Thursday, May 31, 2012

Life lately . . . .

has had its ups and downs . . . .

Have I told you that I'm about to become a grandmother for the first time?  My son and his wife expect the birth of their first child within the next week or two.  It's almost surreal - this waiting for a blessed event that once again changes everything.  It seems no time since my son was, himself, a wee one.  Now he's about to become a dad.  And his wife becomes a mum.  And we older ones, the generation before, who up until the moment of this new life are the mums, are no longer the mums.  We become the grandmothers.

The pregnancy has not been without its troubles.  Morning sickness was more like all day sickness.  Major renovations were being carried out on their house and once the pregnancy was confirmed, became even more urgent.  My son's job become somewhat redundant at Christmas and just at a time when income became very important, there was none.  There was a lot of stress.

But the house is mostly sorted, a new job has been found, baby showers have been celebrated and now we wait for the happy event.  I have been knitting (chuckle, as my knitting skills are somewhat suspect), thank goodness for Ravelry - it has taken over from eBay as my most favourite bookmark.

In March I began making a quilt for my sister in law who was turning 50 in April (snort, did I think that was plenty of time to get it done?) and whilst I was in the process of piecing it, discovered to my dismay that my niece had just turned 30 (not 29 as I thought) and as I had made up some crazy plan that a zero birthday deserved a quilt, I then had 2 quilts to make.  I'm pleased to say they were both done by the middle of April and are now warming the toes of their recipients.


This is the one I made for my niece.  I thought I'd taken a photo of the other one but iPhoto tells me I didn't.

In the meantime, the garden got very little attention and the more bedraggled it looked, the less inspiration I had to work there.  After such a lousy, wet summer, autumn has come along with warmish sunshine and coolish nights and I have ventured back into the garden to say hello to all the healthy weeds and try to get a little bit of order happening before winter comes.  I've been getting plant catalogues in the mail with tempting pictures of lovely things I should be planting now but the weeds need to come out first.  I started on Monday this week in the 'snake bed' - here's a photo taken half way through my gardening day -


Check the height of the kikuyu!  It was growing up through the roses and the salvias, had completely covered the poor yellow irises and in the front left corner, under a thatch of kikuyu, I found my treasured little snowflake bulbs pushing up through the soil.  I had to sit down on the step and contemplate their determination and gave myself a small lecture about not letting things get in the way of what I would like to achieve.