace garden directly out the window (cala lilies and coastal rosemary, and one little unflowering rose) is the same row of eucalypts, the staff car-park. You lie in the same type of clear plastic bassinet. And you looked so very, very different.

You're getting better now. I think we'll be able to come home soon. You're smiling again, your big, joyous grin. You're talking (you have the sweetest voice in all the world), and waving your hands and feet like a very enthusiastic conductor. These last few days you've just been lying still, apart from your head bobbing with your breathing, and your tiny chest labouring.

Little one, we were so very scared. We are so very grateful to all the lovely staff who looked after you so well. We are so grateful for modern medicine - for air. I don't know what would have happened if we did not have the technology to give you oxygen. My mind shies from it. But I am suddenly thinking of all the children in developing countries who do not have access to the oxygen that kept you going.

Littlest, you are on the mend now. It seems there is a very clear course to bronchiolitis - progressively worse for 3-5 days and then better. You are past the worse and soon we will be home.

O Littlest, it is so very, very good to see you smiling again and studying the ceiling with awed wonder.

(About to come home, Monday)

moments - the walk before

Last week my girls and I went on our usual walk - to see the unicorns (although only Poppet can see their horns), to look at the blossom I had seen from the car and to see if the fairy mushrooms that had been there last winter had returned.

My Poppet jumped and leapt and ran and cavorted. I admired the high blue sky, the deep green of the grass, the crisp air and trees that managed two seasons in a day - with autumn leaves and blossom on the same branches, even though we are in the heart of winter.

My Poppet had the nasty cough she has had for the past few weeks - my Littlest had the sniffles. Over the next few days my Littlest's sniffles developed into something far worse - bronchiolitis and we ended up spending four nerve-wracking days in hospital. I have never been so scared. My sweetest Littlest was wheezing and coughing and struggling so badly. I have never been more grateful we live in a place and time with amazing medical skills.

We are home now, my Littlest is smiling again. But these are moments from our walk 'before.'

Joining with Em for moments from our week. 

a wilder magic

'And then for one glorious, supreme moment , came "the flash." …  It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very near a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside but sometimes just for a brief moment , a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of an enchanting realm beyond - only a glimpse - and heard a note of unearthly music.' 
(Emily of New Moon, L.M Montgomery)

I've been meaning for awhile to change the name of my blog - it never seemed quite right, but I wasn't sure what to change it too.

I began thinking about what I really wanted to reflect in my blog, what I'm really wanting, for my children, for myself. And for my children, for myself, and for my writing, I want a wilder magic.

I want that sense of wonder, that we are terribly close to something joyous and startlingly beautiful.

So much of our world is bound up in screen time - and I am one of the worst offenders - but when I look back on my life, it's those moments spent outside that I remember most clearly and with most delight.

Held in the green curve of a cresting wave, the shore spread before me.

Running into midnight water in Scotland, friends giggling around me and phosphorescence around our feet.

Walking along a narrow cliffside path towards a promontory castle, the wind so strong I can lean over the cliff edge and be held.

Running through rain, feeling it's bitter cold on my face and feeling intensely, exultantly alive.

Floating in un-still, luminous tropical ocean with my Beloved, frangipani floating around us and the rain steadily falling.

These are the moments I want for my children - the outdoor moments. The wild moments. The times that aren't comfortable, aren't clean, are often not entirely safe. But make you feel so alive - so close to a sense of 'other.'

These are the moments that I want to capture in my writing. These are the moments I want to capture here, in my blog. Those wilder times, outside, the times that sing. Those times of mud and sand and walking home wet and shivering and sand-encrusted and mud-laden.

Screen time is easier. It's less work. It's more comfortable. It's safer. It lacks the squish and ooze and mess.

But it doesn't have that wilder magic, it doesn't even allow for the possibility of it.

Of a dolphin swimming alongside you in the sea - or a fleet of manta-rays come to glide amongst you under a lightning filled sky.

Of seeing a certain slant of light through mist and having your heart contract.

I love to see the joy of my children as they play along the shore, run barefoot and red-toed over a rocky reef. As we talk about the names of the birds and the markings on the sand. I'm learning to hold my tongue when they turn the front path into a mud-pit and play happily in it for hours.

There's a line in a song by the Scottish singer Jackie Leven (now sadly deceased) -  'The old islanders say that neon steals the poetry from the young.' And to me it seems so true. This screen glare of iPad, iPhone, computer, television, is stealing the poetry away. The poetry found in time spent in nature, in lines of great beauty written by someone four hundred years ago, that you read and then it haunts you for days, years.

 I feel it in myself - time I once spent outdoors or reading actual paper-books, is spent scrolling. It's easier. I can scroll in bed, in the dark, as the kids sleep beside me and I feed the baby. Or I can light a candle and sit with my little one in the rocking chair and just drink in her fast-changing wonder. I can check my Facebook while stamping my feet in a cold playground, or I can climb up the ladder and speed down the slide, study the trees surrounding us, the patterns of the clouds.

I love the internet. I'd never willingly give it up. Having information at my fingertips is wonderful. Being able to keep in touch with far flung friends and relatives is a great gift. To make new friends, to have amazing, inspiring images, sayings, movies from around the world and time sent to me, wherever I am, is a great privilege and mind-blowing. I have no intention of separating my kids from it.

But I want to find a better balance.

I want more of that wilder magic. I want this space to reflect that search, those times spent outside, or reading, when we leave the door open to wonder and wildness.