Friday:
Soft play in a garden centre.
Sunny sunny day outside.
Warm cheese scone and coffee in my belly.
Boys for the moment happy being Batman and Raa Raa.
Quick.
Highlights this week have been:
A theatre trip with our NCT group. A lovely no tension puppet show aimed perfectly at ages 2-6. No horrible moments or things to fear. Lots of cute puppets on adventures. I wish I could have captured son2s face as he gazed in awe and chuckled along.
Bumbling along the seafront with the boys on a sunny warm afternoon. Throwing stones in the sea, ice cream and the craving of my body for spring.
Walks around our estate looking at the shoots of flowers emerging.
Park trips standing in the warmth remembering why parks are a Good Thing.
Rediscovering our garden.
The boys delight in a new cd given to us by friends. Love son1s commitment to learning all the lyrics.
Son2 not crying when he was dropped off at nursery and singing songs from his morning there all afternoon.
Moments where the husbandface has been able to be engaged with us, tramping through a windy day to a windy park and hearing the boys rejoice in Daddy with us time.
Good friends coming, eating and praying with us. Balm for the soul.
Drumming. A new drum. Sore hands.
New shoots of interactions at church, women’s prayer breakfast, chats with others, community meal and sermon writing. Spring is on it’s way in more ways than one.
Running in the start of storm Doris. Wind burnt face. Laughing for joy over hills of green.
Darker moments have occurred. There was the Sunday afternoon of collapse and son2’s very sweet voice. ‘Mummy cry? Daddy, make sure Mummy alright? Yeah?’
But over all it’s been a Good Week.
Mostly because I read some amazing stuff in the Bible. I know. Who would have thought?! My prayer book has me walking with Jesus in Luke at the moment. I was stunned by a passage on Monday morning. It was one I really can’t ever remember reading. Jesus raises a widows son from the dead. But it’s not so much that he does it but the way he interacts with her. She is really upset, as you can imagine, and his heart goes out to her. His heart goes out to her. Such a small phrase but it had me in tears for a long time. His heart went out to her. Such tenderness and love. I love Jesus’ care for people, his tenderness and compassion. Mostly I find it very easy to believe that in relation to others but this week I’ve felt him speaking directly to me. To say his heart goes out to me. He is tender to me. He welcomes me.
Mental.
Each week my prayer book has a couple of verses to read everyday. This week it’s been some verses from Lamentations. The ones that say the Lord is good to those who hope in him and it is good to wait for him. The other verse has talked of the unfailing love of God. These have kept me going this week. God is good. Always. Unfailingly. Whatever. I am his dearly loved child.
By the way.
Come in close.
Let me whisper in your ear.
So are you.
This is a beautiful memoir of a year away from the internet and the surprise of finding God beyond the world of social media. It’s written wonderfully. It made me seriously want to up my writing game. It made me want to reach out in love to the people around me more and deeply long for a sequel in which Esther shares the story of how she manages the internet well now, after that year away. I think it’s always good to read books like this which challenge something that seems so integral to our lives and helps us question how to use it better. 
Tipped to be the latest hot young adult fiction, Ink tells of a world where all your life, good and bad, is tattooed onto your body for all to see. At the end of your days your soul gets weighed to see if you are worthy of the afterlife, if so your skin gets made into a book for future generations of your family. In that world we follow a girl whose Dad’s soul weighing is no straightforward affair. It’s a book about doubt, faith, power and abuse of power and what happens when you start to question everything you have ever known. It’s beautiful throughout and I can’t wait for the next instalment. 
I got this for Christmas and laughed my way through it for an evening. It’s a brilliantly hilarious take on modern parenting. She too has two boys under 7 and I identified with SO many of her stories and am especially glad that her boys also replace song lyrics with the word poo and fight over whose Mummy she is. I think her basic premise is we put too much guilt on ourselves as parents, we should love our kids and not worry too much about the rest (and alcohol helps). It’s a sweary fun book and I love it and the blog it comes from. 
A fairly thin sketchy book documenting the time between the second and third books. I enjoyed it because I loved Bridget Jones in my 20s and 30s and now she’s having a baby and it’s funny to see her in that context. I think this must have been thrown together from the film scripts but it doesn’t add much to the story. Fun to read a bit of her life again but not essential reading. My main memory of it is crying at the point where she has her baby. After giving birth I can now never see or read anything to do with having them without weeping copiously (not complaining about that, just noticing). 
I have loved reading these stories of redemption over the course of this month. I saved them up to read one a day and have been nourished beyond all expectation that God is a God who is at work in the bleakest of places. I valued so much the honesty and vulnerability of these people as they shared what God has been doing in the midst of the black. There were very few neat nice endings, very few stories of ‘and then God made everything nice and shiny’ for that I was glad. It felt very real and extremely helpful for the place we find ourselves in at the moment.
I love Susan on Radio 4’s News Quiz and more. I really enjoyed reading this tour through her thoughts on depresssion and how she has dealt with it over her life. I’m not sure I agree with her on all aspects but she wasn’t asking for that. She was sharing her story so that more people would feel able to be open and honest about their depression. The more we keep talking about the realities of mental health issues and making talking about what goes on in our heads normal the better for all.
I felt pretty conflicted reading this book. I couldn’t decide if I loved it or not. I didn’t really identify with the author on many levels. She was a busy person figuring out that life is best lived small and slowly. It was fascinating hearing stories of her crammed speaking schedule, her realisations that hanging out with her kids and husband were actually more important than the tours and books and really interesting hearing of her embracing different spiritualities than activist mainstream evangelicalism. It was a book that confirmed my thoughts on life and kind of made me feel slightly jealous that she even had the issues to begin with. As someone who is living a very small life right now I was glad that someone else thought that slow living was the way forward but I related to very little of her life. Having said all that I think it’s still worth a read as she’s an excellent writer and lots of this book made me love my life more.
The Long Walk Home 