First Frost

The alarm sounds and immediately we're all resistant, our senses telling us to remain curled in our thick blankets. We all take a few extra minutes processing what is to happen next, all except my husband. He rises quickly, fearful that slumber will steal him away again. Last night without realising the turn of the weather, I had already decided to gift the boys a bacon sandwich for breakfast. It was after watching my eldest lifting and dropping thick globules of congealed weetabix from his bowl the day before. A true sign of being 'weetabixed out', a signal to tag in something new. My heart hits a quickening pitter patter as the teenager looks me in the eye and utters words of thankfulness and gratitude and gives me one of those smiles that makes you filled to the brim, the sort of smile that you could draw on with a pencil, its just so perfect. I leave the house with layer upon layer, ready for my daily walk to work. Today the ground is glistening, cheekily shining and showing off its newly acquired armour. I step carefully, thinking especially of the tenderness in my right knee. As I walk I catch sight of the glorious low rising sun, she is magnificent today and the reddest I have seen in a long time. I mistakingly glance at her, mesmerised. She returns my gaze and leaves me with spots before my eyes and I delight in the nostalgia and think of girlhood and memories of playing in the heat of the African sun, a different friend. A different time. I walk on. Past the folks breathing out billows of smoke, their faces marked with the concentration of ice removal and the weary interruption of routine. The season is upon us and suddenly thoughts of festivities stir in me: the scent of cinnamon and orange, of Christmas cookies baking and homemade concoctions of warming alcohol. A mental note made to retrieve the wooden advent calendar from its loft hiding place, to begin a list of ideas for stockings that need filling with the lovely but simple things in life. My motivation motto that I use annually when buying gifts for those boys of mine: something they want, something they need, something to wear and something to read. It is still so fitting, still so perfect. Late night drives. Walks, short and long. Visits to the prettiest of villages with picture perfect scenes of decorated trees and sparkling lights. Thick socks and blankets and oodles of hot chocolates. Finding pubs with real fires and cosying in for shared puddings and warm drinks. Moments snatched for journalling. Time spent sat in silence amongst loved ones, each person doing their own thing. Books sifted through and perhaps even read. Letters written and perhaps even sent. Popping out on foot for items forgotten and left off the list that suddenly you can't do without. Films. Ahhh, dear films. All the favourites and the hope of some new. Coffee. Fresh, fresh coffee and the ritual of preparing it. The soundtrack of home. The promise of the new. Vinyl and pain au chocolat and scrabble and early mornings when there's no place to be and no rush to go. This first frost has stirred a-plenty and I am thankful for all that it is bringing my way. I'm swept up in the magic of the season, a Grinch no longer perhaps or for now at least.

Sweet Peas and Memories on a Properly Cold Day

Today has been one of our coldest and foggiest days so far this year. I haven't left the house all day and I feel a little numb and a little restless for it. It has been an unexpected day. My first day off work since I began my new job in September. A day needed not by I but by that youngest boy of mine, who woke, complaining of aches and a temperature. He is the one that was born with his cup spilling over with joy, his cup is always half full and I am often challenged by this joyful spirit of his. However, our new rhythm of mama working full time and him spending his early mornings and an hour after school with two different childminders on different days, and the transitions in routine, in weather, well I think he needed a day and his body decided to tell him so. His chest began whispering this notion at the week-end, it said quietly 'remember me, I like to return right alongside the dry cold air'. I mostly managed to banish it but the whispers, a few determined ones lingered in the air and made themselves heard but again we are shooing them away, for it is only a week and a bit till the end of term and make it we all four will, by hook or by crook, to the end of term.

Today, I was determined to leave some words. Any words. Even if I was to resign myself to 'I have no words today' because sometimes it's the doing and not the thinking that's necessary. On this cold, cold day where I felt the chill like I haven't felt it so far this year, I used every like persuasion to convince my body that I was not cold, just like my Granny used to do. Scarf around my neck. Woollen socks. Slippers on. Warmed milk in a china cup. A blanket across my knees. When my nose still felt cold and wet like my childhood pet dog Snoopy, I decided that a trip down memory lane must be the only thing missing. The best part of memories is being taken back right into the mood of a previous experience. Right back like it happened yesterday. And so I looked at photos taken earlier in the year, a much warmer time of this year and stumbled across these images. They were taken back on the seventeenth of August, when the sun had scattered freckles on the boys' nose like seeds in a field, when his skin had a slight glow kissed by the sun, when time was our own and we were the boss of time, when it was just me and him, him and I and I had these words to say.

'Spent half the day with just this one today. We took a walk around our local park and as we did so, I recalled memories from his toddler years. We smelled the scent of sweet peas from a way away, so we followed our noses. I began to tell the boy all about how the scent triggered memories of Grandma Peppermint, who in the summer months always had a vase full of sweet peas at the top of the stairs as you entered her flat. They came from Uncle Horace's garden, he would bring a big bunch that he had cut from his garden and had wrapped in last weeks newspaper. Gran would always say that she preferred flowers in the garden than in a vase but she always confessed that the scent of sweet peas indoors was rather spectacular.'

Winter and endings and hopeful beginnings

The colder weather is here and all of a sudden it feels like winter. I keep spotting the last of the berries on trees and hedgerows, hearing magpies fighting and cackling in our back garden, resembling very much the types that have left things to the last minute and have been caught out. The boys and I have taken great joy in peering into houses and admiring peoples christmas trees along our school route and I have watched two boys exhaling air and pretending to blow smoke circles, just like I remember doing when I was a kid. Winter signals that the year is coming to a close, another chapter almost gone. I feel a little overwhelmed, a little unprepared to say goodbye to this year. I'd like to think that enough years have passed now for me to know that it's not healthy to dwell on missed opportunities and wishes that haven't quite come true, to not beat myself up for not ticking off items on my to do list for the year. I'm sure I'll get around to writing some words reflecting on the passing of the last twelve months as I did last year and the year before that, well if the mood takes me that is. I'm left at the end of this year with a rather plain and surrendering sense of 'it's enough'. 

It's enough. 

It's enough fear, it's enough of being too scared to dream and to dare to dream bigger than ever before. No regrets but a little sense of melancholy tells me to dream bigger next year, to try harder at what comes more easily. This last few months has felt like an uphill struggle, trying to do what doesn't come easily for reasons that don't altogether make much sense. Dream bigger. Mediocreness is suffocating, it doesn't allow space to breathe, it leaves a sense of something being missing. I don't want that anymore, it's enough! It's actually enough to just sit on the sofa with our woollen blankets, with me nagging the children to sit still and with hubby holed up in his chair in the corner of the sitting room right next to us drawing in his sketchpad. To sip wine, make hot chocolates with marshmallows on top, to watch the lights on the christmas tree and to think of loved ones near and far who gifted us with special decorations that sit on the tree year after year. To suck on peppermint flavoured red and white stripy candy canes, the ones that I pretend to buy for the children. To wait as long as possible under the blankets and then head to the cold kitchen to make real coffee, lots and lots of real coffee for my hubby and I. It's enough to find a forest that smells of pines to take a walk in, to make up for the fake tree in our house. To find a pub on the way back from our forest walk, one with a real fire that we can sit by, to make up for the lack of a log fire in our home. To finally get around to teaching my eldest boy to make mix tapes this christmas, 2015 has got to be the year of the Acquaye-Tonge's mix tape collection. To just be without a schedule or timetable or places to be at set times. To be able to just pop out to the cinema on a whim, to stay in pyjamas all day and finish all those books that I've half read.To play countless games of mankala (or owari where I'm from) and all those promised games of monopoly and cluedo and scrabble, in tribute to christmas day tradition when Grandma Peppermint was still alive. 

It's enough to want the simpler of things that we can all so easily be robbed of because of busyness and overspending and duty and overcommitting and guilt trips and losing sight of the real prize, all getting in the way. The four of us, in pyjamas all day long, good food and good coffee and music, good music. It's enough. Merry Christmas. That's all folks!

Happy memories from Christmas's past!

Everything is fine, Nothing is great.

It has been deep in your bones cold and I actually like it that way right now. Walking back from the school drop off taking time to notice the frosty dustings on holly bushes and leaves and spiders webs, all glistening in the light like icing sugar or fairy dust. I like the feeling of hearing only my own footsteps moving along a path, greeting  and re-greeting my fellow parents, neighbours and strangers alike knowing home is close by and I'll get to tuck myself away in one room in the house to work away on a project, only getting up for a fresh cup of something hot. That's what I did for a while yesterday, hungry to make and do with my hands and so a new canvas was born, the one you see here. Elaine - my college tutor years ago, would have told me to 'work into it' some more but with natural light quickly fading and my patience also I called time on this piece after 1.5 hours. And by the way by 15.13, the very latest I should leave for school collection, there was no natural light in the house. Winter is here.

This week was a hard week, some are, we all know this. My heart ached when I was taken to one side (by a lovely individual I hasten to add) and told that my little one who is not yet five in number, is not quite .... ticking boxes on paper as he might and perhaps it was reason for concern. It is no concern of mine or his fathers for he is a bright and lovely boy, except now that it's been mentioned I know. I know. I know that at just four years and five months he is being watched and boxes remain unticked? I've been that child and working in schools I've seen those children being watched, seen the production line, those that get moved off the line, moved elsewhere. It will be ok and I'll make sure of it, both of us will but I have felt heavy of heart and weary with over thinking. I know this also because I postponed a phone call to my mother suspecting all too well that I would crack. A day later I made the call and when I heard that warm voice of nurture I absolutely humpty dumptied off the wall and smashed into pieces ... but it's ok. This woman carries the strength of all the kings horses and all the kings men and she could and did put me back together again. A special possum in my life who I like to call 'possom' even though I know it's the incorrect spelling but I have been doing it too, too long to feel it is deserving of change also shared wise words and after reading them I felt whole again. I felt understood  which is of course half of the great battle. 

I wondered for some time if I should share this information here, my instinct was to not do so because it still feels raw and sad and unnecessary. I struggled for clarity in my thinking because the topic of school opens up some wounds that I try to keep buried, ones that surprised me, one's that I think are pretty generic, others that are not so much so. I reached a decision finally based on one of the anti bullying strategies I remember from secondary school - 'SPEAK OUT against bullies!' I can picture the posters clearly even now and in particular the one drawing pinned on the door of Mr.Hughes classroom in the science lab. 

I don't want to stay silent, I want to speak out. I don't want to specify or even think about specifying who the bullies are exactly in this situation and I have no interest in debate about curriculums, government, homeschool v mainstream education etc but what I do know is that in the classroom that they call life there is plenty of room both for those that sit cross legged in their carpet spot looking on and for those that shuffle and make something out of nothing from carpet debris and abandoned paper clips! Which one are you?

15.13 and no natural light - in my back garden.

Starry night, Misty morning

Sometimes a photograph doesn't capture the excitement of the moment. This is the moment my family lay down on the floor in pitch blackness in one of our favourite quiet places, to look up at the stars! When life is full of routine a simple break in the line up is met with zealous enthusiasm, adults and children alike. This was very much the feeling yesterday after school when the boys and I headed to a local cafe to meet up with a good, good friend of mine and her girls of pretty much the same age as my boys. There was a lot of re-acquainting to be done and with the brilliant efficiency of the language of 'kids' they were re-acquainted in minutes and with one push of a 'kid button' they were ready for fun, fun, fun!

After cake and biscuits of every description, babyccinos (it was actually a cheap and small warm chocolate drink but for the sake of urban chic 'babyccinos' it is!) we said goodbye to our friends and began our walk home in the dark still reeling with excitement! The cafe, fun with our friends, the dark, the cold night, being out late, daddy walking to meet us, knowing that the next day there would be no school due to elections. Well, all of it had all of us fired up and then the littlest of our family pointed skywards and announced: 'The stars are up there tonight and they are beautiful'. At this point that soppy hubby of mine enthused and ready to continue our break in routine asked aloud 'who wants to drive to the countryside, away from the city lights to see the starry night?'

So after a quick dinner, hot chocolate warmed on the stove and filled into a large flask and double chocolate cookies packed, hats, scarfs and coats bundled into the car too, we were ready to see the stars! It did not disappoint! Pitch blackness. The smell of real wood fires burning, giving off a little orange light. The sound of moving water. Eyes catching the occasional glistening of the water in spots of light. Hundreds of stars. The heat of small unsure hands gripping. Canal boats laying dormant in the darkness. Seeing white breath fall from our mouths. I must admit I was a little scared when hubby took our eldest under a bridge right by the waters edge and they disappeared before my eyes into the blackest night. I breathed and exhaled a big smoky breath of relief when the younger boy exclaimed 'I don't like it, I don't want to go ... it's too scary'! Proud that the older boy was enduring the adventure and being wary of not spoiling the fun I said nothing, until of course little ones were out of earshot when I informed my hubby 'you know sharks can get everywhere! I didn't want to get too close to the water!!!!'. 

Then back to the car for cookies and coco and a little laughter. Oh how we laughed at that innocent man jogging who pretended not to see all four of us sat in the car, parked off road looking dubious. How we laughed as we sipped from our cups whilst watching a man in a nearby house switch on a light in a room and begin looking at himself in a mirror. Hubby teased the boys that the man was picking his spots and then using the toilet and they laughed and laughed. I can't remember what music played in the car on our journey home. I remember that the little one fell asleep and that the eldest talked the whole way home and hubby and I gave each others hand a 'Thelma & Louise squeeze' in triumph of our great big, little adventure.

It was a misty morning in our neighbourhood today

A few months ago I didn't think I would relish them having an  extra day off school! Time is precious ... 

He's pretty pleased! We smeared our back door in shaving foam for him to draw and write in.

Then Zach joined in for his spelling practice 

I love it when it's time to get vests out! This is what we call the 'where the wild things are' vest!

There's nothing like watching Tom & Jerry with kids whilst eating chocolate coins and talking about Christmas all whilst mama sips on her non alcoholic hot toddy! Perfection!

Short days, cold nights

Autumn is here and the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder. This is a time that hubby used to dread, a time when he would seemingly wimper as if in pain as he pined for the warmth and blue skies of the place he grew up. Somewhere along the way he learned to embrace this season and with it he opened my eyes once more to the cosy loveliness that winter can be! I love the way he regularly smiles, raises those eyebrows of his and shakes his empty mug by the side of his head and declares 'Another coffee?', the way he brings out his 'raver coat' when he really means business as far as staying warm. I love the way he wears that hat we bought at the Frankfurt market last winter, indoors as often as he does outdoors lifting the ear flaps up when he feels he's getting too warm and how this makes me laugh! I love the way that winter re-ignites our love of film and film night becomes a regular pleasure as we challenge each other to offer up our top ten or twenty films of all time in order and debate the worthiness of each selection. Tonight we watched one of our favourites whilst that hubby of mine massaged my shoulders and played with my hair as we sipped hot coffee all the way through. We did this with peaceful and thankful hearts, content in the knowledge that Len (our mechanic) successfully welded the hand break back on that came off in hubby's hand at the end of our road on monday morning! Strange things happen in film and strange things happen in this our life together.

NB Minor correction - it was indeed the gear stick that came off in hubby's hand and NOT the hand break!