Four Years Later... !

Eeek... ! Four and a bit years on and I'm not sure if anyone will read this thing anymore, but I do enjoy reading updates that pop up on long abandoned blogs.

We have two babies now, not really babies at all, our Elka is 6!!! ?! And Ari is 3. And we lasted almost 3 years in Richmond before fleeing to the Blue Mountains- turns out we weren't as tough as we thought we were... but also turns out that we love it here and life is better, although we do miss the coast, it's just objectively nice, but not really THAT far away if we get desperate.

But anyway, 6 and a half years of mothering, and my head does still work. And I feel like I've made that journey from complete and utter exhaustion, bombardment and confusion- that is becoming a parent- and I've survived, and the making in me survived too. I have less time, but I'm more patient than I used to be and I have a completely different perspective.

And I've worked out how to make the dolls I always wanted to make, but didn't have the time to learn to make. Market after market every weekend meant that I just had to turn out as much as I could- and I look at those blinkies and dew drop dolls, and they are cute and sweet and well sewn, and I'm a little shocked to see the faces that I managed to embroider- I'm not quite back to that level of skill yet- but I was always dreaming of different dolls, and drawing them but I wasn't able to sit down and have the time to fail a hundred time before getting to the place I needed to be. With Elka at school, and my chilled out buddy Ari at home, I somehow have muddled through that over the past 18 months. From ugly, terrible, wonky things to sweet dolls in clothes (yay!) and woollen hair.

The mere though of sewing clothes used to boggle my brain. I remember the first time I looked consciously at a quilt my Grandmother had made and it dawned on me that she had cut each little piece out and sewn them, bit by bit into a piece of fabric that was as big as my bed. Madness, I thought! Then I did it and it all made sense, bit by bit. And now I'm feeling that way about these new dolls, bit by bit, piece by piece, they come together. And it feels good.

So anyway, that's where I'm at.

A post shared by rebecca lander (@beecah) on Mar 10, 2017 at 2:10am PST