Tuesday 12 June 2012

Tuesday's Time To (12th June)



Today's Tuesday's Time To is all about favourites - my favourites! I'll start by saying though that my favourite time has to be tea time!  That's because at that time of day, we are all together for perhaps the first time during the whole day - and with our work and studies done for the day it is a time to relax and draw close together as a family.  I love tea time!  But I also love ...

A time to plant ... my favourite plant is probably the rose.  Not only does it look wonderful, but it smells beautiful too.  Roses are supposed to symbolise love, so for me also they are a very romantic plant.   If and when we ever have a garden, I think roses will be one of the first plants we grow in it.

A time to heal ... no one really wants to have a "favourite" medication, do they?  But I have to say that today my favourite medication has to be the painkillers I am taking for my arthritis!  Without them I could not have got my work done.  I am having a very bad flare-up of it just now with fever and swollen joints, which is making me feel very uncomfortable.  But the painkillers are helping ... a bit!  I have a hot pad that I sit on too when it flares up like this, and I find a warm bath very helpful too.  But hopefully the pain will be less, and I'll feel a bit more sparkly soon!

A time to laugh ... our son Cubby Bear is my favourite comedian!  He has an impish sense of humour, and has done sinse he was a wee boy.  Cubby is quite shy, but once he gets to know someone a little better, they realise he has a funny side to him too!  He likes jokes that make the whole family laugh - like this one  - "What goes "ha ha ha plop"?  Someone laughing their head off!"  Well, it made me almost laugh my head off the first time I heard it!

A time to embrace ... my favourite hugs?  Hmm, I love hugs from my husband, hugs from our children - and hugs from our birds, too!   You might not know what a birdie "hug" is ... it's when your pet bird comes up close to you and bows its wee head to ask you to pet it.  Our birds prefer this if you do it with your face, rather than your hand.  It's their way of saying "I love you", and we feel it is a great privelige for us to be able to get this close to them without them flying away from us.

A time to keep ... my favourite keepsakes are ones from our children's earliest years - their wee shoes and mittens, first drawings, first writing.  Little Bear made me once a cute mother's day card.  Inside it just reads "Mummy I love you".  I will keep that card forever!

A time to sew ... my favourite sewing is definitely cross stitch.  I love that you can get completely absorbed in a piece of sewing like this - concentrating hard on getting the stitches neat, and the colours matched perfectly.  It is more relaxing than machine stitching, and possibly more so even than knitting, as there is no need to keep a count if you use the pre-printed kits as I usually do.  It is a very rewarding pass time too - I just wish I had more time to spare for it!  At the moment I am concentrating on getting my latest knitting project finished (just half a sleeve to go now) - but I plan to do some sewing once that is done.

A time to speak ... this one is easy.  My favourite words?  No competition.  "I love you" - either spoken or heard.

A time to love ... I love my family, my simple life, my pets, my home.  But most of all, and first of all, I love our Father God in Heaven.

A time of peace ... my most favourite peaceful place is a long, long way from where I am sitting right now.  It is a place called Cockenheugh Crags, near to the farm where I grew up as a child.  It is a wonderful, rocky, hilly place with beautiful views of the Chevvy hills in Northumberland.   There are fir trees and huge grey and black jagged rocks - wild, but with clear, calming views of unbroken sky as far as you can see when you step through the trees, and for me it was a wonderful place to walk and dream and think when I was growing up, a place where, in summer, if the wind was in the right direction, it could be absolutely silent.  It is truely a place where you feel as if you are observing the rawness of God's creation with no embelishments from humans whatsoever - just the bare beauty of nature, unspoilt, as it was just when God made it.   It's a long time since we went back there, as most of our family no longer lives so far North, but I still miss it and hope to revisit all my favourite retreats such as this one, when we do finally get a chance to go there again.  Very soon, says Papa Bear!