May is a naturally joyful month.  All the fresh bright greens in a billion different shades, leaves so bountiful the trees are weighed down, canopies so dense that they form dark tunnels. Bees buzzing, swallows and swifts filling the skies, and the flittering fluttering movement of butterflies again.  Ducklings! Goslings! Nests of chirruping chicks! Gosh, May is lovely. Has it always been this lovely?  My heart has been SO FULL this month.  There’s just so much love buzzing about.

I’ve been in at the deep end with working out how to look after two little people since Ross went back to work.  Usually Piglet goes to grandparents for two days a week but they’ve been on holiday/had covid/on holiday so he’s been home with me.  I think it has been really good for us.  He’s getting used to the baby and includes her in all his chat now.  She has every nap in the carrier, face squished against my chest, while Piglet and I play.  He asks to go for lots of ‘nice, lovely bike-walks’.  He zips about on his balance bike, giving me mini heart-attacks as he flails down hills, and Trixie sleeps through it all.  We make our way down into the woodland through the bluebells to our favourite picnic bench by the stream, or down round the orchard where we found hundreds of empty snail shells on the path (why would that be?).  Riverbank playdates, Wildlife Club, trips out with Auntie Ruth: Piglet plays and Trixie mostly sleeps and we have muddled through just fine.

And then the evenings and night-times are Trixie’s time.  After Piglet goes to bed it is her time to be cooed at and played with.  Night feeds that become dawn feeds that are dawn chorus feeds.  The thin white light that slides round the black-out blinds as the blackbird takes up song.  Her big, dark eyes look up at me in the semi-light.  Oval, heart-stopping love bombs.  Milk and birdsong and the new day beginning.

Other May things: waiting for the swallows to come back (slow start, I think, but the skies are filling up nicely now); the first screaming swifts; lots of orange-tip butterflies; spotting lapwings and hares from the Heatherslaw Light Railway; pond dipping; tadpoles; a blue tit nest in a hole; blowing dandelion clocks; an erruption of hawthorn flies on the morning of our garden party; the ceanothus tree blooming bright blue five days too late for the party.  Piglet very much enjoyed spotting the bright yellow oil seed rape fields on car journeys, shouting YELLOW FIELD every time.  

I have nothing bad to say about May, despite broken night’s sleep and the tantrums of a newly-three-year-old, nettle stings and sick in my hair.