Supplies time! Usual Saturday grocery run, plus getting a new sharps box, and having a look around the charity shop / thrift store. I went in looking for sourdough proving baskets (now I know what they are!) and an egg caddy but they had neither today. Did get a couple of cheap plastic lidded storage boxes from the supermarket though, should be about right for storing bags of flour and oats in.

-2 today and it’s TOO WARM – I should not have worn thermals today!!

While I was out, Steve was cleaning the dishwasher. Scrubbing the filter, putting an empty hot wash through with dishwasher cleaner, scrubbing some more, rinsing… It takes ages and the cleaning cycles were still going until well after lunch but hopefully the effort will have been worth it. It should be worth it even just for the fact he had to look up the manual online to see which setting did what, and discovered other useful stuff like it has a dedicated tablet setting! Who knew. Manuals can be useful!

Potato cakes for lunch, and then the boys and Steve headed outdoors to play/work while I put a very tired and sore Erika to bed.

And then I joined the boys to play in the snow! Steve was filling up the workshop woodpile, the boys were trying to use an old deep baking tray as a sled, Ben persuaded me to make a snow angel (LOTS of fun but SO not such a clever idea – the boys have onesie snowsuits: I have trousers and a jacket and my trousers are tucked into my boots rather than pulled down over the top like their snowsuits – I got snow in everywhere!!) and I got some more branches out of the way before the boys started a snowball fight with Steve. SO much fun!

I’m really impressed with both the boys to be honest, despite at least a couple of (soft) snowballs to the face they both brushed themselves off and carried on! Was lovely seeing them all laughing and running around happily together with Steve.

I rounded off my outside time by building the little wendyhouse thing that we got (at least) third-hand back in Worthing, which had stayed at that house while we lived up in Manchester. It finally rejoined us a month or so ago and of course a snowy day was the perfect kind of day to build a wendyhouse!!

This evening we have just collapsed in a snuggly heap on the sofa. I wanted to order in a pizza but couldn’t justify the cost, so we had crisp butties (with cheese, everything is with cheese!) and beer for tea. The kids, despite being offered all their usual fare, decided to have cereal for tea and we weren’t going to protest at that!

After tea Erika started getting frustrated at pretty much everything, culminating in her finding her boots in the hall and begging to go outside. In the dark. She cried and cried and begged and begged, she found her boots and tried to put them on, found a hat and pulled her coat of its peg, and the wonderful human that is my husband got them both wrapped up to go explore the snow in the dark together. She came straight round to the window to say hello, she noticed the growing collection of snowbodies, she investigated the little playhouse, touched the snow on the bench, was satisfied, and decided that was plenty enough and it was time to go back indoors.

Bedtimes have changed a bit this week. Steve realised that he was able to go to bed earlier (as he needs to) if he put the boys to bed. So instead of me snuggling with them, reading to them, and then staying with them while they fall asleep, now I snuggle with them while Steve gets Erika ready for bed, and then we swap. I stay out with Erika and get my house jobs done which I’d otherwise be trying to do when she was past the point of coping, and Steve reads to the boys and then they all go to bed (in their own beds) together. Steve reads to them. He’s reading a young fantasy novel (dragons and things) to them. It doesn’t have pictures! It’s only been a week, so who knows if this is something that they will be happy to keep on with, but at the moment it means Steve and I are both in more appropriate places in the evenings. And I’ve realised that something in the computer or the internet connection does some housekeeping at quarter past midnight every night, and Erika can’t watch any of her usual stuff past that point – so if I manage to load her up with pepperoni and frozen berries while she watches the last of her shows, we can then put dishes back in the kitchen and turns lights off together and she is in a perfect place to then snuggle up with me for milk to fall asleep.

Mental health time. This past week has been exactly the right pace for me for healing – evident in the fact that I’ve been able to get my head around baking and cooking again. But it’s astonishing how something so seemingly innocuous, like a pair of trousers, can feel like it’s about to derail everything. I might feel like I’m healing and getting better, but I’m still fragile and “better” is a bit of the wong term to use. “Managing” perhaps.

Thing is, Steve’s clothes have ALWAYS been too big for me. This year though, since he’s been cycling the 11k to work and back more often than not, and I’ve been doing the grocery run by bus instead of walking everywhere, we fit the same size trousers. In fact the work trousers I bought hoping they’d fit me, don’t. They’re too small for me (partly because they are high waisted and that’s about where my i-port sits) but they do fit Steve.

Honestly?

I’d rather restrict.

And that thought, the fact it’s even there in my head, TERRIFIES me even more than Steve for the first time in our together-lives (and it’s been 17 years so far) being more svelt than me upsets me. It’s a thought that has lurked for a long time. The control required of diabetes life is a perfect breeding ground for that kind of thought. I’m really grateful that I can be open with Steve about how I’m feeling, so we can work together to make sure I don’t spiral either back into a depressive episode (hello eating nothing but crap and not caring why my sugars are going haywire) or into a restrictive eating disorder. The diabetes nurse has, hopefully, finally made a referral for me to see the diabetes specialist psychiatrist so maybe at some point this year I might get to see her and chat about how the diabetes is affecting my mental health.

Anyway. I’m ever hopeful that we’ll get through this. I need to get back to running. Figure out a time to do homework at home, so I don’t have to get the bus all the way to school to do my homework twenty minutes before class. Attempt to cycle into town once a week. Get back outdoors cutting up trees and clearing overgrowth. Get physical again, find my happy place out in the garden, keep working at gently and mindfully carving out our space in this landscape, and come through stronger.