New Beginnings...

It’s 6pm and the sun streams explosively through the house, pouring through the open kitchen doors and windows and splashing in pools of light and hope all over the floor. I can’t get over it. Less than 4 months ago it would be pitch black outside by now, and we’d have had 2 hours of darkness already.

Instead, although it’s bath-time, my head and heart are distracted by the turquoise, cloudless sky, and my feet get that unmistakable itch. It’s the urge to abandon the usual routines of evening, such a comfort in the winter months, and play on the beach until the light fades, or ramble over the rocks above the bay, watching out for porpoises and greeting spring lambs along the way.

The boys’ body-clocks are thrown haywire too. A CBeebies presenter sings tunelessly about it being bedtime, and I watch surprise and confusion ripple across the 2-yr-old’s face as he glances quizzically out the window. “Is it nearly bedtime?” he asks, his face upturned to mine, his unknowingness poignant and still so sweet.

Nannie planted broad beans with the boys. They seem to have grown exponentially, just since breakfast-time. They stretch upwards from their pots on the kitchen windowsill, threatening to overtake us, Triffids-style.

Talking of growing things, the sunlight seems to have fast-tracked the boys out of their winter clothes. They grow like weeds. Trousers that seemed to fit them yesterday hang at half mast around china-white ankles. I can’t keep clothes on them of late, and I laugh out loud when the 2-yr-old staggers into the kitchen, a soggy mess of ice cream cone in hand, his lower half inexplicably undressed and thrust at me, with a wordless demand that I wipe up the errant drips of ice cream trailing down his skinny legs.

They grow in non-physical ways too, and I find myself dizzy at the changes that each week seems to bring. The three of us walk hand in hand towards the beach and people stop and comment, always mistaking them for twins, or just remarking at their cuteness. They glower at the unwanted attention and I play it down. I glance from one little head to another, so easy to confuse, and for a panic-filled second I wonder where the babies are, and who left these strapping handsome boys here? Life seems so civilised now that there’s almost nothing that they cannot do. They’re independent souls, but fused together with a bond that leaves me speechless every day. They’ve begun the uneasy separation from one another that nursery or separate friends brings about but I don’t relish the thought of big school for one and (hopefully) nursery for the other in September, after the summer of rediscovering themselves as one another’s best friend on the planet.

As they grow I realise with a feeling not-to-far-removed from sea-sickness that we’ve left babyhood far behind. Some days I don’t think our family is finished yet, but as we morph into a more civilised stage I feel a sense of horror at the very thought of going back to nappies, buggies, bottles and the accoutrements of a stage that we seem to have slipped easily away from.

The 2-yr-old rose to the potty-training challenge, shaming me into the realisation that it was me who was reluctant to take the plunge. He clambers up the stairs and pokes his head around my bedroom door while I am getting dressed. “Mummy, I did a wee and a poooooo...” he says, teasingly, and my heart sinks for a moment, until I realise he doesn’t mean he’s had an accident. I follow him downstairs, bemused, and discovered he’s responded to the call of nature by sitting on the potty without a word to me, doing his thing, and then tipping the potty contents with absolute precision into the toilet bowl. He was in nappies six weeks ago and has been dry at night for 3 of those. He is a genius, no?

This week’s been hard. Dada feels the pressure of workplace shenanigans that hold both unrelenting hope and scary unknowns in equal measure, and I’m filling in gaps and mothering boys often single-handedly while running a household and trying to grow into the shapes I need to be.

Our day comprised of swimming before breakfast, playing on swings and hiding in woods at Dada’s workplace (free chicken nuggets and chips for lunch thrown in), a bit of down-time and then running through the fountain, throwing pebbles into rockpools, and taking forever to choose ice-cream before settling on the same flavour they choose every single time. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how many cones we buy, or how many combinations of extras and toppings that we order, there’s always change from 4 bucks.

The 2-yr-old pulls his best silly face, inches from mine, while I’m fixing him with the you-better-start-behaving look. “Do that make you happy?” he says, grinning like a crazed monkey until I laugh involuntarily, and I realise no-one has ever made me laugh as much as that kid does. Similary I can’t think of a person who has touched my heart as tenderly as his brother does, with his earnest words and capacity for conversation.

I taught myself to climb a tree today, with my 2 intrepid explorers in tow. We must have perched up there for 20 minutes, spying out to sea and pretending to race horses. “You guys are adorable,” said a workplace-friend of Dada’s as he passed us by and noticed us lingering in the trees, and I wondered what we look like to other people, what they see and how that compares with what being us is really like. There’s another thought hidden in here about duplicity but if I’ve learned anything from blogging it’s that I need to hold back a little more. Which brings me to why I’m back, after a brief spell of virtual silence. Lots of reasons, and I’m glad for the sense of time and perspective that my non-blogging days have restored. I was stealing time from my boys to document their days which seemed all out of kilter, and I had developed an inexplicable habit of reading blogs aimlessly, wasting time that could be better spent in a hundred different ways. I can’t say how often I’ll drop in, having acquired an altogether healthier rhythm without the daily blogging fix, but it occurs to me that if nothing else my blog has recorded my journey into mamadom in ways that no baby book ever could. It seems a shame to end that record now, when the wonder of their childhood is only really getting started. So here I am, back, with a sense of caution and a redressed sense of what a blog is for. I’m not giving pieces of myself away this time, and I’m saving 90% of what springs to mind for other writing opportunities, but I can’t leave the story so unfinished, so here starts yet another chapter.