prettiness

I have been in love with water colour painting these big free mandalas. There are 102 free ones to print out and they are super addictive. The boys have done a fair few (pen and pencils, they are not interested in the watercolouring, preferring the fiddlier ones).



I turned one into a times table wheel for Isaac, I saw something similar in a Steiner classroom recently and he wants to be good at his times tables so as to do his long multiplication with ease. As he gains confidence in each he gets a gold star to affix to the corresponding coloured egg. Super pretty. This is the first 'star chart' our house has ever seen :) I am thankful it's not a horridly gormless and undermining potty training one or food eating one, yikes.



More prettiness on the hall table and beside it.





Pretty little kitchen, one of the girly's favourite in-the-house nooks to play in.



What's cooking in the witch's kitchen?



Finger labyrinths as seen here. The idea is to trace the less dominant pointy finger around to the centre and back out again. An aid to relaxation. The boys keep doing them. I saw Fe get up from the table in the middle of eating and when I asked what he was up to said he was mad and going to chill at the labyrinth....! Pretty funny.





They reminded me of the book Larry's Party by Carol Shields. I have recently been having a Shields kick and re-reading all of her books that I own (Larry is a guy who designs mazes). I particularly like this one and also Happenstance. But oh my, talking of re-reads, this week I re-read Donna Tartt's, Little Friend. Now The Secret History is fab, just ultra absorbing, but I had forgotten the lure and dark exotic quality of this book. The suspense, sense of place and characters are just excellent. I savoured it so much and as I am super fast reader had to pace myself in order not to finish up too soon. Some books are just like that..... I am really having a major comfort re-reading seeion of late, my old faves piled up in a familiar and embracing style by my bed (Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, a few David Mitchell's, a Kingsolver or two, some Mary Oliver, Helen Dunmore's short stories, David Guttersons; East of the Mountains, Cold Mountain..... oh I could go on and on and on and have a leaning tower of Pisa by the bed for always).

Ok. But back to Larry's Party, I realised (again) when reading this book that I just don't like walking around labyrinth's or mazes. I don't. I dislike terribly the idea of taking the wrong turn, the mass of options at every step. Shudder. Not my idea of fun or a good time. What I'd like is a labyrinth that has one opening and one path only that spirals straight to the pretty center (a bench, a fountain, a statue) and then winding back out again. I wonder what this has to say about me, hum? I'd like to think it was simply that I make a million choices every day for everyone and it's be nice in relaxation time not to have to make a single one! For it all to be decided and for me to only tread a gentle path..... although I imagine it's more sinister and gloomy and revolves around my fear of taking the wrong path in life, or making wrong decisions.... oh dear, how dull.

Aaaaannnnnnyyyy way, enough psychobabble, who cares, I just don't much like to walk mazes :) And so I very much like these one way finger labyrinths....

shadow theatre

I saw this here and one hot long afternoon, wilting from heat and needing to be inside we made one.

Felix thought it was most hilarious.





Especially Isaac making a bendy man break-dance. After a while they turned it into news reporting. The news was random and a crazy sounding hodgepodege such as hot weather, a traffic jam along our lane and an oil spill in America, plus many football results. Actually it's not far from the real random sounding news repots....

tokeloshe reins

Tokeloshe is a Good Fairy, guardian of the trees. He is mischievous and likes to cause you to trip over fallen branches. He loves beauty and makes petals float down, seed pods spin through the air and leaves burst into fiery or cool colours. Tit Tat is the queen of the fairies and is neither good nor bad. One must be wary though of Tit Tat, she had many fairy children and hid them here and there, woods, home and valley. She's forgotten where they all are and even what they look like and so mournfully spends her days searching, searching.... Sometimes a mortal child wanders across her path and she tries to tempt him to fairy land where he will forget all and never return home. Sometimes she is so convinced that a mortal child is her own she follows her. Placating her is easy enough. She likes to sleep, slumbering on clusters of silky seed fluff in tiny dry nooks, she adores salt and chocolate and can easily be distracted. Tiny boats floating downstream delight her and she is much diverted.



Tokeloshe has entranced us for days and days now with silken floaty showers of fluff. They spin in the air, lazy and gentle puffs of summer snow flakes. They coat everything here, ground, trees, washing line..... all day long they float and shimmer... fairy dust.







We gather some and turn it into a bed for Tit Tat in the old stump of tinder dry half-tree.





Felix wonders if Esmé dressed in fairy wings will she be mistaken for a lost fairy child. Sly Esmé has fast legs and shares her chocolate aplenty on frock, table and floor, a trail of sweetness to placate an army of sleepy wandering fairies.



Under this tree Tokeloshe performs the best show of glitzy fairy dust. There's a heady scent of sweetness and warmth under the cool tree that hums me to into a rich reverie. I can half see bouncing children (protected by a magical fairy-proof netting) and sometimes the rest of the world is gone, or at least shrinks to fit in to a whole leaf. I see a mini beast tiger, sipping from a fairy plate, shimmering green trunks, home to the entire universe...









Delicious.

After a day of story weaving non fairy children are as dirty as ever they could be.



Especially after days smearing the red clay of the stream bank.





Or spent half naked, planting stones in pots of earth to grow into fairy trees; with love and care they often do.





Magically transformed to this:



or this and this and this.....











As the moon rises a soak in the fairy-tub is often called for.

the green of life, it's lessons ever flowing

He's such an artist. He sees form and shape and ideas in even a rock from the stream.



She likes to be outside, ALL of the time :)









But then so do I so it's ok.



Sometimes late in the day I am surprised to find a warm egg still in my pocket from when I plucked it from the nest that morning.



We have a white broody hen and under her I found eight eggs, so right now my dh is constructing a little broody pen for her, just for her, to lay us some chicks. It's very exciting, lets hope the cock's been doing his grand work.

I am still making nettle soup (nettle and sweet potato is our fave) and luckily they like it





I love our little patch of wildness so much. So much because it's only us who visit it. Every time I see it I feel the wonder of it.













And so we get to see the changes without someone else making them. It's a tunnel of green and wild garlic and damp cool water. I could lie there all day, but must contend with my shoes off and sitting on the earth.







I touch the trunks of trees and feel their calm deepness of being radiating out. They just *are*. They are peace and patience and life.





Some are mottled or diseased and still they grow, accommodating, not resisting, but managing life and living all the same.



Everywhere you care to look you can find every life lesson you ever need to learn, right there in the garden or lane or field or woods.

Our evening walks are also full to the brim with time for the senses.









I love watching them walk, so confident, taking the short cut home.