Goodbye sun, hello moon: Autumn & everything after.

The last summer moon of 2013.

Goodbye Summer and Hello Autumn, I'm never quite sure whether I'm supposed to mourn this or celebrate this, but personally it's a celebration. I am not a Summer person. I love Autumn; the smell, the colours, the feeling of it.  I love the cozy dark nights and the vicious slash of colour against the grey days as if nature is ripping apart the grey at it's very seams with poetic fingers that draw the earths blood in pools of orange, red and browns.  Textures beg to be touched as they entice you into some illicit affair.  Things feel alive, the world is on fire, nature is the phoenix, as we dance upon that fragile line between birth and death.  Never has death looked so beautiful and rebirth so promising.  Winter is coming....

I love how ripe and swollen with delicious anticipation Autumn is as we count down to Samhain, Guy Fawkes night and then Yule.  As the leaves die in some macabre beauty around us and the branches lie barren for now, skeletal and brittle, we celebrate for we know it is not the end, just one end of many more which will lead to yet another beginning.  It's intoxicating.

I love the layers as we bundle up, the stews and soups with puddings and custard.....the splashing in puddles and kicking through leaves as we collect one of natures bounties, shiny conkers ripe for the plucking.

Autumn is when I feel most alive.

So how are we welcoming the equinox? well, Thing Two is full of snot and cough and Thing One and The Toddler are as always fighting like cat and dog, or more fitting for The Party of Five, like cat and kitten.  The Husbands temper is ablaze and I'm significantly useless.  With at least several hours of kip a day for a minimum of 5 days a week, I'm exhausted yet functioning...sort of.  Yet a week without daytime sleep and I can barely think straight.  Yet it is still somewhat more favourable than last week when I had my third evening out since  which resulted in me returning home to a bollocking from a furious Husband and a Thing Two in floods of tears followed by an impromptu two bus trip to a park last Sunday with Thing One running head first into a window at the bus station and The Toddler falling down the stairs on a double decker bus.  Joy.  Fear not though, they're terribly bouncy and have not a mark between them.  Yet another of those incidents that they'll likely never remember and yet we as parents will inevitably never forget.

The Kitten has been given free reign round the house in daylight hours now much to The Cats horror.  The days are punctuated by hisses and growls and The Cat finally grew a spine and decided to eat The Kittens Food.  The Kitten retaliated by shitting in The Cats litter tray.  It is essentially a pissing contest to see who's the cats bollocks, only not as they're both girls.  Happy days.

Things One & Two were deep in debate about whether The Toddler should be a boy or a girl with Thing One wanting him to be a boy and Thing Two rather convinced he should be a girl.  The Toddler however just wants to be a Power Ranger.  Fair enough.  Although I'm terribly impressed with their albeit oblivious belief that one can be whichever gender they so choose, I did rather feel duty bound to point out the somewhat obvious fact that The Toddler is a boy.  I say I felt duty bound, yet I never have been one much for duty so I left them be.  Not getting involved.

Thing Two has rediscovered her  inner photographer,seeing as she finally found her camera and we happened to actually have batteries for it, the moon must indeed have been blue that night.  Never one to disappoint in  predictability The Toddler wanted in on the action and commandeered the camera well on his way to needing his own Myspace and Instagram accounts if his penchant for photographing his winky and his dinner are anything to go by.

Sleep is still evading us, in this house in-between insomnia, illness and buggering demonology going on resulting in me sneaking lavender oil into the bath to try and knock at least one of the spawn out.  The Toddler refused to even get out of the bath last night as he did this amusing little ritual of floating whilst walking on his hands up and down the bath insisting he simply must do 'real fish' before he could even contemplate being extricated from the watery wonderland.  Who I am to argue with that logic?  It was an improvement on his earlier bath antics which made me exclaim 'please get your winky out of your watering can spout'  Upon finally getting the little bugger out of the bath the games commenced as I tried to wrestle him into his pj's whilst he laughed at me, forward and backward rolled at hyperspeed across the bed then farted in my general direction.  Such a charmer.

Oh but lest you be mistaken the fun indeed didn't end there.  Then commenced the epic 80 minute stint of singing, pretending to be a fireman, serenading me with Anthrax and nursery rhymes, demanding a towel to wipe his snot, burping in my face, attaching himself to my back, draining an entire beaker of water (this was after half an hour on the breast) and cuddling the orange cover of some sort of flashing light thing from a building site.

He then had the utter audacity to roll onto my side of the bed whilst I went moon hunting out the bedroom window which was rudely interrupted by a fog horn skank with a rather limited vocabulary consisting mainly of obscenities having a loud conversation with her young daughter across the street...in the dark.

Still, this morning soon arrived and despite a treacherous inability to go the fuck to sleep, I still had several hours in bed before being presented with a bacon and mushroom butty in bed ....and two bunches of roses!  The Husband evidently wants blowing.