Round and round the garden.

This time of year always reminds me how much I love having a garden. A few days of sun and the odd shower and suddenly everywhere is full of colour and bees. At the moment the alliums are in full bloom, as are five of my six clematis, the flag iris is out in the pond, and the poppies are ready to pop any minute.

And this year I had an extra surprise. The enormous number of straggly wallflowers my mum gave me a couple of years ago that never came to anything and I had pretty much forgotten about, turned out to be an enormous number of beautiful crimson sweet william, and they're now flowering merrily all over the garden. Just as well I never got round to pulling them out!

Time for bed.

Some time ago P decided he was too old to sleep in a baby sleeping bag any more so we splashed out and got him a cot duvet. However both of us baulked at paying £30+ for a cover with a design we didn't particularly like, so it was decided I would make some instead.





This week (thanks largely to the Royals and their extra bank holiday which meant C was at home and could take both boys out for a long walk) I finally finished the second one, so at last I can change the sheets on P's bed without having to make sure I get them all washed, dried, ironed and back on the bed in the same day.

A bit of fluff.

Our neighbours have a tree in their garden which at this time of year produces clouds of fluffy seeds which collect in great drifts in undisturbed corners of the garden and greenhouse, and indeed in the house if the weather is good enough to have the back door open. This year it has been more than usually productive. The greenhouse, in particular, looks like it's been filled with cotton wool and I have spent a lot more time than I'd have liked chasing fluff round the living-room with the hoover.



Add to this the remarkable number of dandelions that the warm weather has brought out and it's difficult to go anywhere at the moment without coming back covered in fluff.



It also takes an inordinately long time to get anywhere if you have a dedicated dandelion-clock aficionado in tow!

Having a smashing time.

This year Greek Easter was the same day as it was here, and unusually the temperature was five degrees higher than it was in Athens (as my dad gleefully told all our Greek relations who called to wish us happy Easter). So we had a lovely family Easter in my mum and dad's big new garden, with delicious food including lamb souvlakia and tzoureki* cooked by my mum and my youngest brother.





We also introduced P to the traditional hard-boiled egg-cracking contest, a practice he took to with great enthusiasm.**



* A sort of Easter bread/cake. My brother also made a marathopita ('fennel pie'), which was delicious but caused P much consternation since he was convinced there was grass in his bread!
**Strictly speaking the eggs should all be red, but the packet of dye I had included 5 colours and it seems churlish not to use them all.

Gar-den-ing

Last Sunday was [probably*] my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Since they both enjoy making things, and since they have recently moved to a new house with a large, but currently fairly featureless garden, my siblings and I hit on the idea of buying them a weekend away in Derbyshire learning to make willow garden sculpture. It was a great success, not least because the weather was gorgeous, and they came back with the car packed to the gunnels with creations and with more willow for future projects. P in particular is very impressed with their handiwork.



* I asked my dad which year they got married and he replied confidently "1972, because it was two years before you were born, and that was November 17th 1974". I pointed out that I have always been under the impression that I was born on November 18th 1973, and my birth certificate appears to agree with me, so we finally decided it must have been 1971 that they married, making it their ruby anniversary this year.

In the nick of time.

This is R. He arrived in the middle of January, in the middle of the night, two weeks earlier than expected and caught us all on the hop rather, especially since my parents weren't due to arrive to be on hand for the birth until the following day. However, thanks to the lovely Katie of Oxford Kitchen Yarns, who not only happened to be awake at 3am to be in receipt of frantic text messages, but also agreed to remain awake and to take delivery of a sleepy and slightly startled P while C and I were at the hospital, everything went swimmingly.


*



Katie also gave us this beautiful tractor/tow-truck vest for R which I have been waiting impatiently to put him in. As it has short sleeves and it seems that makers of baby clothes in this country consider it unseemly for a <3month-old baby boy to wear anything other than pastel blue, light brown, or white (preferably emblazoned with vomit-inducingly cutsie critters/slogans), I immediately set about knitting him a navy cardigan to go with it. The pattern is the Lazy Daisy Baby Jacket, which is a pleasingly straightforward knit, and thinking it would be the work of a moment I started on the newborn size. Unfortunately R had other ideas: two months later it's finally finished. Luckily R is quite a dinky little chap and it should fit for at least another two weeks!

* At least two member of R's close family have remarked (somewhat unfairly in my view) that in this photo R looks like Hitler without the moustache. Personally I thought it was quite a nice one and one of the few in which his hair actually looks vaguely presentable, since usually it stands straight up on the top of his head giving him rather the aspect of a startled radish.

Asking for the moon.

Sadly for quite a lot of this summer P has been under the weather with one thing or another. This, we are assured by the doctor, is simply a result of his having started nursery after Easter and will eventually give him the constitution of an ox. In the meantime, however, we have been treated to long stretches of sleepless nights, rivers of snot, and the occasional torrent of vomit.

The most recent lurgy to assail him took the form of some sort of flu-like bug, which gave him a raging temperature and completely took away his appetite, to the extent that he wouldn't even eat bananas, previously his all-time favourite food.* After about four days in which he ate half a yoghurt and virtually nothing else, I discovered he could be persuaded to nibble on a dry biscuit and decided any nourishment was better than none.

This proved to be my undoing: as a result he appears to have developed an addiction to "Moon biscuits" and to believe, now that he is well again, that he should be able to have as many as he likes. Consequently he now spends large portions of each day clinging to the side of the fridge, looking hopefully at the top, where he knows the biscuits reside, and shouting. Refusal to give in and let him have one** results in anguished howling, sobbing, and theatrical displays of despair/apparently fainting from hunger owing to the cruelty of his heartless parents. This all miraculously stops of course as soon as he actually gets a biscuit, the receipt of which is greeted with a cheerful (and slightly self-satisfied) "ta!" before he beetles off nomming happily, not infrequently with the whole crescent-shaped thing wedged sideways in his mouth.





Thus far "ta" and "hiya" seem to be about the only recognizable words in P's vocabulary (and ones which he must presumably have learned at nursery), though he's getting pretty close with lots of others. Indeed, not infrequently he does manage to say something quite clearly, but he's not very reliable and can seldom be persuaded to do it again, especially in company. Last week he seemed to be practising the letter B and, after a fair amount of coaxing, managed to say "bird", "bubble", "banana" and of course "biscuit",*** but the minute I proudly relayed this information to anyone, he stopped. This week seems to be being brought to us by the letter M, so all the bubbles have mysteriously become mumles instead.

In the absence of comprehensible vocabulary we have been trying to teach him to imitate animals and make the appropriate noise for the appropriate critter. After much quacking, clucking, miaowing, and barking, he finally pointed at a picture of a duck in his book of animals and, in reply to the question "What noise does the duck make?" said "'Ack".

His proud parents were thrilled with this, until we discovered that according to P, dogs, cats, all birds, some sheep, and in one case a hippopotamus all also say "quack". Every encounter with a cat or dog in the street is now accompanied by pointing and a volley of frantic quacking.

The only animals, it appears, that do not say "ack", are bees. These he knows say bzzzzzzzz (or in P's version bvvvvvvv). Even this achievement, however, has been slightly tempered by the possibility of misunderstanding. The other day I realised whilst giving him his lunch that he was buzzing as he normally does when he sees a bee. Looking about to see if one had got into the house I drew a blank, but finally realised that what he was actually doing was buzzing every time I said to him "Eat your beans", raising the interesting possibility, not only that he thinks we've been feeding him bees on toast, but also that he considers the lavender hedge to be infested by bumble-beans.

* Indeed he pretty much mugged an old lady for hers at Blenheim Palace the week before and had to be carried off kicking and screaming.

** On the flimsy grounds, for instance, that it's 8am, he's only been up for 20 minutes and we're just about to have breakfast.

*** Oh, and (owing to me dropping a tin on my foot) "bollocks", which needless to say was the only word he imitated spontaneously without hours of repetition.