wood walks

May 29, 2011 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)42 Comments

It's school half term break here – it hardly feels like enough time has passed since the Easter break and I'm not at all prepared.

Luckily both Toby and I share a love of quiet, woodland places and since he's so hard to entertain at the best of times, we'll be having a daily jaunt to the woods to help keep him occupied.

We walk along in silence, enjoying the sounds of the birds and the wind in the leaves and sometimes we get rewarded for our quiet strolling by a glimpse of a deer or a fox. Toby has a favourite wood walk with ancient contorted trees (a legacy of coppicing) and a brook running through the centre.

It also has Ermine Street, an ancient Roman road running through it and I like to think of all of the people who have passed this way through the ages, apparently including William the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell and now Master Toby…

Toby usually loves paddling in the brook (and occasionally peeing in it!) but at the moment it's completely dry thanks to the lack of spring rain.

Despite that everything is verdant and cool and so very peaceful. I hope that peace will keep us company the rest of this week as we're still waiting to hear about dates for respite care and Toby has been particularly unmanageable over the last few weeks. Hopefully the woods will work their magic on him and help to keep him calm, he usually is when we're there.

I love this picture of him strolling along ahead of me, he looks for all the world like any other nine year old boy. Seeing him like this does me the power of good!

I won't be back this week but hope to be back with some knitting updates next week. Hope you have a peaceful week where you are and thanks for dropping in to visit.

general stuff

nostalgic

May 13, 2011 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)37 Comments

For some reason I've been feeling rather nostalgic of late. I feel very lucky to have had a happy and carefree childhood and have lots of vivid memories, some of which are triggered by a particular piece of music or a smell or perhaps an object. When I saw these glasses in the Pedlars catalogue I was suddenly swept back 35 years to my Gangan's kitchen, because the exact same ones always sat in a little stack on a shelf in her glassware cupboard.

When I was growing up my family would always visit with my grandparents on a saturday morning. My Gangan would brew coffee and the grown-ups would talk in the kitchen while my brother and I watched saturday morning tv in the living room – Tarzan and the Osmonds featured heavily in the early '70s and then later it was swap shop or Tiswas. There was always elevensies – either my Gangan's special concoction of drinking chocolate, dessicated coconut and the cream from the top of the milk mixed into a delicious goo or maybe some cake or cookies. To drink it was either a glass of robinson's lemon barley or some PLJ in a glass exactly the same as these.

I love that every time I drink from these glasses I have a little blast from the past and despite the fact that both my grandparents are no longer with us, they feel close again. Funny how inanimate objects can conjure up such intense feelings.

Is there anything that makes you feel nostalgic about your childhood?

general stuff · in the woods

Bluebells

April 27, 2011 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)34 Comments

One of the nicest things about having children in different schools is that the inset days are usually different. This was the case yesterday with Toby going back to school a day earlier than Amy, giving us the chance to spend some extra time together. After breakfast we headed off to the woods where the bluebells were out. Sadly they were a little past their best but still scented the air and made the woods more magical than ever…