Random, with mermaids and forests

• The tooth fairies that have been allocated to the Coffee House are really, really flakey. They never turn up on the right day. One summer they didn't visit till the third night, leaving behind a pitiful letter of apology about having to travel round the world to collect teeth from children who were on holiday. To give them their credit, however, in order to find our teeth they have to find their way into a fiendlishly complicated Fairy Complex, built by Littlest out of wooden sculptures and a Hello Kitty Cafe set, which is jammed up tight against the wall with no discernible entrance whatsoever.
  
  
• My new swimming float? It's amazing when you hold it out in front of you to practice kicking. When you put it between your knees - and I never expected this - your legs flail from side to side in an almost uncontrollable way. It's as near as I've ever come to understanding what it might be like to be a mermaid.
  
  
• My second Lisette Portfolio dress is finished. This might not qualify as magic to you, but since the fabric was bought in October from a distant fabric shop I think it counts as a miracle that I ever got round to making it. Here it is, ready for its final iron, and already covered in bits of fluff. The buttons were a gift from the lovely friend I'd originally forced into the car to visit the distant shop; it seemed a perfect way to finish it off.
  
  
  
  
  
  
•  I've been invited to go and see The Forest, a dance theatre piece for children and adults which looks absolutely gorgeous. I'll report back.
  
  
  The Forest at Live at LICA (Promotional Video) from Live at LICA on Vimeo.

The trap is set

Ah, the Spring. Not that it's here, mind you - I live in the frozen North, remember, so whatever your crocuses are doing, mine are certainly not.

But Sunday morning offered two sunny hours for me to rediscover the garden, and start the delightful job of cleaning the green stuff off the slippery ramp and raking the lawn. And finding the joy that other people's cats have found in my garden, which they obviously think is a bathroom I am providing for their use.

If you own a cat, I'm afraid that this Sunday we were not firm friends. Because I blame you. The sheer extent of the problem this Spring has convinced me that everyone's cat has made a contribution.

Quite simply, wherever you are in the world, I have no doubt: your cat is crossing fences, motorways or oceans in order to come over here and crap in my garden.

We have read the advice about how to keep cats away: with orange peel, with water guns, with 'uneven surfaces'. This last suggestion just mocks us, bearing in mind the fun that the cats have had on the slate chippings surrounding our bay tree.

So Littlest responded to the problem with a new invention - the Coffee House Patented Cat Trap. Here it is in position.
 

It might not be immediately obvious how the trap works - so luckily we have our paper stunt cat, a present from Driftwood, to demonstrate.

First, the cat hops over the fence into the garden; with wrong-doing in mind. 

See the premeditated evil in its face?

Tempted by a bowl of milk, it creeps beneath the trap. 

(The milk is secretly laced with orange juice.)

The shock of the orange juice causes the cat to start. 

The trap falls. The cat is surrounded - surrounded - by pipe cleaners.

Tonight, before you go to bed, look your cat in the eye and tell it to watch out. Things have changed around here. They would do very, very well to just keep away.

If at first you don't succeed, do something else

I read Ali's post about the Couch to 5k recently and had a little stab of jealousy. There was a time, once, when I would jog down the canal path full of hopeful energy.

Admittedly it didn't last very long. My knees swelled up and the physio had to be seen and it was All Over For the Running. Some readers might then remember Gawain, the lovely bicycle which was my next great hope for health and fitness.

However. It turned out that cycling along a canal path is both joyfully whimsical and tediously boring, neither of which is condusive to physical challenge. Either I cycled along at a blissful snail's pace, watching the ducks and the shimmering trees, or I pedalled petulantly, with no real goal, having seen the same ducks and the same damn trees a hundred times already. Also, there is enough stuff to maintain around here without having to look after my own brakes. Gawain is in the shed, and has been for some time.

What I needed was inspiration - and I found it on a couple of dozen posters plastered all over the pool where Littlest has her swimming lessons. They led me to Swimfit, a website where you can create personal swimming programmes which build in intensity. You then log them as you complete them, rather than swimming up and down the pool idly in the manner of a lady cyclist on a canal path.

I like swimming. I'm just good enough at it to not feel like an idiot when I step into the pool, and just bad enough at it to have the motivation to improve. I've ordered a Kick Buoy. I've discovered that so few people go to the adults only evening swim at my local pool at present, it's actually possible to swim a whole length of backstroke without hitting someone in the face. (The other session I go to, where every swim costs £1, is full of teenaged girls with mascara flowing down their faces, flirting and shrieking at soggy, unpleasant-looking boys. I am beginning to wonder if I really should be encouraging the Lattes to swim.)

My husband found me logging my swim, and logging my wine consumption on the NHS alcohol units tracker, and informed me that I fit the profile of an internet 'self quantifier' - someone who constantly records information about themselves online. I have two thoughts about this: 1) that as a blogger I have no leg to stand on, and 2) that people with iPhones have relinquished their right to comment on other people's over-use of technology.

Ooh! Whilst typing this, I just remembered that Kelloggs sent me a press release to say they're offering free kids swim vouchers on promotional packs up until March. There's info here. Is this in time for half term? I hope so. 

You may have noticed a new little widget that has popped up at the side there - an advert from John Lewis. I haven't run an ad before but I couldn't turn this down - an advert for company I was happy with, which didn't blink or flash, and which would pay for my trips to the pool for a little while.

What stress? I just gave mine to the charity shop.

I went to a parenting workshop. Because, you know, I wasn't putting myself under enough pressure as it was, what with rehabilitating a child through a painful and traumatic surgery. It was important too to call every aspect of my parenting into question, and convince myself that this whole situation would be much easier to bear if I were a better mother.

The decision to attend followed a full week where the main sound in the Coffee House was howling. On one occasion, when both my children were screaming their faces off in different parts of the house, my mother and I could only stand at the foot of the stairs, holding onto a newel post each, shrieking with deranged laughter.

This hysterical heartlessness is not something I have learned from any parenting manual.

The message behind the Simplicity Parenting book on which the workshop was based is that our children are overloaded: with toys, with media, with activities. Decluttering, slowing down, and establishing family rhythms are ways of bringing some calm into family life, and preventing children from becoming overwhelmed. Children need time to be bored, to find their own activities, to enter 'deep play' away from outside stimulation.

The thing is, I agree with all this. But left alone with a Vision Sheet to fill in about what I would be throwing out or giving away, I found myself scribbling "Our stress is nothing to do with the stuff on the shelves." My question about how you can strap a child into a metal frame for an hour and then expect it to autonomously choose its own activities could not be answered. Our 'family rhythms' at home revolve entirely around sessions of physiotherapy.

It turns out that expecting a parenting workshop to solve our family's problems is the equivalent of cleaning the house in order to stop the roof falling in.

Still. I have cleared out some DVDs, and hidden some plastic ponies in a suitcase in the basement. (Whatever the course leader says, children under nine do remember what toys you have decluttered in their absence.) I've sorted the children's clothes into outfits in an attempt to Simplify Choice. A man from the Scope shop came by and I gave him a load of books. I'm trying to keep the house clearer and more quiet, and be mindful of the time things take so we don't overburden ourselves.

But on returning home from the workshop with my Vision Sheet and my new resolve about cutting back on television, I found my family gathered round a film, playing with a new set of tiny plastic dogs. They were calm, and they were happy - and that was a very simple joy indeed.

Making time

Like many of you, I've been keeping an eye on Silverpebble and ThriftyHousehold's Making Winter bloghop. It's full of busy-ness: mitten-knitting, muffin-making, beeswax-melting, putting stuff in jars. Over here, though, there has been little making - unless we count the very basic job of feeding everyone (lately it has been VERY basic), and an incredibly rudimentary Rapunzel costume.

What I have been trying to make, however, is time. The last few weeks have taken a lot of energy, and the present is still very fraught. What we need around here is calm: but you can't make that on a stove or a sewing machine.

For me, the answer is usually to go back to yoga. A few years ago, when I had ME, I relied very heavily on the very approachable Elizabeth Irvine's meditation podcasts for mothers (she no longer updates, but all the archives are there to download for free) and the slightly less down-to-earth Jean and Jesse Stern. There are a lot of meditation podcasts out there, but some of them were a bit too New Age for me to handle - I can't honestly keep a straight face if someone starts calling me 'pilgrim'.

Picture of a candle that I didn't take

The thing about making time for yourself is being realistic about how much time you actually have. I'd love to go to a yoga class once or twice a week. Maybe I could go for a swim! And have an hour or three, lazing in a cafe, reading a book... I'm sure I'd be much calmer then. In the real world, I'm promising myself five to ten minutes of candle gazing a day, and a short yoga practice every other day.

If you've done yoga before, I'd really recommend these seasonal yoga podcasts, recorded by Sonia Welch, a very lovely yoga teacher whose classes are among my favourites when I have the time to actually get to them. The podcasts aren't really for beginners - you have to have an idea what you're doing - but they come with comprehensive notes on the postures as well as advice on the best food for the season (I never manage to eat the right food for the season). The winter podcast is lovely and gentle, and after making a habit of it for a short while I can feel the benefits. A bargain, I think, for £6.50.

I doubt that calm will ever fully be felt in The Coffee House. But I'm making an effort, at least.

Two final things:

1 If you do know someone with ME who is looking for a way forward, my best advice would be to direct them to the yoga teacher Fiona Agombar, whose book, CD and weekend retreat were among my lifesavers.

2 On a more trivial note, have you seen Blogger's new threaded comments (below)? This is the most exciting thing that has happened so far in my blogging year. Luckily it is only January.

The new Normal

This morning, Eldest went back to school for the first time since early November. Just for the morning; so as not to tire her out. It's a gradual getting-back-to-normal process.

Things are settling down: now Eldest is no longer confined to bed, we are eating at the table instead of perching around her with dinner-trays on our laps. The other day I went to Dunelm Mill and spent a gazillion pounds on cushions, in an attempt to pretend that the electric hospital bed in our tiny living room - still needed for daytime physio - is actually a perfectly acceptable day bed. The metal cot sides detract from the look, but you can't have everything.

The children are back in their own room. (Littlest refused to sleep in the bunk bed alone, and slept on the sofa next to her sister for six weeks. Any fears we might have that sleeping in the same room would wear off in a couple of weeks have been delightfully unfounded.)

A lot has changed due to Eldest's surgery, and though we can glimpse now what the benefits may well be, there's a lot of road to travel yet. But life is often topsy-turvy; it's time to start focusing on what's normal, not what's not.

And to thank you all for your patience and your kind words during this particular Winter of Weird. Receiving comments from people I have never met, showing such affection and hope for our family, has been incredible.

Take a deep breath

I like the run-up to Epiphany far better than the days preceding Christmas. The presents are unwrapped, the hysterical BUYING is over. There's usually time to rest and relax, to read, to help the Lattes make pictures with tissue paper. Our tree stays up forever. Each year, I give thanks to the Magi for taking their time.

Not this year. This year it has been hard; a period of pain and tears and physiotherapy. (The tears have not all belonged to Eldest.)

It's not exactly the most reflective or inspirational environment in which to make New Year's Resolutions. But though we might be capable of changing our own destinies, we can't do a lot about the date.

Each year, we sit down in the Coffee House with a bit of fancy paper each and write our resolutions, which we keep in a little gift bag on the kitchen noticeboard. In 2010 we made little mini-books which, whilst beautiful, gave us rather too much space; we all felt obliged to come up with enough pledges to fill the things. Faced with the possibility of quite so much life-enhancing change, I began to make vague and sweeping statements which had no hope of being satisfactorily fulfilled.

By 2011 I thought I had it sussed - I was all about the SMART goal, with specifics. Do this once a week. Don't eat that.  But by far the most disheartening part of resolutions is opening up the bag on New Year's Eve and being confronted with the unhappy truth that the resolutions we make every year, however we word them, boil down to more or less the same thing: a thing which we still have not achieved. And if we rely on a magical date to get us going, it's probably never going to happen.

I was just feeling rather maudlin about this when I came across Littlest's resolutions from last year, which Mr Coffee had transcribed for her. These are resolutions I hope we can all try to keep this year.

My resolution for 2012? The clue's in the title. I don't know if I'll manage it  tomorrow; or even this week. Another week in hospital looms - for rehab this time. If you do ever think of us, think training montage. Let the soundtrack in your head be Eye of the Tiger.