Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

We spent the day doing up the class again. This time Ghin came along and did a drawing on the main blackboard of his own! It was so cute... here he is and stuff which i did as well...   He looks so grown up here Here is the drawing in its entirety. Gnomes and river, etc. This is my drawing that inspired his drawing. This is unfinished as yet. It is going to be part of the music lessons. A start to the nature corner. The string of coral, crystal and shells was given to Oisin's class one class six years ago - little did i know i would be using it in mine! Curtains for all the windows, finally A parent contributes decorations to the classroom - A paper cut of a the Wild Swans Ghin does a second drawing My complete drawing, with clouds and flowers Did you know the sun is a planet? :-)

I spent an amazing weekend in Galway with a friend and we wandered around the place with some of the best weather. I have been to Galway before but i've never sort of taken a day to walk around, eat, lie in the grass, see the museum, speculate on life. These photos were taken from the museum in Galway, where we could see the Galway Pride coming through the Spanish Arch.   So one of the conservations we started having were about the weirdness of human beings and how they had to have something to be prejudiced against. I said, i'm no anthropologist but i do think that in some respects we are living through a very conservative time. In the past people were far more tolerent of sexuality and sexual relations. I'm not sure about that but i'm sure i read it somewhere. But i think of more so called primative societies and they had a more accepting attitude to transgender, mental health issues (often shamans had some form of what Western society calls mental illness) an...

So here are photos from our family holiday ... Inishowen   There is no doubt that Kinnegoe Bay is the nicest beach, one of the nicest, i have ever seen When i die i want my ashes scattered here and in Uluwatu, Bali The first beach, which is ok... Natural treasure Ghin finds unburied treasure The second beach - where we can run free with the buffalo It really is some sort of incredible paradise Ghin and i - we were the only ones who made it to the second beach Back at the first beach the boys were building racing cars and airplanes So i love this photo - it looks like i'm in the Med... Esply with the stripy picnic mat... ...and Peter looks like he has been washed up the beach, from a conference in Norway....

Er no officer, i was not sending my children to take shelfish off the lough, promise. Last Sunday, well, the Sunday before that, we went to Strangford's Island Hill Nature Reserve. I had never been there before and DESPERATELY needed a walk. Oisin didn't want to be driving for miles. (Originally i had planned to go to Slieve Beagh but that was severely vetoed when i revealed it was an hour's drive. Uh no, i'm not driving said Oisin. The day was mostly crap weather wise, so i thought what the heck, let's just go Strangford. The first photo there was very idyllic except that in the second photo Ghin had gotten stuck in some mud. I wondered, oh dear, if they end up being stranded or worse it will look like i had sent my children to me Chinese cockle pickers and i will have a job to do explaining this to the PSNI. Thank fully they were not stranded and instead we ended up walking to the Island. There they found clay. Oisin actually made a candle holder from...

Almost there What did i spend the hottest day of the year doing? Well drying out my tent and doing the rabbit hutch, but also finally painting the last bits of the classroom, the windows. I then put up curtains and it looked amazing. So lovely and so home like. I might do the same today as well. I also did a BBQ at Anita's and Jonni's, but then after that i came home and read the boys the riot act because they were fighting. Mothers who have sons - does this always happen? Do children fight all the time or is there something i'm not doing right? I was so annoyed and fed up with them that i said, look here, i don't know what the score is, but i never ask anything of you, and the one thing i want is that you all get along and you don't. Everything you want i get - you are spoilt children and i'm sick and tired of this. One day you will come back from wherever it is you are and you'll discover that i've left for Singapore. I know this is terribl...

After spending the weekend driving around the Near West and Near Middle of Ireland, and then to Dublin  and then Belfast back, we are now blobbing in jammies and FB. I have this massive cleg bite on my calf and it is now all blistered and swollen. Oisin asked me if it was a disease. Thanks my son, always know how to make me feel better. Actually it was really good hanging out with the two boys. I had seldom done that. Normally i'd be with someone else or with Peter or whatever, but this time, for a couple of hours it was just me and them and it was so cool. My sons who are growing up, and Oisin turning into a young man before my very eyes. Since i have such a poor visual memory, i am so glad i took photos of them as they grew up. Especially Ghin. I think i realised how much i was missing out when i didn't photograph Oisin - so now i have lots of photos of the two of them. The weather is now something awful. Thank god we had a good weekend for that holiday. It was very...

Watching Freestyle Football Circus skills meet footballing I have to say that this is the one and only time i have been interested in football watching these tek Neek guys freestyle footballing... it was amazing. I must apologise to Josh for taking him to not Kilmenan and then to the outskirts of Temple Bar, frogmarching them from the National Museum - ie Collin's Barracks. I'd really like to do Dublin properly. Really properly. I realise that i've only ever seen and bits and pieces of it now. And after 15 years in Ireland i can better appreciate what all these places mean. We only got to spend a very short time there and then, before we knew it the weekend was over and we had to come home... ah well...

Four dogs, Five cats...40 Horses, what more could a boy want? Ghin gears up for his first ride out I love oisin's serious face... Go Merrylegs! Perfect days Body painting! I'm too sexy for my shirt! Funny man! Get off the fence bro! If you ever wanted to go to Cavan and go horse riding i cannot recommend Ross' Equesterian Centre enough. On the shores of Lough Sheelin, in the heart of Ireland, equipped with fishing and boating and everything else, and looked after by the nicest family you could ever hope to meet... seriously it is the perfect holiday. Oh yes, the weather helped. I did say to Josh you are most certainly getting the best of Ireland! You will now remember Ireland with this sunshine, which is honestly the only week of sunhine we have had - for a whole week like! The last time we saw Josh i was 18 and he was 19 - and we were knocking around Singapore for a month. He tells me that he went back to Singapore four ...