Lovely Lammas

It's bucketing down with rain and blowing a gale outside my window at the moment :-)) A little taste of Autumn, to relieve the drudgery of the non stop summer. Bliss.

Today we've been celebrating Lammas/Lughnasadh and the first harvest of the year. We've had a fab time making corn dollies (or trying to, it's a lot harder than it looks!!!!) and we "borrowed" some leaves from our sweetcorn plants to make some maize people too; those turned out rather well. I was going to put a picture here of Emily hard at work and displaying some of her finished articles but surprise, surprise, blogger won't upload pictures today. Again.

We read a lot about the background to this festival and some of the stories in the Circle Round book. After talking about the mixed emotions of gratitude for the harvest vs sadness at the loss of the sun and the fear ancient peoples must have felt when facing the end of summer, Emily decided to write down some of her worries on bits of card for a worry burning session out at the barbecue, lol. She held each bit of card in the flames and watched it burn, taking the worries away (fingers crossed).

We also made scrummy, melt in the mouth spiral cookies following a recipe in the Circle Round book. They were delicious and turned out really well. Emily says the light coloured swirls are the sun losing its power and the dark colour swirls are the darkness of autumn approaching. I'm not sure what they're *supposed* to represent, but her interpretation seems entirely reasonable to me. I'm going to try uploading the pictures via Hello instead; if all's well then they should appear above this post....

Meanwhile, I'm feeling rather pleased with myself as I've lost 10lbs in the last couple of weeks :-)) I'm hoping that a continued weight loss might kick start my menstrual cycle back into action as it seems to have gone rather haywire all of a sudden - haven't had a period for over 65 days now, which is just flippin' typical just now that we've decided to try for a new addition the family. **Frown** I've never had problems with that before, but rather worryingly I now seem to have most/all the symptoms of PCOS. Mind you, I thought that was something that was supposed to be present for a lifetime, not come on suddenly like this. I daresay it's not....but it's a niggling worry. You know what it's like when you look up health information on the internet.......it's so easy to imagine you've got everything under the sun :-(

Tomorrow Emily and I are off to Anwick Forge with Romy and Hazel for a home ed group event - apparently there will be crafts to do and the kids will each get to forge their very own metal snail, which Emily is hugely looking forward to. Should be interesting!