Recently

Every year our jacaranda gets off to a slower start that the other trees in the neighbourhood and I think to myself 'oh, it's not so spectacular this year'.

And then a few weeks later its blooms intensify and I remember that it just takes a bit longer. Why do I struggle to trust in the reliability of the beauty of this tree?

My mum's Alzheimers is progressing, inevitably, and Lil has been dragged to various appointments and assessments with me, largely against her will. Mum's pug collection was a rare moment of delight and connection between Mum and Lily as they played with them, lined them up, and 'taught' them on Mum's bed.

We dragged the kids to the Emily Floyd exhibition at Fed Square with the promise of the Noodle Nightmarket at Birrarung Marr afterwards. But they loved the exhibition and we didn't have long enough there for them. Lots of hands on stuff for kids to do and lots to absorb as well. We are a bit crap at getting around to all the many great things on. A resolution for the new year, perhaps, to see more of my own city. I've been hopeless at that this year.

We revamped our dining/sewing room. It's quite a spectacular room, with this wild crazy wallpaper, but it had horrible curtains I'd never liked, a ceiling painted in multi-coloured pastels that I'd loathed (the ceiling is gorgeous pressed metal but I'm not a fan of that style of painting even though I understand it's true to the period). This amazing nouveau box window badly needed repainting and so we did it in glossy black to match the doors and skirting boards, did the ceiling white, took down the curtains and got a new table that actually seats our family plus guests.   When I say 'we' I mean we got proper painters to do it.  I was so impressed by them I started to fantastise about chucking in my job and becoming a painter.  It seems to me that it would be a hugely satisfying profession.  Each day you'd see a measurable change  -'I painted that much, it looks much better'.  We've got a new sideboard that accomodates nearly all my fabric and notions and will get a window box built in for my machines. I think this might mean that I can actually keep things a bit tidier and we can use the room for, you know, actual dining without the drama of having to move all my sewing stuff out.

It's a lovely place to sew.

There have been occasional ice-creams, amongst other treats. Tooth flossing has entered our daily routine.

We had a slightly disasterous night away where we had no water, except the nearly continuous rain that fell outside. Grace and Lily picked wildflowers and saw kangeroos, but it wasn't the relaxing mini-break I had been hoping for amid the busy-ness of the end of year.

Ruby and Nina continue to confound me, alternating as they do between thickest of thieves and cruelest of siblings. I'm trying to learn how to stand back more, to be supportive without intervening too much. These are hard lessons and I feel I'm a slow learner.

Meanwhile Grace and Lily make shops and schools, potions, medicine, restaurants, gardens, pick bouquets, bicker, cry, laugh, cuddle, set up massage tables and dog training schools and make Pokemon islands, raise babies, read stories and walk imaginary dogs.

I can't help reflecting on the year and the contrast to last year when at this time we were in New York, or about to go.  After our three months away I vowed to make several changes, including seeing more of my friends, stressing about work less, and making more time for various things I had decided were important, like seeing movies, reading books, taking a class or two.  In all truth I have not managed to implement any of these changes and if anything have seen less of friends, been more stressed about work and done less of the many things I like doing!  On the upside, my resolutions are ready-made for 2015.

Posy

On Tuesday, as Lil and I walked the short distance home from kinder, we picked a little posy from the flowers poking out of people's front gardens. This is something I did endlessly with the older girls, but the rhythm and traditions of their early years are, I often feel, lost to me now. There was a certain cycle of work I was in - off work for a year with a baby, back to work for a year, off work for a year with the next baby - and so on for eight years. In my 'back to work' year, I worked part time, and even when work was at its most absorbing, I was either breastfeeding or pregnant, physically anchored in the world of early childhood. I'd cycle in to work and gear up intellectually for the day, and cycle home and wind down, ready to be reabsorbed into the countless daily tasks and minutiae of mothering small children.

Lil is still a very small child, not even four yet. And I still work part time and have two days a week home with just her. But our days together are not the same as my days with the other kids. When Ruby was four I had a two year old and a newborn. I think I gave myself over much more fully to the requirements of the job. I didn't expect to get anything done, other than to look after the kids; baking and visiting friends and making playdough and going to the library was the stuff of our days. With Lil, though, it can feel as though our lives have already moved onto the next stage and she has to keep up. She stays up later and watches movies the others would never have seen at her age. I don't put on funny voices or read stories at dinner time anymore to entice her to have another mouthful and I can hardly believe I ever did that with the others. My days standing at the swings and endlessly pushing small children are over. I can't do it anymore. I'm not interested in making the connections with other mothers that I once eagerly sought. I know enough mothers now. My cycle home from work no longer clears my mind and leaves me prepared to step back into family life. Work encroaches on my thoughts and emotions. It's like a magnet, or a vacuum, drawing me toward it and requiring energy to withstand its dark attraction.

Picking this little posy with Lil took me powerfully back to those early days, and left me a little melancholy for all that she has missed out on, from me. I assuage my guilt by assuring myself that she gets plenty of zoo and library and parks with Kim. Guilt is a useless emotion, anyhow, and I don't really feel guilt so much as wistfulness for that time that has now gone, and the knowledge that I can't go back to it, or back to the person I was and the mother I was then, even if I tried.

Pottering

Life seems to be geting busier. I suppose it is the inevitable consequence of having four children and those children getting older. Now we have netball and soccer and tap dancing on weekends. There is often a birthday party, or two to attend. Sometimes dinner with the in-laws. Maybe a footy match to go to. The school musical is coming up for three nights in August, and then there will be the fete and quite a lot of very big things going on at work. All of which is ticking down to our big and exciting adventure in November. With less than four months to go, the list of things to be done (passports, visas, renting out the house, fixing the ceiling fan etc) feels more overwhelming than it is. Every so often I am seized by a small spasm of panic: 'oh god, I have to draft those interrogatories by Wednesday!'

It really did smell like violets.

Miniature patchwork quilt

Mousie Brown sleeps warm in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower

So this weekend I sewed.  Some bags for the kinder and something bits and pieces for the fete.  Nina joined me to make a (miniature) quilt.  Ruby baked a cake and made perfume.  Lily and Grace painted their nails and made a mess.  Craig covered books in mylar. As an antidote to panic, I recommend pottering about.

In the Bleak Mid Winter

The title of this post is a joke, of course.  It is mid-winter, but it has been anything but bleak.  Today was Melbourne's warmest July day on record.  It was disturbingly balmy this morning and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are living right at the frontier of climate change.  Even the garden looks like Spring around here, with jonquils and violets blooming.  Although our inherited English cottage garden has mostly gone now as Craig gradually replaces it with more indigenous plantings, I do love the bulbs that have self planted and come up in suprising and new locations each year, the violets that grow like weeds and our few remaining roses.  We moved to this house at the height of the drought and it amazed me how tough those old roses and the camellias were, thriving with barely a drop to drink.
After the warm start to the day, a huge storm blew in.  By 3.30pm the sky was black, and rain was lashing the windows of my 12th floor office.  And then the clouds lifted and the sun came out and there was the most perfect, full arched rainbow right over the city, descending into the Rialto and coming out, slightly distorted, the other side. I've never seen anything like it, and didn't even try to get a photo of it.

Crazy, ridiculous

Crazy ridiculous things in my life right now;

• the size of this zucchini and the girl holding it. (We sort of ignored it and it kept growing. I suppose it's inedible now. The zucchini that is.)

• this weather (Come on autumn, we are waiting. I am not interested in any 'record number of consecutive days over 30', or 'hottest March on record' prizes.)

• the mozzies around this place (That burst of rain a while back was just what you needed. You are loving my kids.)

• next week (Craig has to go to Brisbane for a day and then go up again the next day for two days and I have to go to Sydney for a day and Grace turns six and we have invited fifteen kids to a party that we have not planned and it will be over 30 all week. And I want to make this for Grace's birthday. Plus normal life, school, work, kinder, piano, chess, netball et al)

Predictions

Ignore my legal notes, Lily's chicken scratchings apparently say that she will be a painter and a dancer when she grows up and that Grace will be a rock climber

Something Wonderful

Today something wonderful happened for one of our clients at work. It was the sort of thing that most lawyers probably never get to experience in their professional lives and I was privileged to be a small part of it. I work with some pretty special people. I also live with some pretty special people and today I was made especially aware of just how damn lucky I am to have four healthy girls.

Nina ready to go to the show

Grace with her new glasses

Lily asleep under triangle quilt

Ruby playing chess with her Great Grandpa's chess set

David v Goliath

Hot air balloon  - Photo by Craig

When David entered the ring with Goliath, immense, looming, and he with only his sling shot, was he calm?  Did he know it was all that he needed? 
Was Goliath inwardly perturbed by this boy who seemed unafraid?  Did he have pause to note the stone and consider the damage it might wreak?  Did he bellow with confidence, or bluster?

I'm going into the ring with Goliath tomorrow.  I don't feel calm.  I am not at all sure that a sling shot is going to be all that it takes.  Goliath doesn't seem perturbed by my presence.  He's big but he isn't a fool and we both know that, unless my stone lands exactly on his temple, it won't do much damage.

I keep reminding myself; it is only work.