Planting, Dancing and Bullying

It's raining now after two days of the most perfect spring weather. I managed to sew a lot of flower seeds as well as some peas and yellow string beans.
On Friday I bought Forsythia x intermedia "Lynwood Gold". The three naked branches leave a lot of room for imagination, and I hope it will grow thick and flower lavishly.
I did manage to finish the socks for Walter's dance recital on Saturday. This is how they turned out, I was rather pleased, even if the project was quite quick and easy.

The dance recital was great, and I couldn't be prouder since it was the first time I saw my child dancing with a proper dance club. I think even Ralph felt a bit envious watching his brother, but I doubt that will be enough to make him join the dance club as well.

I'm at school three days a week - Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. As luck would have it, both on Thursday and Friday "things happened" at school, and I've been thinking about bullying prevention and attendance problems for three days now. I have some sort of a plan in my head that I wish to implement, but I must admit, the task seems daunting.
This video might be a good start - at least to know which methods have been proven to be less than effective, and it is a nationwide problem that has not really been addressed on a national level in my country, so I need to put together my own materials, translating and adapting from strategies that have already been proven to work.

I do hope to make a difference, but I feel sooo new to all of this...

The Pleasure of Making Things

I don't make new clothes very often any more. Basically because I can't keep up with the demands of fashion for two style-conscious young men who are quite anxious when it comes to being seen in uncool stuff. And also - I know how much my time costs, so it's usually not cost-effective to spend four or five hours, or much more, to make something that I could buy if I worked hard for two or three hours. But I do love sewing, and there are some things I can run away with. Those are the things that rarely get seen by others - like pants or shorts for wearing at home, and also pajamas. Making them fills me with immense pride in my own craftiness and allows me to learn new things. The lingering summer heat has provided me with a perfect opportunity to brush up on those pant sewing skills that are badly underdeveloped and unused. (Did I tell you I can only make pants with elastic waist and bed-clothes, and such? I'm no good with more complicated designs like stretchy fabrics, T-shirts or - God forbid - a dress!)

I've made more camouflage fabric shorts over the years than I care to count. There are at least three reasons for that.
1) The fabric is dead easy to sew - it has lines on the wrong side that make measuring, drawing and cutting incredibly convenient.
2) It's a rather safe bet that the boys are going to wear them. The novelty has worn off over the last four or five years, I must admit, and I wouldn't buy camouflage any more now, but I got this fabric last year and just didn't get around to sewing. You can never know if the boys would actually wear the blue or green, or black, or grey that I would imagine the boys would like when buying the fabric, and I know from experience that taking them (or the husband, for that matter) to the fabric store with me not only bores the living daylight out of them, but also completely ruins the magical joy that I experience in such venues.
3) Camouflage fabric disguises dirt! What's not to love?

I've noticed the shorts I've made a couple (three? four? hopefully not five!) years ago have "shrunk" on the boys to the extent they almost need to lie down to pull them on. A sure sign of growing! And an even more sure sign of a need for new shorts!

Sewing is like gardening - you can only learn by doing, and by now I have a pretty clear idea of what works and what doesn't. Like, now I know The Boys need deep pockets in the front - they have wallets, and money, and phones now! I hadn't done sewn in pockets before, but it really proved to be very easy. I'll keep making them. I also know I need a wider elastic, but I don't see a visit to a fabric store any time soon, so I'll have to do with a rather narrow one for the waist.

It's a real treat to take time away from work, especially on such hot days as these, to make something new. To hide in the bedroom with closed curtains to block out the light, to have some gardening programs providing heavenly and inspiring background noise, and to cut, and sew, and iron (yes, even iron in 37 degrees Celsius), and to come out for brief moments to measure someone's waist or to ask someone to try on the almost finished garment, and then - yes, to present it to a boy who's happy not just because he really needs new shorts, but also because he knows how much pleasure his mom has in her own private blissful sanctuary behind the closed doors of the bedroom - sewing away.

(I couldn't choose one picture, because - just look at the dog!)

A Lazy Day for a Neurotic Mind

It's very hard to do nothing. Surely you know the feeling. You've got a million things to do but you just can't bring yourself to do them, so you just waste your time wishing you had an absolute need, or better still, an urgent must to do something. But you don't. The deadlines seem far off, the chores seem daunting, and you just do nothing. You spend a lazy day and at the end of the day feel weirdly exhausted and less than fulfilled.

Here's what I did today.
I cooked. I cooked a lot. Three meals for the children, two meals for my husband. I baked. I had some jam that had gone sour, and I used that. It didn't turn out right, but then again - normally I wouldn't even bother. It's just that we're down to the last eggs and flour. Oh well.

All this running out of money thing has hugely improved our diet and our eating habits. It can't be overstated, it's nothing short of a miracle - seeing my kids at the table at mealtimes and clearing off their plates without so much as a complaint. They're eating chicken, they're eating pork chops, they're eating anything I give them and thanking me afterwards. Ever since I've stopped buying convenience food like cereal or yogurt, or cookies, or cottage cheese desserts, they've come to eat "normal", healthy, proper food. I am concerned how to keep this rhythm going after next week when I'm getting paid. But there's a downside - I have to spend a lot of time cooking and even more time - planning.

I also did the laundry. It's all piling up in the bedroom again, but at least it's dry - lately we've been having much more rain than sunshine, so I had to wash at least one load today. It's supposed to be hot and sunny next week - hopefully I'll get to washing blankets and airing the pillows.

In the afternoon I took the kids exploring. We rode our bikes to an eerie little place some 4 kilometres from our home - there are little gardens and sheds, and almost no people at all, apart from quite a curious man who was working in his garden and looking ever the fence all the time to see if we hadn't come to steal some strawberries or beans. But we hadn't. We had come to explore and to have a picnic. And the dog had run all the way with us!

And then we came home, catching the first large raindrops, and sat down to watch a very nice Swedish family movie "Nils Karlsson Pyssling" together. I loved the book (it's quite a short story) as a child, and I was glad to see that the boys loved the movie which is done quite close to the original. I can never enjoy a movie if I don't have something to knit or sew, so I spent a good while rummaging around the room for an embroidery project I had begun years ago, but I couldn't find it (surprise, surprise), and the boys suggested that I should crochet them some slippers. I've made dozens of those from some leftover yarn, and they don't last long, so I had already decided not to make them any more, but the temptation of doing something with yarn was too great. It's been more than a year since I've knit anything at all. Partly because I felt no need for knitwear, partly because the kids had entered a phase when Mom-made things seemed a bit, well, humiliating, and partly - because I had actively tried to do something that involved less sitting down and more moving around. So I was quite scared to pick up the needles (or the crochet hook, for that matter) and to decide what to make. But I'm so very glad I did. That simple Mary-Jane slipper pattern seems to have broken down some "knitters block", and I foresee many more leisurely projects in the coming days. So it's been a wonderful day after all.

How to Keep Cats Away From Plants (and to Indulge Your Inner Five-Year-Old)

A couple of weeks ago in the Botanical Garden fair I bought two actinidia kolomikta plants - a dioecious plant that requires both male and female plants to be planted quite close together (0.5-2 metres apart). Everyone I talked to, including the seller, a very kind and pleasant old man, warned me that I had to protect the young plants from cats since they supposedly find it more irresistible than catnip or valerian.
Keksis, our three-legged predator, didn't pay any attention to the plants, but the dog was very interested in digging under them, because I took away old boards and bricks from the side of our shed, and he was absolutely certain that rats must be living there, right under the new plants. I scolded him and began researching the subject of protection.
We've spent all money on plastering the house, so I didn't have any for the garden. I looked for "little fences" on Pinterest and found some that looked really sweet. This morning I went to a nearby wood, taking the dog and the hubby with me, and cut me some osier twigs - as many as I could reach without getting my feet wet in the quagmire. It turned out - too little, but I didn't want to go back for more, so I just did with what I had.

I made two little signs from old scraps of wood and children's set of acrylic paint - just to let the dog and the cat know they are not to touch the plants (or to dig under them)! I'm not stupid, I know they can't read, so I drew them pictures! (Apart from the wrong colour scheme for the dog, the likeness is quite good, if I do say so myself!)

So there you go! My wonderful actinidia plants and protection against Keksis and Rich!