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It's actually been a busy one for us this week, so not a lot of cross stitching done, but a lot of giggling and laughing.

• The arrival of our fluff babies! Five gorgeous quails, four girls and a boy (in two separate hutches...poor George has to wait until the next batch to get some company). I've posted a couple of photos at the bottom.
• The Imps ecstatic giggling when bouncing on the harnessed trampolines in town. One of the best £3 I've spent, just to hear her giggling like that.
• Finally winning the battle of my downstairs, and getting it to a point that it now fairly easy to keep up the tidy. 
• Being able to appease my need to rearrange furniture (there will be a post around this tomorrow or Wednesday!)
• Barbecuing on Saturday with friends. Being able to introduce people and everybody getting along together like a house on fire. We're already planning Yule, and at least one other meal before then. There was a lot of laughing going on, and I think we finally finished at around 1am.

Harriet

Gertie and Gertrude

Bounce!

Mel

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• We're now in the home stretch for the arrival of our quails, and I'm stupidly excited. We're just waiting for the arrival of the food and feeders, which I expect either tomorrow or Wednesday, and the birds will be arriving on Saturday.
• The hilarity of wet cats. I needed to bath my cats to give me a fresh start to sort their skin out. My boy, Loki, is absolutely loopy and loves water, so he didn't mind being dumped into the bathroom sink full of warm water and baby shampoo (and after a generous dollup of body butter for extra dry skin rubbed into his fur, his neck is almost healed). Florence didn't enjoy it at all, but she was funny because her fur soaks up water like a sponge...on top of leaving a huge puddle in the bathroom carpet, she looked so pathetic it was difficult not to laugh (her neck is improved, but was a lot worse than Loki's in the first place).
• The first Christmas gifts are now hiding in the cupboard under the stairs. It's a joint gift for the Imp and I from her Grumpy, and we managed to get a really good deal, so shopped early. I already have Yule and Christmas on the brain, and have for the past month or two. I've already forewarned Angela at The Pagan Mom Blog that my excitement for this year is likely to start creeping into my posts pretty soon. I think the reason that I've got it into my head to start preplanning is because since I started this college course before, I know what's coming, and I want to have everything superbly organised so it's very little effort when the time comes.
• The Imp's current fascination with chickens. When we visited a friend who has some recently, we hardly saw her in the house because she was out chattering to her rapt audience and feeding them the grass that had been growing between the flagstones in the path.

The Imp and her audience

The Imp and her audience

Mel

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It's been another quiet one for us this week, though with the Imp it feels like something is always going on.  Here are my Joy Pockets for the week. Don't forget to visit Monica at Bohemian Twilight if you're interested in joining in with this fantastic meme.

• Having the opportunity to spend lots of time in the woods, and making me brave enough to explore our little woods near us. Our day at Lincolnshire Forest School on Saturday really made me see that the Imp is ready for that extended exploration, and she's fantastic at it. On Sunday, we wandered to Boultham Woods, and I let her take the lead. 
• The Imp telling me, spontaneously during our walk yesterday, "I'm really having fun, mummy!", as she searched for 'sweeties' (blackberries...which aren't quite ready except the occasional bitter one).
• Being caught up with my paperwork. Ok, this one might seem strange, but I hate paperwork. But I managed to get all of my financial forms into college as soon as I received them, because I had all of my evidence in order before they arrived. 
• Being able to find a reasonably priced replacement for the power switch that I broke on my netbook (when replacing the wireless card). Now to figure out how to get it installed tomorrow, with the assistance of a friend.
• The arrival of our new hutch for the soon-to-be arriving quail, and the reality that hit when I got it put together on Saturday evening.
• A fantastic friend that I met in college last year moving just a bit down the road from me.
• Continuing to watch things grow in our garden. Our pumpkin is starting to go orange, some of the sunflowers are bigger than my head, and the smaller ones have loads of gorgeous flowers on one plant, and it's so heavy I'm going to have to stake it tomorrow.

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It's been a quiet one for us this week, but there's always positive things for us.

• Spending loads of time with the Imp, even if it's just watching her play with her cars while I work on my cross stitch (though she is absolutely fascinated with it, so I really must find a kiddie-friendly alternative...maybe for her 4th birthday in January).
• Our sunflowers starting to open this week, and how much they brighten up our drab back garden.
• Weeding in the garden taking less time as the proper plants take over.
• Having a new 'project' to do research to start up, and the reality hitting that it's going to happen really soon, with the Imp's grandfather buying us a double hutch off eBay, that will be housing our soon to arrive quails
• Getting to meet a friend's menagerie, and having a first look at what will be the new additions to our family (start of our menagerie :P )
• The letters arriving from the college with my September schedule, and the excitement that it's all going to start properly this time. Last year, I had been called up off the waiting list and started a fortnight late and couldn't get childcare funding. This year, my funding paperwork is all sorted, I'll be starting on time, and I have a clue as to what to expect.

Blessed Lughnasadh!

Happy and blessed Lughnasadh Eve to you all! This is one of my favourite celebrations on the wheel of the year (along with Samhein and Yule), because it is quite dear to my heart. The main reason is that it was the first celebration that I had truly celebrated, by attending a weekend festival with a friend in 1997 at Lothlorien Nature Sanctuary, in southern Indiana. 

Midsummer Moon Dance is not an event that they hold any more because it wasn't one of the big ones, but it's a weekend that I still remember very clearly. I remember the circles that were held, that were kept open and informal. The amazing feeling of sleeping under the stars...there was no light pollution and the weather was hot, humid, and clear for the entire weekend (too warm to be sleeping in our tent). Everybody going skinny dipping in the creek at the bottom of the hill, to cool off. Getting my head around the concept of 'Skyclad is welcome'. And the Thunderdome. Nothing will ever compare to it...everybody sitting around, people who brought their drums, flutes, and even a home-made didgeridoo, and spinning and dancing around the bonfire (and almost catching my skirt on fire because I semi-tranced and got too close).  The energy over the entire weekend was amazing, and I went home buzzing.

Unfortunately, I've not had the opportunity to do anything similar. Here in the UK, most of my friends don't really acknowledge it because it's not one of the major celebrations. Because so many of us have no real connection to the harvests, we've lost the celebration of the first harvest, and even the second harvest (Mabon, or the Autumnal Equinox). Even Samhein has lost it's entire meaning. Yes, the veil is thinner and we celebrate our ancestors and those that have passed on over the year, but it's also the celebration of the final harvest. Today I will be celebrating by cleaning my house (similar to a spring clean), adding a salad to my lunch with the lettuce harvested from my own garden, baking some zucchini bread with zucchini and eggs gifted from a friend, and taking a bit of that as an offering to Lugh with the Imp to the nearby river.

We'll also be spending time in our back garden, which for my first real attempt at a veg patch, I am really proud of. I'm in a rented house, and the landlord thought that it would be easy maintenance for the tenants to layer the garden in pebbles and peat. Unfortunately, the weeds are a nightmare, on top of it reminding me of a barren wasteland.  So, I used a load of the pots that people had given to me, scraped a few of the stones at the end of the garden away (I wanted to do more, but it's really difficult when doing it with just a spade), and planted seeds in whatever space I could find. I had planned on moving the pumpkins all down to the end of the garden, but I had a plant that had decided to reseed itself from last year's harvest (I only put pumpkin out last year as an experiment) in March, and it now is taking over my path and has a pumpkin the size of your head. I've had lots of kos lettuce that I have been harvesting, as well as beetroot (I dice it and roast it with potatoes, onion, smoked sausage, and herbs...yum). I currently have lots of little green tomatoes that I expect to get bigger and go red within the next fortnight (maybe? This is coming from a complete novice). The sunflowers, as you can tell from the pics, are now almost as tall as I am. The two sweetcorn plants that I randomly bought from the market for 10p a piece and threw into pots now each have a tiny ear of corn with the silk coming over the top forming. The pumpkin plants at the end of the garden are getting big really fast.  We don't have strawberries this year, but the plants that we bought to rescue are finally starting to thrive. As are the herbs in the 'mixed pot'...I've already snipped a few of those for a stew the other day, and it was amazing. I usually use dried herbs, but I'm definitely going to change my ways. I'm currently making arrangements to sort out the bits that we need for the arrival of quails, so we'll have quails eggs of our own, soon.

Next year, I've been offered the assistance of friends and a rototiller, so I'm now starting to plan in my head how to correct the mistakes that I've made this year (not enough compost in the pots of tomatoes, for example), and what more that we can put out. I do have cucumber and radish out this year, but I think they need to be somewhere else, where they're not being shaded by the sunflowers. I still have my fingers crossed for them.  I also want to put out onion, carrots, and possibly cauliflower, along with other veg. 

I can say that it makes pulling all of the weeds a lot easier and more enjoyable. And the bigger the veg (especially the pumpkins) get, the less weeds there are. And the Imp is actually getting really good at helping weed, even if she did accidentally mutilate one of the smaller pumpkin plants the other day (it was an accident...it's in a shady corner, so not as big as the rest of them, and absolute inundated with weeds).

Long view of the garden, trying to capture most of the plants.

My pot of mixed herbs (basil, oregano, sage, thyme, and a little lavender) and one of the lavender that I'm trying to rescue in the other pot

One of the many ladybirds that we've had this year in the sunflowers. Various bees have also been sighted.

View of the sunflowers from the neighbour's garden

One of the tomato plants

The pumpkin that helped itself

Quail chicks at my friend, Raine's, that I am getting prepared to start with.

Mel