lately...

peanut butter cookies

garden guitar

 pink and lime green

 peek-a-boo bovine

safe dangling

danger dangling

last week

Last week the two younger boys (and myself) attended a creative writing and Lego making summer camp. It was held in our local library each morning. We learnt how to plan and write a story and then, using Lego figures and an amazing app (Lego Story Visualizer), transform them into a comic strip with proper backgrounds and speech bubbles and all the wham! whizz! bam! and sock! you can handle.

Mide did some quite detailed drawings of his character - Spaceman Skiff who fights with aliens and space pirates. And then ideas were transformed into comics...

William wrote about a gang of baddies, led by the aptly named 'Slasher', who were determined to envelop the city in a toxic gas cloud... It makes me so happy to see them engaged in such a creative way and also work alongside one another which doesn't always happen. Mide overcame his massive anxiety at experiencing new things and decided it was worth giving it a go and William had two of his favourite things right there - Lego and writing - so he was delighted. Thank goodness for the library!

winning too

It is so damp and grey that I light the candles before we eat. The steady drip, drip, drip of the rain is the soundtrack to the evening. We light the fire and set up a board game in the sitting room. The boys choose Trivial Pursuit. It's the family edition which makes it easier for their diverse age ranges and Mide and I play as a team. It sounds relatively simple to play a game together but for us it's not. Autism makes it hard to understand turn taking, it makes the unpredictability of the role of the dice agony, it makes not knowing the answer to a question tricky to acknowledge and guessing the answer just plain awful. However having said all that Mide managed well and actually enjoyed it! So much work, patience, understanding has gone in to getting him to this place ~ the first time he has played a family game with us all the way through to the end without having a tantrum or leaving the room in anger. Also, he happened to win. And slowly I feel that we are winning too.

Sunday

The day started with sun and a few puffed white clouds. On my walk I admired the sleek, glossy flanks of the little black cows tucked behind the hedges. Sunlight was in the fields, glinting off the sea of grass. Home to a sink full of breakfast dishes and homemade granola, coffee and yesterday's paper. Now the rain has come and books are the order of the day. Sounds of squabbling from deeper in the house ~ the two younger ones, all shorts and grazed knees, are bickering and I hold my breath, wondering if I should intervene. Silence again, dispute resolved and I turn back to My Cousin Rachel. The sun is struggling through the clouds, now it's time for tea, some cake maybe. The peace of a Sunday in July.

to the sea

To Dun Laoghaire to walk along the pier with icecream, seagulls screaming and boats with masts tinkling, clinking until all you can hear is the sea, the sea, the endless sea. We watch as the tug helps the cruise ship leave the shelter of the harbour and we wonder about the people on the deck waving to the people on the shore. How I would love to sail out from Dublin, out to sea, to places new to me but always, always with the prospect of returning home.

summer scenes

Summer days - grey skies and buttercups at the Hill of Tara, lined fields, honeysuckle woven through the hedges, early morning walks with fog and fresh scones for breakfast.

June reading

June is the perfect summer month - the weather has picked up, the boys are nearly finished school and the promise of holidays is stretching out in front of us. The garden has been the scene of most of my reading. The sun umbrella shades the table and chairs, bees and insects buzz in and out of view and swallows tear the skies with their arrow speed. I can close my eyes and float with the characters I've been reading about or let my thoughts drift and turn in the peace of their worlds and drift out of, away from, the reality of mine.

The coast is undoubtedly my happy place. A walk along the shoreline breathing in salt laden air and suddenly everything inside me is calmer. I have no idea why the sea helps me to feel this way. We didn't grow up near the sea or even spend extended amounts of holiday time at the beach. To actually swim in any great depth of sea would frighten me and I'm an appalling sailor but that surge and swell of water meeting land, the sounds and sand are something I need. Tim Winton had the kind of practical, magical childhood by the sea that I would give my eye teeth for. He writes "I am in the sea but not of it". I think I am of the sea but not in it (due to my extreme cowardice and Jaws).

Wouldn't it be so nice to believe that anything is possible? Elizabeth Strout has carried on where My name is Lucy Barton left off. We are shown deeper insight into the lives led in small town America where Lucy's childhood poverty was despised and hidden from view. We get to understand more about her situation and the effect on adult life - hers and her siblings. The characters are cleverly interwoven- each person's story leads to another and slowly the picture of life in rural Amgash is revealed in all its pain and ugliness.

Speaking of cowardice why do we spend our lives so afraid? We are afraid of what others will think of us, we are afraid to take risks, to express ourselves. One of the luxuries of aging is that hopefully our fear diminishes and we get to worry less about the opinions of others. I'm in the middle of Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf. Two neighbours, in their seventies and both widowed, decide that night time is when their loneliness is worst. Addie asks Louis to come and spend the night with her - "I'm talking about getting through the night. And lying warm in bed, companionably. Lying down in bed together and you staying the night. The nights are the worst. Don't you think?". 

Sometimes is pays to be brave. To get in the water, even though that's where the sharks live.