sustainablemum

Around Here

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:58:00 +0000

It has got proper cold here, autumn is sliding towards winter. We are due snow this week often that is the forecast but not the reality. We are prepared, the winter tyres are on the cars, if we get loads we will just stay at home.

We have had our annual birthday month, my husband and I at the beginning of last month and my son last week. When Alice was little she found it so hard to wait six more months for hers to come round. My son is now 20, that time has past so quickly, but slowly too which is a weird dichotomy. I will not be writing about him much now not that I have in the past few years as I haven't blogged that much. He is at home with us, working full time earning some funds to go travelling next year. It is a new stage of family life for all of us.

After a very full and (too) busy October I have managed to keep the diary much quieter for this month. A better balance of fairly busy weekends and whole weekends with no commitments at all. The absolute perfect indulgence which I am embracing to the full. I have turned down offers, meet ups and meetings, and am embracing the season.

My quieter weekends means that I have been doing many things at home that I never seem to be able to find the time for. At the beginning of the year I wrote a list of the things that I would like to sew during the course of the year, I have added to it a few times over the months but it was not a very long list. I love sewing but I am slow and don't have room in my house for a dedicated sewing space. Getting everything out and putting it away each time I sew means it doesn't happen very often. I have, however, completed two of the those projects this month alone. I will share photos of them when the light is good enough to take some photos, it is a little grey and gloomy here at the moment.

I have also had a bit of tidy up of my yarn stash. It is entirely made up of balls that are leftover from knitting projects most of which are parts of balls, there is a small bag of unused balls where I have bought that extra ball as a just in case and not actually needed it. I am not one for buying yarn that I like and might use one day, although I am often tempted. It is all stored in a big fabric basket that I made, you can see it in this post here. It is hardly surprising that after four years of adding to the yarn in this basket and not taking much out it had become an overflowing mess. It is still in Alice's bedroom although in a different piece of furniture now. I was clearing out the knitting bags I have in the living room and found several balls that needed putting away in that overflowing basket. I have been meaning to tidy it up and maybe get rid of some of the yarn in there and spent a least an hour doing just that. Part way through I realised it was probably about time to find a project or projects to use up some of it so I had a look on Ravelry. For those of you not familiar with this site it is a knitting (and crocheting) ~~rabbit hole~~ website with thousands of amazing patterns, many of them free. I didn't stay on there long, but long enough to find at least one pattern that will use up a significant proportion of my stash. I have moved all the yarn for that project into a basket which is now in the living room waiting for me to get started on it. I put some in a bag for the charity shop and the rest has gone back in the fabric basket. It is far better organised now.

Whilst my stash project waits to be cast on, I am knitting presents for that event next month, it feels a bit early to be writing that word here, although I am also on with making cards for it too. I have a (second) sock, a hat, a wash cloth and mitts on the needles right now. Lots of small projects, one of which always leaves the house with me wherever I am going, even if I only have time for a few rows it means they are all growing. I have two more pairs of socks and another wash cloth to make, I think that is entirely manageable. I have already finished a small jacket for a special bunny, the soft toy sort of bunny, that belongs to my nephew.

With life slowing down a little I have had time to revive my rather neglected sourdough starter and have been making bread more regularly again. The loaves were a little weird to start with I think the starter was a bit lifeless, the loaves were so heavy and indigestible. A little TLC has bought it back to life and the loaves are once again back to their normal, tasty selves. We are not big bread eaters in our house, we only eat one of two loaves a week but much prefer home made bread.

I made a batch of sauerkraut last month, I bought one of these at the end of the summer and really wanted to try it out. I have been making sauerkraut on and off for years. I have a Sandor Ellis Katz book which I have used endlessly, I have yet to make a duff recipe from this treasure trove. Apart from that is sauerkraut, it more often than not goes mouldy before it has fermented properly. It didn't matter what I did, or how much I sterilised or didn't, the mould would arrive. I even cleaned out my pantry as I wondered if it was something in the air in there, still didn't work. I don't thing my weights were doing the job at keeping air from coming into contact with the vegetables. The Kefirko fermenter seems to be doing just the job, after a whole month there is no sign of any mould. I am looking forward to cracking it open this week to see if it tastes as good as it looks. If it continues to work after a few more batches I might just have to purchase another one.

Despite a busy October I managed to read two books, Landlines by Raynor Winn her third book about an astonishing walk that she and her husband completed from the far North of Scotland to their home in Cornwall. It wasn't their plan when they set out, they started on the Cape Wrath trail which is 200 miles of wilderness in one of the remotest parts of Scotland when they finished that they continued on the one trail after another until they made it home. Those of you who are familiar with Raynor Winn will know that her husband was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease which improves when they walk. She is a wonderful writer. The second was Underland* by Robert McFarlane another writer I love. This books is about Robert's journey into a variety of subterranean landscapes, he has a wonderful way of weaving words. This months reading is Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, a highly accessible description of an intriguing and most definitely possible way of redefining economics to meet the needs of humans (all humans not just the richest) whilst also not extracting to the point of depletion. If you haven't already guessed I read non-fiction, pretty much exclusively. I have read one fiction book this year so far.

I reached a rather amazing milestone earlier this month, a 1000 day streak on Duolingo. That's over two and half years. In reality it has been more like 1030 or 40 days as there have been many days when I have had to use a streak freeze to keep it going. Most of those days when I have been out and about with zero mobile phone reception or access to wifi. It has mostly been French with a little Ukrainian and more lately Romanian. It is one of the first things I do when I wake up, a good habit to get my brain going of a morning.

So that is me at the moment slowing down and enjoying and embracing the cold and dark as we move through Autumn into Winter.

* When I typed Underland into this post, it autocorrected to Sunderland. The Sunderland I know is a city in the NE of England and, absolutely no offence to the place, a totally different place to that of those described in Underland. It probably has its own subterranean cultures which are every bit as wonderful in their own way. It made me smile, got to love an autocorrect.

Giving Thanks

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 22:24:00 +0000

We reached the halfway point between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice a week or so a go, I am a little late with the post but better late than never. This halfway point is a time some call Samhain (pronounced sow-ein), a halfway point of the dark days, a time of resting and recharging something that I am hanging on to with every effort at at the moment. My days have been full to the brim one after the other, I have been saying no a lot more this week in an effort to redress that.

I know that Samhain, 31 October, is also a time that some celebrate Halloween, I am not a fan. As a child it wasn't as big an event as it is now, but people dressed up and had parties, I found it all rather terrifying, now, as an adult I don't feel a connection to it all. I know that so many do and have a great time dressing up and maybe also making mischief, it is really not for me.

We can really see the visible signs that the earth is slowing down, the leaves are providing us with their stunning visual palate turning the most beautiful colours and falling from the trees. I love to watch the leaves as they make their descent, have you noticed that each tree's leaves have a different way of making their to the ground? Have a look when you are next out and about amongst the trees. They and other plants are nearing the start of their period of dormancy.

As we, in the Northern Hemisphere, continue to move further away from the sun our temperatures will continue to fall, bringing with it the frosts, that some might have already had, and later snow, some parts have already had some of this too. These colder temperatures bring with it the death and decay in the plant world, an important part of the cycle of their life.

Whilst the earth is resting and recharging we can reflect on all that it has provided for us over the past year.

We give thanks, for the rain, replenishing the earth and sustaining life. I know for some parts of the world rain is in short supply and in other parts they are flooding with so much rain. It is more important than ever that we learn to adapt our behaviour and how we manage our resources, to be more resilient to the changes in the weather, so that we are ready for droughts or flooding.

We give thanks for the abundant harvest from the earth, the food and medicine it provided to sustain our lives. When we stop and think for a moment that all the food we eat has all been provided by our beautiful planet, it is so amazing.

We give thanks for the air that we breathe sustaining our lives, allowing us to speak and sing. This is another resource, like water, which we cannot live without and which we must learn to adapt our behaviour. I am so lucky to live somewhere with really good air quality the air tastes so different to me in built up urban areas, places that people are living and moving around in all the time.

While the earth rests we too should use this time to rest, giving us a chance to renew and replenish our energies. We can use this time to think of new plans and new beginnings, for sowing the seeds of our future in our minds and storing it until the time of the light and warmth returning. A seed of a something you want to do, to be, to learn or adventures you want have. We are not going to use this time to set them in motion but to incubate them and let them start to take some shape.

We can also use this time to reflect or start to clear our minds of our fears, troubles or insecurities, those thoughts that we go over in our minds. It is a good time to start the process of letting go of them, perhaps by writing them down or drawing them, whatever way works best for you. If you have access to a fire, perhaps in your house keeping you all warm, you could burn them as a way of helping you to release.

For Inner Tranquility

Quiet I bear within me

I bear within myself

Forces to make me strong

Now will I be imbued

With their glowing warmth

Now will I fill myself

With my own will's resolve

And I will feel the quiet

Pouring through all my being

When, by my steadfast striving

I become strong

To find within myself

The source of strength

The strength of inner quiet

Rudolph Steiner

Our strength, our inner strength is what will carry us through this period of dark, dormancy and rest. It will help us to release our fears, we have started that journey bringing them into focus and recording them, maybe you have burnt them in the fire, now we need to make peace with them to help us move on.

Our inner strength will guide us to a seed of a new beginning, one that we will take within us and allow it to sit there quietly, as a seed does in the earth awaiting germination and development. When we are nearing the end of this important time of rest and recharging, allow this seed to come into focus in your mind ready for you to take forward into the Spring, the light and the earth warming once again.

Waste Not, Want Not

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 13:38:00 +0000

When I left home to go to Uni I remember my mum giving me a piece of advice, one of many I am sure but this one stuck with me. Knowing that I would likely not have a lot of money to spare, as we hadn't growing up, she advised me to ensure that I did not scrimp on spending money on food, to go without other things.

There was not a lot of money in our household growing up, but Mum always made sure that we had good home cooked food to fill our bellies. We had good quality cuts of meat so did not eat it every day of the week. Apart from spaghetti which I hated, and still do, I am not a massive fan of pasta generally and baked beans which I haven't eaten since childhood I remember loving every meal my mum cooked.

What I don't really remember from my childhood is being aware of how much food costs or there ever being any food thrown away. Food prices have gone up a lot in the past few years, I don't know about you but it feels like the bills for a food shop has nearly doubled. I was horrified by a statistic that I heard on a podcast recently about food waste suggesting that food equivalent to eight meals a week is thrown away uneaten. This is a statistic that I can visualise and make sense of unlike others which always seem to state the weight of waste in tonnes, I don't personally buy my food by the ton. That waste not only measures food that is thrown away before it has been prepared or is languishing at the back of a cupboard or the fridge too long but also meals that are prepared and are not all eaten and are thrown in the bin. I have heard and read so much about food waste, about buying food that never gets eaten before it goes off but I had not even considered the food waste that is a result of food being prepared and then not eaten. Perhaps I am lucky to have children who are far from being picky eaters but this is so far from the reality in our house, partly because if food is not eaten it gets boxed up and put in the fridge, it wouldn't occur to me to throw it away. One of my favourite midday meals is to dive into the fridge and produce a meal that is made up of all the random leftovers, my mum used to call this a fridge bottom meal.

I hope that the eight meals a week statistic becomes more widely known as I feel like to could be a good reminder to us all to be more mindful of what we do with the food that we have spend the time earning the money to pay for. Another interesting comment I heard on the same podcast was about the cost of food and how we are careful with our purchases and then seem to forget that when we have the item at home. I had not considered that before but I am sure that is so true. I have often found myself mulling over which brand of an item to buy, is the more expensive one worth the money, will it taste better. We are careful with our pennies in the shop considering each purchase carefully but then we when get the items home do we continue with that same careful consideration. I try very hard to but I know there are occasions when I fall off that cart, especially when we are going away I always seem to have a fridge full of leftovers and fresh items that are not quite finished but are not quite enough to make something else with. I have come up with some of my best meals at these times, meals that it would never be possible to recreate as that unique set of ingredients will be hard to replicate again.

One of the best ways of reducing waste is meal planning as you only buy what you need, and it makes shopping really quick, well it does for me. I know that meal planning is not for everyone, I started doing it when my youngest was born. As I go shopping with a specific list I am not tempted by offers which is another way we can end up with wasted food, buy one sometimes two and get one free, if they are items that can be frozen I might be tempted but I rarely buy them unless they are on my shopping list already.

We bought a new to us fridge recently, we happened to see it in a charity shop we sometimes visit. We were not looking for a new one but our old one was over twenty years old and the plastic inside was so brittle that so many bits had broken beyond usable repair. We had also outgrown it years earlier but it seemed wasteful to get rid of it when it still worked, it was far too shabby to donate even then. We have retired it into the garage as storage for grocery items that we buy in bulk from a wholesaler a few times a year. Our new fridge is twice the size of our old one, I have lost freezer space but I have a big chest freezer in the garage which is now much fuller. I was finding that food was going off in my old fridge, particularly vegetables and salad bits as it got squashed for lack of space in the boxes that fridges often have for those items. I also ended up burying items at the back which I often couldn't get to without playing Tetris each time I wanted something. Keeping things visible in the fridge is so much easier now and seems such a obvious way to stop things going off, so simple but yet it is all too easy for things to get buried and forgotten about isn't it? I also recently discovered that you can keep potatoes in the fridge, who knew? I didn't. I wouldn't have had room in the past but I might just be doing this in the warmer months we have an unheated porch which is the perfect place to store vegetables in the cooler months.

What about you, do you have any tips for preventing food waste you can share?

Counting my Blessings

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 19:47:00 +0000

I left a comment on a blog recently, I wrote it without thinking about how it might be read by others. It wasn't anything unkind or critical, just that I have not been to see a GP or any other kind of doctor for over 18 years, nor have my son or husband, my daughter was hospitalised with pneumonia in late 2015 but has not been to a doctor again since.

We forget that our ordinary lives might be extraordinary to others, particularly when our experiences do not mirror the norm. It did not seem unusual to me as I wrote that comment, but when I actually gave it some thought I realised it is.

Our lack of doctor visits does not mean we haven't been ill just not ill enough to warrant a visit. I will admit I have a distrust of doctors so am unlikely to be reaching for my phone to book an appointment and more likely to be doing some research.

In my twenties I was diagnosed, after a barrage of tests which went on for a number of years, with Crohn's disease. If you have not heard of this it is a chronic condition effecting the digestinal tract my symptoms were in the large intestine. It floored me for a couple of years restricting my ability to do much physical activity. Being so young I was frustrated by an illness that was preventing me from doing the activities I loved which required a level of energy that I often struggled to achieve. I couldn't bear the thought of that being my life, for, well, the rest of my life.

This was in the days before the internet and google doctor. I had to accept my fate and just get on with it and I largely did until I had a seemly new set of symptoms which put me back in the GP waiting room. This time it wasn't Crohn's it was the medication I was taking to manage it, they were slowly destroying my liver. To say I was devastated was an understatement. More tablets to support my liver? That is the road I could have gone down but I didn't. I stopped with that GPs support. I perhaps should say that at this stage of my life I was moving around a lot working contracts that lasted about 9-12 months, I moved to new GP practices too. In hindsight this was beneficial as I got lots of different opinions. The GP that supported me to stop had not been the one to put me on the medication, she was stopping, in the first place.

She also sowed a seed, there were alternatives. I didn't venture down that road for a few more years. I stumbled on in the way you do when you are young, largely ignoring and accepting the symptoms I had. They were not as bad as for some, I functioned in a job that required high energy levels and had a discomfort every time I ate that I had gotten used to. I questioned this discomfort with a specialist, could my symptoms be related to what I ate. The answer was not what I expected, Crohn's is nothing to do with what you eat, this was 1996 that may not be what you would be told now.

Nowadays I am symptom free and have been for nearly 20 years. I restricted my diet for a number of years to manage this until I realised that was a different kind of managing things. I did a mountain of research and changed my diet again, restricting my intake of a few foods (wheat and refined sugar were two of them) to see if I could reset things. Thankfully it worked, with the exception of coffee which I absolutely cannot touch and tea which doesn't make me feel great, I can eat anything now.

I am grateful each and every day that my health is good, that I don't need to visit the doctor from one year to the next. An unexpected consequence, is that by taking responsibility rather than handing that over to someone else, I feel far more in tune with my body. I am not for one minute suggesting that everyone can and should do this, it has been a slow considered process over a number of years and I am so grateful it has worked for me and had a really positive outcome.

The last time I set foot in my doctors surgery I was there to see the nurse for a routine blood test as part of my continuing management of Crohn's. I caught flu as a result of that visit. I went in healthy. I have never been back. I have reach age milestones and I get calls inviting me for appointments which I turn down, they are not compulsory and I was not given a reason for attending other than the surgery gets paid for each patient they test.

And no other illness since, I have yet to have Covid. That could be down to a number of things. We eat healthily and in season, a lot of our food is organic. I don't have any refined sugar in my diet. Or house is relatively chemical free we don't use any products with artificial scents, make most of our cleaning products. We do lots of activities that are keep us active. I take rest when I need it. I sleep well, most of the time, the odd blip here and there is not the norm. I reach for herbs when I feel something is 'not right' researching when I don't have the answer to hand.

I have worked really hard on my mental health processing many of the things that have effected me over the years, slowly making sense of them and moving to a place of acceptance from one of resistance and denial. The connection between physical and mental health and the effect the latter can have on the former is something I am reading and hearing about more often but it is far from mainstream yet.

Is it all of these things, some of these or none of these? Who knows? What I do know is that I have worked really hard to be blessed with the good health and I plan to keep it that way for as long as I can.

Sowing seeds of rest

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 21:25:00 +0000

It is the time of Autumn Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere, that special day of the year when the daylight and darkness is the same all over the world because the sun is directly over the equator. It heralds the beginning of its journey south and where I live in the Northern hemisphere, we will be getting less and less sun over the coming weeks, our days will get shorter and our nights longer. It is the start of Autumn, the door way to Winter, a time for us to prepare for the change in the earth's energy.

The Colour of Autumn

The world is full of colour

Tis Autumn once again

And leaves of gold and crimson

Are lying in the lane

There are brown and yellow acorns

Berries and scarlet haws

Amber gorse and heather

Purple across the moors

Green apples in the orchard

Flushed by glowing sun

Mellow pears and brambles

Where coloured pheasants run.

This is a time to be thankful to the abundant earth and all the resources we harvest. We take our Earth and the gifts it gives us so freely rather for granted, it can be hard to maintain a strong connection when we are so far removed from the means of production. We need to do all we can to change the thoughts of those that think they can continue to take, take, take without heed to the consequences.

This is a time to be thankful for the rain which will fall in greater abundance in the coming weeks and months, however annoying and tiresome we find it, it is doing an important job replenishing the soil.

This is also a time to give thanks to all those wonderful people we have in our lives and who we spend time with, be it face to face or online, for their support and connection. We are so lucky to live in countries where we have freedom to communicate with whomever we wish to and have the choice over how we do this.

As the summer fades away and autumn takes its place, so too does the light. This is the time of diminishing light with days that can be gloomy, the clouds heavy with rain. For many animals this is the start of a period of rest, either by hibernating or sleeping more and eating less. It is also a period of rest for the earth, the leaves fall from the trees and plants as they preserve their energy within and enter their period of dormancy. Would that we could sleep or remain dormant through this time, but our lives don't fit that pattern.

I know I have been guilty of resisting these dark days and of wanting the light and warmth to return as quickly as possible. By embracing the darkness we too can preserve our energy, we too can slow down allowing ourselves to recharge, like the earth.

If it is your thing a Root Meditation is a lovely way to feel connected to the Earth. Sit somewhere comfortable and close your eyes. Imagine there is a tree behind you, you are leaning on it, feel this tree at your back, firm and strong. Feel its energy, energy that is flowing through down into its roots. Now begin to feel your roots reaching down into the Earth spreading out like the roots of the tree. Feel those roots holding you firm. Feel the earth's energy flowing through you. Inhale the nourishment, absorb the calm. Breath in and breathe out. Feel your breath rising without any effort at all. The breath of life, like day and night, like the tides, like the seasons, in and out, in and out. All is in balance.

So lets look forward to the time of darkness and embrace it into our lives. Lets be kind to ourselves, give ourselves permission to rest and do less. Lets reclaim the balance within each of us which can get lost in the busyness of life in the warmer months. As the circle of the year turns we will be able to head into Spring in six months time, recharged and bursting with energy.

Whilst we are in this time of resting and recharging we can reflect on our achievements throughout those recent warmer months, look back and think about all those amazing things we have done however big or small. This is not a time to be starting big new projects but rather to think and plant seeds in our heads of where we would like to be, to go, to do in the future.

We can also use this time to let go of things, de-clutter your house and give away those things that are no longer of use to you. De-clutter your minds and let go of ideas or values which no longer serve you, that are troubling you or causing you pain, listen to and trust your inner voice for guidance and wisdom. Find a way that works for you to release them, maybe writing them down and burning them.

I hope you will move into Autumn with more strength, embracing rather than resisting the dark. I hope you will be kind and gentle to yourselves. I hope you can find the time each day or week to rest and be still to enable your body to recharge and reclaim any balance lost.

A Peek into my Day

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 22:27:00 +0000

Outside my window my view is somewhat shortened to a few fields, the clouds are low today

Around my house it is mostly tidy and clean, the carpets, however, are in a desperate need of a hoover, there is a pile of bits at the top of the stairs waiting to be put in the loft, I need them again on Wednesday so I suspect they won't make it up there, half a tent is waiting on a new tent pole as we broke one during its last use, a rucksack hangs on the newel post drying out.

Reading in the news of a terrible tragedy I am incredibly thankful that my Dad is still with us. He is the same age and was assaulted by a 17 year old after he crashed into my Dad on his electric scooter in a pedestrianised area in his town. My Dad has poor eyesight, a condition that has no name, but he struggles with changes of light and can no longer see things which are moving quickly, I am absolutely sure he would not have seen the lad. Despite the assault breaking bones in my Dad's face, for which he was operated on this week, amazingly he did not fall over. The outcome could have been so very different, for which I feel so blessed. My thoughts are with the family whom have lost a loved one.

I have started on Christmas knitting this week, am I allowed to mention the C word this early in the year? I guess it is a bit late now. I am creating a pair of socks, a present for a friend. I do so love knitting socks.

After what has felt like weeks of rain I am hoping the weather forecast of three days of sunshine this week comes good. There is nothing like a bit of sun as a pick me up.

With the advent of a new term comes changes to our routine we haven't quite refined it yet and I am thinking about some of the spaces that have been created an whether to fill them with regular things or leave them to see what happens. It is always fine balance.

A chance conversation with a friend means that we no longer need to do quite so much driving one day a week I am loving the space this has created. A small thing that has created lightness.

In my kitchen my sourdough starter is doing its thing, my sprouter is full of seeds and beans just reaching that stage of starting to sprout, tomorrows soup, a rather wonderfully named Belly Hug Soup, made with lots of spices, lentils and veg is sat in a pan, there is a loaf of sourdough defrosting on the side to be eaten with said soup.

Although I started work again when the schools went back on the 4th I am going to my first meeting of the term tomorrow night. Most of my work is completed alone in a time of my choosing, it often gets done out and about whilst Alice is at her groups.

I have a presentation to do this week and I am pondering what to include, I don't want to create death by powerpoint.

I am remembering fond memories of my uncle who died last week. He was an incredibly talented musician and inspired Alice to take up piano lessons. I loved listening to him play.

I finished a book last night and am now on to the next one I am reading The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn I am already well into Chapter 3. I am doing something I never thought I would and am reading some books on my phone. They have a ridiculous number of pages but I am reading more than I have for a long time, if I am waiting to do a pick up and things are running a little late, I always have a book in my pocket.

Before Covid I played in an orchestra, our rehearsals stopped when the pandemic reached our shores. As is the way in family life other things filled its place once things started up again. That night is once again free and I am wondering if I have space to start going again.

I love Podcasts, they are the soundtrack of my life these days. I am listening to Cautionary Tales with Tim Hartford an eclectic mix of fascinating stories of human error, catastrophes and hilarious fiascos. I love it when an episode pops up in my feed, there were two this week, to my delight.

After reading an article on substack I am enjoying making use of the Calm app it was suggested as an alternative to doom scrolling on waking, this not something I have ever partaken of but I was intrigued enough to check the app out. I had tried the Health and Her app but I didn't get on it with, I am enjoying the daily check-in's and reflections on Calm.

I am wearing navy leggings, a long sleeved merino top and stripy me knit socks, I have been for a longish walk this afternoon and have yet to get changed.

I was sorting through the notes on my phone which had become a little numerous, I came across a page of quotes my favourite quote amongst them 'you can't pour from an empty cup'. I am much better at keeping my cup full these days

A Peek into my Day

Unpausing

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 21:30:00 +0000

Hello.

Life has moved on. By, ahem, 18 months.

A long pause.

filled with things known, parenting, knitting sewing, work, volunteering, fundraising, a trip to South Korea (Alice).

and unknown, more work hours, more fundraising, a trip to Norway (Cameron), learning Romanian.

College is finished, courses successfully completed. Home educating continues into a sixteenth year. I am savouring these years knowing that they are slowing moving to their end.

As we move into a new season our lives shift into one too. Cameron is out at work, full time, earning funds for future travel plans. Alice is considering her future and where she might want that to go, pondering exams her cohort will take next year, will she too? Pockets of time are ever expanding for me to do as I choose, it continues to be a novel experience, one which I am learning to lean into. I will always be a parent but I can feel things shifting, I am not always needed.

This new season is also a time for resetting things, a particular kind of new year. After a summer of a free form version of routine it is time to find a new one, one that fits where we are now, this might be different to one that has gone before. And that is ok.

Like the tides we are pulled together regularly by the need to eat and to enjoy each others company. A sacred time every evening. A tradition started my mum who insisted me and my siblings were home for tea every day whatever we were doing, in those days before mobile phones the time imprinted on to us via a blackboard in our kitchen. We linger a little longer at this time of day now, making sure we eat at a time when no one needs to rush off. These times are important aren't they, it won't be long before we are just two at home, the children out in the world doing their own thing. I need time to move slowly right now, to prolong these moments and treasure them whilst I still have them.

Pauses are a permanent feature for me now, I am leaning into them and finally able to enjoy them completely guilt free. Book reading in the middle of the day, yep. Napping when I am tired, yep. Ignoring the housework when I need to rest, yep. Life is still crazy busy and filled to the brim but sometimes there is room in there for a wee pause, one that is not filled with the guilt that us mums are warrant to pile on ourselves.

What do you fill your pauses with?

New beginnings

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 21:45:00 +0000

It is the time of the Spring Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere (if you are in the Southern Hemisphere you can read my Autumn Equinox post here) that special time when the daylight and darkness are the same the world over because the sun is right over the equator. As it begins its journey North we will get more sun over the coming weeks, our days will get longer and our nights shorter, its warmth will return.

In the heart of a seed

Buried so deep

A dear little plant

Lay fast asleep

Wake said the sun

And creep to the light

Wake said the voice

of the raindrops bright

The little plant heard,

And arose to see

What the wonderful

outside world might be

K Brown

Everything in nature is coming alive and awakening, as the sun gains in strength and the days are longer and warmer. Blossom and catkins will or are, depending on where you live, be appearing on the trees, spring flowers are starting to appear and the animal kingdom are preparing or having their young.

We have spent the last few months, the months of dark of cold resting and recharging. Now that the days are slowly growing longer and nature is coming alive, we can awaken our inner energy. We can start to give form to the ideas and plans we have been thinking about and give them shape and direction.

At the time of Samhein, we sowed the seeds of future plans, of thought and ideas which we have been holding on to during the time of dark. Now at this time of emergence, this time of fertility, we can start to give our plans shape, to help them grow. If you haven't done so already now is a good time to share those plans with others.

If it is your thing, a seed meditation is a lovely way to feel connected with the Earth at this time of awakening and emergence. Get yourself into a comfortable sitting position somewhere outside, if you want to you can close your eyes. Imagine you are a seed full of life, plant yourself into the warming Earth, feel the water of life falling on you gently until you begin to open up. Feel you roots growing and reaching down into the Earth, they are soaking up and drinking all the wonderful nutrients the Earth provides Feel a shoot unfold in the the air, your leaves unfolding and soaking up the suns rays. You have everything you need to grow, for your well being, you are in radiant health. Open your eyes when you are ready.

The equinox is a time of balance, the night and day, the light and darkness are equal. Some would say this is a time when the inner and outer worlds we inhabit are also in balance, equals. We can use this time to look at areas of unbalance in ourselves, be kind to yourself whilst you give thoughts to these to help you rebuild positive thought patterns for your future.

It feels particularly poignant, that the wheel of the year is at the time of balance whilst we are feeling that the world around us is anything but. It is more important than ever to find a balance in our lives, if we feel ourselves being pulled into a world of worry and anxiety, with actions that make us feel positive. It is important that we don't feel bad for doing that, we are not going to get through this without this balance. We will not be able to support and care for those that we love if we are not in a strong and as stable as possible position ourselves. Make the time to work out the things that you need in your life to keep you positive, whatever they are, keep them near.

This is the time of new beginnings, a time to start new things, to go in new directions maybe strike out on our own to make things happen. This is a time of hope.

Over the coming weeks as our plans for the future start to take shape, blossoming into reality, like the world around us waking up, our actions will be guided by the positive side of ourselves.

If you can spend time outside, do so, going slowly, noticing. Give thanks to Mother Earth for the new growth, the eventual return of the warmth, the transformations that are slowly unfolding around us, for her fertility and abundance.

Feel yourself to be part of that energy and life, bursting from the earth. In this time of uncertainty I do hope that you can find hope, ways to stay positive and a sense of balance.

Adventures in my Kitchen

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 15:09:00 +0000

This post comes to you from my kitchen. We definitely feel like we are slow stepping towards Spring here, the days are longer, the sun is shining more. It is still bitterly cold and we are still getting frost and the occasional flurries of snow. In the kitchen we are most definitely still eating the food of winter. The veg boxes are full of root veggies and will be for many more weeks to come. I am heading towards the time of being ready to move on from those but know that is still a way off yet.

My kitchen is a small space, 3.7m x 2.8m this has been extended from the original footprint of 2.8m x 2.5m by previous owners removing internal walls. I have also made use of an under stair cupboard as a pantry which originally would have been in the hall. I have read in a few places recently that having your washing machine in the kitchen is a peculiar quirk of Europeans, whilst I cannot speak for those over the channel, where I have not visited many private homes, in the UK it is commonplace. This is because it is often the only place to put it. Many of our homes were built before washing machines were even a thing so a separate utility room is a rarity, my house is nearly 100 years old and is unusual in my village as it was originally built with an internal bathroom, most of the houses we looked at before buying this one had had a bathroom retrofitted by taking some space from the largest bedroom. The alternative would be to locate it in the living room or dining room as the hall is not a big enough space, that is the downstairs of my house, so the kitchen is where it sits and always will do.

I am continuing to make full use of my slow cooker, I love that I can throw some ingredients into it in the morning and by the evening we have a tasty meal to eat. It is really helpful on those days when we are home a bit later and need to eat shortly after we walk through the door. I have found that jacket potatoes do well, they don't have the crispy outer that you get from the oven but that is a small price to pay with the amount of electricity we are saving. I wrap each potato in silver foil and place it in the slow cooker, it takes about 3-4 hours on the highest heat on mine. Being the frugal person that I am I keep the silver foil unwrapping the potatoes carefully each time to allow for that, it lasts about five or six uses. I bought a new to me recipe book last month and have found a few dishes in there that go well with jacket spuds, pinto bean chilli being our most favourite so far. We love these beans and I love it when I find a recipe to use them in.

My sourdough starter is still doing well, I thought I had killed it at one point but I threw most of it into the compost bin and fed it up again and it was as right as rain within a couple of days. I make bread at least once a week, sometimes more, if I have the oven on more often. I cut the loaves in half and freeze them, that way I always have a supply. I feel like I have mastered the recipe that I have been using for a while now and am considering others to give us some variety. I watched a series of programmes about sourdough and have used some of the techniques mentioned in them, I feel like I am slowly getting a feel for the dough, how much I need to kneed it and what it should look like when it is properly cooked. I am realising that these are skills that are so much easier to pick up if they are passed on rather than read about in books.

I had an intention to make and eat more fermented foods this year. I haven't got round to making sauerkraut yet but I have had a continual supply of fermented pancake mix to make dosas. There are hundreds of recipes out there to make these pancakes, mine uses quinoa and lentils with fenugreek powder. As it is winter I have to leave this mix for a few days to get the fermenting process going, it sits on the side doing its thing. I am eating a pancake for breakfast a couple of days a week. I have also made a quantity of fermented coconut chutney to go with them, I am still working my way through the first batch I made this year but it is running low so I need to make some more soon.

These dosas have been a welcome re-addition to my breakfast choices, I am not a cereal girl and I am not keen enough on porridge to have it every day. I had been eating boiled eggs every morning which whilst quick and easy is not very varied. I have been making oatmeal pancakes again, a really simple recipe of medium oatmeal soaked overnight in yogurt before adding egg in the morning and frying them up into wee patties. They are delicious with fruit and as I have a freezer brimming with fruit picked from the garden I have been making coulis with blackcurrants to have with mine, a good burst of Vitamin C which is always good thing in Winter.

I have also re-introduced risotto into our menu, we have it each week now after Alice requested it. I have been looking for different recipes to give us some variety, apart from the traditional, for us, of just adding peas we have also had mushroom, tomato and mozzarella, squash and chilli and leek and tomato and mascarpone, this last incarnation is very rich but totally delicious. If you have any vegetarian risotto recipes that you would care to share I would love to hear about them.

I have mentioned salve making on a previous post from my kitchen, I tried two batches last year and both sadly went mouldy. I don't think the leaves were quite dry enough when I put them in the oil. I removed a few leaves from my comfrey plant late last year and had them drying in the bowl in the kitchen. I finally got round to soaking them in oil at the beginning of the year, they will soon be ready for making up into salves and are looking like they will not go mouldy this time, third time lucky, I hope.

That is my round up for my kitchen in Winter I will back again in the Spring, bye for now.

Busy (Gently) Doing

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 21:53:00 +0000

The last month has flown by and here we are nearly in the middle of February. I most definitely did not want life to go back to business as usual after the lovely break over Christmas and New Year, that seems like a distant memory now but I would still love to go back to the gentle flow our days had back then.

Alice and I had a lovely week away visiting friends. It was a long drive which took most of a day but well worth the trip. She spend a week with a friend, I stayed a little with her friends parents and also took the opportunity to spend a couple of days with a friend I have known for most of my life. We met when we were 5. It's that kind of friendship where we can pick up from where you left off last time we spoke or met. We haven't managed to meet face to face for eight years but chat regularly on the phone. I love that so many of the choices we have made in life are the same with out us even talking about it before making them, I sure that is one of the reasons that we have stayed part of each others lives for so long. My great aunt who died last year at the age of 104 still talked about a friend whom she had known for nearly 100 years. The friend died a couple of years ago just after their hundredth birthdays, they spoke on the phone every day, I very much hope my friend and I are still doing that in our nineties, if we live that long! There is something very comforting about a friendship that has lasted so many years. There is no explaining to do, the shared history is enough.

Driving to stay with friends was actually my second time away in a month, most unusual for me who doesn't leave my county from one month to the next. Eldest was on an Archery coaching course over a weekend, it was just far enough away that it would have been a lot of driving back and forth. I decided to risk it with booking accommodation and wait until a couple of days before, sure enough I found a really cheap property for two nights reducing the driving considerably. Unfortunately the bargin accommodation turned out to be cheap because the heating was on very very low. The house despite being a terrace was freezing which we wouldn't have minded except there was no extra bedding in the house and sleeping was difficult in very cold beds. I think I managed about six hours over two nights, driving home on the Sunday night it was a toss up between a warm car to take off the chill which made me sleepy or a cold car to keep me awake. It took me four days to properly warm up again and I felt like I was keeping something like a virus at bay too, eldest sadly succumbed later that week and had his first day off college in over a year.

I have taken on some more work hours, it is a temporary situation helping out whilst a permanent appointment is made. I did not think I have the capacity to work any more hours and I really don't. It is only an extra two hours a week but it is two hours that I have had to take from other things, two hours, that in reality I don't really have to give. I knew that, but it is not a permanent arrangement. There have been many weeks when I have had things on every evening of the week and coupled with busy days and weekends I am meeting myself coming back some days. But I know it will be ok as it is not forever, I can give it to someone else, I hope sometime soon.

The day before our week away I picked up my glasses to read a recipe and realised that one of the lenses was missing. I looked everywhere for it and all these weeks later it has still not turned up. I hadn't worn them much that day except to drive Alice to her piano lesson. I am pretty sure it was in the glasses then as wearing them without it made my eyes feel very odd, but who knows, maybe it wasn't there then. I prefer to wear glasses for driving, I am right on the legal limit in my country, I don't have to, but feel safer when wearing them. Luckily I had an old pair which were a similar enough prescription for driving. I wear varifocals and the long sighted bit was not, reading and close work has been a bit of a challenge. I had had my eyes tested recently and decided not to upgrade my lenses after that as there was only a minor change. I now have two pairs of new glasses, if a pair breaks I mow have a spare. It is the first time that has ever happened to me in thirty plus years of wearing glasses, hopefully it is the last.

I have finished reading two books already this year. One I started last year so not sure that really counts but if I carry on at this rate I will double last years count. Both books were non-fiction history books, one about Roman Britain, Under Another Sky was a interesting account of Roman remains across the country interwoven with the legacy of that time period both on the lives of subsequent generations and the built environment. The other book was closer to home, Ring of Stone Circles is about the neolithic and Bronze Age stone circles and henges of the county where I live. I knew that we had a lot, but I had no idea that they were quite so numerous, they are less well known as in other parts of the country. My village has a rich history from this period although sadly the evidence has been mostly destroyed by road and railway building. I love that both of these books has a useful glossary in the back listing the places they visited.

Alice and I have started going for a longish walk on a Monday afternoon each week, we have not always been blessed with dry weather but have decided we will go whatever the weather. I prefer to walk at this time of year, going out in the rain is not always my idea of fun but there is nothing quite like returning home lighting the fire and warming up after a bracing walk in horizontal rain. Inspired by my recent reading we have visited an Iron Age hill fort, two henges and three stone circles amongst other places. We have just finished a project on Geology and have plans to do some geology walks locally too, we also live in an area rich in many different and interesting rocks.

We have also celebrated Burns Supper with our Explorer Scout unit, Imbolc with friends, helped plant over 1000 trees, learnt how to coppice, made a bird feeder, participated in the RSPB Big Garden Watch, finished sewing a rucksack, knitted socks, a hat and some mitts.

The busyness has calmed this past week as Alice had picked up a virus of some sort which has kept us at home all week. She is all better now but I really needed that time at home to reset. I managed an afternoon nap and some time on the sofa on more than one evening. I have hit the weekend feeling more relaxed and am now ready to tackle another full on week. The peaks and troughs of life flow on.

Listening to your intuition

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 19:32:00 +0000

This week is the half way point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, the time of Imbolc, a time to celebrate the start of the earth awakening as we are starting our slow journey back towards the sun, It is still very much Winter so we may not feel it at the moment but our temperatures will start to slowly rise, this will bring with it the wonder of nature that is new life, the sap will rise, unseen by us, inside the trees bringing with it new energy.

Wish for the Fields

Night is dark and cold and long,

Winter's hold is still so strong.

But beneath the earthen crust

underneath the frozen dust

Life is growing, moving, thriving

roots are drinking, resting, striving

Buds are swelling on the trees

In the hives still sleep the bees

But moving, humming, strumming, sing

Soon we all will welcome, Spring

M. Johnson

The days are very slowly beginning to lengthen, have you noticed how it is a little lighter, from one week to the next, particularly in the evenings? It really feels like we are heading towards the time of Spring when that starts to happen, doesn't it, that extra light gives us hope and prepares us for the warmer temperatures that we know will come in the weeks ahead.

During the dark time we have looked to our inner strength to grow and support us. It has helped us to release our fears, a journey that we started at Samhein by bringing them into focus and recording them, leaving them behind, maybe you did this in the flames of a fire. We have been resting and recharging over Winter, now is the time to truly say goodbye to and cleanse ourselves of those thoughts that give us doubt and lessen our intuition, releasing our fears can help us on that journey to make peace with them, making space for us to welcome in new plans. We can then start to use our inner strength to bring forth our visions as ideas for the future.

The Earth around us will begin its slow journey of waking after its rest in the coming weeks that take us to the Spring Equinox. This is a time of new beginnings, the buds will soon appear, small shoots will poke their way through the soil, you may have already seen these, the snowdrops are just starting to appear where I live. As the nature spirits begin to stir, waking from their long sleep and seeds long buried and beginning to wake and shoot; this is a time for us to sow the seeds of new plans and new beginnings, those that we started to think about back at the time of Samhein and have been starting to give shape to since the Winter Solstice, over the coming weeks our seeds of a new beginnings, plans, learning or adventures can start to take more shape.

I like to think

That, long ago,

There fell to earth

Some flakes of snow

Which loved this cold,

Grey world of ours

So much, they stayed

As snowdrop flowers

Mary Vivian

If it is your thing, doing a Rising Meditation at this time of year can be an amazing way to feel connected to the earth and to absorb its rising energy. If you get yourself into a comfortable standing position, perhaps with bare feet and/or closing your eyes if you want to. Staying still, feel the ground beneath you feet, feel its energy, feel that energy flowing into your feet, up your legs into your body, into yours arms, your fingers, up your neck and into your head. Feel that energy flowing through you, strengthening you, holding your hand, guiding you in the direction that you want to go. Think about your positive qualities, those things that you are good at, you are an amazing person, you can use these qualities you value in yourself in the year ahead, they will serve you well.

We can also use this time to cleanse our lives physically too, maybe giving away possessions that we not longer have a use for or perhaps stopping an activity or job that we find draining and get no pleasure from and that we have the ability to change. Decluttering our homes is a really rewarding thing to do, if it feels like a huge task, start with one small area, or a cupboard, take your time and don't try to do it all at once.

If you have absorbed the rising energy of the earth, try and make time to feel that rising energy again over the coming weeks; use that energy to bring your seeds of new plans and beginnings into being. As we emerge from our restful state, as we absorb the energy from the Earth may our actions be guided by the reflective, feeling and caring side of ourselves, the path of our heart where we follow our dreams and deepest wishes. May we pledge to ourselves to listen to the path of our heart and to our intuition, the inner voice we often quieten with our doubts, but which is so often a voice of wisdom.

Memories to Treasure

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As we enter a New Year ready to be filled with memories, I, like so many bloggers, have been looking back at the past year. I sometimes write A peek into my day posts, I thought it would be fun to use similar prompts to look back at last year.

Outside my window

I am so blessed to live in a beautiful place, I will never tire of the view from my window. Each and every time I open my curtains to greet the outside world, I never know what I am going to see. A grey dull day with low cloud obscuring my view, a cold and icy winter morning which is slowly waking up, the moon still shining brightly catching the first rays of winter sun, the green haze of spring or the beautiful colour palette of autumn. Every single one catches your breath with its beauty.

We finally got new neighbours, they moved in a year, almost to the day, since our previous neighbour died. We were a little baffled as to why it took so long for renovation work to start as we had thought the house had been sold back in February. It turns out the sellers never sorted probate, to transfer the house to their names, after their mother died three years ago. It seems they were selling a house that did not actually legally belong to them. By mid August it was all sorted and renovation work started in earnest, for two months there was a lot of noise and bustle but all is quiet now. It is bittersweet to have different neighbours, we are glad someone is living in the house, but it is tinged with sadness as a reminder that our beloved neighbour is no longer with us. We really noticed last Winter that the heating was off, our house was noticeably cooler the heat drifting into the unheated space next door, our house is the middle of a terrace

It felt like we had four proper distinct seasons last year. Sometimes spring, summer and autumn can all feel the same as the temperatures don't rise enough to distinguish summer from the seasons either side, the extra hours of daylight the only differentiation. The warm and sunny summer meant that my garden produced plenty of vegetables for us, we don't have enough space to be self sufficient, but there is nothing like a home grown salad freshly picked and eaten immediately. We found a CD with photos of the garden when we moved in, I had been searching for those pictures earlier in the year and finally found them when we were decluttering last week. A computer died on us about sixteen years ago and took two years worth of photos with it, luckily we had shared many photos with family members so we got them back but had clearly not got round to putting them back on our current PC. It made me realise, seeing those old photos, how much work we have put into our garden .

The dramatic rise in energy bills has galvanised us into increasing the number of solar PV panels we have in an attempt to reduce our bills slightly. We already have solar water heating panels on the roof of our house which fill it front and back so we are making use of the garage and workshop roof for solar PV panels. We already had a few up there which have been using to provide electricity for the garage and workshop, but we are in the middle of installing an array of 24 panels to give us a greater supply. We have a friend who is an electrician who is going to wire them into our mains feed so that we can supplement the supply we pay for. It may also be time to find a suitable place for a small wind turbine which we have talked about for years.

I am thankful

I have had so many things to be thankful for this past year, I am sure I could write a post entirely about that. We had a wonderful family gathering in March, our first in years. It was lovely to spend a few days with my niece, all my nephews, siblings and parents, I very much hope we can find a time to do it again this year.

I continued to embrace rest and pausing during the year, making more space for it in my life. I started off taking afternoon naps, something I shall continue this winter, it felt good to have this as part of my hibernation. Even when lift got crazy busy in the summer there was still time for pausing, a different kind of rest to that which I was taking in the Winter but a rest none the less. This is a legacy of lockdowns that I want to continue with for years to come.

I have some wonderful friends in my life, their friendship has carried me through many a time this past year, when I needed a listening ear there was always one available. Those tough moments in our life are always so much more bearable when we have someone to help us through.

In my kitchen

I started making sourdough again, creating a starter and keeping it going. I watched a lovely series on the internet which gave me a new found confidence and improved my loaves no end.

In those weeks when I have a little more time to plan our menus I have made sure to get out recipe books that I have not used for a while to search for old favourites that I have forgotten about. What that reminded me is that I am making recipes from those books. When I cook something often enough I can then cook it from memory so those books which I don't think I am cooking from are getting used all the time, from my head.

The slow cooker has become my new oven and gets used far more, a bonus as it is so much cheaper than turning the oven on. I have had a couple of fails but in the main I have managed to wing it to adapt oven based recipes to great success. What that means is that I have to be highly organised on the rare days that I do use the oven to make bread and cakes neither of which I have tried in the slow cooker as I am not sure if that is possible. Perhaps that is something I should look into for this year.

I have created

Almost all the creating this year has felt like it was for fundraising, with the exception of several pairs of socks, I have knitted one hat, a pair of mittens and two jumpers which is a very short list of finished projects for me. I did not do much fundraising knitting just a mountain of dish cloths, it is a little slow to be a good use of time in relation to the funds you can raise. Small items tend to sell better, we have found, even small knitted items take time.

It is the same with sewing, I completed one project, a basket, which was a present for a friend, I started but have not finished a picnic blanket, and Alice and I have started making her a rucksack. Fundraising sewing was making needle cases out of old felted jumpers and scraps of fabric from my stash.

We were lucky enough to invited to join some home educating families on a few day courses to make jewellery, willow baskets and a stained glass hanging it was lovely to be able to have a go at these things, guided by a professional, without having to buy in all the equipment ourselves. I have long realised that are a lots of things I would love to do but simply don't have the time to devote to them all, so attending a day course is a great compromise.

We made a mountain of clay Christmas decorations most of which sold, they were a great return for the time and cost of making them, a three pound block of clay made over a 100 which we sold for 50p - £1 depending on the size. We have also made some daisy chains which did not sell at Christmas markets but hopefully will sell at stalls in the coming months.

We also did a lot of needle felting, this is another creative project that does not take a lot of time and has a good return for the cost of making them. We felted numerous hearts which we made into garlands changing the colours with the seasons as we went through the year. For the Christmas markets we made small star garlands. We have sold about 30 heart garlands (that was 90 hearts in total) and ten star (that was 50 stars in total).

I have been

I haven't travelled a great distance this year despite driving many miles a week, it is all close to home. We travelled in March to our family gathering that I mentioned above, we accompanied Cameron on his D of E expedition in a neighbouring county and returned there a few months later to assess another group both of which were a lovely few days of exploring the area with Alice. We visited my mother in law twice once in the summer and a second visit that ended up being squished between Christmas Day and a commitment on the 29th. The arrangements for both of these visits were less than ideal, I am not sure where the communication is breaking down but I have realised I need to be more on it with making sure that they are nailed down water tight at the earliest opportunity. When you get invited for Christmas and then get told in December that that does not include Christmas Day as other arrangements have been made, as they also have on the 29th, a one full day visit is a rather short and expensive, for a 600 mile return journey.

We had a wonderful family holiday a few miles from home, I realise that my intention to blog about that did not happen, lost in the busyness of the summer months. We have become very last minute about organising husbands time of work, usually shoe horning it at the last minute between other commitments. I am thinking that it would be better if we got some dates in the diary now and then other plans can be made round them, family life needs to come first.

I am remembering

My beloved Great Aunt who died earlier this year at the age of 104 and a half. She lived a seven hour drive from me, not a journey I managed to make that often. Our annual visits for the last thirteen years have been an important part of our year. I have missed making that trip this year. She was the most wonderful story teller remembering times in her life from so very many years ago. Her memory never faded, my memories of her will never fade, she is our link to an earlier very different time. I am blessed to have a photo of her as a toddler with my granny and their mother, my great grandmother, taken in 1920, it used to sit at the top of the stairs in her house so is also a memory of my time spent with her.

I had been blogging for ten years this year an anniversary that passed me by in February, I have had several long pauses in that time so I may only have about five years worth of posts. This is post number 906. I love reading back over old posts, not just to see what we were up to but so that I can see how much my writing has changed over that time.

I have read

I am not one for keeping lists of the books I have read, I have no idea how many books I have actually read this year. Looking at the books in the house I was not quite sure what I have finished reading this year and what I might have actually read last year. I did not visited a library in 2022 so I know that if I have read a book it will be in the house somewhere. What I can say with confidence is that I did not read a single work of fiction this year. Highlights for me were Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life by Karen Maezen Miller, Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake and Mothers of Invention by Katherine Marcel.

Around the house

We have done very little work inside the house this year, a couple of new shelves and other tweaks. I wanted to do more decluttering in 2022 and boy did I manage that. I went round the house slowly room by room, removing things that we had not touched for years. Cupboards and other spaces were emptied out and sometimes completely reutilised as the entire contents were no longer needed. There were many spaces that were not touched or need revisiting this year too. Decluttering is an ongoing job and one which I am loving doing.

Along side the decluttering I am still using the same method for keeping the house clean that I started at the beginning of 2020. I often take breaks when the whole family is home but as I know I will be picking it back up again when the holidays are over it matters not that the house is ignored for a few days or weeks. The premise of this method is that you have daily jobs, thirty minutes a day on one room a day for four days of the week and then one day a week when you focus on a deeper clean on one of your rooms on rotation. My days of the week and the jobs I do are very different from the inspiration for this method but they work for me and that is the important thing isn't it. I very much had a love hate relationship with house work before finding this inspiration, I wanted to do it but hated the tasks so never got started. Breaking it down like this is perfect for me which is why I am still doing it three years later. It is now a habit and an integral part of my morning routine.

Favourite quotes

I am a sporadic collator of quotes, I have a few that I keep in the front of my diary and transfer from year to year. I did not write many down this year, I thought I had more but this is all I could find.

We can't change our history but we can change our relationship with it.

These are words that I have read on repeat this year to remind myself that things that happened in my past were not my fault. Like a big hug, which we all need sometimes.

The thing that screws us up the most is the picture of how it is supposed to be, what if we deleted that, the idea of that, and we just looked at what is and found it to be enough.

I heard these words on a podcast and pressed the rewind button so many times to listen to them again and again before realising that I needed them to be written down. They were spoken by Glennon Doyle. These words have reframed things for me completely and when I find myself reverting to the unachievable picture these words pop into my head as a reminder that that is a less than helpful place to go to.

Enjoy the little things in life because one day you will look back and realise they were the big things.

A friend shared these words with me as she had found them to be a comfort to her. She didn't write them and I have seen them written elsewhere too. In the last few years I know that I have changed my focus a lot and one of the things that gets more of my time is those seemingly little things.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

I went on a course many years ago, which spent some time looking at the impact of our actions on others. I don't remember much about the rest of the course but that part has continued to stay with me. I always try to be careful about the words I use around others to ensure that I don't cause harm or hurt, I also accept fully when I have done that to others. I have been on the receiving end of messages that were written in this vain in this past year, if I had written a reply immediately it would have come from the heart not the head, writing and speaking when emotions are running high is never wise and invariably leads to pain. Pausing and reflecting is the only way I can respond rather than react.

I have learnt

I rekindled my Duolingo account, after a long hiatus, at the end of 2021 after watching many films in Swedish and wanting to learn some of the language. I managed it for a few lessons and then my limited knowledge of the intricacies of grammar in English meant I had to stop so I switched back to French. I am lucky to have an old Duolingo account which was set up in 2012 so I get to make as many mistakes as I like as I have unlimited lives, you have to subscribe to get that on an account now. I received some stats at the end of November which told me how much I have learned in the previous year, I don't remember receiving this before or maybe it was switching to the app on my phone that meant I was a lucky recipient. Duolingo is learning done in isolation but alongside millions of other users worldwide, you can, if you want, be a part of league tables but I found them to be too distracting so turned them off on my profile. I was somewhat surprised to learn that I was in the top 6% of language learners on the platform, I didn't think I used it that much with only a lesson per day, I spent an astonishing 4756 minutes (that is 79 hours) learning 1422, new to me, French words. The few minutes each day add up it would seem.

When Alice secured a place as part of our County's contingent to travel to the World Scout Jamboree taking place later this year I knew that we were in for many hours of fundraising. I had organised very little fundraising before so it has been a steep learning curve for me and all my fellow parents. I think by the time we have raised the full amount we will be experts in what works and what doesn't. The things that you think will be big earners have turned in to big flops and those that you cannot imagine will raise much end up being the best and easiest. We are nearly there and need to keep going this year to get to our total, I feel sure we can do it and I know I will miss this part of my life when we get to that point.

Not long before Alice secured her place to attend the Jamboree I stepped up to become a Scout Leader myself. My unit is the one for older teenagers, 14-18 year olds, we call them Explorer Scouts in the UK. I have been volunteering on and off for this unit for the last twenty odd years but doing a little bit now and then is very different to being the leader. I am so lucky to have the support of two very dear friends both of whom have years of scouting experience between them. It was very time consuming at first as I often had to look things up before doing anything, I also wanted to set up my own systems which again takes time. They always say that your first year in anything new is about learning and your second is about consolidation, this definitely rings true with me and I feel so much more confident with what I am doing now. There have been moments when I have wondered what I have taken on but I know that learning about this role and learning about fundraising and all the time that consumes, at the same time, was not ideal but I am through the other side now.

I have long wanted to have more spontaneity in my life and be ok with it, to not be controlling and planning everything to be totally watertight. Life is not like that. I tried a bit more spontaneity in our lives over the summer last year and it felt ok, in fact it felt more than ok, it felt good. I really enjoyed the flow our lives had at that time. I know that I could not be like that all the time and that is ok too, the balance of a bit of it now and then is enough for me.

I have listened

I love listening to Podcasts, they are my own curated radio station these days. I cannot remember the last time I switched on the radio to listen to a programme. I could not have imagined writing that a few years ago when the radio was my aural wallpaper from waking up to going to sleep. I listen to huge variety of podcasts from current affairs such as politics, the environment, LGBTQ+, book reviews, comedy, music, my local countryside and many more besides. Stand out favourites this year were the wonderful candid interviews on Call me Mother, I hope there is another series this year. The monthly seasonal podcast released on the first of each month As the Season Turns, it is a cornucopia of interesting information about the natural world. The fascinating and witty Stories of Scotland which explores Scotland's nature, culture and heritage, each episode is completely different but well researched and a joy to listen to. I am so grateful to all the folks who give up their time to make podcasts available to us completely free, I donate to some of them to support their work which I hugely appreciate.

I have not listened to as much music this year, I have some downloaded on my phone but tend to listed to Podcasts when I am driving. I listed to Spotify at home but don't have it on my phone so can't have it on when out and about. I often have Spotify on in the evenings when I am reading things online. They kindly created a playlist for me of my 101 top listen to songs this year, all six hours 35 mins worth, I think some at the bottom have probably had two or three listens, so it is stretching it a bit. I don't know how many hours I listened to those at the top of the list as I don't have the mobile app, but I do know that my top three songs were, Painter by Låpsley, Roses by George Taylor and Burned by Love by Juke Ross, I know that I listened to these alot, they were amongst a set of songs that I found towards the beginning of the year and made up, along with fifteen or so others, into a playlist which became my go to songs in the evenings. The artist that featured the most in the list was Blanco White closely followed by Tones and I, two completely different musicians both of which I love.

I am looking forward to

The diary is already looking busy for the coming months, weekends are filling up fast, we blocked out some time to travel to spend with friends who live way south of us, an old school friend for me and a friend who has moved there for Alice, we are looking forward to these days with them.

We are in the process of finding another big house to rent for a few days for another extended family gathering, we need fourteen beds so they are few and far between. I very much hope that we get something organised again as it was such a lovely long weekend last year.

A few plans for 2023

I don't usually make resolutions for the year, or come up with a word, although I love to read about others doing both, they don't work for me. I have a few intentions which I am hoping I can make into habits or make happen this year.

I want to make time for my friends, to arrange calls or meeting up face to face. I always think this will just happen but time drifts by and it doesn't, life is such that I need to be more intentional about making this happen rather than just hoping it will. My visit to my old school friend is the start of that. I have already made contact with few other friends whom I don't see or speak to often to see if we can arrange a date for a catch up chat.

Alice had a hard year last year with her oldest friend going off to school which was difficult enough but much exacerbated with a total lack of support extended to her, from them, as she worked through that transition. She started to feel ready to make new connections at the end of last year and we tentatively started attending a new group. We have reached out to a new family and hope that we can meet in the coming weeks, she is nervous about this, the lingering effects of last year's events.

Alice and I started doing sewing every week at the end of last year and once we have completed the project we are currently working on we want to make clothes. I got a book of patterns for Christmas and am looking forward to doing this with her during the year.

I have mentioned my morning routine earlier in this post, another part of that is my daily yoga practice. On the days when I need to be out of the house earlier I don't manage to fit this in as I am not prioritising it. When one day becomes three and then more, I really notice the ripple effect of this on the rest of my life. I want to make sure that I don't miss more than one day in a week during the year this year. I am also going to restart a journal this year as I know that this will help me to support my yoga, amongst other things.

My last intention is another thing that I have neglected and that is making and eating more fermented food. I regularly used to make sauerkraut, chutney and pancake mix amongst other things. I have a lovely fermented food recipe book which I want to start looking through every month to inspire me to try new things. I know that my gut is in a much healthier place than it has been in the past, my Chrohns Disease has been in remission for 18 years now, but it it is important to look after your gut all the time not just at those times when it needs a bit of extra support.

Thank you so much for reading this very long post. Thank you to all my lovely readers and those of you that have commented in this past year, I am grateful to you all. I very much look forward to reading along with you all in 2023, which I hope is a year filled with memories to treasure for you all.

I will leave you with a poem to start your year:

May love and laughter light your days and warm you heart and home,

May good and faithful friends be yours, wherever you may roam,

May peace and plenty bless your world with joy that long endures,

May all life's passing seasons bring the best to you and yours.

Drifting with Purpose

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 22:32:00 +0000

The Winter Solstice slipped by this year without me turning up in this space. I have moved into hibernation mode slowing down as the earth has slowed around me. The busyness that Christmas can bring into our lives feels like it pulls me in the opposite direction of the one that I want to be taking.

We spent the solstice as we usually do, with a walk up a local hill to watch the sun setting. After a week of beautiful sunsets the day itself was grey and gloomy the only sign that the sun had set was the gloom getting darker. It was still as magical, sitting at the top of the hill looking down at the lake, the lights of the houses twinkling in the gloom. It is where I wanted to be a that time, an important place, one where we have watched the sun set for all, bar one, of the last ten solstices.

We made a list the following day of all those jobs that need doing but there is never quite the time for, it is our holiday list to be worked slowly through until the time when work and college are calling again and life goes back to that. We have cleared out several spaces in the house, getting rid of things that we no longer need. It is a good time of year to remove things from our lives, from our homes or from our minds, letting go of thoughts that are unhelpful, that influence us in ways that leave us sad and unhappy. A clearer mind is so calming, we are more productive, we sleep better and we can manage our day to day life more efficiently. I love this act of reducing, when you know that things are coming into the house, a house which is small and fairly full, there has to be some space made to allow those things in. I find a cluttered space overwhelming, it is a constant process to keep our house less cluttered.

I also find this time of year overwhelming and have worked hard, over the years, to reduce the overwhelm. I have said no to so many offers of things to do this December, to ensure that we had more breathing space, and this year has been almost perfect. I am not sure what would have made it more perfect other than going to a country where Christmas is really low key. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with Christmas. We spent the day itself out on a long walk, it was not the best conditions but we rather like our long walks on Christmas Day as it gives us a chance to park and walk in places that we would not normally visit. We live in a very touristy area and there are some beautiful places which can be teeming with people in the warmer months but on a cold wet Christmas Day are pretty much empty. We had the car park to ourselves. Breakfast was large and hearty, so we only took snacks with us to eat whilst out, tea was prepped in the slow cooker alongside breakfast so we could eat when we got home. We had filled the wood burning stove too so we came home to a toasty warm house with wonderful smells of tea filling the nose as we opened the door.

Present giving was low key, a couple each before breakfast followed by a few more when we were home and fed. Husband and I tend to give gifts to each other through out the year so we don't give each other presents at this time of year, we give the children something they want, need, to wear and to read at this time of year. We had a small bag of gifts from my parents. We had also been sent some presents from friends we have not seen for a few years as COVID has stopped us meeting up. We were rather surprised to be sent these, we randomly get presents from these friends and as much as we appreciate the thought they are rarely anything we want, only Alice did well out of those, the rest have boosted the fundraising stock and the present cupboard.

Boxing Day saw us packing up and heading south to visit my mother in law, we joined the roads with thousands of others, we naively thought it would be a good day to travel, that the roads would be quiet. I guess the rail strikes have effected folks travel plans and everyone took to the roads. A four hour journey turned to six and half as we met accident after accident. We only had one full day together before we returned home with an equally long journey extended by yet more accidents. In the twenty odd years we have been driving south to see parents I don't think I have ever seen so many cars on the roads, I know I don't go far on the roads these days but they did seem a lot busier than normal.

We have returned to work on the list, there are now three remaining, all the large ones, they always get left till last don't they. I have some work to catch up on, those jobs that there is never time to do normally so a similar list to our round the house jobs. It is good to start a new season and a new year feeling like you have cleared up the clutter from the previous one, it gives me the space and time to do some thinking and planning. I love the slowness of the days at this time between Christmas and New Year, they are drifting with purpose.

We are slowly heading towards New Year my favourite time at this time of year. We are hosting friends this year, an open house with food and drinks. I am not sure we will make it to midnight, the last few years we have toasted the New Year in earlier and headed to bed, it is the being with friends that matters more to us than doing things at the 'right' time. I am loving these slow days with all my family at home, full of moments to treasure. I hope your days are full of those moments too.

Our Advent

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 15:28:00 +0000

Alice and I started off this week making our version of Speculaas adapting a recipe that we have been using for years to ensure that our gluten free and dairy free friends could share them. The resulting biscuit dough was far too moist to be rolled out but Alice was adamant that she still wanted them to be star shaped. We managed to find an entirely unconventional way to cut them and get them onto a baking tray without squishing them too much. Making these biscuits have been part of our Advent for years, a tradition that I am sure I will continue long after the children have left home, they are so delicious and don't last long. I am hopeless at remembering to take photos of food when I have cooked it, when I went to the tin to take a photo there was one small star remaining, one of a couple we made at the end when we were running out of dough.

This time of year can become crazy busy with invitations, things to do, places to be, presents to buy. There is so much more going on and it can be so easy to say yes to everything without thinking about how we can fit everything in. Last year we did things differently, I did no planning beforehand and just went with the flow and it worked well, we did not get overwhelmed with 'too much'. I have planned things this year but with plenty of space for pauses and rest which will not get filled up, it is all too easy to fill in the spaces isn't it, so you end up dashing from one thing to another.

A few weeks I got out my collection of Christmas books and stories, along with previous years plans which I always keep to make planning each year easier. I love the stories that we read and share each year, last week we read The Glass Angels by Susan Hill a delightful story set in the 1940s shortly after WWII, I still remember the first time I read this story but even after several years of reading it has not lost it's charm. We have a focus for each of the four weeks of Advent, following an idea that I read on the internet years ago. I am sure what I do, what we do, is nothing like that original idea but it is important to make these things are own to make them work. If we try and follow what other folks are doing we are setting ourselves up to fail which is never a good start for things.

Advent for me is a time of moving through the darkness to the return of the light, a time to seek out the light in everything and keep it gently glowing. It's a time of inner searching, of anticipation, of inner quiet through all the busyness of life and all that this time of year brings. It is a path to finding balance and peacefulness in my life, not just at this time of year but at all times.

In week one of Advent, for us this was last week, we focus on the mineral kingdom the physical foundation of life, the ground we stand on and the basis of our ever changing existence. We think about our connection to the earth and what that means to us. It is a time for us to think about any changes we should be making over the coming year to be ever mindful of our effect on our beautiful earth. We live in a geology rich area so we took a walk locally to investigate the rocks, this has kindle an interest in Alice to learn more. I did a geology project with Cameron at a similar age so I already have some notes which I can use again, I am looking forward to repeating some of the wonderful geology walks we did back then.

This week we have been focusing on the plant kingdom, a kingdom that like us, but unlike the mineral kingdom has life. We have been thinking about all that we receive from this kingdom, the nourishment, the beauty, how it is life sustaining for us and it in turn is sustained by the earth, wind, rain, light and warmth from which it creates a balance of growth and decay. We have been celebrating the bounty of this kingdom, showing gratitude towards the growers who invest their time and resources in providing food to sustain us.

Next week we will be focussing on the Animal kingdom with which we share our capacity for movement, will be reminding ourselves of our relationship with this kingdom, of our appreciation all that they do for us and our need for continued compassion to all animals. In the last week of Advent we will be focusing on Humankind and our relationship with each other and the world around us. We will be giving thanks to the friendships and people who have nourished and supported us this year. We will be thinking about those who are struggling at this time.

Amongst all the stories and poems we are sharing we will be observing St Lucia day next week making Lussekater buns, making wreaths and sharing food with friends, celebrating the Winter Solstice by hosting a small ceremony and watching the sun setting, making some small gifts and decorations, spending time with extended family celebrating a significant birthday, baking and eating mince pies, and putting out extra treats for the birds as we have very cold weather forecast. I managed to get all my cards made last week but have only sent out the International ones and those that I am hand delivering so far. I hope to write and send all the others by early next week, we are currently experiencing lots of postal strikes so if I don't send them soon they won't make it in time.

We have pared back our focused learning time for this month, focusing instead on the time of year and all that it holds for us. Some of things we were due to have been doing with others have been cancelled, or we have not attended as Alice was not well at the beginning of last week. My plans may not always come to be but they are only a plan, something we hoped to do if we could, if they don't happen it is not the end of the world, whatever we do will be good enough.

I hope whatever your plans look like for this time of year they are good enough and that you have space to pause and rest somewhere in there too.

The Spaces in Between

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 23:21:00 +0000

One of my favourite places to take a walk is in a wood. A wood in summer, with the trees in full leaf can feel like there is hidden magic hidden round every corner, the sunlight shining in rays through the trees creating magical spots of light. In the winter a wood feels more open but can still be dark as the daylight hours can often be cloudy and gloomy giving a wood an ethereal light. The colours in the spring and autumn are always magnificent, the green haze in spring and the ever changing colour palette in autumn bringing a wood alive in more ways than one . The spaces in a wood, the gaps between the trees are what makes a wood for me, it throws the light around giving it a special magic that changes with the seasons, a wood with trees close together is a dark foreboding place and not one I particularly like exploring.

My life has finally gone back to be being nearly as full and busy as it was pre-Covid, it has been a slow build up. I loved the quiet that lockdowns bought me. I enjoyed the stillness and slowing down. I thought I could maintain that but it was not to be, I am my own worst enemy for taking on things that fill my time. I don't, however; regret what I have taken on, the paid work, the volunteering it fills me up as much as it fills my time. I thrive on having things to do, I don't long for a time when I have nothing to do, I prefer to direct my energies elsewhere. What I have taken from the time of Covid is how very important time for stillness and rest are and however busy I might be I find time for this each and every day. It does mean that some things, like writing posts on this blog get shelved for a while but that is how it has to be. I am still writing it just takes me so much longer to get a post to the point of being able to post it, I am rather enjoying the mediative and slow process of taking time to write a post, dipping in and out as time allows. I feel sure that it will improve my writing, time will tell.

When life is busier and there is more going on, there is so much more I could share and write about that ends up drifting by and remains in my memory without being recorded. Life slips along wrapped up in food preparation, housework, planning, creating, spending time with friends, family, fund-raising, working and then every now and then I show up here to share snippets, the breadcrumbs that I have yet to sweep up and forget about. It is so easy to paint a particular picture, the parts that we are comfortable sharing or the image that we want to create of ourselves online, we read about the lives of others through the lens of our own experiences which are often so different from the writers. I am guilty of making it appear that my life is ticking along all rather wonderfully, it is like that most of the time but there are those moments when it all comes crashing down or those days when it feels like I am going backwards rather than forwards. It is what we make of those times, those days when anything we do feels like pushing a car uphill, can we move on and put it behind us, or do we carry them around for days feeling them getting heavier and heavier, creating barriers that we can't see over.

We had a significant day in our family this month, a rather special birthday. We are now a three adult household, I am a parent to one adult and one child. Nothing changes but everything has. I spent weeks putting together a memory book for his birthday, collating all the letters that I wrote to him on each of his previous seventeen birthdays some of which I published on here. I have never been totally comfortable sharing details of my children, the names I have used for the past few years are not their real names, I debated for a long time about whether to share the letter I wrote for this eighteenth and decided on reflection not to, those details are not mine to share anymore. As well as the letters I loved looking through eighteen years of photos looking for a selection to include in his book. We bought our first digital camera a few weeks before he was born in November 2004, we decided at the time that as we were likely to take many more photos that we needed to make sure we organised those photos in folders on our computer. It made looking for them so much easier, we still use cameras for almost all of our photography we only started using smart phones a couple of years ago and they are very much not the latest model with a fancy pants camera on them or a lot of storage. My digital SLR is usually my go to camera.

I managed to double book Alice for a weekend in February next year, this seemed utterly ridiculous given that it felt so far in advance, in reality it isn't really. The end of the year always feels like a big landmark to me and the new year always feels so much further away than it really is, like I need the old year to be finished and done with before I can start thinking about the next one. I always realise at about this time of year that that simply does not work and I need to get on and buy a diary. I have tried keeping track of our goings on using electronic diaries but it does not work for me, I love the bigger picture that a paper diary gives me and have simply not found a way to replicate that satisfactorily using any electronic diary. I keep a list of dates for the following year at the end of each diary but a list of dates is not a good way to keep track of plans, hence my double booking Alice and saying yes to something when she was already busy. Thankfully it was easily resolved. I spent a day filling my new diary with birthdays, festivals, lunar cycles, work meetings, and plans we have committed to, there is something rather satisfying about adding to those completely blank pages. I don't keep a journal but my diaries are a wonderful record of what we have been doing, I often refer back to them and always keep the previous year's diary close to hand on my desk.

I started this year with an intention to walk every day that I could manage it, an intention that slipped a little as the year went on. I have found myself circling back to that intention in the past weeks, it has quietly slipped back into my day. It is dark at about 4.30pm here now, properly dark and I love going for a walk in the dark. It is less stimulating and as a busy introvert that meets my needs, giving me a balance of calm and peace during a full day.

I don't know when I will be back here again but please know I haven't gone for good I am just taking my time to bring the words and pictures together. Thank you to all of you who drop by to visit and for all the lovely comments that you leave me, they are much appreciated. Till next time..............

Busy (Gently) Doing

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 21:57:00 +0000

It would seem that I haven't written one of these posts recently, not since early August, that feels like a lifetime away now. The evenings are darkening here as we head to the halfway point between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice. I am ready for this, the dark evenings always make me want to be still and restful, sitting on the sofa in front of the wood burner enjoying the warmth and cosiness that that brings.

I didn't managed much of the rest and stillness on the sofa last week, I had four meetings on three evenings which was not great planning but as they were all meetings that I had to attend and others were organising I had little choice. Two were for work which involved some pre-planning for me, the others I just had to turn up. The week was completed by an assessment over a weekend, I thought I was going to be out for the whole weekend including an overnight, so when I discovered late in the week that it was going to one day, and not a particularly long day, Sunday at home felt like a much welcomed bonus.

Weekends have been really full with courses, weekends away, canoeing with Explorers and Alice on two Scout camps on back to back weekends. We have something on every weekend up to Christmas, lots and lots of fundraising, two family birthdays and friends staying, all lovely things to be looking forward to. I used to find it hard to manage with full weekends one after the other but our weeks are much slower now, so busy weekends feel possible. A full week followed by a busy weekend can be too much week in week out.

I spent a lovely day out by myself after dropping Alice and a fellow Scout at a Jamboree training camp. It came at the end of a full and difficult week. It was a wonderful recharge and gave me the space to be able to reframe things that I have been trying to make sense of. It was lovely to be able to move through the day at my pace without anyone else needing me to move on before I was ready. It is a very long time since I have been able to do this. I know that I am slowly moving into a very different passage of motherhood, my children are becoming steadily more independent and it is gives me more and more time to do things for myself. It is strange, yet liberating. I sometimes feel like a toddler as I take these tentative steps, wistfully looking back to those times when my children were by my side, yet also loving this new way of being.

Alice and I are still feeling into a rhythm which has not quite revealed itself yet. It has needed to be a slow process for her to absorb changes that have hard for her. She is loving her music lessons, her French lesson that she shares with Cameron, but is missing connections with a group of friends. We had hoped that we could have a pause from changes for a year or two but another friend going to school this year has hit her hard, particularly as they offered no support to her as she made this transition, despite us checking in with them that school was going well for them. The past weeks since schools started back here have been really hard for us both, last week has been the hardest. I am hoping that we have now sown the seed of some possibilities, dipping a toe into some new things that will hopefully lead to the connection she is looking for.

We have created space for a day at home each week, one that we make a commitment to. If we are not going away and needing to pack and prepare we are using the time for creativity. Alice has been keen to make a rucksack for herself for months. I naively thought that could just fit around whatever else we were doing, I have realised it needs a set time, so now it has. She created a pattern, the fabric has been purchased and is slowly being cut into the shapes needed. A slow process fitting around the ebb and flow of everyday life.

One of the things I have loved about moving from the summer to the Autumn is that my morning routine has a space again. I wrote about the spontaneity of the Summer and how that looked for me this year. I did enjoy it but those things that I like to do each morning often got sidelined, I am loving the way that they anchor my days for me. I have a few things that I do each morning, not always in the same order, before Alice and I get the day going together. It gives us both a space before coming together. I have missed this over the summer and have loved finding this groove again, which has a more comfortable feel to it this year as we begin our second year without Cameron.

In the midst of all the goings on round here I realised that Cameron's eighteenth is in a few weeks time. I have long had plans to give him the words that I wrote to him on each of his birthdays, some of which I have published here, in a book along with photos. Those readers who have older children may, like me, have years when their children simply did not want to be in any photos that you take, I have so few from the past few years. I am glad I remembered to do this in enough time, I am just finalising the last few tweeks and hope it will be delivered in time, postal strikes permitting.

Before I go, I had a few requests from my last post for the Rhubarb and Orange Sauce that I mentioned so here is the recipe that I follow. I tend to just throw everything in the pan without weighing it so I am sorry that this is a bit vague with the quantities, I find that all recipes are a matter of taste so if isn't to your liking the first time you make it, do adjust it to suit your particular tastes. It is rather delicious.

Rhubarb and Orange Sauce

Approx 2lbs Rhubarb chopped into smallish pieces

Juice and zest from 1-2 oranges

1 tablespoon honey

Optional 1 - 2 teaspoons ground ginger

Put all of the above in a pan, the amount of orange juice to add depends on how juicy your rhubarb is. If you live in a very dry climate you might need to add more juice. I don't always remember to add the ginger it tastes just as good without it. Bring to the boil and then simmer for approx 30-40 minutes until the rhubarb is no longer recognisable as pieces and the sauce is fairly thick, it will thicken more as it cools. I put this into jars, allow to cool and then freeze them until I want to use them. This will not keep unless refrigerated due to the low sugar content. If you prefer things sweeter then add up to 400g of Caster Sugar for this quantity of Rhubarb.

Adventures in my Kitchen

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 21:27:00 +0000

This post comes to you from my kitchen. I had every intention of posting from my kitchen each season but that hasn't quite happened, the summer was a rather busy time and I hardly posted at all, ironic really when I had so much to write about.

The salve that I mentioned I had steeping the last time I posted from my kitchen sadly went mouldy. That is the first time that has happened to me, the leaves were not all in the oil they were steeping in, their contact with the air, I think that is what caused it. I threw it all in the compost bin and have started again, I hope this batch is good enough to make a salve with. I need to buy some more jars for when the steeping is done.

I have been soaking and cooking pulses in industrial quantities periodically over the past months. I buy my pulses dried mostly in 3kg bags, so that I didn't always have to remember to soak and cook them each time I needed them and to save energy by doing it with a larger batch every few months. I soak around half of the bag in a large bowl before cooking them all up. I then freeze them in 250g quantities which is the approximate amount that you get in a can of pulses if you buy them that way. I don't have to remember to get them out of the freezer hours before as most of the time I am throwing them into what I am cooking so they defrost in the heat of the food. I am lucky to have a very large chest freezer in my garage which has plenty of space. I always aim to have four or five different pulses out there and if they have just all been replenished there can be thirty or forty bags. When I am down to the last one I will soak and cook some more to make sure I have a constant supply. I got a bit out of this habit and have started it up again. Now that it getting darker earlier I need to make sure that I get the right thing out, some of them look very similar in the dark!

I have mentioned in several posts recently about all the fundraising that we are currently doing to support Alice getting to South Korea next year. We have been doing a lot of fundraising which has involved baking. We have tried various recipes and how now settled on four cakes that we can make really quickly as we have done it so often. It works best if Alice does most of the making and I do the clearing and washing up in between each cake and any of the prep that she finds hard or slows her down. We have become a good team, the kitchen still ooks like a whirlwind has been through it by the time we have finished. We make two gluten free cakes, a lemon drizzle and an almond and coconut traybake, and two gluten cakes, gingerbread and orange and poppyseed. These were the ones that sold the best and we rarely come home with any much to the disappointment of my husband and Cameron. We have had a bit of break from baking this month as none of the fundraising we have done has needed baking which has been really welcome. We have plenty in the freezer now so next time we need cake we are good to go.

We had a good crop of edibles from the garden this year. We are never going to reach a place where we are growing all our own food our tiny garden is way too small to reach that but we grow what we can. We picked and froze 10lbs each of blackcurrants and whitecurrants. I usually make these into a coulis type sauce over the winter months to give us all a good dose of vitamin C in the months when we need the most as there are so many more colds and the like around. The rhubarb plants were less productive this year although they gave us a good crop, I have made huge amounts of rhubarb and orange sauce which is now in the freezer, I love having this on pancakes at breakfast time. I need to split the rhubarb this autumn to encourage it to be a little more productive next year. I have lots of friends who would like a plant for their gardens, rhubarb does well round here nearly every garden in my village seems to have a rhubarb plant although not all are being harvested from judging by the huge flower heads some display.

We have had an abundance of salad leaves, edible flowers and lettuce. I didn't buy any of these for months. I grow several different types of salad leaves, wild rocket being one of them it grows like a weed in my garden. I tend to grow lettuce where you just pick the leaves, I can make them last for months if I water them well, they have finally gone to seed over the past couple of weeks. My cucumbers, gherkins, tomatoes and courgettes did really well. I managed to pickle one jar of gherkins this year as I discovered that I could add them as they are ready, it remains to be seen whether that works. I have made several batches of courgette and brie soup which are now in the freezer to use up the last of the courgettes. I don't freeze it with the brie in it, I add this once it is defrosted. Now that it has turned colder my leeks are doing well, I am picking chard and kale which I have in abundance, my cabbages are slowly growing and the purple sprouting broccoli has lasted another year and will hopefully flower again in the spring. I have winter lettuces and salad leaves in the polytunnel which I hope will provided for us for a few more months before going dormant over the cold of winter.

We have moved to a more autumnal menu with soup, stews and bakes back on the menu. I make full of use of my slow cooker which we purchased earlier this year. There are a couple of days of the week when we are out in the afternoon until quite late and it is so good to come home to be able to put tea straight on the table as it has been cooking in the slow cooker. I shared a couple of pages in my last post from a cookery book for a 'recipe' for a warm salad which is still a regular fixture on our menu. There is also a page for a stew and also a grain bake using the same format. I have been tried various combinations of these as I work with flavours and ingredients to find things that work, a buckwheat based bake as been the best attempt so far.

I thought I was going to lose my veg delivery box earlier this year. The company I buy it from doesn't actually deliver to my village. Unfortunately for us there is another company that does, it is CSA scheme from a local village, the share is small so it only does about one or two meals for us, because of that scheme this other larger company will not deliver as they would be in competition which I get. We have been using a friend's address to bypass that but they were renting and told us at the beginning of the summer that they were having to move. Luckily for us we have other friends in the same village so we were able to continue with our delivery. I had hoped that a new organic veg shop was going to open in our nearest town but sadly the plug was pulled on the venture, I would have preferred to have visited a shop each week as I could buy what I wanted but the box is a good alternative to buying in the supermarket where everything is covered in plastic. I had been finding that the box we had been having was no longer big enough for our needs so we have now increased to three boxes a week! One is fruit which we get once a fortnight but even with three boxes it is really good value and far cheaper than buying elsewhere. I have stopped buying any fruit and veg in the supermarket for the first time in years. I would love to stop shopping in a supermarket completely but there are few items that I have not been able to find elsewhere so we still use it for a few things but the number of items is gradually dwindling, I hope that there will be a time when I can stop completely. I much prefer to support local small businesses.

I dug out my elderberry syrup and the dregs of garlic syrup recently. I made the garlic syrup years ago but it has lasted well, the elderberry was made last year and there is still plenty left. They were so useful to have in the pantry when we all went down with some cold type virus recently. A cup of elderberry syrup mixed with hot water is wonderful warming drink when you have a cold.

I have been given a big bag of apples which I need to peel and do something with. I will most probably cook some up into a chutney and make the rest into a sauce, freezing some and dehydrating the rest to make fruit leather. I am also on the look out for some pickling onions which I also usually make at this time of year. My husband loves pickled onions and this is lovely treat for late winter/early spring. The last of my tomatoes have failed to ripen and probably won't now that the days are shorter and cooler. I will be picking them soon to make some tomato ketchup with, they are mix of slightly ripened and green ones and they make a delicious ketchup despite not being ripe. I don't have much room to store alot of food in my pantry once I have some chutney, pickled onions and ketchup the shelves will be full again. We have run out of chilli jam so I will be making more of that once I have more chillis.

I watched a series of programmes about making sourdough bread. It was a fascinating watch and I kept rewinding bits to watch techniques again. I learnt so much and have been putting the various techniques into practice here. I am now making bread rolls twice a week and they are much improved. I think I might try making a loaf now, they have always been a bit of a disaster but I am feeling more confident with what I am doing now. Like so many things it is not so much following a set of specific directions but having a go and getting a feel for it, I guess that is how all cooking skills would have been passed on before the days of recipe books. There are so many factors that can effect a sourdough loaf that is easy to get disheartened, the beauty of a home made loaf is that it will not be the same each time you make it but that can make learning hard as a different thing may go wrong each time. Those rather flat, teeth breaking loaves are not happening as often now which means I have less breadcrumbs to hand but we have more delicious bread to eat which is always a winner!

My kitchen is a busy place, I spend so much time in there so it is not surprising I have so much to write about. Thank you for reading this long post.

Learning to embrace Spontaneity

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 21:11:00 +0000

We are well and truly into the throes of Autumn here, weather that changes from gloomy grey, heavy showers and bright blue skies all in the space of a few hours. It keeps you on the toes and you never quite know what clothes to wear. If the sun is out it can be really warm but the second it goes behind a cloud it is baltic. I always feel like it takes longer to get out of the house at this time than it does in the depths of Winter when many layers are an absolute must. You never quite know which coat to wear, if at all, do I need a waterproof? hat? gloves? I usually end up packing them all into a bag which they invariably never leave, but I know that that one occasion I don't is when I will need them.

For the second or maybe third year running, I have not been keeping track, my sunflowers have decided that this is a good time for them to burst into flower. Whilst most other plants in the garden are dying back, they are blooming away, a burst of sunshine amongst the decay. I am hopeless at growing flowering plants, I think they collude behind my back, but this waiting until it turns cold before flowering, whilst rather wonderful and cheery is also a little baffling. Perhaps I should just stick to edibles, they seem a little easier to master.

We have slowly found our groove with a rhythm gradually evolving and revealing itself as we find our feet with a new college timetable to work around. Cameron is totally settled into his new course, Alice is still trying to find her way. She is really missing being part of a group of friends, we are looking at ways to make that possible. She is not ready for too many new things, they feel just a little too much right now, the recent changes have not yet settled for her.

As we have transitioned into our Autumn rhythms, I have also been reflecting back on the Summer. It was a super busy one this year, maybe a little too full at times but I did love each and every one of the things we did. The heat, the sunshine, feel like a distant memory now.

My house was very neglected for a few months. I usually do cleaning and tidying as part of my morning rhythm, this was totally abandoned for most of the summer. The laundry was about the only thing that got regular attention, the kitchen surfaces stayed clean and I waved a cloth at the bathroom when things looked bad. I was pleased that I did not notice the dust bunnies having a merry party in plain sight. They were invisible until I started my morning clean again, I think they have mostly been moved on to new party locations.

Our summer days had a very different flow to them this year, we completely abandoned our structured learning time which we only usually stop if we are away or have guests. As we spent most of the summer doing one or the other it is unsurprising that the days when neither were happening there was none of that going on. On those rare days that we were at home without guests or a trip away to get ready for, we were busy just being. Resting. Doing whatever felt right for the day ahead, the hours slipping by so fast that it felt like breakfast was followed by tea. Learning still goes on all the time, structured learning time is not always visible in this house, only when it is requested.

There was a time when I used to worry about those days where you did whatever felt right. They felt wasteful as often they seemed to disappear in a flash of nothing. I had nothing to show for them, it has taken me years to realise that you don't need something to show every single day. Some days don't have measurable evidence of achievement, and you need those days too. They are an important part of the balance, not everything we do needs or indeed should be measurable. Those hidden achievements are the building blocks of life, the skills that give a foundation for life and are more important than knowing what 126x39 equals or the effect of the Romans on British society.

The summer is a time for spontaneity. It is so much easier to get out of the house in the summer, there is no requirement for organising clothing which can take as long as you might end up being outside, it has certainly felt like that at times, especially when the children were really little.

I have always thought that I am not very good at spontaneity, it is all too easy to get into a mindset about what spontaneity is. When we view it through the lens of other peoples life and what they get up to and the bits of their life they choose to share, it feels impossible to replicate in our own life. Unsurprising really. We have no ownership of it, it is like trying to fit a square peg in a round whole, it will just not fit. When I looked at what we had been doing during the summer this year I realised it was spontaneous, it was my spontaneity, our spontaneity. It is not quite a perfect fit more a work in progress.

I didn't need things to be organised well in advance. I said yes to many things at short notice. I abandoned all pretence at keeping the house clean and tidy. I had lovely days that evolved as they went along. I went to bed when I felt like it. I had long lie-ins. I woke really early and went for walks. We ate meals at random times of the day.

I loved it, but I know that I could not be like that all the time. I needed that space over the summer, the change, a break from the norms. I am loving getting back into my rhythms. I have welcomed back my mornings, filled with language learning, yoga, cleaning, breakfast, before my focused time with Alice or getting ready to go out depending on the day, like a long lost friend.

Autumn is my favourite season. I am totally ready for a slower pace. I need the rest after all that spontaneity and busyness!

Slowing down

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 20:10:00 +0000

It is the time of Autumn Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere, (for readers in the Southern Hemisphere you can read my post about the Spring Equinox here) that special day of the year when the daylight and darkness is the same all over the world because the sun is directly over the equator. It heralds the beginning of its journey south and where I live in the Northern hemisphere, we will be getting less and less sun over the coming weeks, our days will get shorter and our nights longer. It is the start of Autumn, the door way to Winter, a time for us to prepare for the change in the earth's energy.

The Colour of Autumn

The world is full of colour

Tis Autumn once again

And leaves of gold and crimson

Are lying in the lane

There are brown and yellow acorns

Berries and scarlet haws

Amber gorse and heather

Purple across the moors

Green apples in the orchard

Flushed by glowing sun

Mellow pears and brambles

Where coloured pheasants run.

If it is your thing a Root Meditation is a lovely way to feel connected to the Earth. Sit somewhere comfortable and close your eyes. Imagine there is a tree behind you, you are leaning on it, feel this tree at your back, firm and strong. Feel its energy, energy that is flowing through down into its roots. Now begin to feel your roots reaching down into the Earth spreading out like the roots of the tree. Feel those roots holding you firm. Feel the earth's energy flowing through you. Inhale the nourishment, absorb the clam. Breath in and breathe out. Feel your breath rising without any effort at all. The breath of life, like day and night, like the tides, like the seasons, in and out, in and out. All is in balance.

So lets look forward to the time of darkness and embrace it into our lives. Lets be kind to ourselves, give ourselves permission to rest and do less. Lets reclaim the balance within each of us which can get lost in the busyness of life in the warmer months. As the circle of the year turns we will be able to head into Spring in six months time, recharged and bursting with energy.

Whilst we are in this time of resting and recharging we can reflect on our achievements throughout those recent warmer months, look back and think about all those amazing things we have done however big or small. This is not a time to be starting big new projects but rather to think and plant seeds in our heads of where we would like to be, to go, to do in the future.

We can also use this time to let go of things, de-clutter your house and give away those things that are no longer of use to you. De-clutter your minds and let go of ideas or values which no longer serve you, that are troubling you or causing you pain, listen to and trust your inner voice for guidance and wisdom. Find a way that works for you to release them, maybe writing them down and burning them.

I hope you will move into Autumn with more strength, embracing rather than resisting the dark. I hope you will be kind and gentle to yourselves. I hope you can find the time each day or week to rest and be still to enable your body to recharge and reclaim any balance lost.

Falling down rabbit holes

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 20:37:00 +0000

Whilst my parents were staying with us in late August we went for a lovely walk up on the fell near our house. It is an area that is rich in history with many cairns, stone circles and evidence of settlements. We were trying to locate a roman road that was marked on the map and focused as I was on looking for this I failed to notice a large rabbit hole beneath my feet. It was deep enough that I went in nearly up to my knee, my ankle did not like the experience I think I probably pulled or sprained a muscle.

After a short rest I felt surprisingly ok and managed to walk for a least another hour before we stopped again for a drink and cake break. Whilst resting I checked on my foot and managed to make it painful for reasons that I cannot fathom, I guess I rubbed the effected muscle in the wrong way. By the time I got back to the car I was hobbling somewhat, driving home was rather painful. It was difficult to walk for 24 hours after which it was swollen but no longer painful, normal movement slowly returned.

Whilst I was away camping recently with Alice, walking back the tent in the dark I stepped on a slight slope my weakened ankle could not cope with and I managed to pull a different muscle. Luckily I was able to drive the next morning, getting home could have been interesting had I not been able to.

We are slowly heading towards the Autumn Equinox which for me marks the beginning of Autumn. As with all changes of the seasons the last weeks of the old season and the first few of the new one mark a transition period. We have started a new rhythm for the new season, a rhythm which is tinged with sadness.

Nine years ago when Alice reached the age when her peers started school education, regular readers here will know that she has never been to school, we were invited to be part of a group that we attended until March 2020 and COVID ended us meeting. It was a lovely group and a privilege to part of it all those years. The children that have attended that group have also changed over the years, there were two constant over the whole period Alice and her friend, the daughter of the mum who hosted the group.

She has been through a lot of changes over the past few years with friends choosing or having to go to school and friends moving away overseas. In May this year we received the news, with rather thoughtless timing two days before her birthday, that the same friend was applying to go to school to continue her education. We always knew this friend would go to school at some point, but we had thought this would be in two years time. She was the last remaining member of our lovely group who had not started school, so that group, which has been part of Alice's home education for so long, is no more too. This transition has been made so much harder for her because she has had absolutely no acknowledgment from her friend or her mum about how this change might feel for Alice and effects that change has for her. This has been hard for me to hold for her too. The reaction that Mum had to her telling another family also effected by this change has really saddened me as it left me with no doubt that they don't feel responsible for how their behaviour is effecting others or that she wanted to hear from me how that change might feel for us.

Dealing with lack of empathy from others is really hard, an added layer to an already challenging situation. Because this has happened to me with this family before I was prepared for it this time, I did not take it personally and was able to use my energies to support Alice rather then trying to work out why on earth anyone would think behaving in that way is ok.

Over the last week or so there has been a lot of noise in our house wafting through the wall from next door. Since our neighbour died last October the house has stood empty, it was emptied by the end of the year and put on the market to sell. It was very over priced and not liveable in, neglected by the landlord for the past twenty years they have owned it. The front door was locked using a padlock as it was so misshapen the normal locks did not work, every room in the house needs work doing on it to make it liveable in. We have been baffled that no has moved in since it had been purportedly sold in February/March time, so long ago that we cannot remember. It now has new owners who are rapidly working on it to make it habitable again. It seems the delay was over probate which confused us, it was inherited by two sisters when their mother died about five years ago, it seems that that was not sorted at the time. My husband and I are looking forward to having new neighbours especially as it will mean that the house is heated over the winter, we live in a terraced house which is wonderful when everyone has their heating on but as the house was empty last winter it made heating our house much harder, with the very large rise in our bills having the house occupied will make a real difference.

Whilst my husband and I are welcoming the changes next door, Alice is finding them hard. She has only ever known one neighbour, he was a constant for her next door, an extra grandparent who she was really fond of. She loved spending evenings with him when her dad was away, her brother at Scouts and I was out. They would spend hours chatting and doing jigsaws together. She would go to sleep at night listening to him playing the guitar through the wall, she started lessons last year inspired by him. It is too much change at once for her.

My ankle limited what I could do for a few days, it is still a little swollen and is still preventing me from doing some yoga poses weeks, thankfully walking is fine. Alice is navigating through the change of her friend being at school and all that holds for her. Having your feelings ignored is hard and has added an extra layer in an already difficult situation. She will be ok, she will get through this and it will help her build resilience to deal with similar situations in the future. I am really grateful to Alice for speaking her truth and telling me how having new neighbours feels for her. We don't all experience change in the same way and when we are able to speak honestly and openly we can find the support we need to navigate through this. I am naturally sad that we have not been able to do this with our friends.

We will be ok, with time.

Resting and Reflecting

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 19:52:00 +0000

I have been a little absent from here in the past few months, my sporadic posting in some part due to my busyness. My life has been much quieter and slower over the past couple of weeks. I read blogs and write posts in the evening, it is the time of day that is mine. When the evening arrives at the end of each day I have been reading blogs but the words have not been forming together in ways that I needed them to to bring a post together. My evenings have been full of knitting, of watching, of pausing, of rest. My head has been so full during my busy time now that that life has slowed the capacity to arrange words has taken a while to return.

The summer is a time of energy, the world around us is at is peak, nature is bursting with life where I live. We have not had the drought that other parts of my country is experiencing, it is green and lush where I live, the occasional rain that has fallen nourishing the earth and all that grows. It is a time of being busy, of making the most of the warm temperatures, of being outside soaking up the valuable vitamin D that the sun provides us with, before the temperatures turn cooler and we hibernate inside around our fires or whatever provides us with warmth during the colder months. As an introvert who loves quiet I find summer a difficult time of year.

The weather has been really warm, it is lovely to not have to wrap myself up in endless layers each time I leave the house. We have not had such a reliably warm summer for a few years here. There is so much to love about the summer but it is not a time of year that I can completely embrace just yet. It is not that I feel like a fish out of water it is more akin to that feeling when you are wearing an item of clothing which doesn't quite fit and despite your best efforts you cannot seem to make the adjustments so that it is a completely comfortable. All that said we have had some wonderful adventures.

Way back in July we went away camping during a very hot period, a large tree next to our tent bought some welcome shade and coolness to our living quarters. We are so lucky to have such beautiful countryside on our doorstep, we travelled a couple of hours from home along winding slow roads to reach this wonderful spot. We walked miles. In an effort to reduce our driving whilst away we took our bikes with us and used them to reach the areas we wanted to walk in, a good move as there were few parking spots which were always full as we cycled, somewhat smugly, passed them. We found places to lock our bikes up before heading into the hills or round lakes for long walks, interspersed with swims to cool ourselves down in the heat. It was good to spend this time just the four of us, chatting and enjoying each others company. As the children get older these times feel so much more precious, moments to treasure as we all spend more and more time doing our own things.

We were home for one day from that adventure before heading out to the next one, this time it was to drop Cameron for his D of E Expedition whilst Alice and I were supervising remotely. I usually assess D of E expeditions but am, quite rightly, not allowed to do this when my own child is in the group. I swopped roles and supervised his group, which involved us being in the area should we be needed if a problem arose. We camped too although it was cooler and wetter for these four days. It was a pottering time, with shorter walks which were no less interesting. It was lovely to spend so much time with Alice, we spent lots of time in our tent chatting, playing games and reading many words from the chapter book I am reading to her at the moment. We got ourselves into a lovely rhythm.

The next adventure, a couple of weeks later, was for Alice and Cameron. They headed out for an international scout camp which was held a few miles down the road from us. The,y along with 4,000 other Scouts and Explorers, enjoyed a week of activities both on and off site from the venue they were using. I was hoping to have a relaxing week at home mostly by myself as my husband was also away for three days that week too. Sadly one of the leaders did not leave me with much confidence in her ability to care for my children and those in the rest of the group, so it was not relaxing experience I had hoped for. They enjoyed themselves in the main, Cameron felt that he was treated like a ten year old and as he is nearly eighteen this was somewhat waring for him. The lack of trust and respect by the adults of the young people in their care has been reported back to those who can implement further training.

We have enjoyed time with both sets of grandparents, time, which now that Cameron is at college, is restricted to college holiday time so it added to an already busy summer. Time with them has always been arranged throughout the year, college holidays being new to us we need to get better at using this time more wisely so we don't end up filling the days up completely. I have lost my ability to see the bigger picture too, a skill I had honed very well before lockdowns came to our shores. I have already blocked out a few weekends in the coming months to ensure that we do not get ourselves too busy in the coming months which are already looking rather full. They will be our pausing time, quiet time at home pottering and resting which is so important to us.

Whilst my parents were staying with us Cameron got his results from his course and exams. He was delighted with them, his hard work over the year paid off, he passed them all including a Distinction in his Art Diploma (Film and Photography) which was higher than he had been predicted. He had been working at upper merit all year and did not think he would gain this level of mark, we are so proud of him. This means that he has easily gained a place on the next level Art Diploma which he starts next week, he is both nervous and excited. I was really nervous when he went into college to get his results, it has felt like I have been examined as well as him, my support of his education over twelve years he was home educated under the microscope. He has just applied for a part time job, having given up his village paper round of four years back in April so that he could focus on his final course project and his exams. I hope he can find something to give him a small income whilst he is at college. It was strange supporting him through the application process, it is years since I have written a CV or applied for a job. Although I do have two very part time jobs, both of which I have started in the last couple of years, I did not need to apply for either of them.

Over the past week I have felt things shifting, as the nights draw in, the temperatures steadily dropping especially at the beginning and end of the day we are heading slowly towards the start of Autumn, my favourite season. After the busyness of the summer I am ready to head into a period of transition to hibernation over the Winter. I wanted to have a summer which was full of wonderful adventures after what has felt like a long period of not being able to do that, I have had that this summer but I don't think I would do quite so much again. It has felt a little too busy for me with not quite enough pausing in between for rest before the next thing. This past week has seen that shift too of having a long enough pause that has enabled me to feel rested and ready for the next thing which is another four days of camping from Saturday. A D of E Expedition again, this time I am assessing. When we return Cameron will have started his new course and it will be time to start planning a rhythm for Alice as all her groups start up again. I feel ready for that now.

A different perspective

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:57:00 +0000

I mentioned in a recent post about a wonderful exhibition that we visited with some friends. I had read about it on a blog and was amazed, and delighted, that it was coming to a place near us as we live in a quiet rural area. It looked amazing in the photos but it was of course nothing compared to seeing it in real life. It is always hard to get a sense of scale in photos of places and things you have never seen, that is not a criticism but an observation. I therefore had no idea what to expect when we walked through the door of the host venue. It was one of those wow moments, we had all been chatting amongst our wee group and as we stepped over that threshold we all stopped talking and stood completely still.

Suspended from the high ceiling and slowly rotating round was a scale replica of our beautiful planet. A very blue planet, the BBC series with this name was apt. We read about the percentage of our planet that is water (around 70%) and that is very hard to visualise, the imagery of this exhibition made it very obvious. There is a lot of sea.

I remember investigating sea voyages of long ago with Cameron, of reading about trips that would take years, of those earlier sailors vying, during the age of exploration, to be first to circumnavigate the world. It is hard to imagine the shear scale of those early attempts and later achievements when they are written on the pages of a book, looking up at this slowly revolving globe it was so much easier to. The distances are unbelievable in some parts of the ocean, those journeys seemed all the more remarkable as I stood there and soaked it all in.

I am grateful to Cameron who spent hours as a younger child reading atlases and maps like other children would read books, he taught me so much about the countries that fill the landmass of our planet. I could work out where most of them are. We could see how remote the island their dad spent two years of his childhood living on, and why it took six months to get there by boat from the UK.

As I stood there near that entrance, later in a raised viewing gallery and wandering around the building watching that globe slowly revolving, it pulled you in and made you stop and pause. It is hard when our lives revolve around such a very very small part of the whole to think about the impact our actions have on the planet. Whilst what I was viewing was a work of art, a replica, it drew you into its beauty and majesty in ways that are impossible in every day life in our small corners of the world. It made me stop and think about my actions and the impact they could be having on the whole planet we live on.

I have always tried to tread lightly, to, as a family, live mindful of our impact but sometimes that can get a little when we get swept along by possibilities. It is also all too easy to become disillusioned when we feel like we are doing our best and we still read about wildfires, flash flooding and drought taking place on the doorstep. The impact of which ripples out to effect agriculture, water supplies, not to mention the ecosystems themselves. We hear about industries, companies, corporations who are held up as examples of malpractice, who should be doing more. Those industries, companies and corporations are run by humans, humans who make decisions that effect their lives as much as anyone else's, humans who are feeling the impact as everyone else is, or are they? Am I being naive to think that we really are all in this together and if you are incredibly wealthy or living in a place which is experiencing little climatic change (if such a place still exists) then does it feel like business as normal to you?

It is very hard for us to really feel and experience the effect that our decision make on the planet as a whole. Our decision to fly in an aeroplane we know will discharge pollutants into the atmosphere, pollutants that are invisible and therefore hard to see the effect of. When we buy an item of clothing we have no idea from the labels on that item what processes the item has been through to the point it is ready for sale, it may have travelled many miles not just as a finished item but as part of its manufacture too. It is very hard to find this information and about many of the items for sale both in shops and online, including our food. There is is also the impact of those processes to consider. It can all become very overwhelming, it is easier to ignore it.

Like anything in the news these days I have to ensure that I don't get swallowed up in the doom and gloom of it all. It is hard to listen to the news that the harvests may fail this year due to drought particularly when prices for so many things including food are going up at a rapid rate. It is so hard to reframe that in ways that can lead us to positive action. I think that devoting more time to my garden to ensure that I have a good supply of my own veggies would be a good start. I have pretty much stopped engaging with legacy media, preferring to get my news from alternative outlets one of these is podcasts, I actively seek out those that focus on climate issues, the sort that get me thinking without the doom and gloom. I am currently listen to Famerama, Wardrobe Crisis, Drilled, Hot Take and the latest one I have found Local Zero. If you listen to any others I would love to know about them, please do let me know in the comments below.

I very much hope that our beautiful blue planet continues to be habitable for many generations to come.

Busy (Gently) Doing

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 20:45:00 +0000

It's nearly a month since I last showed up here. I naively thought that once I had been on my back to back camping trips then I would be able to return here as normal but that wasn't to be. I am sorry I didn't come a visiting for a while, I am slowly catching up with you all and your news.

I wrote in my last post that June was full to the brim and I was happy it was all over now, looking back that was a little premature. My life has finally slowed down to a very much less full to the brim feeling, but July was even more full than June. The gentle part for me became about paring back my life to what was coming up next, focusing on that and not thinking about much else. Spaces like this were quietly shelved along with most of the housework, tending the garden apart from a bit of watering when things were looking dry and anything else that I love to do when time allows for that.

The month started with a visit to a wonderful exhibition, I intend to write a post reflecting on that but I offer you one photo for now and a huge thank you to Ellie, an incredibly talented and creative blogger, who blogs at Feltabulous who mentioned that she had visited this exhibition when it was near to her. I thought that living in the rural North West of my country that it would not come anywhere near me so was amazed when I looked it up to find it was coming to where some dear friends live. We visited together and all thoroughly enjoyed it, you can find out if it is coming near to you or somewhere you are visiting here.

We had a wonderful few days camping as a family. It coincided with a heat wave with temperatures that were high for us Northerners (folks who live in the North of England are sometimes referred to as Northerners) who are used to cooler summers, it was exhausting doing anything. I feel for all of you that live with those temperatures day in and day out all summer. It only lasted a few days for us. We walked many steps, swam in many rivers and a very deep lake, we rode bikes, a steam train and had a generally marvellous time. We had the campsite to ourselves after the first night, sharing the place with the sheep and two traffic cones. We were only a two hour drive from home in the same county as we live, we are so lucky that we do not have to go far to find a beautiful quiet spot. I came home feeling totally nourished and relaxed.

Cameron, Alice and I barely unpacked from that trip as we had a day and a bit at home before we had to all go out again to support Cameron and his group for their D of E Expedition. They had very different weather than the previous week, a lot more rain and cooler temperatures. Whilst I think they would have preferred not have had quite so much rain they were glad it was cooler. They walked 76km/47 miles over four days carrying all they needed for a camping expedition in their rucksacks, they are not allowed to buy any provisions on the way. They were also unaccompanied by adults just the five young people learning how to take care of themselves and others. They sauntered into the car park at the end looking totally relaxed and not at all exhausted having walked such an incredible distance carrying so much. Alice and I stayed in the area they were walking through, we didn't meet with the group at all but were nearby in case they needed our assistance in any way. We too were camping, the first night we spent on a sheep farm where we were serenaded by noisy sheep for most of the night. We went on several short walks exploring new to us places. We visited a village where friends used to live, they departed for a new life in Ireland about four years ago it was very strange to be back there without visiting them. We had hoped to visit a wonderful antique shop and a lovely yarn shop but were very disappointed that they were both gone. We had a lovely walk instead.

We arrived home late from our second camp and had arranged to have tea at our house with some other friends who moved away from the area and were up visiting, they were due to go home the following day. We had a lovely fish and chip tea from the takeaway in our village. I ignored the car full of stuff until the following morning.

Unpacking and putting away got mixed up in preparing for an all day fundraiser. In my head I was ready for this event but in actuality I was far from that. I spent three long days finishing off the many bits I had mostly finished but not quite. I ended up with thirteen knitted cloths, eight needle cases with embroidery on the front and fifty one beeswax wraps that were made into bundles of threes for selling, along with the felted hearts we had made for a previous event, ten aloe vera plants, thirty cup cakes baked by Alice and a box of prizes for a tombola, at about midnight the night before we were ready. It was a lot of work, a very long day but completely worth it, after taking out expenses of about £40 we made just over £800 so a worthwhile effort, we have now raised nearly three quarters of the money and have another year to raise a little more than the final quarter so I think we are highly likely to do that!

I still could not put my feet up as the following day I had headed out early with Alice in tow to the first day of a two day first aid course, she stayed with a friend for duration of my course. It was great fun and the best one I have been on in all the years I have held a first aid certificate. I was tired by the end of it and looking forward to finally being able to have some more restful days. Life has now slowed completely. There is no more having to focus entirely on the next event which I am glad of. I used to be good at looking at the bigger picture and being able to factor in preparation time for things, it would seem I have become a little rusty during the past couple of years of life being a little different. The coming weeks include extended family time which we are all looking forward to, I know that in the blink of an eye Cameron will be back at college and Alice back at all her groups but for now we are all enjoying each others company at home.

Busy (Gently) Doing

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 21:51:00 +0000

I am happy to report that our dishwasher is finally fixed. I am not entirely sure what solved the problem in the end, I am just happy to have it back in the kitchen and working; it sat in the garage, in pieces, for weeks whilst it was being fixed. I missed it.

It has been another month filled to the brim, some days it was about prioritising the most urgent of urgent things, I am happy that that is all over now. I have, it would seem, forgotten about planning my life to ensure that things are not too close together, allowing time for organising and sorting time things has been forgotten too. I had got rather good at that prior to the first lockdown but it would seem that skill has been neglected for too long and has become a little rusty. I managed to double book myself for one evening as I failed to put a meeting in my diary which had been planned months before. I fitted them both in but not without spending considerable time re-arranging the times to make that work. It was an extra I could have done without. It is all too easy to drop a ball when you are busy.

I have been looking at the coming weeks which are the summer school holidays here in the UK, for us this means that several of the things that we attend are paused and we change over to a more fluid, go with the flow rhythm. I had convinced myself we were not that busy, that is not quite the case, we do not have a single, completely free, weekend until 10/11 September that has been blocked out to keep free. The weekdays are not jam packed but there is little space for much else. I am really looking forward to three days at home completely alone when everyone else is away.

It seems like weeks ago now but we started June with a long weekend for the Platinum jubilee, husband was home for two extra days. Beacons were lit across the country all at the same time, one was within walking distance of our house so we wandered up there. It rained, very hard, whilst we were walking up the hill to the Beacon we got rather soaked. When the Beacon was lit it was dry, we used the warmth of the fire to dry out a bit before walking home in another rain shower!

We have spent some wonderful hours with friends, a long bike ride over hills and lanes not far from our house, a wild swim, my first of the year in a local lake, visitors from the USA who moved away eight years ago and we have stayed in touch with. We spent a lovely afternoon at a local place, revisiting memories of the hours spent there together when they lived in the UK, I love that each time they come over we pick up from where we left off despite the long gap in visits.

There has been a lot of fundraising going on, I am ready for a pause but, with it being the summer and living in a tourist area, that is not going to happen any time soon. We are over half way through now so we might actually achieve our target by the end of the year which would be rather marvellous. We have had a second hand book sale and pop up cafe, a have a go Archery day, a garage sale and a BBQ. We were supposed to be hosting a Curry night and Quiz in our village but two weeks before the date we did not have a single booking so we pulled the plug on that one, I don't think my village is into curry. Luckily the hall we had booked did not charge us despite our cancelling. I have to say I was quite relieved, organising large events is great as it raises lots of money but, it is exhausting doing it on top of everything else going on. I have become a master at baking four cakes simultaneously, I am using the same four cakes each time baking is needed and now have a good supply of each in my freezer. I just need to get better at remembering to take them out of the freezer in good time!

Cameron has been home with us full time for weeks now, Alice and I are enjoying this whilst it lasts. I have taken him out with a friend to go mountain biking, a few times, Alice and I have been enjoying walking in the woods whilst they are riding. He came to a home ed group with us a couple of times which felt like old times again. His course and exam results will be out in August, we are hoping that they will be good enough for him to earn a place on the next level course that starts in September.

My Explorer Scout unit has had a busy programme, we had a fun evening with a local outdoor bowling club who hosted some of us to have a go. I could not even get my bowling ball, the bowl, to the end of the green and could not roll the bowl as everyone else seemed to be doing with ease until someone pointed out that the ball I was using was far too big from my hands which admittedly are on the small side. Once I changed bowls I was all set and rather enjoyed the last few matches we played. We have had two evenings with other local units, a wide game in the woods and a rounders match and BBQ. I assessed a small group for their Bronze D of E Expedition, Cameron and his group have been sorting themselves out for their Gold D of E Expedition which is taking place in a week or so. Husband and I led a day of canoeing training for some other leaders in our area, it was a great day out on a local lake.

Despite the busyness I have managed time for resting too. I have continued to have afternoon naps which have been a life saver. The pause and recharging an absolute necessity to keep everything moving along. I have been going to bed earlier too and spent more time reading. I managed to finish reading three books in a month which is unheard of for me, I had no book to read for a few days until I manage to borrow a couple from a friends shelves, the best kind of library.

We are off as a family camping this weekend for a few days, with a day at home following by a second camping trip to support Cameron and his group whilst they do their D of E Expedition. I am rather looking forward to the simple life of camping without the clutter of life at home. I apologise in advance if I don't come visiting for a while and if you comment, it will not be lost in the ether of the internet it will just be waiting patiently for me to approve it. There is patchy reception where we are planning on camping, normal service will be resumed soon after.

A Peek into my Day

noreply@blogger.com (sustainablemum) — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 23:00:00 +0000

Outside my window it is overcast, the sky is heavy, the cows are lying down suggesting that the rain forecasted is most likely to fall some time soon. I don't mind a bit of rain at this time of year as it saves me having to water my garden and ensures our water butts are kept full for those times when watering is needed.

Around my house it is moderately tidy. I had a bit of a purge on the tidying front today, I even got the hoover out to clear the particularly bad corners, I don't have much carpet in the house so it rarely makes an appearance. It is amazing how much time we spend moving things, from one place in the house to another, which is all that tidying is really, isn't it?

We have had two big fundraising events this month and have another four next month I am thankful for the generosity of everyone that is supporting us, we are already passed the halfway mark.

I finally got my jumper knitting out of its bag where it had been slumbering, ignored by my fundraising knitting, I am creating dishcloths still, I now have fifteen, but the jumper now has a complete body and half an arm. Hopefully it will be ready for the Autumn!

We are doing a garage sale fundraiser on our drive this weekend and I am hoping the weather is dry and folks wander down to our end of the village.

Life is pretty full at the moment and I am thinking about a lot of different things, I am just about managing to juggle everything to keep things ticking along, only occasionally dropping a ball.

Quiet and still time, busy resting is still a feature despite my busyness I am loving this time even when it amounts to a few moments here and there on some days. The intention is always there.

In my kitchen I have a tin full of leftover unsold cake from last weekend's fundraising efforts, my comfrey salve continues to steep, my sourdough keeps doing its thing, I currently have a leaven bubbling away ready for making pizza dough for tomorrow nights tea, it is all very tidy, I am finding I need to keep the kitchen like this when I am busy, I find it easier to keep on top of things.

Later I am going to take Alice to her home ed gymnastics group, we will do a bit of supermarket shopping on the way. We have perfected the art of whizzing around the supermarket in twenty minutes, I buy as little as possible in there, preferring instead to support our local independent shops for most of my food shopping. We stick to the list, which works most of the time until you forget to put something crucial on the list!

I was listening to an interesting interview on a Podcast this morning, the interviewee studied Economics at university 30 years and mentioned that the courses have changed little at his alma mater and many other similar institutions, the natural world, the biosphere, the environment is still not included in the curriculum, I am pondering that and its ripple effect. Is it any wonder we have so many resistant to making changes to support the climate.

I have noted the times of the new moons in my diary, and I am remembering, the importance of being in tune with the lunar cycle, to make sure that the seven days surrounding a new moon need to be kept as quiet as possible. I have realised this year that around that time I need to be quieter and have more stillness in my life, otherwise I become too exhausted.

I have read a lot, for me, this past month at the moment, I am reading Mothers of Invention by Katrine Marçel. You can listen to an interview with the author here, it inspired me to buy the book. I have also read Devotion by Hannah Kent, my third book by this author, I have loved them all, and Land by Simon Winchester who went to school with my Dad.

I was on the receiving end of rude and unkind words last week, I am wondering why they wrote them. I think they must be hurting themselves in some way and have tried to give that hurt to me, I am unable to receive it as it will not help either of us. I am unable to continue working with them, as they do not think there is anything wrong with the words they used, I am fortunate that I am able to collaborate with someone else.

Much as it is hard to deal with situations like the one I mentioned above I am learning that it is possible to find a way through the pain they cause me by not taking it personally and recognise that the other person is the one that is hurting and I cannot help with that unless they recognise it in themselves.

I am looking forward to the end of July when I am hoping my life will quieten down a little. My diary is looking wonderfully empty and I am going to work hard to keep it like that, I am wanting a little more spontaneity in my life and there does not seem to be any room for that at the moment.

I am wearing navy leggings, a short pink skirt, a navy linen top, navy trainer socks with white spots and a hand knit pale pink jumper, it is cooler again here today so the socks and jumpers are back out.

Every weekday morning as I potter through the house doing my daily housework I am listening to whatever Podcast takes my fancy. I love that you can create your own radio station, I used to be an avid BBC Radio 4 listener but I cannot remember the last time I switched the radio on. I would not be without my Podcasts now.

I heard some wonderful words on a Podcast recently, my favourite quote for the moment, 'the thing that screws us up the most is the picture of how it is supposed to be, what if we deleted that, the idea of that and we just looked at what is and found it to be enough'.

A Peek into my Day