Loo cleaning, lawn foraging, lone weeding and gigantic mistakes

Hello friends

I’m not even sure this post will get sent; brain being addled and the rest, but I’ll see how far I get. The end of this week marks the finish of week one of isolation and lockdown for most of us here in the UK. And for most of my friends, we are also homeschooling (or supposed to be homeschooling), because they were sent home at the end of last week. I decided to take my kids out early, so I’m at the end of week TWO of ‘homeschooling’ and isolation. I’ve had a chance to settle in to the whole thing and find out what works for us…for ME. The answer of course, is NONE OF IT. But there are silver linings which I think the entire country is experiencing, not least the opportunity to concentrate on the garden, which often gets passed over for the rest of life. Here are our five minute forays for this week…which in general have extended themselves to 30 or forty minutes of actual gardening on my part (air punch!) I cannot sit here and tell you that I am mentally cruising, but I do know that without the garden and the gardenING I would be in a far worse state.

Monday

The seeds we sowed last week are appearing. As usual, the children are momentarily excited and then look for more stimulating things. In my experience it’s a myth that seeing a seed germinate is a magical thing for a child; I’m sorry but I just don’t think it’s that exciting for them…perhaps if they’d NEVER watched telly it’d be exciting for them. I’m enjoying it immensely though, although the presence of so very many seeds in little pots panics me slightly. Sowing too many seeds is something I have taken great pains to avoid over the years, and yet here we are, with all these tiny babies - the result of being cooped up with three children for a week already. It’s a bit like a baby boom.

The children are a bit trigger happy with my trowels so I pull out the old wheel barrow with the flat tyre and a bag of compost. I give them a trowel each and tell them to fill up the wheelbarrow. They spend a blissful amount of time doing the shovelling until my eldest spoils everything by suggesting she help them pour it in. ugh. I dig up some random plants to put in the wheelbarrow; a campion (Lychnis coronaria) which grows absolutely everywhere in my garden, a geranium whose name I have forgotten and some forgetmenots. There are also three sweet pea seedlings left over from my autumn sowing so we make a mini wigwam with three bamboo sticks and plant one at the base of each cane. The children water and I breathe deeply, reminding myself that this is THEIR garden and none of it matters….THEY CAN KILL IT ALL!

After we’ve done some ‘learning’ (me reading to them) I give them both a cloth and teach them how to clean the bathroom. This activity is such a massive success that I’ll be doing it every week…(every day?). They are diligent as anything and LOVE getting all the toothpaste off the basins. I don’t let them do the loos - that would be too nerve-shredding - and they are a bit trigger-happy with the spray (I make it myself out of white vinegar, sal suds, water and tea tree oil and you can find the recipe here) but I really don’t care. Now if only I could yank the Rotter away from his work to do same then I might REALLY have a success on my hands. I cannot tell you friends, how wonderful it is to have a clean bathrooms whilst simultaneously entertaining ones children.

Tuesday

I need to tell you now about Joe Wicks. For the uninitiated, this person is a bird-like personal-trainer from Croydon I think who has somehow managed to garner the most enormous following. I’m afraid I don’t know much more about him, except that he has seen a glorious opportunity to spread himself further over the globe, like smooth sun-pat, which, once consumed, sticks to the roof of your mouth in the most unavoidable way. I’m no stranger to an at-home workout, and let me tell you, I’ve done some shocking ones in my time. This guy is, well, a bit BLAND. Blandness isn’t very forgivable in my book, but this man Joe gets a pass, along with my devotion and love because his ubiquity means that ALL my children’s friends are doing this daily morning workout, and that fact alone is enough to get my kids moving and laughing and their hearts thumping every morning. It means that by 9.30 I can feel that if I achieve nothing else, then we will have done this one, TERRIBLY GOOD THING, and had fun, and that is oh so comforting. Amen.

We pack our still-sweaty bottoms into the car on a mercy mission to get some fresh vegetables to my parents. I have a veg box delivered every Tuesday and my parents have, for obvious reasons, been unable to get to the shops. I wipe the box with the hellish chemical wipes and put it on their doorstep and we manage a decent but weird conversation yelling at one-another from doorstep to window. The awfulness of not being able to be close to my own parents does not escape me. The small children are bemused. I will never take simple human contact for granted again. Please make this stop.

I have been having a rather lovely time watching Miles Irving teach a course in foraging. It’s called ‘Learning with the Experts’ and I was gifted the foraging course, in the hope that I would like it, which I do. I’ve so far watched the first video twice, because it show Miles discovering and picking things out of lawns and disturbed ground…a bit like my garden! I tell the children to go out and pick anything out of the lawn that isn’t grass. My son comes back with a plateful of dead leaves (fair play) but my daughter finds a dandelion and a dock, and something that I think might be hedge mustard. This hasn’t kept them busy for long but it has entirely delighted ME, and MY DELIGHT IS AS IMPORTANT AS THEIRS. The weather is utterly lovely. We are eating outside and hauling toys onto the lawn and then hauling them back again.

The mess though, is oppressive…the constant clearing up. The unbelievable number of times I am filling and emptying the dishwasher. I deal with it by retreating outside, pretending it’s not there. This afternoon I begin to pull apart a shallow pot of houseleeks that has seen better days. The children each join me to help. I stare at their pudgy fingers and want to cry. We re-pot the little chicks in new compost and top-dress with new gravel. Everyone is frightfully pleased with themselves. I leave the mess to the Rotter.

Wednesday

The thing I miss most is time alone. I never get this. Like, NEVER. Even when I put the telly on to get 30 minutes of nothing they come to me…eager for my participation, climbing on me. I love them so much, and I so desperately want them to go away. I have murderous thoughts about my Rotter who works from morning until late at night in my daughter’s bedroom. He may have to be on calls sixteen hours a day, but he gets to be on his own doing it. He is doing exactly the same thing as he does normally, except that because he is physically at home, and coming downstairs at various moments, EarPods in, meeting still in session, looking for THINGS TO EAT, it makes it very hard not to be scandalised that he cannot help me. AT ALL. I know I am not alone. Several of my friends married to key workers are experiencing the same bloodthirsty feelings. I am basically obliterated by 9pm, which is when his day is beginning to ease off a little. He might sit down next to me, hoping for some connection. All I can manage is a smile and an ‘I hate you so much darling’ at which we both laugh and I trudge off to bed. #lockdownlife

ANYWAY, today I actually do manage some blissful me-time. Instead of urging them out into the garden with me, I leave them indoors, doing god knows what, and start weeding. After fifteen minutes when they don’t come I wonder what on earth they are watching but desperation for these moments to continue prevents me from going to find out. I get lost in it, with the sun on my back, chasing the bindweed, teasing the creeping buttercup, chopping away the brown stuff. I feel ten years younger and decide on a whim to re-pot a scented pelargonium that I’ve been neglecting. I find it a larger pot and put it in with new compost. And then I decide to repot another, and another, until ALL the scented pelargoniums are in new, up-graded apartments. So good. So, so good!

Puzzles on the lawn are followed by hoovering. Five year old is now obsessed. I follow her up the stairs with the Henry as she clumsily vacuums each tread. This life is quite doable if I decide to slow down and give into it. I have nowhere to be. I can stop on the stairs and hold the hoover.

Thursday

Very good post has arrived in the form of salvia seedlings. They are the ones I had last year in the front. The ones that several people were so excited by that they actually knocked on my door asking for the name of the plant. Full disclosure; I did actually take cuttings of these last year but they failed. I can’t remember why…must’ve been neglect. Thank god for professionals who take cuttings for a living…HURRAH! I open the box and curse myself for not buying enough (normal). They are the most perfect little baby plants friends! I literally want to kiss each one of them. I find some small plastic pots and plant them, water them and the whole thing leaves me so happy and full of hope because they are going to be HUGE and epic.

My eldest is doing asexual reproduction in plants, and I call her away from her desk to take a cutting from a begonia leaf. She can barely disguise her unwillingness but is very sweet and indulges me…she’ll see…SHE’LL SEE when the babies appear out of a LEAF! Or perhaps again, it’s just me who finds that thrilling. She cuts off a healthy leaf, turns it upside down on a board and makes some cuts in the main veins. I think she enjoys this because she’s obsessed with Grey’s Anatomy right now which is FAR GORIER THAN I REMEMBER…or perhaps I am just becoming less tolerant to gore in my old age. We pin the leaf down onto some damp compost with some hairpins and she gratefully scampers up to her desk again.

We clap for our NHS and I have never felt more at sea and also more proud. Please make this stop.

Friday

I made a very bad mistake earlier this week, accepting some work that for various reasons I should not have accepted. The result is that I have unintentionally majorly inconvenienced a person with whom I have had a great working relationship for years now and I can not TELL you how awful it feels. I read a furious email at 3.30 this morning and cannot get past it. Looking back it is obvious that I was being thoroughly stupid, but back then, I couldn’t see it. I cannot remember feeling this way since I was a little girl when I was caught helping someone in an test at school. The total shame and shock and the horrible feeling somewhere between my throat and my stomach lingered for weeks. I’m not easily able to slough off this type of thing. It gnaws away at me…I still wake up remembering the trauma of that school test. Needless to say I have apologised but the morning is spent pep-talking myself into making sure that I do NOT bring this stress into the day with me. Bland boring Joe Wicks helps enormously here, as does spending most of the day in the garden, chucking any delusions of homeschool out the window, and taking delivery of the most exquisite streptocarpus called ‘Crystal Ice’. I bought it as a present to myself before all this awfulness blew up in my face and I want to thank that woman I was who whispered “buy it, you’re worth it” as my finger hovered over the ‘complete purchase’ button. It really is the little things.

x Laetitia

PS If you want to see pictures of everything I’ve been getting up to with the children, just go to my Instagram and you’ll find a bubble beneath my profile that says ‘Kids Gardening’ xxx