We’re in pre-wedding trip mode and in just under a week’s time a group of immediate & extended family and friends are meeting up in Brazil for our son’s wedding. He and his fiancée met here in Australia, but all her family are in Brazil so that’s where they’re having the ceremony. Three flights, 30 hours in the air and then a 12-hour overnight bus ride - not looking forward to all that time in a plane. Now that I have a dress to wear and a list of what to pack, my main concern is what books I’m going to take with me to help me through 60 hours stuck in a seat with minimal hope of getting much sleep.
About two months ago my husband came home looking rather glum & made a comment about his day being very pleasant up until a few minutes beforehand. He’d just accidentally run over our 14-year-old cat, Polo, on our driveway. Polo was a grumpy, aloof specimen of a tomcat who only really loved our youngest child and just put up with everyone else. He had been part of our daughter’s life for a long time, and she was very upset. When she disappeared to have a good cry, her older brother buried him with honours & made a little gravesite with rocks and ferns in our bit of bush next to the house which comforted her somewhat.
Creating
English Paper Piecing is my ongoing creative outlet, but I haven’t actually finished anything recently. However, I do have a quilt in progress but I put that aside to work on a crochet rug for my to be daughter-in-law who has been working in Switzerland in medical research, while my son is working a few hours away in Germany. Not sure where they will live when they marry but it will probably be Germany, London or Sydney. A crochet rug wouldn’t get much use in Brazil I imagine.
I haven’t done much knitting, but when my husband’s granny made me some socks a few years ago I was inspired to try to make some myself. So far I’ve bought some 4ply sock wool and have some videos by the Winwick Mum Sockalong to help me out when I get started…it’s a pity you can’t take knitting needles on flights. It would be an ideal time to watch the videos and get started.
I’ve used a couple of free patterns @ Ann Wood Handmade for sewing ideas.
Grandchildren Days
We look after two of our grandchildren aged 1 and 3 years of age one day a week and usually take them out somewhere in the morning for a couple of hours. If it’s fine we go to a park but we had a really miserable cold, wet day a while ago, so we went to a local aquarium supply shop that has a good size collection of aquariums with many different types of sea creatures. The staff were happy for us just to wander around, aware that we weren’t there to buy anything, and gave the children some food to feed the fish. Last week we took them on a short train ride & went to a park for lunch.
Once a week I do reading lessons with our 6-year-old grandson who is being taught at home. His 4-year-old brother seems to have picked up reading by osmosis - their Mum reads to them each day and they’ve been loving the Swallows & Amazons series of books by Arthur Ransome.
Coming up
Continuing the read along of For the Family’s Sake. A reader asked if I would write about family life with children as they get older, so I plan to include some thoughts/ideas about that when we return from our trip. One of the biggest strains of raising children is adjusting our authority as our children mature and knowing how, when and where to extend or limit the boundaries we have in place. This is more complicated when you have a large family with children in different stages of life - babies, toddlers, teens and everything in between.
Commonplace Quotations
It had come gradually—it was not till the first year of their life together, so admirably intimate at first, had closed that she had taken the alarm. Then the shadows had begun to gather; it was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one.
He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship, any more than she. But she had seen only half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now—she saw the whole man…
Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.
—The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)
Whatever language we use, we must be constantly aware of a reductionist creep that starts by saying humans have some similarities to machines and ends by saying humans are nothing but machines. The next step is to say, as some already do, that certain machines are so humanlike that they should be protected by human rights legislation.
—2084 and the AI Revolution by John C. Lennox (2020, 2024)
“You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”
—The Power-House by John Buchan (1920)
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A wedding in Brazil! Wow! This is the type of thing I can’t imagine; please share your wisdom on orchestrating a wedding that far away from home!
You definitely can bring knitting needles on planes! Stick with wooden needles especially, and you shouldn’t have any trouble.