Weekly round up… bumper 2 week edition..

Posted on March 16, 2018 by Kath
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It’s been 8 years, 8 years but this year. I am going back to the land my soul loves. More below…

It’s Friday morning, the sermon for Sunday morning is mostly done and oddly seems to make sense, the house is quiet and calm with the small whirlwinds at their school for a while. Belle and Sebastian are bringing music to my ears and I’m finding myself in the mood for one of these weekly round up things.

I’m sure March had just begun last time I wrote one of these, it seems a little ridiculous that it could now be the middle of March, time is doing that crazy fast thing again, and, to quote the wonderful Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you’ll miss it…” Quite. (does anyone know who Ferris Bueller is anymore? Bueller, Bueller, Anyone?)

Ahem.
So, lets stop and look around…

The last two weeks have been very small and slow. I’ve been sick, sicker than I’ve been in a while, with a horrible virus/flu thing that is taking a while to shift. Amazingly I didn’t have to just push through, amazingly because I’m really not sure I could have done this time. The lovely Husbandface and friends came to the rescue, sorting out the school run on a couple of days and generally giving me the time I needed to lie in bed staring at Friends, wondering how it is 14 years since they finished being on our screen all the time.

Sickness makes everything small and quiet. I haven’t seen many people, son2 has also been ill so we’ve watched endless rounds of Puffin Rock (lovely for the Norn Irish accents all over the place). That’s pretty much it for the week to be honest. Most of life has been put on hold. I’ve been fairly ok with that, this term has felt like a bit of a slow adjustment to life in our new normal and being sick, having time to rest and get better is part of the deal.

Counselling has been pretty awesome in helping me process much of the stuff of my life, each week I feel like we sort out a different cupboard in my head, take the bits and pieces out, look at them together and then put them back, neater and with less rubbish around them. This round is coming to an end in a couple of weeks and I feel pretty good about that, glad of the things I’ve been able to realise about myself and my approach to life and hopeful about having better tools to live life well with. I think I come away with a gentle realisation that I’ll never be ‘sorted’ out but that’s ok.

I think my greater ease with myself, who I am and what I am like is feeding into all sorts of areas of life, and maybe that’s why no sermon grumps this time around… Or maybe it’s a fluke. Or … Anyways. Whatever the reason is, I am grateful for change and a sense of peace with who I am right now.

Being sick helped me plan our, slightly scaled down, summer adventures this year. With Husbandface rather rudely getting an amazing job he loves which isn’t teaching comes a decrease in holiday times. I am sad. But happy about the non exhausted husbandface who has fun colleagues and work that doesn’t destroy his body. It’s a mix of emotions. Anyway. He does, obviously, get some holiday time and we are using that to head to the Lakes and Northern Ireland in a VW campervan, pretty much the opposite of the beast we hired last year, but hopefully good for the tiny small winding passes in the Lake District.

I can’t wait. I haven’t properly been back to the Lakes for about 8 years. Writing that makes me sad. All through my 20s I would visit the Lakes about 2-3 times a year. Some might say that’s overkill but it is a precious and amazing place. I’ve stayed away because of various things, not really having time in the first couple of years of marriage and then feeling like I had no idea how to relate to the place with small people in tow. I might just have stared at the mountains and cried (in a bad way, rather than in the good way I do whenever I go there). This year I turn 40. It feels like a good year to go back and see how family holiday and adventure works there, to give the boys chance to fall in love with the hills and lakes, to visit my valley around Buttermere. I feel in so many ways, over the last few months, that I’m coming back to life, feeling daily more and more like Kath again after 5 intense years of being a carer for small people and then my lovely husbandface. Going back to the Lakes will hopefully be another step on that road to enjoying the stuff which I love and brings me alive. We are also hopping across the Irish sea to see lovely family and see more pretty mountains as my sister and father in law live near the Mournes. Ah. Happy Happy Days.

With that all booked the call is to live well now, to look to the couple of weeks in front of me and to remember that it is Easter soon. Lent has passed me by this year and I’m starting to realise that I really don’t want Easter to pass us by as a family. Easter is rooted deep in my soul, the rhythm beats strong,  from the crowds of Palm Sunday, the upper room, a dark dark painful wrestle in a garden at night, the sadness of Good Friday, the quiet despair of Saturday and then to the joy that Sunday came. I love drawing away from the eggs, chocolate and hot cross buns (apart from when consuming them) and  looking to the reality of what Easter points us to.

It’s the story that I can’t get away from, the certain stuff in a world of grey nuance, the bit of my faith that feels entirely non negotiable. Everything else seems so uncertain these days but Easter brings me back to the wonder of a cup, a cross and an empty tomb. It’s the story that has followed me since I was small and I pray will lead me until I am old and grey. It’s the centre of all I hold dear and it’s the stuff of hope in this world. Resurrection will come, death has been defeated, Jesus will come again, forgiveness is real and possible, guilt and shame can be taken away, I can be who I was made to be. I can love freely, widely and expansively.

So yes, once this sermon has been done, I’m going to start musing on helpful ways to celebrate Easter, and book in some baby sitters so we can enjoy some of the brilliant ways our church helps us do that in a passover meal and a Good Friday evening reflection.

View noted and recorded.

How have your last two weeks been?

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Weekly round up. The snow edition.

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Kath

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It’s been a weird old week around these parts. A fairly up and down week, and mostly a cold one.

We kicked off the weekend in style by enjoying a freezing cold beach picnic. The adventure was declared a success and gave us all a thirst for more outdoor fun. The next day the outdoor fun was met with tears and wailing by the small ones but 1 out of 2 ain’t bad for weekend adventure joy…

The snow that swept in on Monday night altered all my plans for the week and left me in a bit of a spin. I’m not so good with changes in routine. We enjoyed our first snow day together on Tuesday, we made snow angels, delighted in the novelty of it all and saw friends. Even so by the end of the day angry shouty lady had made a return. I’m not so proud of my behaviour as the day wore on. I was deeply, deeply thankful that we live in a world of grace, of the unconditional love of the Maker and that forgiveness is needed and real.

Wednesday’s sunshine brought out light in my soul and I delighted in new starts, blue sky, pretty walks on the downs and sleep. Phew. Thursday brought another dip as both boys were once more off from school and nursery. The grey gloom of the day didn’t help. The lack of ability to get out and enjoy the outdoors due to icy winds, below freezing temperatures and a smallest who was unimpressed with the cold by now, made me feel a little trapped. The lovely friend who invited us round for the morning did help. The day felt much more manageable and less cut off as a result. Still. By the very end of the day we were once more at logger heads and the return of the husbandface was very welcome. This morning I’m back on the hoorah for grace up of the roller coaster having enjoyed a long stomp over the hills around the back of our house. Cabin fever has been averted for a while.

Up and down, up and down swing my emotions.

In the midst of this week I’ve also despaired at the glut of information available to us. Douglas Coupland’s book ‘Bit Rot’ is still swirling around my head and some of his comments that we have the world’s knowledge available to us within seconds, via the internet, have been haunting me. I don’t know what to do with all that knowledge, it seems that it paralyses rather than sets us free. If I have a question about parenting, how to eat healthily, an aspect of my faith, looking after a pet, hiring a camper van or even the weather I am met with a wealth of conflicting information. There is no helpful way to deal with the vast amount of stuff that all claims to be well researched and the right way to do things. I am overwhelmed by the whole thing and wishing to be isolated on a small island with no internet. I know there are good and brilliant things about the internet but right now I just feel pressurised and paralysed by all this information that there is no consensus on how to process. Does anyone have any wisdom on this? Any idea how to deal with the flood?

In better news my brain has been blown by a distilled quote from John Swinton, a mental health theologian who said something along the lines that the essentials of being human is caring for others and being cared for by others.

To see being cared for as an essential part of being human strikes me as insanely wonderful. It means that we don’t have to be strong to be human, we don’t have to have it all together, that people who spend their lives caring for others are no more human than the people they are caring for.

This idea gives dignity to us all, whatever state we are in, whether stuck in bed unable to move or able to pour our energies into sustaining others. It also means that it is utterly good and human to be looked after, to be helped, to receive care. As someone who has received so much recently I find this so freeing. I don’t have to pay it back to regain my worth as a human. Part of being human is to receive.

For those of us who believe in a God of grace who has poured themselves out for us this is incredible news. We don’t have to work to earn our worth, part of us reflecting the divine is receiving from the divine. We are recipients of grace, unending love, forgiveness.  We bend that out to others but we also receive it from others. We are just as human if we spend all of our life receiving.  That I am so bowled over by this makes me think that I have imbibed a world view that says the people who are doing the caring have more worth and value than those being cared for. Putting it that starkly horrifies me and I want to say sorry. I feel so freed by this view of what it means to be human. So freed.

So there we go, it has been a week of ups and downs.

How’s about you?

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Thrifty Outdoor Adventures pt1.

Posted on February 24, 2018 by Kath

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Rather ambitiously I want to start a series of posts documenting our search for fairly cheap adventures outdoors. I am trying to curb my cravings for a campervan. There are SO many more ways to explore the outdoors than in a campervan (to some that might be blindingly obvious but my head is kinda strange at times). We also want our boys to grow up loving the outdoors, I figure as much exposure as possible in as fun a way as possible will help. This week I feel like I’ve come out of the gloom of winter and that although it’s freezing out there we need to start being more intentional about getting outside.

Today we kicked off the adventures by heading to Seven Sisters Country Park and a walk down to the beach at Cuckmere Haven. I wasn’t sure whether the extreme cold or the extreme moods of son2 in his 3 year old grumps would bear this out as a wise choice but we took the plunge anyway. It was a delightful success, here are some of the ways we tried to make it as fun and manageable as possible:

Getting prepared.
We decided that instead of just dragging the boys (aged 5 and 3) out of the door that we would give them as much involvement in this endeavour as possible.  All week I’ve been dropping in hints of what we would do on Saturday and asking son1 for his advice and input. We are reading Swallows and Amazons to Son1 at the moment so any mention of exploring is a winner in his book.

Embrace a good list.
We wrote a list of things we would need to pack for our picnic, healthy and slightly less healthy. Son1 had lots of ownership over what went on the list which made him super excited about it all, we also promised the joys of cocktail sausages and pork pies, along with some super healthy wraps, cut up pepper sticks and some fruit.

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Food is your friend.
I made flapjacks (“NOT YUCKY ONES MUMMY” Advice which I took to mean put loads of sugar and butter in them) these were very useful in son2 surviving the whole hike to the sea and back. He’s happy as long as there is constant food available.

Did I mention lists?
Son1 loves a list and so before we headed out Husbandface and the boys made a spotting list of things we might find to tick off as we went along. I think we found pretty much everything on the list (except Swans, clearly it wasn’t the weather for Swans…)

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Go at their speed.
We went at their snail like pace and enjoyed the scenery. I think I sometimes forget their legs are uber small, I get easily frustrated that we aren’t fast or that it doesn’t feel like enough exercise. Thankfully I had sated my desire for endorphins the previous two days and so could enjoy a slower pace to life today.

Make it fun.
I recommend getting hold of a brilliant person like my lovely husbandface who can raise the joy when icey cold wind is blowing in your face on the way back and it all gets a bit too much. Son2 saw a brief bit of shoulder action but was persuaded back into walking with more flapjack, a quick rest and some fun chasing of each others shadows. Constant encouragement and i-spy also made the walk back from the beach easier.

All in all I think it was a great success, we made the most of a beautiful cold sunny day, we ate outside, we had fun, son2 only had one teeny tiny moment of being on the edge and we walked just over 2 miles with them. Now to think about where we can get outside next week.

And the thriftyness?
We spent £3 on parking and used some of our petrol in the car. We had enough cake and hot chocolate in a flask to make the lure of the tea shop seem less tempting and even the boys could see that ice cream on a day like today might be a bit mad.

Part 1. It’s. A. Win.

(sorry, watching too much swashbuckle as we warm up back at home…)

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Weekly roundup (either a day early or 6 days late.. you work it out..)

Posted on February 22, 2018 by Kath

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On Sunday my lovely mother send me a text saying: “Where’s your weekly reflection???”

So, for her and anyone else who has come to enjoy these processing thoughts here we go.

To be honest the weekly reflection last week would have been a slightly miserable affair. I haven’t been in the best of places mentally or physically over the last couple of weeks. Today the sun is shining and I am drunk on endorphins and the blissful peace of an hours walk on the downs. Today everything feels ok again. Last week, not so much.

On one level we had a delightful half term, friends came to stay and I felt like we were all on holiday together in our house. We did fun things, saw other friends and generally enjoyed being able to drink tea together in person. Later in the week the boys and I hung out, enjoyed sunshine in the park with friends, went to the theatre and saw a rather surreal play about a boy and a penguin, we scooted around the block in the sunshine and generally loved being with each other. The husbandface and I also managed a couple of evenings with friends playing Settlers and rejoicing in being able to be sociable again.

On a whole other level I could feel my body complaining at the pace, at the full on world of Son2 who was going through a whole heap of insanity in the first half of the week. I could feel the exhaustion, which had started the week before, weighing down my soul like a thick heavy blanket. It was hard to breathe. On the gloriously sunny Saturday last weekend I went for a run and hit the wall. I staggered around my normal route and then spent the afternoon in bed, occasionally wandering downstairs and crying a bit. Wonderfully husbandface is well enough to deal with exhausted crying Kath again (which, lets face it is probably why I sank so hard, another stage of my body believing we are in a new world). Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week I took things slow again. Me and the smallest watched all the TV in the world on Monday and sat doing puzzles as we edged towards bedtime.

The next few days were also full of slow, of letting my body rest and riding out the storm. I think I probably had some kind of virus as I haven’t felt that bad physically for a while. The black dog lurked and did it’s best to make me believe all was hopeless. I sat with my tangled thoughts in my counsellors room and was at least able to acknowledge that soon the sun would come out. I spent two days staring longingly at camper vans on the internet and wishing this now away.

Who knows, maybe it was the perfect storm of February blues, which I have every year, the exhaustion of the last couple of years catching up with me again, the adjustment to this new world still taking place in my head and a virus.

Whatever it was I am still here. The sun did come out.

I am incredibly grateful to friends who have sent gifts, messages of love or arrived on my doorstep with cookies and meals. I feel very loved and taken care of right now. I am grateful.

My counsellor is always asking me to figure out what I need. I find it incredibly hard to work that out most of the time. However. Yesterday I dragged my head back to now, to the today I have rather than the mythical future I don’t have, which seems to require money to enjoy well. I started to realise that I need to plan in fun and also make the most of where we are in life right now. We can’t do some stuff that I want to do (pretty glamping and camper van fun) BUT we can enjoy the amazing gifts we have been given.

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I went for a walk on the Downs in the sunny sunshine this morning because my soul functions so much better outdoors. It was good to remember that. It was good to remember that the key to most of life is gratitude. Gratitude brings me into the NOW, being thankful brings me to the present because I am thankful for things right now. I know this thankfulness helping isn’t a new thought but I’m thankful (ha) that I have been reminded of it again.

Thankfulness brings me to the now and brings me to the One I am thankful to. As I walked for an hour or so up and down hills I got drunk on the beauty around me, the quiet stillness walking brings and the wonder of the Maker of all this eternal beauty knowing me.

Getting outdoors is always what I need. Money isn’t needed to get outside. I’ve realised I can look at our year ahead in discontent at a perceived lack or I can embrace what we do have. We have bodies, a wonderful gift of an economical car which is fun to drive, a box of camping cooking equipment and a picnic blanket. We can have thrifty outdoor adventures. We don’t need much more right now. The boys are at an age where small walks are possible. I have 15 hours a week where I can satisfy my desire for bigger hikes. We can get creative with food and ideas of where to explore. We have the South Downs national park on our doorstep. There is no shortage of fun and joy to be had out there.

So there you go. A rather rambling reflection on these last two weeks. They’ve been fun, they’ve been super hard, they have been full of being looked after and experiencing grace.

Right now I am thankful.

Ask me if you see me around what I’m thankful for today.

It really helps.

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Weekly round up… Half term here we come…

Posted on February 10, 2018 by Kath

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“Your child is now half of their way through their reception year”

What?

It’s the beginning of our first half term holiday without the husbandface in his sprint collapse rhythm.

It feels surprisingly ok.

We’ve had a good week around these parts.

The sunny sunshine has been good for my head. The metaphor explosion epiphany moments during my latest counselling session suggested that there was some good deep work going on. A white dog appeared to outshine the black dog and introduce gentle kind thoughts into my self critical inner world. It felt like an intensely spiritual moment in a room where we don’t really talk about God much. I smiled like a loon for the rest of the day.

Later in the week I hit a strange wall of tiredness. I have a theory that the more I believe that the husbandface is healing and recovering, the more my body lets it’s guard down. I’m slowly slowly trying to ease my grip off pretending that I can control my world and make everyone in it safe. I’m starting to try and trust that this moment is really all we have to live in, enjoy, delight in and know God in. The future is unknown and that is. Wait for it. O.K. (sometimes. maybe. please God). Maybe working that out in counselling this week enabled my tired body to stop a while. Thursday and Friday afternoons found me asleep in front of Friends reruns on the sofa. It’s taken a while to realise that this is what I need in my hours away from the small ones.

I tried to run on Friday morning and had to stop. I physically couldn’t do it anymore. It might be time to start listening to my body and rest more.

On Tuesday afternoon my eldest weirdo sang sea shanties dressed in a pirate hat with the rest of his class to celebrate the finish of their pirate themed half term. I was super proud and loved getting to see his special book afterwards full of pictures and comments on stuff he’d done over the last few weeks.

I’m not sure what I think about the rather bizarre celebration of pirates that small people seem to be obsessed with. I kind of like the fun of it and have to remember that it really has nothing to do with actual pirates who were kind of horrific if you think about it for any length of time. Ah well. The boys are also obsessed with Swashbuckle on CBeebies right now. The only song I ever have going around my head at the moment is, ‘hey ho, swashbucklers go, take on the pirates, yo ho ho…’ (at least in this narrative the pirates get caught and made to walk the plank for their transgressions…). Secretly I love it.

I’ve been reading Douglas Coupland lots over the last few days. He really is a kind of weird prophetic voice reflecting on the transitions in technology over the last 4 decades. I’m reading Bit Rot and having my brain exploded all over again. Hoorah for his voice. I found a rather pretentious note on my iPhone the other day simply saying, “Why does no-one listen to Douglas Coupland anymore?”. We should. He has SO many interesting things to say about our world.

Talking of interesting things about our world. We watched in awe as Elon Musk’s amazing rocket went into space this week. We had genuine goosebumps watching two of the rockets come back to Earth and do exceptionally controlled landings. We are living in the future. It’s so odd. But wonderful. All at once. (Having read an article about Elon Musk’s personal life I feel less inclined towards him as a person but am in awe of the stuff he has managed to achieve so far, and that the dream of life on Mars may become a reality in my lifetime…)

In other wondrous news we are reading Swallows and Amazons to Son1. I can’t really get my head around this being the first time for husbandface as well but I am loving revisiting it. I’d forgotten it was my go to soothing book when I was growing up. If I couldn’t sleep or had a nightmare I would re-read this over and over again. I’ve read it countless times but haven’t touched it for about 20 years. It’s such an antidote to all the usual fast paced stuff thrown at us each day, nothing happens, everything is described in exquisite detail, including what the children ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s beautifully dull in places and then thrilling in others. I am fairly impressed the boy has stuck with it and can’t wait to show him Lake Coniston in the summer.

We are looking forward to the week ahead, we started today with a slow morning of museums and then some rest time this afternoon. Lovely friends are then coming to stay for a few days tomorrow.  I will try and keep one day in the middle for a very very slow day before the half term madness of our NCT group going to the theatre and Pizza Express at the end of the week.

I’m looking forward to hanging out with the small ones, they seem to like each other at the moment. Son1 is reading or trying to read everything in sight and we feel in a definite new stage of life, well apart from son2’s rather trying 3 year old moments. It’s hard being 3. Really. Anyways, a week out of normal routine looks pretty good right now. I’ll see you at the end of the week to see how things panned out…

How’s your week been? 

 

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