Sunshine and a family is created!

I was rather alarmed to discover how long it has been since I last posted...where on earth has time gone?!?! Pre-LO, I wrote my diary dilligently and seemed to have an excess of time to catch up on emails, read, gaze out the window and muse (of course, I didn't quite appreciate this GLUT of time until it was gone!). And now...now there is this wondrous being, bursting with life and energy and exuberance, filling my days with high-octane fun! Who knew that someone so small could literally FILL life to the seams?!

He's growing and changing and learning and just being gorgeous. At eighteen months, the world is full of wonder - hats are his latest obsession as is exploring the garden at high speed (I laugh now at an old post I wrote about our frustration with the social workers making us build fences around our cliff top home, get down off my high horse and say thank you, thank you, thank you). Now that finally we have some warmth and sunlight, it is like the three of us have crawled out of a dark cave and are expanding into the light. Winter was tough, I'll admit it, so much darkness and cold. We holed up in our kitchen and kept the range going and hung rugs in the window when the north-easterlies were howling in. We got through a LOT of candles. I think LO thought the world was made up of one dark room filled with people and animals...it reminded me of the American Indians in their teepees for the winter, only moving to drink and eat and add more wood to the fire. That was us.

And suddenly we have light and solar power again and a garden bursting with weeds and some vegetables. The evenings are back, and R and I can sit up after LO has gone to bed and reconnect. Last month we officially became a family - the courts decreed that we are a family of three! R and I weren't quite prepared for the impact this would have on us: no more social worker visits, no more health visitor reports, no more low-level anxiety about what ifs. A few days after the official ruling we took off for a few days to Devon as a family and the sense of completeness was immense. We didn't have to let the social workers know where we were going and who we were staying with and could just get on with being a happy team of four (we took the dog). LO flourished with our full attention, minus the distractions of work, and those few days made me determined to make as much time as possible to be a family.

There was something about that long, dark winter that makes me feel like our little family was incubated, and now we are emerging into the light with a new sense of growth. Now I understand what attachment is when LO reaches out his arms for kisses and cuddles, turns to us and says Mumma and Dadda, hugs his cats and dog. This week I have popped him in the back carrier and we have been out on adventures - walking across cliffs with the wild sea breeze in our faces (poor baby with snot across his face that I couldn't see!) and wandering around magical bluebell woods. Delicious. Today we'll be planting out the sunflowers we've raised from seeds and LO will be eating mud, no doubt.