An unintentional blog break...lack of energy, creativity, enthusiasm, time, place and before you know it weeks have sped past. At the moment we lurch - from day to day, from hour to hour, from crisis to crisis, from phone call to phone call, tantrum to tantrum, activity to activity, one city to another - it's barely wonder we have any sense of composure, or sense of balance.
With the children away for school holidays with grandparents, I have a small chance to regroup my thoughts. I was going to say find some new energy....but I'm just going to leave it as regrouping thoughts. I've caught up on some emails, caught up on some design magazine reading, and I've bought some cookbooks.
Cooking is my salve - my way of reconnecting, something I've said many times before. It's been really missing in the last few weeks as I've just been too tired to even think about cooking something different each night. The amount of thinking that happens through the day to just get us through, isn't enough to extend to fancy - or even good basic - meals. And it grates with me. We should be eating great food every night. I'm home, it should be the one basic good thing we do each day. And often it's not. And I always know when it's time to regroup when the food thing starts going amiss.
New cookbooks though, completely enthuse.
So tonight we are saying thankyou to a close friend of my husband's brother - someone who has often been our lifeline and communication with a constantly changing battleground. Someone Paul communicates with when he's not communicating with anyone else. And someone who's good fun to be around despite everything. A thankyou dinner for her time and effort in clearing houses and cleaning houses. And a small conference on how we approach things in the future, how we might serve each other and Paul to the best of our ability, and how we can act as a family team, filling in gaps, and finding some balance which at the moment is disparate and lacking.
I love to say thankyou with food. Given from the heart, made from the heart. A conversation about the changing time and seasons, deliberated over as I sit in the sun which is streaming through the house, and I look and see buds on trees, waiting to burst forth with glorious magnolia bloom and scent. And there in the corner, I noticed this morning, a native orchid about the flower - the second time only in 6 years of being here. And I am once again reminded there is beauty of we take the time to look.
oh! and before I forget....the pyjama pants were found....tucked inside the doona cover....the shoelaces were found....tucked in the back pocket of Max's school pants [along with some pieces of chalk, some pieces of concrete, some twigs, and some dirt]