Well, September was a lot.  No drama, just very full days. I launched the 2024 Wildlife Calendars at the start of September and OH MY GOODNESS you guys were completely wonderful.  It is such a thrill seeing orders come in and calendars going out in their Royal Mail sacks.  Calendar Launch is my favourite week of the year every year and I thank you for that!  It does mean that I give myself an enormous amount of work to do in a short period of time, though, which is possibly not the most sensible thing when you have small children and your childcare is on holiday.  We powered through, though, and made it to the October half-term intact, if a little run-down.  There was no time in the midst of it all for September blogging, so I’ve bundled my September and October journals into one.

September things: 

• Flexi Fridays – we’re trying out a flexi-school approach for Piglet.  In Scotland, Friday is a half-day, so on Fridays we decided to homeschool (for a variety of reasons). Our Fridays together have mostly been wonderful, so far (although there’s been a few where everyone squabbled all day and I seriously doubted our decision). One of my favourite Fridays was a trip to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh to see an exhibition about Fungi (on until December 8th, and you can find my products in the shop).  Piglet made friends with a squirrel and it snuffled his hand and he was delighted.  There’s a gentleness in him that animals love. Other lovely Fridays have been pottering around Drygrange, walking down to the river for picnics, picking apples in the orchard and brambles in the wood, baking and painting and mucking aboot. I give myself a pretty hard time when the Fridays don’t go well, but I’m working on that.
• A final seaside trip of the summer – we were lucky enough to be able to borrow a caravan at Pease Bay on the east coast. It was mid-September and a pretty grey weekend, but nothing gets between my kids and the sea! The weekend was a 50/50 split of pure joy and seriously hard going. The kids turn into wild animals on the beach – running through the water, sitting in the waves, crawling in the sand, climbing cliffs, squawking like gulls. It’s so free and joyful until it isn’t. All of a sudden they are cold and wet and there’s sand stuck to them and all hell breaks loose. It always ping-pongs between sensory seeking and sensory avoidance and that’s quite tiring to parent, sometimes. Huge highs, big lows. Add in not much sleep and a bit of a cold and sometimes trips are just exhausting. But being by the sea always makes it worth it.  Heaven, for me, is walking along the beach with my wee family, wrapped up in my big coat, collecting a handful of shells and rubbing one between finger-and-thumb.  Everytime we spend time at the seaside I make Ross discuss the option of moving to the coast or an island. It’s the expansiveness, the vastness of the sky.  I wonder if I moved to the sea, would I miss feeling enclosed by my woodland, would I travel back inland to feel held by trees and moss and birdsong. I think I probably would.  I think my spirit is more fern than seaweed.
• Flamingos – The most magical half-hour of my September was hand-feeding the flamingos at Bird Gardens Scotland. It was a (heavily hinted at) gift from my sister. The flamingos ate from our hands and they were so gentle and magnificent.  The kids did brilliantly (and the flamingos did brilliantly with the kids!). Trix wore her flamingo jumper for the occasion and was straight in there; Piglet was more hesistant but once he got going he was obsessed. Owen, the mastermind behind Bird Gardens, was knowledgeable and kind. My favourite fact learned was that the flamingo’s knees go pink as they approach maturity. That might mean that there’ll be baby flamingos (flaminglings?) in the next couple of years and then I shall die of adorable. I would thoroughly recommend visiting Bird Gardens, and a flamingo experience if you can stretch to it.  

October things:

• Half-term – we made it to half-term without getting chicken pox or any other nasties, and had a lovely week of pottering, pumpkins and walks in the woods. That’s the first ever term of school complete and I couldn’t be prouder of our wee man.  It was lovely to have a quiet week together before – deep breath – the Christmas term.  My favourite thing about Piglet being at school is seeing the excitement about learning that has emerged.  It is very cool, as a parent, to see horizons open up on a daily basis.  Reading!  Amazing. 
• Drawing together – instead of feeling frustrated about not getting a chance to draw in my sketchbook, I’ve been sketchbooking with the kids.  There wasn’t space in this blog post for all those sketchbook pages, so I’ve popped them in a separate blog post here.
• It has been a really warm October, overall.  A couple of frosty mornings, and a few misty ones, but lots of warm weather.  The cosmos at my back door are still flowering.  This week is Samhain, the mid-point between the equinox and the solstice.  Samhain is also know as the third harvest, and is the moment to lift any veggies still in the ground before the hard frosts come.  Samhain, Halloween, Diwali.  World-wide, this time of year holds great significance in the tussle between the dark and the light.

Sketchbook Pages:

 1 and 2 Squirrel sketches from our day out at the Botanics

3 and 4. seaweed and red stone cliffs at Pease Bay

5 Flamingos

6 and 7 October pen drawings