A mish mash of things, also, Happy Birthday to my brother.

It’s dark and cold when Isaac comes stumbling into my room, bleary eyed. He’s too asleep to say anything yet, so I throw back the doona and welcome him into the warmest part of the bed. Sighing contentedly, he snuggles in and I watch his eyes close, praying that we’ll both get more sleep.

Two minutes later, he is poking me in the eyes.

“Hi Mummy.”

“Hiiiiiiiiii Mummy!”

“HIIIIIIIIIIIIIII MUMMY!”

I struggle to get my eyes open long enough to look at him, before tucking the blankets in tighter around him and asking him to please, fortheloveofeverything, sleep.

It’s not long after this that Amy joins us and jumps into bed as well. Her morning breath threatens to knock me dead and I make her roll away from me and breathe somewhere else, on pain of being kicked out of bed. The room is icy, despite the underfloor heating and I suspect the world is frozen.

Eventually, the sun rises and I am forced to be awake. No one says anything about getting up, however, so I stay in bed with a book for a little longer, while everything defrosts. The children come and go, alternately snuggling me, or tucking their cold feet under my legs.

Good morning.

***

So, I’ve had this problem. I’ve been caring too much about what you think and not enough about what I want. Not changing themes, not redesigning, writing on a schedule, not posting because I only posted yesterday, or this morning. And honestly, I think doing it for someone else is doing it wrong.

Somewhere in there, I stopped telling stories and started just talking about stuff and maybe there isn’t a difference, but caring so much is killing me.

I’ve been more caught up in branding and social media and working the system, that I lost the bit I loved, which was sharing stories and snippets. I’m not saying there are changes afoot, but there are changes afoot. Sort of. I’m going to write what I like, when I like, regardless of when I posted last.

And if I start to worry about cluttering up people’s readers and writing too much, or not writing enough, well then. We’ll all just deal with that then.

***

When I was 5 years and 7 months old, my baby brother was born. I remember my father picking me up from school one day, so that we could go and see Mum and David in the hospital. Some details are fuzzy, but I remember being absolutely positive that I needed to wear my white shoes to the hospital and spending long enough trying to find them that that my father was frustrated with me.

In the mess under my bed, I eventually found my shoes and squeezed into them, before discovering that they were too small anyway. I didn’t care, I was five and I wanted to wear white shoes to the hospital to see my mother.

That was 17 years ago now.

Today my brother turns 17 and he’s had a rough time the last two years. We buried our grandmother on this day two years ago and so it’s bittersweet. Life and death, all tied up together. The timing could have been better, but birth waits for no one and neither do funeral directors.

I would really appreciate if you could send him birthday wishes here, if you’d like.

Happy Birthday David! I do love you, even if you’re annoying sometimes.