We’ve been out today in the pale, bright early spring sunshine, because we are all obviously vitamin D deficient. We’ve had a perfectly fine winter – not very cold, uneventful, longish and grey but no more than you would expect (and no worse either – I don’t suffer from SAD). Sure, I find the winter a bit of a bore but also kind of nice – I quite like the dark morning running and the nesting and the warm traybakes for dinner and settling down to watch TV and then early bedtimes for (nearly) everyone. But there’s that thing that happens when the sunlight lights everything up in an almost overhead florescent light kind of way and the blossoms burst and you remember what it is to feel lighter and happier. Skippier. Excitable. Smiley. The tug of outdoors and the longer days and the warmth and sun on your face.

So this morning I said ENOUGH PUT DOWN YOUR STUPID PHONES and they all followed me out like little ducklings because they all must feel it too, and we frolicked in the park and no one complained. It was a bit weird because the first tranche of children have moved on now, and the little ones haven’t done all the things and been to all the places that the first lot experienced, or they were too young to remember. So we have to try to do the things again to make sure we don’t have massively different childhood stories between them all. My older siblings had a kind of tribal threesome growing up experience before I was born and sometimes I hear my parents telling these stories about their three kids and the stuff they all did and I am like….uh……nope, I wasn’t there. I came ten years later when everyone was kind of teenage and over it.

Today we did go and revisit the patch of climbing trees and lower bushes that I took them to every afternoon during lockdown. It’s hard to remember the afternoons we passed there during the one exercise break we were able to take, because it was boring and samey and stressful. We would bring the dog and he would make a huge fuss after a while, barking and trying to run away into the Serpentine, and we had people come and complain (from afar) telling me that my dog was disturbing their precious quiet time. He very much was, but there was just me and six children (one a baby) and no where else to go and he was disturbing my peace too, as I recall. I was doing my best.

The police on bikes or patrol cars would sometime come and ask me about my massive oversized group of kids and I – exceeding the magical group of six – and I would say that they were in fact all mine and the numbers simply couldn’t be helped.

We had an Easter Egg hunt in the patch during that terrible period because going into our communal garden for our annual hunt wasn’t quite in the spirit of confinement (we weren’t very well-received as such a big group of small marauding boys while everyone else was busy trying not to mix households), and I remember the ickiness I felt spreading the foil-wrapped eggs into slightly dog-pissy tree forks and thickets of grass, pretending like it was all fine and fun and good.

Anyway, we went there today, and ran around the Diana Memorial Fountain and got suitably wet. We had coffee, babyccinos and hot chocolates overlooking the water, found the huge climbing tree in the Rose Gardens, and waved at the parakeets. I felt all joint-achey the whole way and Mark confirmed that’s what being old feels like. Every day.

So that’s awesome.

Tales of illness

Last night, Mark got all stomach-achey and vomited for a good long while and I was like ROLL MY EYES IT’S PROBABLY KIDNEY STONES and I was trying to find a way to tell him that when he did, in fact, have to call the ambulance at approx 3am for morphine and a trip to A&E, I wouldn’t be coming. Last time I had to try to sleep on a plastic chair which hurt my already screwed-up neck and all he did was sleep off the serious drugs (in between moaning like a woman in labour and looking at me with tears in his eyes saying THIS FEELS SO AWFUL) and I was feeling a bit sick of having to do that kind of thing AGAIN. I was getting all annoyed because the doctor told him last time to become a vegetarian and I am always saying ‘go on a diet and come for a run with me bro’ and he doesn’t do either and so I think the kidney stones are kind of his fault. I was a bit ungenerous and so I put him to bed last night at 8pm and said to shout out if he needed me and closed the door. We had a perfectly nice movie night and ate creme eggs and Doritos. I crept into bed at 11pm and he was asleep, so I hopped into bed and settled in, fully expecting that sleep would be brief and jarred when the kidney stones moaning began.

BUT! He slept til morning and he seemed ok, which means one of two things. Either, he has a kidney stone brewing and last night was just a little teaser of what is to come, or he poisoned himself by not cooking the lentils well enough in the chicken soup he gave us all for tea. I am hoping, really hoping, for the latter. Why weren’t you all poisoned, I hear you asking….? The only thing I can think is that he has a very babyish stomach and we are all made of steel.

More worryingly

The other thing I woke up to was a whole slew of messages saying that my dear old Dad had collapsed at church and was in hospital all the way on the North Island of very-far-away New Zealand. Mum was up there at the hospital with him still but she doesn’t know how to use the phone – Dad does all of that (and a whole lot of other stuff). We were lucky that they have a few nephews and nieces living near them (thank you, you guys!) who looked after them and let us all know what had happened, but they are pretty much alone. No kids in the actual country. No one to do the stuff that will need to be done. No one to help them. No one to take responsibility. So we are thrown back into the worry about how we can all manage what will be increasing ill-health and general elderliness when we are all plane rides away. I don’t know quite how we got to this, and I know they don’t either. Thoughts on caring for marvellous and loving elderly parents who live in a different hemisphere and who are currently utterly unsupported by their brood of four adult kids most welcome.

Photos to cheer us all up after that

Covid lockdown tree patch:

Noah and me, before he chipped his tooth in half (again) on a piece of soft bread. Go figure.

The horse stature. Everyone must climb this and I must take a photo. They also must look into the weak sun for the best light even though it is clearly burning their retinas.

More covid lockdown tree patch shenanigans:

On strong sons, the kids can now pretty much heave themselves up into the trees using their extremely impressive upper arms. Ned said he would like to become a BBC gladiator eventually and his name would be ‘Dorito’ because he loves Doritos and his musculature is currently triangle-shaped. I think that’s a marvellous goal.