I cannot. Spent the day staring at the insides of my eyelids instead, in despair at how it can all go so horribly horrible horrid wrong.
Tiger burst out of bed determined on vengeance for something. Nothing got better from that point. Maybe I had committed some heinous crime, stealing up in her dream, taking a chainsaw to her favourite unicorn. Whatever it was, it was not something she was prepared to forgive in a spirit of the day's cooperative home education and self learning adventure, that's for sure.
She came to breakfast in a fuming rage, slammed the crockery about and crunched up toast like it might be the bones of small furry animals.
I admit making a joke about dormice was possibly the very worst thing I could have done.
Two hours later and the fight has scaled up into a full triplet war and the whole house is sunk in chaos with a lot of howling, yelling, screaming and hanging onto door frames. I have my head in my hands smothered in snot and tears in a lookalike to a bullfrog. I now know for certain sure that by all my philosophical convictions and weirdy hippie ways, I have irreparably damaged my children forever and beyond.
Not long after deciding it is all my fault, I hit that self piteous mental sluice of self destruction self blame and self harm where taking a couple of razor blades to my wrists is a selfless act whereby I can let someone else breathe the air I waste. It is only the thought that if I do not first pay the milkman, the newsagent and the speeding ticket I acquired on Friday (36 mph in a 30 mph zone), then my mercy death will leave behind a slew of merciless unpaid bills. Then the bailiffs will knock. Dig, bound for Brazil, will wave the children off to foster homes where they will be tortured and the house will be bulldozed.
So because it was such a horrible, terrible, unredeemed day, here is a picture of a home made book with a butterfly on the front.
This is part of Grit's new project to encourage the little grits to make notebooks from recycled rubbish because I am fed up of parting with £7.50 in museum shops for three boring notebooks since no-one can remember to bring a jottings pad. The butterfly book is recycled from fabric, scrapbooking bits, card, and a sequined keyring I scrounged from a bucket in Scrapstore. The pages are made with fabric interfacing so they can be stitched, and it's bound together with wire. Here's the insides. Better to show you those of the book rather than mine.
This is called the Saturday book. And yes. Shortly there will be a book for each day of the week. They'll hang around the house, and I'll be encouraging the little grits to stick things in them as we go - and no I bloody well don't care what day they choose to scribble in. At the end of Spring we will know our lives through seven beautiful handmade and handfilled books, each named after a day of the week; timebeaten, timeless, timecapsules spilling drawings, scrap, found items, glued in daisies, sprigs of leaves, stitches and patches.
Well that's what I'm working towards.
And grit's day is all about that: working towards something but I don't know what, chewing my knuckles, breaking my heart, not giving in. Even when we reach that point when all is hopeless, abandoned, forlorn, lost, blasted apart, destroyed, empty, desolate, finished but not yet grieved over. But never mind because there is a sodding book with a butterfly on the front.
