A perfect day for Kite Flying

A windy autumn day. A trip to the Ruhrpott to meet my wonderful friends and let our children get to know each other. A kite. A field between two rivers. A kite that may lift you up in the strong wind and whish above your head. A kite that crashes into a tree and has to be freed by a brave 10 year old supergirl. More tree climbing. Homebaked cake to finish off an a day full of adventure. 

Couldn't help but wonder if today will be one of those days that will be referred to as "I remember when I was a little girl, when we flew the kite in Schwerte..."

Bottom picture by Cubling.

Days like this

Sometimes I wonder if I was ever made for this life as a parent. After a day like today, when in spite of doing fun stuff (and giving up trying to work with both around at 10 am knowing this was not one of those days where any work would happen) all day long, it appears that I often can't manage to create an environment where both of them are happy at the same time. This was a day that should have been easy: the sun was out, we were in the park totally going at their pace and doing what they wanted to do. Just that the two wills won't coincide.

So I take turns between the two of them trying to calm, soothe, find out what's wrong, feed, water, try to play, get interrupted by other one screaming, distract, and repeat. Is it me? How come that apparently at nursery, Snowflake is ever calm and happy but at home, she throws one tantrum after another, and half of the time I'm in the dark as to what it's actually about? How come that after 2 years of playing together like the best of friends, they are now like two vicious cats with sibling rivalry unleashed?

 (look, they really love each other!)

If Cubling comes too close to me, say for a cuddle, or even dares sit on my lap, up comes her sister and pushes her off. And she can push now. I mean, she manages to push Cubling off good and proper and sometimes hurts her in the process. There's biting and scratching, slapping and kicking and the ever just under the surface waiting to explode tantrum with full backwards fling onto the floor.

Meanwhile with all the attention going to younger sibling, older sibling gets frustrated and as much as I empathise and try to keep the peace, she starts her whinging and whining show. Interspersed with random, made up singing, recitation of phonemes and generally loud noises. Sometimes it gets to a noise and madness level that I wonder if my child is truly bonkers, as this noise level of random sounds without meaning can't be normal. I don't see other children act like this. Maybe they do, I just don't see it.

Often, it gets to a stage where she is totally in her world, and nothing I say reaches her. Or the opposite is true, a neverending litany of moaning and whinging, noise and sabotage of anything I'm trying to do, while refusing to engage in any meaningful play with me (which I'm told helps to reconnect and get out of such mayhem. It doesn't for us. She never wants to play when she's in this state).

At the end of a day like today, I get the nagging feeling that I really would rather have spent the day in the office, and that, if asked, the girls would most likely rather have spent it at the childminder's. It's most definitely not a nice feeling. More than anything I keep asking myself what on earth I'm doing wrong.

I took pretty pictures though. They may have kept my sanity today. And oh dear, another 3 days of this to get through all by myself. Help.

Fallen leaves

Today, as the last leaves fell off my tree, I'm still treasuring the colour and beauty it brought me all year. It showed Cubling when spring came, and how autumn transforms the leaves in one last celebration before the long winter. Late last autumn, I planted this tree with Cubling, which was my birthday present from my sister and parents in law, and a year later I say goodbye to the last leaf, gather some for crafting and pressing to make its memory last into the winter, while we await for it to blossom again.

(Photos were taken last week, when it still had a few leaves left)

all set: growing in winter

The cold season has most definitely arrived. Two nights of frost and markedly colder days have surprised me. Autumn is my favourite season, in a melancholic kind of way. What I love about autumn are the colours, the transformation and preparation for winter. There's so much to explore outdoors, and indoors the preparation for winter, getting the warm clothes out, making jam, the business of the various festivals ahead of us (doubled for our bicultural family). I look forward to doing things indoors, making the home cosy.

And yet, every year, I get surprised by the sudden arrival of the cold season. I feel so very cold, reluctant to go out, and wonder how I'm going to make it through the winter. Oh and that clock changing thing - it makes me really irritable. Then, things fall back into some sort of swing and the cold stops feeling so cold.

This year, I have a lot of plans for my garden, yet can't do much physical work. So what better than to plant some easy growing winter crops, namely garlic and onions? Garlic is so healthy for you, and easy to grow - just separate the cloves from any bulb that you buy and plant them in good soil where you weren't growing garlic recently. Thanks to Homemademummy, I now also have a batch of winter growing onion sets. One raised bed is already cleared and the other one will be this week after the frost destroyed the still growing pumpkins, and if I have spare onions, they'll go to my neighbour who also grows her own.

This is the beauty of growing your own, the generosity and spirit of sharing. A pumpkin to carve from my SIL's garden, tatties, carrots and tomatoes from my FIL's garden, onion sets from a blogger, a total stranger. Sharing seeds, sets, plants and crops really is something very special, it brings people together and it feels so good to give and receive, it's always a very special gift because effort and love has gone into it, and yet it also comes free, it's a gift from nature, which is therefore only to be passed on as a gift. A bit like knitting, where the value is the love and manual labour, which you simply cannot put a value against - you can't ever make profit out of knitting, and therefore knitted items can really only be gifted.

This is the season of preparing the garden for winter, clearing all the old growth and it's a gift in itself that there will be some winter crops, overwintering just like us.

::This post is part of Urban Food Growing Tuesday. If you grow your own in urban spaces, no matter how small, and you blog about it, please share your post in the linky list below, which is open for one week::

Things to sow in September - Urban Food Growing Tuesday

Unsurprisingly, my plans for growing food in my garden have not received the attention they deserve. I guess I'm growing someone much more important at the moment ;)

But but but, let that not be an excuse to share some of the fruits of my research which I ventured into while 9 months pregnant.

Not having done awfully well on the harvest side of food growing (garden is still filled with leaves, but with very few edible fruits), I was rather keen on finding out what can be grown from now to winter. It took a little while to pull all the suggestions together and for the benefit of anyone asking the same question, here's what you can sow and plant in September and October. Bear in mind the information may not be for exactly your climate - it should work in most parts of the UK unless we get another frosty winter (in which case some of these plants may not make it).

If you have any experience planting vegetables over the winter and have some top tips to share, please do! I'm really not an expert and don't know if all or just some of these work, or if there's anything that can help things along a bit.

For my part, I've sown rocket, basil and coriander in the conservatory (which is cold at night and on cloudy days but very warm as soon as the sun shines) and at least they've come up. I've planted spinach outdoors which doesn't grow much at present, and planning to do a few set garlic coz they're easy. I don't have a greenhouse or cloches, but may try some winter lettuce under empty water bottles which can be used as cloches (not pretty but functional).

Other than that I'm looking forward to catching up with my local vegetable growing friends tonight, with the hope of setting up a busy bee rota, where we help in each other's gardens and make things happen with a few more helping hands. A great idea which will make a massive difference to all our gardens big or small. I feel a bit guilty about that one, what with not being able to do much gardening in the next few weeks due to c-section recovery, and I don't like to take help without being able to return it. But maybe I need to leave my pride at home because the only way to my raspberry patch for next year will be with some help. And I will return the favour eventually of course!

So here's the list for your autumn sowing and planting:

September:
- lettuce (ideally cover with cloches)
- spring cabbage
- spinach
- endive
- overwintering onions
- turnips

In October you can sow:
- rocket
- mibuna and mizuna (I don't know what they are either)
- early peas (under cloches)
- winter lettuce

and plant out:
- onion sets
- garlic sets
- broad beans (under cloches)
- rhubarb

It's also the season to plant out any fruit and soft fruit trees, but you can apparently do that in any month that has an "r" in its name. As ever, if you've been busy growing food, please add your bloggy goodness in the linky below.

And rather randomly (if you're still reading), here's a photo of my lovely acer (which was a birthday present last year) in all its autumn glory after the Great Rain the other day:

Wordless Wednesday: Late Autumn, Tollcross Park

Tonight was spent with photos - editing, selecting and creating Christmas presents. Very enjoyable, I'm still amazed at digital photography, especially now that I can combine my passion for SLRs with the doors that digital photography opens. No longer do I need a dark room (my childhood dream was to have one), all it takes is a laptop and some software, magic. So it's only right that I should share some photos tonight. All were taken at Tollcross Park last Sunday, a glorious last day of autumn. And today, at last, I feel ready for winter.

Wordless Wednesday: This season

Mummy go aeroplane Belfast. Back tonight. In the meantime, some Scottish autumnal beauty before it's all gone:

weekend in pictures: here comes autumn

We've been oh so busy. Thursday to Friday noon in Clackmannan, braving the outside world twice, painting, playing with water, climbing, baking. Then straight to North Ayrshire for a night camping on a colleague's farm, to give a proper goodbye to 3 amazing colleagues who are the last in a way too long list of recent redundancies. Cubling was manically and frantically excited, the kind of excitement that is impossible to control, about seeing animals, sleeping in a tent (a first), a pumpkin head, combine harvesters, tractors, mud, kittens, massive dogs, cosy fires, a trampoline tent, cutting logs with an axe, lighting a real pyre. Next visit to another Ayrshire town to see granny and grampa, a shopping spree, finally crash landing in bed. It was all good. Particularly last night's sleep to recover from it all and Cubling's boundless energy.

I have a pile of blogposts to come, more than making up for my recent silence, but to start off with, here's our weekend in pictures:

Cubling dressing up as Mr Kickeriki
Guess who was the first up in the morning?

Making leaf prints with collected leaves. Cubling got really into this, while her cousin is more into letters and numbers, so he counted up to 100 and demanded the numbers to be painted one by one. He's only 2 3/4...
Making (and eating) fairy cakes
Too many cooks spoil the broth? Rubbish. And who has climbed onto the table again, licked the butter tub, stole some dough and tested what would happen to an egg if you dropped it from the table, while her cousin patiently mixes the ingredients to a soft dough?

The attack of the one-eyed killer kitten.