Wednesday 19 November 2014

Things That Keep Me Awake At Night

Hello! I'm BACK. I am in my usual spot, the house is silent and mainly tidy, I have hoovered up the cheerios and corn flakes from the living room carpet (never piss off a two year old and then leave her unattended) and I have a full hour and a half before my peace and tranquility are shattered by demands for yet more Peppa Pig and milk.  I shall attempt to catch you up with the various excitements that have occured in the last few months.

Things That Keep Me Up At Night

1. Worries

I have various and many worries that keep me from sleeping even when I am desperate to do so.  A while ago I couldn't sleep because I was panicking that the children couldn't speak Chinese. It was so unlike me to worry about such stupid things that made me worry more. I began to panic that everyone was secretly taking their children to Chinese lessons and mine would be woefully left behind when the great Chinese take over of the world occurred. How would they get any job if they couldn't converse with their Chinese counterparts? If they got too old to learn would they be able to learn at all? Isn't now the prime time to get their brains around such things? Maybe this would make up for me not teaching them to play the piano?? In the cold light of day I realised that they are not only still learning to spell and write English but potentially extra French or Spanish lessons to compliment what they are already doing at school, might be a better place to start. I also realised that we couldn't afford any extra lessons on top of what they already do so it was an entirely moot point. Quite why I spent a good few hours thinking about trying to get two reluctant learners and one very busy child taking on another very complicated extra language is a total mystery to me. I have gone back to worrying about all the usuals, 'Why will no one buy my house?', 'Should we move?', 'how will I afford x, y and z?', 'how much fatter will I get?', 'Will I ever sleep enough?', 'Is that Ted - does he need his inhaler?', 'Shit did I put the tumble dryer on?', 'Bugger - I haven't paid that bill', 'Should we move?' etc etc etc

2. Birthdays

We have finally completed the birthday marathon. All four done and dusted. Four Birthday surprises, three parties, a tonne of cake and hideous, hideous amounts of money on plastic stuff all behind me for another year. The panic beforehand was higher than ever this year. I have no idea why. Before Bea's I awoke in a cold sweat after a nightmare in which I had forgotten to lay her birthday table, wrap presents or in fact do anything to celebrate her big day in any which way because I had managed to fall asleep instead. In the nightmare I had luckily awoken at 2am and screamed at K to wake up and we had set about rectifying the situation. I have no idea if we managed because luckily I woke up before I got to found out and then wallowed in my sweet relief for quite a while before I felt the shock wear off and my pulse rate return to normal. I don't know if, as they get older, the expectations and anticipation is more exaggerated which in turn increases the pressure on me. Or maybe it was my subconscious forcing me to check all the details of her impending extravaganza as the following day I realised the balloon lady and I hadn't actually confirmed a date for delivery and sure enough - her balloons were not scheduled to arrive on time! QUELLE HORREUR. I know normal people would not panic at such things but about seven years ago I stupidly set a precedent when we only had one very cute three year old and a non plussed one year old so it seemed totally ok to over indulge and spoil the then three year old with a pile of gifts and balloons and cakes and a massive and pricey party. And seven years is a long time to get used to something, so I couldn't very well have her waking up with no foil number balloons - particularly as she had reminded me for about six weeks that finally making it to double figures wasVERY important.  Anyhoo, there is no point in wallowing in the past. On to the present. I found a local party shop and a very helpful woman was able to come to my aid although sadly she didn't deliver. (This is relevant - keep reading I am not just being dull for the sake of it).

The morning I picked them up happened to be quite windy and I had unfortunately decided to wear some comfy jeggings on my bottom half. I couldn't park outside the party shop so I had to carry a number of helium balloons, including a large 1 and 0 and a small 'airwalker' dog a little way back to the safety of my car boot. The wind wasn't kind and I had no hand free to yank up the irritatingly saggy jeggings so I was very desperate to deposit the balloons quickly so that I could prevent exposing myself entirely. By the time I reached the car I also realised that we had so much crap in the car which we were hiding from the house viewers, that fitting the balloons in at all was going to be tricky. Just as I managed to shove in what I thought was all of the unwielding and cumbersome balloons I saw a small, cute dog balloon fly off down the high street. My initial thought was to leave it to its fate and  write it off. Then by some bizarre luck it didn't get instantly run over by the oncoming traffic so I decided to fight for the dog. I slammed shut the boot ensuring the remaining balloons were safe and well and then set off down the middle of Sydenham high street with one hand on my jeans and the other obsessively pointing the key fob at the car and pressing 'lock' in case any local thief had seen this as an opportunity to steal my car and the blessed balloons. The dog (which had weights on its feet to keep it just above ground level - like a real dog) was quite realistically running away and then tantalisingly stopping when the wind died down.  I try not to imagine what an overweight middle aged woman trying to surreptitiously run down the middle of a busy high street whilst holding up her trousers in order to retrieve an inflatable dog looked like, but I do think if I had been an onlooker rather than the victim it may have been quite a funny scene. As luck would have it the dog made it to the other side of the road (albeit quite a way down) entirely unharmed and I managed to scoop it up and place it firmly under my arm before the recalcitrant jeggings had revealed the entirety of my backside. I was quite desperate not to turn around and see if anyone had witnessed the whole thing so I was very pleased to see the shop we had stopped outside was a stationers - I went inside and accidentally bought a number of rolls of hideously expensive wrapping paper I had foolishly assumed would be cheap. Still, it gave me a chance to regroup and calm down before I proceeded to return to the car and make it back home in time to deposit the pesky balloons at my obliging neighbour's house so that Bea wouldn't see them.

Turns out I needn't have panicked. Bea's Birthday Bash was a huge success, she was thrilled, her slumber party was just what she wanted, mainly thanks to a superb Magic Masterclass courtesy of her Godmother's talented husband, the Magician and a huge number of sweets (slight sore point there in that when I came down in the morning I discovered that half the children had lost teeth during the night. It was quite surreal as one after another they presented me with bloody tissues and tiny teeth that had succumbed to toffee consumption). Equally George's birthday went without a balloon escaping hitch. Aside from a distinct lack of money after the first three had had their turn, and a pesky viewing by a rude woman on his actual birthday, he received the giant stuffed wolf he had been desperate for (I have no idea where he gets his ideas from - for Christmas I have to find a large stuffed Skunk - any tips gratefully received) and he had all manner of hideous and not so hideous creatures at his party with the very thorough (but exceedingly pricey) Ranger Stu. And now that it is all blissfully completed, I finally get to start diverting all available funds towards the money black hole that is Christmas. Wahoo! I want my advent calendar to end with January 1st which is when I truly start celebrating.


3. Birthing Sister

During the rather dull half term (there is nothing to report on that front - I was forced to sit through a frankly terrifying ((I really cannot do suspense or threats of danger or any violence in any film - I am ruined for anything but rom coms - I do not exaggerate - I find some things tricky to get through on Cbeebies and cried real, heartfelt tears in Toy Story 3)) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film and the far more enjoyable Book of Life and that was really it) Shiny Life Sister went in to obediently timed labour.  Typically for her, she was actually a day ahead of her due date and perfectly timed for me - as she wanted me at the birth I had told her it would have to be during half term so I could abandon the children with mother at short notice and one day in, she obliged. 

Not that I wish to compete in the tiredness stakes when someone is in the throes of labour but it actually wasn't the best day for me - I had only just arrived at mother's in dire need of some long periods of sleep but thanks to the clocks going back and my very beautiful but early rising nephew deciding that that was the morning to start the day at 5.20 am (old time) - I was pretty done in before I even got in the car to return to London. However, much like in actual labour, adrenalin kicked in and I imagined that she was imminently about to push the baby out so I became panicked about my need to get to the hospital. At the first sign of traffic I dumped the car at Tottenham Hale tube and jumped on my most hated form of public transport (I used to use it every week day but now I find it difficult to cope with - so dirty, noisy, everyone is miserable and if it breaks down I am stuck in the dark underground - what is to like about that?) to Warren Street. Again, it wasn't really my moment in the spotlight but I managed to make it to University College Hospital from leaving mum's front door in precisely one hour and forty five minutes. I felt heroic. I rang mother for praise but surprisingly received none (she was not only more interested in what was going on with Shiny Life Sister but she also had nine children at the house and only one other mother (Kent Sister) for help so was understandably not able to recognise my own heroism in the midst of her own) so I saved it for an appropriate time in the birthing room. Mercifully the father-to-be was suitably impressed by my speed and ability and I felt my accomplishment had been justly recognised. On to the birth.

Well. Turns out that she hadn't been imminently about to push it out and I had become far too used to secondary plus births where things don't tend to take twenty four hours but are mercifully far swifter. As soon as I got in to the room I made the incumbent midwife (who I didn't warm to and mercifully left us very quickly after my arrival) provide my poor suffering sister with some gas and air. This was gratefully received and imbibed. From then on it was just a waiting game. She progressed steadily but slowly and the contractions seemed unfairly strong and painful for the stage she was at. Eventually we opted for some diamorphine to help with the pain, and when that wore off we were lucky enough to get her a birth pool. By the time she entered the pool her husband and I were getting very excited about the birth finally seeming imminent (poor SLS had really had enough by this point - it was about 5pm and she had been in constant pain since 1.30am that morning). By the time she got to fully dilated there was lots of excited speculation about being back in time for Downton and how she was SO close to being out of pain and eating toast in bed. She began to push. She pushed like a 'Mother Fo' (I think that is the term) and she pushed and she pushed and she pushed. The midwife kept putting her bent mirror in to the water to see any sign of a head. I started virtually pushing with her and squeezing her hand in solidarity. Nothing happened. Except that SLS, who was already at her limit of endurance when it had got to the pushing stage, got to a point that there are no words to describe. She was broken. She came out of the pool and tried pushing on a stool. After an hour and a half of pushing she admitted defeat - the baby was not coming out regardless of what she did. Then she suffered an excruciating further half an hour wait whilst plans were put in place to move her to the labour floor as the midwife led unit was not equipped for epidural/forceps etc. The wait was agonising. SLS was in tears and I knew exactly how she felt having had the same experience almost ten years ago to the day. To cut an agonising story short, once she eventually made it to labour ward and the obstetrician eventually made it to our room, it was gone 11pm. I have never seen a more broken human and I would have done anything I could to have taken the pain for her for even a little bit. Finally they wheeled her off to theatre to attempt forceps delivery of this back to back, badly positioned baby girl. At one minute to midnight they managed to drag the reluctant Lia in to the world with brute force and forceps and she was gloriously healthy and well. Finally the ordeal was over. When they wheeled SLS back in to the room her relief was palpable. Although not for long as she started to have a reaction to the drugs and couldn't stop vomiting. So much so that they had to give her anti nausea drugs intravenously. By 2.30am, with her still vomiting, it was my time to leave and finally retrieve my abandoned car and get to bed for a few blissful hours of sleep.

Since then Shiny Life has lived up to her name. In the first week she went for a shopping trip to John Lewis Oxford Street, had her hair done, took Lia trick or treating and when I took Bea and Cybs back for a visit on the 7th day, found her with full hair and make up, in an immaculate flat with a very happy breastfed baby. I was not in ANY way envious of her ability to adapt or keep her figure or manage great make up and have a tiny new baby. Not AT ALL.  All hopes for her to get fat, tired and haggard have been entirely dashed. I bet her boobs even stay perky. Sometimes shit like that just happens. I have decided to just deal with it and be a very grown up big sister and to be happy for her. (Albeit through gritted teeth).

4. The Accidental Fifth

It sounds like a musical chord. It isn't though. Somehow, with the excitement of the loft and all the birthdays we have managed to have a small accident. An accident that will get bigger and bigger until in May next year when it rips me in two to enter the world and take its place in this big family. Am I thrilled? Honestly, even with my love of newborns and children I really can't summon too much excitement about it. It sounds ungrateful and I know that 99.9% of people assume it was intentional even with my protestations to the contrary but really, it was truly a surprise to both of us. I am sure once the tiredness eventually wears off (I am hoping that it must be soon, surely - I have been so exhausted I can't stay up past 9pm, and have nearly been to the doctors on a number of occasions to find out if I have some serious, undiagnosed major health issue) I will feel more positive, but at the moment I am just getting through the days. I also seem to be causing issue with the medical peeps because not only am I fat for this pregnancy but I also turned a year older last week so now I am fat AND old. This is not a combination the medical world seem to be keen on. I have been referred to several different consultants to 'consult' on my fatness and elderliness. One supposes that were I to attend these appointments they would tell me to be less fat and possibly try to be less old (I jest).  Due to the high blood pressure issues with Cybs I am also 'on the radar' as 'high risk'. SIGH. Oh and also my placenta is lying low (maybe due to the sheer weight of the rest of my body pushing is southwards...) so I have to attend something called the Placenta Clinic. Such Fun. These appointments annoy me immensely. Not only because I would just like to get on with the hell of pregnancy, not keep being interrupted by people wanting to talk about it or take my blood or measure my sodding blood pressure or tell me to eat less and move more. Also each appointment means either leaving Cybs with Lovely Friend or worse, taking her with me. She is adorable, naturally, but as a two year old with a temper she isn't the best appointment partner. Anyway, this is why the Accidental Fifth keeps me awake at night. Not only does it make me need a wee in the middle of the night, it also makes me worry about a. coping b. being hideously fat c. stupid BMI fattists who now have a say in my fat which drives me mad. I will lose weight, I just can't be arsed to do it right now. d. how the hell Cybs, who still shares my bed every night, will cope with something smaller and cuter wanting me and my boobs at night. (Just to clarify, she comes in to me in the middle of the night after going to sleep beautifully in her own cot and also, she is actually off the boob, she just still likes to stick her hand down my top to go to sleep - like a warm, squishy comfort blanket. Much as I hate the hand down my top, I do actually love sleeping with her. I can't imagine not doing it.)

So, there you have it. That is sort of the last few months in a nutshell, and why I haven't managed to write for two months. I think that brings you all up to speed. Oh, re the house - no one has liked the house enough to make an offer which is intensly annoying.  I HATE having to keep the house tidy for stupid people to view - ideally someone would just drive past and decide to buy it from the pictures but people are stupendously picky when it comes to parting with hundreds of thousands of pounds - weirdos. We aren't on the internet at the moment so as not to jeopordise K's job which isn't helping. We are planning to try again in January, all guns blazing and on every property website known to man. Hopefully that will bring a steady stream of people willing to buy.  I can't really think ahead until we know where are on the house front so in the mean time we will just settle down to enjoy our final SE23 Christmas and as a family of six.

Now I shall leave you to your lives. I must go and sleep. As per usual.

Until the next time.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx

(As a footnote to all this - how the hellidy hell do people work from home? I have taken hours and hours and hours to write this - an hour and a half was nowhere near enough - I have checked facebook and emails around a hundred times, I have taken a long and leisurely lunch hour, had a little lie down with Cybs ((to get her to sleep but also because it is lying down)), taken an unusually fervent interest in the outcome of an episode of Cowboy Builders and also played a lot of Words With Friends. I think it is quite obvious that if in the unlikely future, I ever had to return to the world of work, it would most definitely need to be in a formal setting with time structures, no kitchen and no TV. And preferably no internet access.)

Monday 22 September 2014

Finally, Summer Part 2

WARNING: As is now becoming quite normal, this post contains explicit references to poo. Do not read if you unable to cope with descriptions of defecation or suffer from a weak stomach.

Onwards. We eventually made it on to the road with our traumatised boys and bemused girls and travelled the hour and a half (as K did point out it wasn't as if we were going very far and we probably didn't need quite as much stuff as I had packed) to the glorious Suffolk coast. My mood improved as soon as we arrived at the holiday house and after some excitable running around the house from the children, K took the big three off to play whilst I unpacked with Cybs.

I must at this point stop the story and take you back a month to when Cybs and I returned home from a delightful lunch in North London with my old school friends and all of their many offspring, held at a very brave friend's house. For some reason, (potentially being with so many other children she decided it was time to move on a bit with her development), that evening Cybs removed her nappy and took herself off to poo on the potty, and then came to tell me about it. This was obviously lovely and I was justifiably proud of her and did lots of the usual excited 'Wows' and congratulatory kissing and cuddling that one is expected to react with in such situations. I didn't however, decide to potty train her. Having thought about it overnight, it seemed a bit of a hassle, I didn't particularly want to spend our entire holiday asking her if she wanted a wee, worrying about her wetting herself or worse, and trying to understand whether she was saying she wanted a wee a poo or something else that sounded just like it in her very babyish speech (her language skills are still lamentably slow and so an awful lot of her words sound extremely similar and you also can't rely on a nod meaning yes - hence all the 'do you need a wee' queries from me would have her nodding away but it wouldn't necessarily mean that she wants one at all - in her mind, she could be agreeing to go to a park and slide down the big slide.)  So, I did what all good lazy arsed mothers did and put her back in a nappy the very next day. The reason I inform you of such things is because that was not a once off. From then on she would sporadically do the same thing but with the added excitement of trying to empty it in to the loo herself with various delightful outcomes. Also wiping. With or without loo roll.

So, (back to the story) when she went for an explore whilst I was busying myself unpacking the millions of things we probably didn't need but I had deemed essential, I didn't think much of it. However, after quite a long silence I went to investigate and opened the door to the downstairs loo to discover that Cybs had discovered that there was no potty in this loo so had chosen to use the floor instead. My opening the door had simply helped to smear it in an artistic arc, over the tiled floor.  As we were renting this house I was already pretty worried about keeping it clean and well cared for, and less than an hour after entering, Cybs had managed to create quite a scene of devastation in the smallest room of the house. I set about clearing her up and then plonking her elsewhere whilst I dealt with the walls and the floor. As anyone who has read this before will know, I am most accustomed to levels of disgusting that most would find stomach churning, so that was not the problem. The issue I was faced with was that there wasn't actually enough room between the bottom of the door and the tiled floor in order to be able to remove the poo from it. Which meant that however much I cleaned the floor, one move from the door and it needed to be done all over again. That is when I hit upon my genius use of the now empty loo roll. I cut the cardboard down the length of the roll. slid it under the door and moved it back and forth several times. Et Voila! An ideal under door poo scrapper. (Patent pending so don't go stealing it). It did sterling work and very soon there were no traces left of the unfortunate event. Shortly afterwards K arrived back and decided to query why I hadn't managed to get any bags upstairs to unpack. As I say, things didn't start THAT well.

After that first rather un-holiday-for-me like day, things did mercifully improve. I do find that it takes a good three to four days for a family used to working separately to adjust to being together all day every day, and for us all to adjust to a 'holiday' pace of life. It took K that long to adjust to the change from work mode to holiday-with-four-children mode - it is a very different kettle of fish. I also became a tad upset when the boys decided to take against the beach for the first time in their lives. For me and Bea, the beach IS the holiday - it is the very thing that makes a holiday a holiday for me. Cybs loves it too but then for chocolate and a bottle of milk Cybs will do almost anything for anyone so I couldn't really use her in my argument 'for' spending all our days there. In an ideal world, the boys wanted to spend all day everyday playing on Minecraft and on the inhouse Playstation 2 unless a particularly interesting day trip was suggested. Eventually though, we all got the hang of it and we ended up, yet again, having the best holiday ever. Bea and I got more than enough beach time thanks to some unexpectedly good weather and some compromising with the boys, we also got a lovely bit of mother and daughter shopping fun (I am now the proud owner of the most fabulous Diane Von Furstenburg shoes which I will almost definitely never ever wear but will adore forever) and we saw lots and lots of friends who were either staying in the area or came up specifically to visit. Cybil LOVED turning two and having her birthday and K and I got to go out for one of the loveliest meals I have ever had. We flew kites, we played, we had great day trips, we went for lunches, we 'mooched', G and K even got to walk a dog which made them both extremely happy - all in all it was everything to everyone.

Although it wasn't without its problems, naturally. Unbeknown to us, Cybs had worked out how to open the garden gate and whilst K was in charge and momentarily occupied, she used her new found skill and went for an unauthorised walkabout - eventually being rumbled a few streets away by some very useful old ladies who then went door to door knocking on houses to try and find her owner; G trapped his finger in the car door the day before Cybil's birthday and I was almost ready to send him to A and E there was so much blood and tears, but thankfully the bleeding did stop and I used my very useful made up medical knowledge to decide he hadn't broken anything so he got to spend the day on the sofa playing Minecraft with K instead; G also fell out of bed the following night and split his lip open on the bedside table, which left him with a very fat and very sore lip for quite a while..... and obviously there was some less than wonderful behaviour from each of them at some point or other, but on the whole, for a family holiday with small children in England, it was marvellous. It was terrifically sad to leave, all bronzed and relaxed and happy together as we were, but we at least had the utter thrill of the loft progression to look forward to.

Bea stayed on with mum for five days as she had her best friend staying there, and I took the younger three back to London a few days after K returned for work. The stairs to the loft were in, the bathroom plumbed and the whole thing painted. It was amazing what had happened during our three week absence. The only down side was the quite remarkable levels of dust on the first floor. Up until they had 'broken through' to fit the stairs, the dust had been at a very manageable level and I was finding the whole thing very un-stressful. When I arrived home with a car full of our stuff, three children used to a summer holiday of entertainment and a house full of dust that needed at least a week of unadulterated cleaning, I became terrifically stressed very quickly. And very tired. However, as soon as was humanly possible (and well before the builders would have liked) we decided to 'move in' to the loft and Bea moved in to her longed for own room. We were effectively camping up there for the first week, there was no electrics to begin with, no carpet, we had to cover the bed every morning with plastic sheeting and for 24 desperate hours, we couldn't find the remote for the newly mounted TV (SUCH excitement - we have never, ever had a wall mounted TV - it feel JUST like being in a hotel room). Still, it was all desperately exciting and quite romantic and the children were besides themselves with the thrill of it all.

Before the carpet went down, every evening I had to hoover the stairs and the room to stop us getting very dusty feet, then remove the sheets and put the bed back in its position and put the rugs down etc etc in order for it to be habitable. After a few nights G decided he would like to do it for me 'as a surprise', Bea then got involved and eventually they were all insisting on bathing in double quick time, throwing on their pjs and running up the stairs to help with 'the surprise'. It was very sweet - Ted was usually on 'look out' and kept running down the stairs squealing with excitement and telling me to 'stay downstairs'. Bea and G went to great lengths to make sure all was perfect for us and even put the pillows in different formations each evening and then her and G photographed it so they could remember how to do it differently the following night. Cybs took to hoovering the stairs and the sight of her naked bottom struggling with the hoover at the top of the stairs will be hard to top. (Cybs couldn't wait to be pyjama'd so just got out of the bath and went straight to it). It was an odd end to the holidays but lovely nonetheless. Although I have to say that the last few weeks of 'freedom' could have been immeasurably improved if it hadn't been for the daily battles getting the big two to finish their holiday homework. It was, in some instances, like having root canal surgery without anaesthetic. Getting G to do more than a few minutes at a time was almost impossible. Every letter he wrote seemed to be simultaneously burning his hand (I mused at the time that Harry Potter made a lot less fuss when it actually did).

And then came Ted's 5th Birthday. Another triumph (I know - even if I do say so myself, but seriously - even I was proud of this one and I don't say that lightly). I managed to get a huge Spiderman helium balloon (it was crouching so it was difficult to measure him but he took up most of a room when in it and was noticeably bigger than K in a crouching position  - I know because I put them side by side and took photos.)  As well as many fabulous presents he also had a stupendous party in the afternoon - mainly thanks to the wonderful Magician who once again did an amazing job. I am not sure how it could have been better for him. (That is rubbish actually - I could have given him a live spider as a pet which is his dearest wish, but I have, I think rather reasonably, said that if anyone moves a live tarantula in to my house, I will move out. Oh and we could have taken him back to Legoland which he is incredibly keen to do....)

For the final day of the holidays I took them out for a last magical day in London to end on a high. We started off with the big three volunteering for cognitive studies at Birkbeck college (which oddly enough they all love doing - I would highly recommend - it's called The Babylab but they need all ages for different studies and they pay travel and hotels if you need to come from afar) then we did an amazingly efficient whistle stop guided tour of the British Museum, courtesy of a very patient and kind friend of mine from school who is not only a PHD and very important in the whole museum world, but is also able to seek out a 1cm squared spider, engraved on to the side of a small glass bottle, displayed on the bottom of a glass cabinet, inside the vast Museum in order to appease a spider obsessed, newly five year old. That to me is even better than a PHD. It took some looking and some phone calls and some searching on the internet to find it, but find it she did.  Although obviously their favourite part of the entire place was the shop. And actually they quite liked the loos.  But their favourite part of the day was an impromptu trip to Southbank and the beach there. G found (what he truly believes) to be a dinosaur bone, Ted couldn't believe I had kept this place a secret and we had an actual beach so close to home and they all managed to walk inside an epic sandcastle creation being built.  After some ice creams we wandered back to London Bridge for the train home. It was such a perfect day. The sun shone, the children were happy and I even bumped in to some school friends on our walk back to the station. It was such a lovely day it was almost sad to send them back to school the next day.

But send them I did. They were actually thrilled to go. In fact they were so excited they were up, dressed and ready to go by 7am and I was pretty pleased to finally get back in control of the housework in their absence.  Sadly since then the boys have reverted back to type and are now complaining daily about how much they hate school. Just as they did on holiday, they would like to spend their every day in pyjamas, watching TV, eating and playing Minecraft or watching Minecraft videos on You Tube (Stampycat and I are not friends...). School really gets in the way of that. Ted was fine for the first week when he was doing half days but as soon as he hit full days it has gone massively downhill. Reception has come as something of a massive shock to him. He is the very oldest in the year and I can't really understand why he is finding it such a shock to the system.  I also can't believe I have said goodbye to my third baby in to full time education. It seems madness. If I want to, I can send Cybs to nursery for three hours every day from next September.  Madness upon Madness. In my mind they were all born about five minutes ago and how we have managed to arrive here is totally beyond me.

So, there you have it, other than another wedding (I was bridesmaid again - so exciting) and a weekend away with the local mums (I know - my life is a social whirlwind at the moment) you are pretty much up to date with toute. Oh and I still haven't bothered to train Cybs. Although she does now have some very lovely 'nicks' (as she calls them) which she is very happy to wear, but is still so incredibly unreliable she is not in them full time. I will get around to doing it soon.... 

In the next thrilling instalment I will amaze and entertain you all with details of the great build and redecoration debacle. As per usual, it may be a while....

Until then my lovelies. x

Sunday 21 September 2014

Finally, the Summer. Part 1

GOOD evening.  I have been staring at this page and the TV for nearly an hour not really knowing where on earth to start. Or end. Or fill in to the middle. An awful lot has occurred in two months - most of it is not noteworthy so don't panic - it won't take you two months to read - not only have I reduced it to the bare essentials but I have also helpfully divided it in to two parts. One today, one tomorrow.  Such excitement for you all. 

I shall cast you back to the end of term, or the middle/end of July for those of you who don't live in terms. (I cannot imagine such a world. I am quietly confident I shall mentally inhabit a world of school terms for the rest of my life. Long after the youngest has left formal education.) So, all sports days were attended (by moi) and I even ran in the mother's race for the last one. This was a first for me. I don't usually agree to such blatant demonstration of my unfit and unhealthy body, but Bea was upset AGAIN after her running race (it happens every year now - it is always her last activity after tug of war, throwing, catching, hurdles etc and she always finishes the race and then collapses in a heap, complaining of leg pain) but this year I was moved by her tears and decided to humiliate myself to take her mind off it all. I still don't know what came over me. BUT in huge excitement I didn't come last. I quite obviously didn't come anywhere near winning either, but with a small advantage of a staggered start for the old/fat amongst the throng of willing racers, I did admirably well for someone of my stature and levels of fitness.

After sports day came Legoland. The surprise worked beautifully, with the boys being thrilled by our naughtiness at skiving off the day from school - complete with fake phone calls to the schools saying they were sick. (Although it would appear that my letter to the head informing the school that we were taking the days off appears to have not been read properly or passed on as I had two messages informing me that the boys had officially been marked as absent and I needed to explain why - I really should have made Actual phone calls...). We got nearly all the way there without them having any idea (Bea had to have some of the information beforehand as she was so flipping desperate to go to school and wouldn't even hear of skiving off - loser - so in order to stop her ruining it all K spilled a few of the beans) but we eventually had to spill the beans when  G started to get rather upset that we weren't going to go to London Zoo and began to start crying. I handed him my phone and asked him to read the words at the top of the map - he said, 'Why does it say Legoland' and then seconds later the penny dropped to much excitement and whooping and even Cybs awoke from her slumber and even though she had absolutely no idea what was about to happen, started joining in the whooping.

Obviously the stay itself was incredibly hard work - from the moment we entered the hotel and pretended to see if they had any rooms left on the off chance - we were 'on duty'. The children were in a constant state of hyper excitement for about 36 hours. It was also incredibly hot. The heat on the second day topped 30 degrees which made everything very sweaty and tired out the children even more. However, we did it. The hotel was awesome (for them) and had a great swimming pool and splash area (which they loved) and the restaurant were even incredibly helpful on the whole coeliac front and provided entertainment in the form of 'hilarious' kids shows. I even managed a glass of something fizzy whilst the children played outside and the sun went down over the Legoland lake. The heat was so intense even at that stage of the day that it felt a teeny tiny bit like being on holiday. For about ten minutes - until someone fell off the seesaw and we had to abandon it all and put them to bed.  Legoland is definitely not my most favourite of places to stay or spend two days in, (and spend a FORTUNE on), however with the hotel, Qbots and refillable drinks on tap, it was definitely far better than I feared and the children were totally amazed by the whole experience. It was worth all of the sweat, tears and ludicrous sums of money just for how bowled over they were by the whole thing.

Then they broke up and we all breathed a sigh of collective and tired relief. It is always a bit of an anti climax though.  On that thrilling last day when I pick them up I expect fireworks to be let off in the playground, tears of joy from the teachers and rousing music over a loudspeaker - but it is never like that. The teachers doll out the children just like they do every other day of the year and the only difference with the parents in the playground is that we all say 'enjoy the holidays' or similar instead of just the standard 'hi' when we see each other.  At the very least the teachers could pop a party popper every time another child leaves the classroom door for the last time. Hey ho. I shall suggest it to the PTA.  The following morning after the anti-climactic last day of term I took delivery of two extra children for the day and then we all nipped off to the doctors for a blood test (Bea) and an asthma check up (Ted). I had deliberately engineered it this way so that they didn't expect too much from their six weeks off - nothing sets the tone of a summer holiday more than a trip to the doctors on the very first morning  - it makes them grateful for any future seemingly mundane trips to supermakets and similar.  I say, start shit and you've got somewhere to go - only fools go big on the first day/week. The rest of the time spent here was so incredibly dull I shall not waste anyone's time explaining what went on. We lived, we breathed, we went to parks. Blah Blah.

On to the holiday. It had an inauspicious start.  The packing of the car with everything we might need for two weeks of indeterminate weather wasn't a major issue to begin with, but as the hours passed and I put more and more and more in to the car I began to get quite stressed about the pressure of it all. And then I misplaced my phone. Normally I rely very heavily on the Find My Iphone App in such situations but sadly, as I was packing at my mum's, my phone had no signal and was basically lost until proven otherwise. When I have lost something and I am under time pressure and imagined pressure I become quite tense. The HILARIOUS jokes about my crapness at losing things from my mother and subsequently K when he eventually arrived did not add to my mood - along with the OH so helpful "Where did you have it last" questions (NEVER ASK ANYONE LOOKING FOR ANYTHING THAT QUESTION). And then we heard terrific shrieking and 'My life is in danger' screaming emanating from the new 'tree house' (it is two foot off the ground - technically it should be called a 'raised playhouse' but that seems a rather unromantic title) at the bottom of mum's garden. I saw in the distance an extremely panicked face at the small window screaming for me to help and I suddenly for some reason decided that the tree house was on fire and they were trapped and burning inside. (It sounds silly now but in the split second my mind had to process the information that it was given it really was the best it could come up with). K and I legged it down the garden, flung open the door and found perfectly well, unburnt and unharmed children. Two were my nieces who were laughing and three were mine, two of whom were screaming and tearful. I yanked the boys out and began a full scale shouting rant demanding to know what the hell was going on. Ted was shaking in my arms and as they weren't on fire, or in any other life threatening danger my mind made another snap decision and decided to start shouting at my older nieces, who I assumed had been scaring them in to this frenzy. After I stopped the rant, the truth emerged. The older girls had not been filling their heads with scary stories, there had not been a fire, in fact not a hair on their head was damaged. It turns out that the door had been stuck and they couldn't open it. PAUSE.

I got "pretty" cross at the boys, who K then tried to stand up for and so I ranted at him instead, and then my mother told us all to calm down. I stropped off to finish the packing and resume my frantic phone searching. When K joined me he asked me what I was doing. Being the grown up that I am I replied grumpily, "What do you think?" to which he said "Are you STILL looking for your phone". This was not wise. AS IF I would stop and jolly along on a two week holiday without it - not only am I surgically attached to the thing but I was also rather in need of it to remotely oversee the loft conversion and organise all the other bits and pieces we were having done to the house whilst we were away and also WHO on earth just shrugs their shoulders and says - sod it, it's only a phone - and stops looking??  My thoughts towards him at this point became venomous and he became pretty prickly in return. I then decided the only way to find the sodding phone was to empty the entire car (it is, as you may already know a rather large Ford people carrier type thing which had all its seats down and was rammed to the ceiling with crap I thought was vital) and start from scratch. K disagreed. We disagreed. Then as I was walking around to the front of the car to commence my angry emptying, I found it.  It had fallen down off the dashboard (where I suddenly remembered was where I had put it last) and was wedged between the small triangular part of the passenger side front window and the side of the dashboard. I hastily retrieved it and pretended to mother and anyone else who would listen that it was actually somewhere very hard to find indeed, in order to cover my embarrassment.



Friday 11 July 2014

Onwards and Upwards

Once again I lament the fact that you are not all telepathic. I write so much in my head as I go about my day, but by the evening I am too tired to translate that on to screen, which means you have missed out on several instalments of my Thrilling Life.  However the Sky is not working and I am totally up to date with Nashville so I had nothing else to do this evening except for talk to K, and we have had a conversation already today so there really was nothing left to do but finally come on here and talk to you. I shall endeavour to catch you up with some edited highlights.

On to why the Sky doesn't work. There has been a seismic shift in the M&O household since the half term holiday. A great occurrence has occurred. YES, we finally have the builders in situ and they are busily turning our hideous loft in to a rather spiffing bedroom and bathroom. The excitement is overwhelming (although obviously tinged with sadness by the loss of our Sky - hopefully very temporarily until we work out a suitable place for the aerial). K and I have waited nearly a decade for this to happen. When we first moved in to this house it needed entirely gutting. Stripping, plastering, electrical overhaul, plumbing, walls knocked down and put up, painting, carpeting etc etc the whole shebang. I was very confident that our HUGE budget of about £15k would be enough to turn the entire house around AND turn the loft in to a fourth bedroom. I had watched property ladder, I had overseen an overhaul of the bathroom in our old flat. I knew it all. K gave up his job to do the labouring and oversee the trades he couldn't manage like the electrics, plumbing and plastering and I sought refuge at my mother's with our little baby Bea and waited for the magic to happen.

It turns out I didn't know anything. We needed tens of thousands more than I thought (particularly as I spent quite a bit on the furniture and furnishings section) and that didn't even include the loft. It transpires that trades are expensive, it turns out that not having an income means money you do have dwindles spectacularly quickly and it also turns out that trying to remortgage whilst no one in the household is earning money, is actually almost impossible. So, we ended up in something of a financial pickle hideous black hole of near destitution. K went back to work, mum stopped us starving and then a bank of dubious accreditation finally offered us a remortgage. We were saved, and so was the house. Since then we have tried to get the loft done a few times but failed miserably. Then the rats moved in up there and to be honest I just wanted to move as quickly as possible and leave them for someone else to deal with. However, just as we are planning to up sticks and move to the country we have decided to splash out (with the help of a bank obviously, we weren't just sitting here on hoards of cash wondering what to do with it all) and have the (previously) rat infested storage hell converted. The preparation of the start of works has actually taken up quite a lot of my time, what with getting plans, agreements, building regs, quotes etc so that we could start the work and then of course the weekends spent entertaining the children so that K could empty the loft of all our rat infested possessions and past lives. But as I sit here now, the roof is off, the dormer structure is up and insulation has gone in and in a few days it will be watertight and the floor will be down. It is surreal. I never thought it would happen. I am literally finding it hard to wait for it to be completed. The builders worked throughout last weekend and on the Sunday evening when we returned home the children fully expected it to be ready to move in to and although I was telling them not to be silly, I shared their feelings. Bea (who is doing her best to fully inhabit the role as 'tweenager') is very keen to move in to the  'master suite' once it is finished, as she feels she deserves it, K and I have put our collective feet down and insisted that this luxury is to be ours and ours alone. She will have to put up with her old bedroom which K and I will helpfully vacate.  Not that she has to cope for long....

On to the moving part. Yes, we are planning to up sticks and start 'the good life' in the country. The loft is the final part of the puzzle. When it came to it, I just couldn't leave the house for someone else to do it. Also I couldn't bear the idea of not getting the most money out of the house as was humanly possible (so sue me - four bedroom places seem to be going for so much more than three beds that the cost and inconvenience of converting the loft seemed like a no brainer). Plus the delay will give the children a final term at their beloved schools and for us all to say our goodbyes and tie up all the loose ends. So once the loft is finished and the bathroom is re-tiled we are putting it on the market and finally finding 'the forever house' in the Suffolk countryside. I am scared and excited in equal measure. When I am in Suffolk and the children are all playing outside in the sunshine I can't think of a single reason to stay in London. When I am in London I can think of quite a few and worry I will make a terrible full time country dweller.  I am sure that there will be times when I think I am a fool for moving, and times when I think I was a fool for not doing it sooner. Much like I can't quite imagine the loft actually being finished, I can't quite manage to picture our final goodbyes or leaving the house never to return, but I remain convinced that it is the best thing to do for all concerned. A smaller mortgage, bigger house, huge garden, smaller schools and hopefully a nice new job for K - it all seems to me to be the best thing for everyone. If I am wrong then there is really nothing much I can do about it other than live with my mistake for the rest of my life.  We can't even afford to buy the house we currently inhabit, let alone move back should it all turn out to be a disaster.

Mother is adamantly opposed to the move. Which is odd as you would assume it would make her ridiculously happy to have me and the brood nearby. But you can never second guess what the woman is thinking. She has come up with a myriad of reasons why I will hate it, but I tend to ignore her, particularly her concern over what I will do when 'one of them needs to go to a party' (she is very concerned about the amount of time I will have to spend in the car and her party scenario was to highlight the fact that when one of them has a party, should I be alone, I will have to put all of them in the car and take them to and from the party....). Potentially she worries that I am moving purely for free childcare and that she will be forced to spend her retirement being dumped with a number of small children whilst I galavant about the place. I must admit, the idea of having her to help out on an occasional basis with childcare was definitely a bonus, but the whole point of the move was to enable us to spend more time altogether as a family. We can't wait to have a big garden that we can all spend the weekends enjoying and a house that is big enough to accommodate us both together and separately. It just seems to us that the stars have aligned and everything seems to suggest that this is our opportunity, and we intend to make the most of it.

Anyway, back to the here and now.  We are tantalisingly close to the end of term - a week and a half to go! I have watched two sports days, with one more to attend, the children are up to date with all jabs, doctors appointments and dental checks. I have even given in the registration forms for Ted so that he can start school in September. I am totally on the ball. I have also attended Bea's end of year dance show which was something I hope I will never forget.

If I could live a different life I would love to be graceful and dance. I was desperate to be Penny from Dirty Dancing and have the ability to move with rhythm and beauty (and be tall and really skinny). Sadly it was never to be. Aside from the weight issue I was not one for learning to dance, I hated ballet and I was the only child who had a written excuse to get me out of having to do 'pliés'.  I have watched elegant dancers and felt an ache that I will never be able to do anything like that. However, watching my first born prance effortlessly across the stage made me cry with an odd mix of emotions. Naturally pride, love, joy, but also an overwhelming happiness that she gets to experience something I will never know.  I am at a loss as to where she inherited it from - K is lovely but I wouldn't say he sets the dancefloor alight with his dance moves although he is arguably more rhythmic than me. My mother and I are very much the 'galumphing' sort of folk - we have big hands and feet and are naturally quite clumsy. There were definitely some dancers on stage at various times who reminded me of me. The ones that 'have it' are mesmerising for all the right reasons; those without draw attention for all the wrong reasons. But I mentally high fived them for going ahead with it anyway. I would never have had the confidence.

Sadly for me I was gifted with musicality which is all well and good if you like playing in an orchestra (I hated it) and practising for hours on end every day (I hated it) and you liked performing said instruments in front of an audience (GUESS how much I hated that). The minute I stopped having to play them, I did. Dance is something you can do all the time and I am so happy that she has it. She performed four dances in all and we were all there to watch her - a first for us - we have never before taken children who can move to any of her performances lest it annoy us distract us. We clearly had a point as Cybs attempted to join her on stage at one point. After doing quite a lot of 'twirling' in the aisle and some balletic arm moves throughout the rest of the show, for Bea's final dance Cybs decided that she would chance her luck and make a run for the stairs to the side of the stage, so that she could get up and there and take part. Luckily a woman grabbed her before she achieved her goal as I was too far away to stop her, although it was more that I was sort of interested to see what would happen if she did. It would have made a lovely family video for us.  Akin to the bit in the film Parenthood when the younger boy gets on stage to protect his sister. I love that film.

So, that is really it, apart from an INCREDIBLY exciting surprise trip to Legoland to stay in the hotel next week. Two whole naughty skive days spent blowing their tiny minds and a night in a themed room with a view of the park. K and I are beside ourselves with anticipation and the excitement of surprising them.  We have decided to act like it's a normal morning, making them get in school uniform and everything, before getting in the car and seeing how long we can last with their constant questioning about where we are going before we give in and spill the beans. We have envisaged getting all the way to the first sign post for Legoland, however I am pretty sure that half a mile down the road and we will want to rip out our ears. It is bad enough when they do know where they are going, let alone without and with seemingly deranged parents who have decided not to take them to school for some peculiar reason. Whatever happens, it is literally the most exciting thing to ever happen to us.

One of the best parts of my half term was a trip to and from London entirely on my own. The reason for the trip was rather dull - boring banking stuff to help get the money for the loft - I was only going up for a half an hour meeting so it was decided the children were best left at home with Mum. It was four and a half hours of utter bliss - just me, the car and four Nashville CDs. Awesome. Like being in a spa but without stressing about the fact that the 'one size fits all' dressing gown doesn't quite fit 'all' of you and with traffic.

And finally, I shall leave you with my favourite comment from Ted from the half term - I was lying in bed and trying to grab a few more seconds of lying down before I forced myself upright, so I asked Ted to go behind the curtain and see what the weather was like. He was quiet for a bit and I said, 'what can you see'. He replied, 'I can't see anything'. I asked if he was looking from behind the curtain or in front of it. He said 'I'm behind the curtain, but I can't see any weather through all this rain. I think it's a bit windy'. That amused me for a long time.

So, yet again I shall make hollow promises about getting in touch shortly and not leaving it nearly two months, but we both know the truth. I may come on briefly to brag about my new snazzy room, but I may be too busy sitting in it watching tv in my new comfy bed to come down the two flights of stairs in order to retrieve the laptop. But, with the shiny long stretch of holidays ahead of us, anything is possible.

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Wednesday 21 May 2014

Pregnancy Perspective

Glad tidings! I greet you with the happy news that Shiny Life Sister is with child.  Mother's eleventh grandchild and Shiny Life Sister's first child, is cooking nicely and due for arrival in November.

So exciting. Obviously you can imagine that at first I was thrilled - finally a mewling infant to take some of the shine off her life! Mwa ha ha ha ha ha (evil laugh - wasn't sure if it was obvious). I was hopeful that she would look slightly less polished and manicured too - I was thinking weight gain, greasy hair, lack of up to date clothing, baby sick etc etc. BUT, then she started to feel terrifically sick. And then she started being terrifically sick. She has been suffering a lot - especially with her final work trip to China where she felt dreadfully ill. And then last week there was a mad hospital dash in an ambulance (demanded by me), in severe abdominal pain which turned out, after an excruciatingly long wait, to be a horrible cyst, twisting her ovary. All is mercifully fine with the baby and she will be closely monitored from now on but she is still being sick which is really not fun.   (AND quite gallingly, she still looks amazingly glam and not at all like she is suffering so all my hoping for her looks go to pot are in vain - I have had to come to terms with the fact that she will no doubt even have immaculate hair and make up for the birth and post birth pictures - I have made peace with it, I advise you to do the same).

So, all in all, her pregnancy has not been easy thus far and there is still a long way to go. And that is just the pregnancy. There is an even longer way to go after that. So, in order to make her feel better about how horrid pregnancy is, I thought I would dedicate this post to some of the crap that comes after. To help her put all the pregnancy crap in perspective. I do like to be helpful. So, here are some of the highlights:

  • You become the unofficial goddess of all that is disgusting. The Goddess of Gross.  I know there must be some homes where this isn't the case obviously, (Blonde Bombshell's husband is responsible for the sick in her house because she can't stomach it) but by and large the poo, wee, sick, dog poo on shoes, stringy snot, plug hole gunk, nits, blood, worms and any other associated gross, is entirely up to you, and only you, to sort out. 
Example: Last week I was upstairs when I heard my lovely cleaner scream and yell my name in a panicked sort of way. I came downstairs to discover her up against the wall outside the playroom looking as if she had seen a ghost. It would appear that the cat had had a go on a mouse and left the decapitated head complete with blood and trailing veins, on the rug in the playroom. I had been in the room frequently in the lead up to my cleaner's arrival and had failed to notice it, (which gives you an insight in to the state of our playroom on a day to day basis) and so, going about her business, she had gone to pick it up, assuming it was another bit of a toy, only to make the grizzly discovery.  At this point it really does fall to the only other grown up in the house to sort it out and that was obviously me. Luckily the 'rug' on which the decapitated head lay, was in fact a large off cut of carpet so rather than scoop up the grossness in a plastic bag, which was my initial plan, I just rolled up the carpet and chucked it in the bin. This week I did a THOROUGH sweep of the floor before she tentatively tip toed inside to begin the clear up.

This is the least of my gross encounters though. On Easter Sunday I was called downstairs by the children because the cat had either been taken very ill, was very naughty or was potentially trapped in the room overnight and had defecated three times on my new carpet. It was a hideous start to the day, particularly because he clearly wasn't that well for some of it so it was hard to clean up, because it was the same colour as the chocolate the children were all merrily eating whilst watching me clean up and because Cybs seemed to want to step in it, which made cleaning up all the harder. K was at least in the house at that point but there was little point in trying to get him to deal with it - by the time I had woken him up and got him down to help, Cybs would have achieved her wish to walk in it which would have made the whole situation far worse and to be honest, I knew he wouldn't clean it the way I wanted him to, so it was just easier to do it myself. The cat has also taken to pooing in the bath far more frequently than is at all acceptable. Although it is the most practical of places for him to do it and very easy to clean, it is still majorly gross and not really something I want to wake up to  - particularly when there is a perfectly good flipping cat litter that is actually designed for him to use. Hey Ho.

And finally, on Sunday evening, after a lovely day in the sun, I got in the bath with the little two. Ted got out to do a wee and when he started to get back in, he commented on the fact that it looked like someone had been sick in the bath. No one had been sick. Unfortunately, it was a matter of the other end and I was mid hair wash. Obviously I vacated the bath pretty quickly and took Cybs out too but then there was a drainage issue. The water was not going down fast enough which left us all staring at a bath full of poo water. Eventually I decided enough was enough. I shan't go in to the gory details but I managed to use a wire coat hanger to dislodge whatever was causing the issue in the drain and eventually the bath was cleared enough for the clear up to commence. After a thorough bleaching we all took turns to shower as it seemed the best option in light of what we had witnessed. After what seemed like the longest bath and bed session ever, everyone was clean and dry and the children were in bed. For five minutes. Just as we breathed a sigh of relief downstairs, we heard a huge commotion upstairs. It turns out that the sore tummy G was complaining about pre-bed was in fact the tummy bug going around and we arrived upstairs to find a big pile of sick on their bedroom carpet and a poorly George. Bea was being very motherly but also retching slightly. Ted, who had not yet had his fill of grossness (he was the one that kept pointing out recognisable bits of food from the bath debacle) came over to have a peek and quickly ran back to his bed and hid under the duvet. It was quite late by now due to the bath delay and it being a Sunday night n'all so I was quite keen to get them back in to bed so my sick clear up window was brief.  I clearly didn't do a good enough job of the interim clear up because the following morning the stench of sick was really quite bad. The splatter had gone further than I had thought possible and so I spent Monday morning scrubbing quite a large area of carpet with anything I could think of to try and rid us of the smell and the stain. (That is the end of the story but for those of you caught in a similar situation I would highly recommend Bicarbonate of Soda which I used to great effect today. Sprinkled a whole box of the stuff over the area, left for two hours and hoovered up - et voila, no sick smell.)

  • You are CONSTANTLY preparing food.  
In the early days when they can't yet have food, you look forward to the day when they are able to eat and the first few times they do so are big occasions and jolly exciting events for which picture taking is mandatory.  However, after the novelty wears off and they stop being small and cute and eating small amounts of things with their hands and potentially that child is not your only offspring, the entire day is centred around the preparation of food, the serving of food and then the clearing up of food and then the packing of snack food to have when you are out lest a child be suddenly struck by hideous hunger pangs in the few hours that you are not serving it a meal. I know it sounds like something obvious that I should have considered before multiple reproduction occurred, but there are times when the need to constantly think about food and its preparation seems ridiculously overwhelming. The big two have packed lunches, so I am entirely responsible for three meals a day for four children, every day.  I am in the kitchen for a disproportionate amount of my day. The lack of their adventurous taste buds also means that I prepare the same meals over and over and over again and it can feel like groundhog day very quickly. And I have further to go than I have already come. Another sixteen-ish years. That is a flipping long time to be in the kitchen. I hope I can persuade Cybs to take up cooking from a young age so she can do the last stint for me. I may well never want to see a baked bean or a sausage for the rest of my life by that point.
  • You become the parent you never thought you would. And not in a good way.  
Even after I had Bea I still had very hard and fast rules about what sort of parent I was/would be. I merrily judged other parents of older children as they did a 'terrible' job of parenting (whilst also smugly knowing that my beautiful tiny baby was not only the MOST beautiful baby that ever lived but also that she was never going to grow up, just like I am never going to get old or grey).  Not that it was an example of the parent that I judged, but an example of my changing standards, my sister had four by the time I had Bea so her fourth and my first were these lovely little blonde twins who spent an awful lot of time together. On one occasion we were in the car and her daughter wanted something she couldn't have or some such (it was a long time ago) and so my sister promised her a packet of crisps which she duly pulled over to purchase. I sighed, or similar and asked if she HAD to buy them as Bea would then want them and I really didn't want her eating crisps at the tender age of one and I maybe said that perhaps she shouldn't give them to her daughter either as they were terribly bad for her. Luckily she was able to just smile and say, 'wait until it's your fourth'. And proceeded to buy the crisps. Fast forward to Cybs who probably had crisps shortly after she was six months, has had more lollipops than you can shake a stick at and quite often eats her lunch in front of Peppa Pig (another of my absolute parenting no-nos was eating in front of the tv). 

Food is just one example. There are millions of others. Telling them to 'shut up'. If I heard a parent tell their child to shut up in the supermarket when Bea was little, I may well have tutted and/or given the child a sympathetic look. I must say it almost every day now. As well as 'bloody' - swearing in front/at children is most certainly not what I would have wanted. Also I say things my mother used to say which I hate. 'Because' as an answer. 'I'm Friday' to yet another yell of 'I'm Thirsty'.  I shout. I swear. I tell them to shut up. I feed them shit. I yank their arms when they won't walk and we're in a hurry. I am fat (I didn't want to be a bad example). I don't exercise (ditto). I don't listen to them read very often at all (please don't tell anyone - I feel terrifically guilty about it).  These are all things I would have been horrified by as I sat, smugly waxing lyrical about the type of parent I would be as I rubbed my swollen, first pregnant tummy. That 'me' would have judged this 'me' very harshly. But this 'me' would think that 'me' had absolutely no idea what was coming....

  • You enter an unofficial, unspecified, never ending competition. Even if you are entirely uncompetitive or incredibly lazy like me.
You are competing for brilliant children as well as being a brilliant parent whether you want to or not. Intelligence, development, manners, behaviour - it is ALL judged. And sometimes commented on. A friend who lives in Chelsea is apparently repeatedly asked 'how many words' her daughter has - from when she was only a year old.  It is mainly so the enquiree can brag about how many words their genius offspring has mastered 'already'. Even if you are not remotely interested in the competition, thousands of others are, and they rope you in to their weird game. A brilliant child is, by association, the product of a brilliant parent/gene pool, therefore to the competitive, children are the perfect fodder.  Sadly even I am beginning to be bothered by Cybil's lack of vocabulary. She is twenty one months old and rarely forms a word. She has Mummy, more, George and something that sounds like 'stop'. She also makes a noise like scooter but isn't actually scooter but I know that that is what it means. Babies far younger than her are more understandable. Sigh. No doubt she will be a late bloomer in that department. She can scooter to school and back very competently and stops and waits to cross the roads, so she has talents in other departments which are incredibly useful. And she makes herself understood without words so maybe she is alarmingly intelligent and has realised that she has no need to actually speak and therefore won't waste her time doing something so mundane. Like Maggy from The Simpsons. Or that evil baby out of Family Guy. Or perhaps a mix of both.

The Internet has taken competitive parenting to all new levels. You can't JUST take your child to Euro Disney, which is, in my book the very pinnacle of great parenting, you have to keep it a secret and then let them know in a 'magical' way just before you go, which has to be filmed and then posted on the Internet to show exactly how happy you have made your child and by insinuation how unhappy our children are in comparison. And it isn't enough to just throw money at the parenting competition, you also have to be amazingly creative which is hideously time consuming. Every day there is another 'what an amazing parent' link on facebook, twitter or even worse - making the news.  From elaborate 'themed' packed lunches (do not get me started on that), to taking a photo every day for eighteen years to make a tear jerking time lapse video for their coming of age, to the Dreamworks animator who makes 'superhero' films of his son, to the inexplicable month long, nightly shenanigans putting toy dinosaurs in different creative and amazing situations for the excitable children to find in the morning.

Every now and again I put some effort in to the whole parenting shebang, just for the hell of it, but I certainly couldn't guarantee 'effort' every day for a month. I see the efforts of other 'brilliant' parents and I feel exhausted.  Maybe that is why my children are so average. Although that is actually a relief. Gifted children require an awful lot of attention and looking after - that also seems exhausting.

  • You can NEVER rely on attending anything ever again. 
This one never ends actually, although obviously lessens over time. However, when they are young their illnesses mean that any number of nights out, weekends away etc can be cancelled at short notice.

For example. For the last year I have been looking forward to a very special long weekend away with my very special friends from school. It was to be three nights of blissed out magnificence in a lovely big house near the Suffolk coast. On the Thursday night, the day before I was due to drop the little two off at my mum's, Cybs started to cough. It appeared that she just had a cold which I thought mum could handle so I merrily left her on the Friday afternoon and drove with indecent haste and happiness to our holiday house.  The Friday night was just bliss. It was all that was right with the world. My Saturday morning phone call to mum revealed that Cybs' breathing was quite heavey and that she was coughing badly. I was quite hopeful it was just a cold so told mum to keep giving her pain relief.  By the afternoon mum assured me she was fine and I stayed for the second night, which was even better than the first, eight old friends eating delicious food, drinking way too much wine, playing games and living the life. I could have stayed for a week, but the following morning mum put Cybs to the phone and her breathing was so incredibly laboured I was immediately terrified. I rang 111 who rang mum to try and organise a doctor's appointment whilst I threw my stuff in to a bag and drove far too fast, back to mum's. On my way there I spoke to mum who told me that the 111 operative had called an ambulance. I drove a tad faster. I got home and found the paramedic still there who had been largely useless. Cybs became so upset whenever he went near her that he hadn't been able to listen to her chest or in fact do anything. He decided she wasn't an emergency and made us an out of hours GP appointment.

Anyhoo, to cut a long and dull story short, we ended up having to wait hours for the GP appointment, I started crying in the waiting room when we got there, we got bumped up the list and managed to avoid the hour delay, saw the GP who agreed she was struggling to breathe and we ended up in A and E for steroids, nebuliser and monitoring. So, instead of my lovely last few days with my lovely gal pals of old, I spent a very scary and long day with a very ill Cybs and finished off the day in the paediatric ward of West Suffolk hospital (which is very lovely for anyone wondering - I highly recommend it as paediatric wards go). I was obviously very upset for poor Cybs but I was bitterly disappointed for me. I do not go away for weekends - it isn't really 'me'. I don't do it out of martyrdom but I am with the children 99.9% of the time (I mean outside of school hours obvs) and this weekend was so incredibly important to me that I was a bit heartbroken for about 48 hours. (I KNOW Cybs is more important. I mean I didn't wallow or anything, I was just silently heartbroken whilst also being very grateful that I was able to get immediate medical help for my poor baby. I am able to see both sides.)

Interestingly not really it turned out that Cybs didn't have croup as everyone (except me) said, because on the Wednesday when we were safely back in London, I took her back to A and E after her breathing, which had never fully recovered, became ever worse. They did all the same sort of stuff, only this time they also took an x ray which revealed a chest infection (my original diagnosis). Happily, she is much improved and back to her wicked but wonderful ways.

  • You HAVE to know where the hell they are, all the time. And even when you think you know where they are you quite often have to triple check.  
Example. During the Easter Holidays we were lucky enough to go to Center Parcs for the day as a guest of Bea's best pal. All was going 'swimmingly' in the Subtropical Paradise (which is a misleading title as it is really nothing at all like paradise and the headache you get after a few minutes inside it, lasts for an awfully long time) until the last twenty minutes when we were trying to wrap things up and have the 'last go' on things. I was giving G his last go on the rapids, Bea and Alice were having their last go on the Tropical Cyclone and Ted was shattered from the two hours he had spent racing around the pirate ship and baby slides in the children's area and was happily sitting in 'our' spot outside the pirate ship wrapped in a towel and tucking in to a bag of crisps and an apple juice, patiently waiting for Alice's mum to return.

G and I finished our ride down the rapids and were just going to chance another final run when I heard a worrying alarm. At first I thought it was telling people the waves were beginning again - but a few seconds later I realised there was a different air to the tropical paradise and like meerkats on the Savannah, all these heads were popping up looking for something. It was then I knew, deep in my mothering bones, that Bea was dying. I saw a group of lifeguards running in the direction of the Tropical Cyclone. I grabbed G's arm and yanked him in the direction of the running life guards. I pushed through the crowds with a hammering heart and tears in my eyes as I thought I saw Bea's friend, with fingers in her mouth, looking scared and bewildered. I think I actually started crying at that point but it all happened so fast. I was busy looking for the lifeguards who would surely be trying to resuscitate my beautiful daughter who had obviously fallen off the stupid rubber ring thing on the death defying ride and was in serious trouble, WHEN, a small child grabbed me. I looked down and saw Ted clinging to my side and I remember thinking what the hell are you doing, get off me I need to save Bea. Then a lifeguard asked me if he was with me and I said yes - again annoyed that everyone wasn't trying to save Bea - she then said 'He can't swim' which was when I realised that all the lifeguards were all stood still, staring at me and Ted. As were a number of fellow guests in the incredibly noisy SubTropical Paradise. It transpires that the alarms were actually for Ted. Bea and Alice had admirably managed not to drown. G was with me and Cybs was safely at home with my mother. Ted had been the missing link, and instead of waiting for Alice's mother, he had evidently decided that he would go for a wander. He had wandered up the stairs that G and I had gone up and then he had found an unattended flume ride and as it seemed quite fun, he sat at the top and pushed himself off. He didn't realise that at the bottom of the flumes that aren't in the children's area, there is a deep pool in which to splash land. So, as he splashed down at the end of the flume he was probably somewhat taken aback and a little scared as he realised he was drowning.

As luck would have it, a very kind man who came down after Ted had seen him unsuccessfully trying to save himself as he attempted to grab hold of the circular floats that divided the plunge pool in to two, and realised that the man in front of Ted was in fact nothing to do with him and that this little boy was on his own and in some distress, so he saved him. It was then that the alarm was raised and all the lifeguards had come running. I was in total shock. All I kept thinking was that he couldn't possibly have nearly drowned as he was sitting on a chair eating crisps. But I knew it was all true as I had a very wet and scared Ted clamped to me and a calm and rational lifeguard telling me that he could have drowned but for a very nice man who was luckily using the flume at the same time.

An hour or so later as we were using the swings in the playground Ted casually said, 'that's the man that saved me when I was drowning' and we went to say thank you, and thank you and a bit more thanking. He told me all the details the lifeguard didn't know and that I hadn't taken in at the time. I am most extremely grateful to him. But, people like him aren't always around and I was clearly in the wrong by assuming that an exhausted and troublesome four year old would stay where I left him for a few minutes. You must always know where they are. Do not rely on assumptions.

  • There will forever be 'stuff' - lots of it and very little of it will be yours.  
  • Leaving the house will always take five times longer than you hope - for an extremely long time to come. Even longer if you have more than one. 
  •  If you are anything like me your jeans will always be slightly falling down and needing to be yanked up. 
  • Leftover children's food will always be appealing even if you are fat and trying not to be.
There are many, many more but this will have to do for now.

On the flip side there are also some good things. Obviously. Or the world would be very sparsely populated. In the interest of fairness here are some: They are quite cuddly and sometimes they have moments of loveliness. And when they get older they can be very good company. And on the whole they are a lot more fun and a lot more smiley than most adults. And they find getting wet more fun and are more open to spontaneous outbreaks of dancing. Dressing them up in fancy dress is also jolly good fun.

And there you have it. I apologise to anyone reading this who hasn't had children or has no interest in having them. It's a bit late to point this out, but this isn't the post for you.

Until we meet again,

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx











Saturday 12 April 2014

K

April has begun. This means three things. Easter Holidays, Easter and Anniversary time.

I have decided not to bore you with the ins and outs of illness, tiredness, child antics and poverty but instead I am dedicating this post to the long suffering (and cause of long suffering); K.

Last Saturday marked eleven years of marriage to the man. This is not a momentous amount of time in the grand scheme of long marriages, but it feels like a jolly long time. It is, I am pleased to announce, a year longer than the power couple Gwynnie and Chris managed. News of their 'conscious uncoupling' after ten years, means that we have beaten them. It may be wrong to feel a sense of satisfaction about that but I couldn't care less - I do. Other people have their careers to take pride in which would clearly be very peculiar for me to crow about, (although I was once responsible for making Kerry Katona Celebrity Mum of the Year which I think you will agree, is something of which I should be magnificently proud), so my ability to stay in holy matrimony affords me a small modicum of pride. I/we have, at times, found staying married pretty hard work. Over the years there have been times (as my blog will attest) where I have thought I might welcome his demise, other times I have thought I would jump in the ground after him, should the worst happen. Most of the time however, we just spend our days happily getting through them. As we were unable to celebrate the first major milestone of ten years last year due to illness and a small baby (we spent the evening in front of the TV with my mother....), I have decided to make a small fanfare over eleven years. To that end I planned a small surprise for him in the shape of a romantic getaway (I even booked a secret day off work and everything), I changed my surname (finally) on FaceAche and I had also planned to make an old fashioned 'mix tape' as a gift - although I failed in my task of trying to 'burn' things to a CD (all of this technology totally eludes me) and I have no idea where to start on making a play list for his ipod/iphone. Therefore, please use your imagination and open your ears to my 'Open Mix Tape' below. (Open letters seem to be very popular with the celebrities, so I thought I would emulate it - it isn't quite Sinead O'Connor to Miley Cyrus or Gordon Ramsay to his Mother in Law but then we are not s'lebs - but hopefully you get the idea.)

K's Anniversary Open Mix Tape

A Side

1. Common People,  Pulp

Do not be alarmed. I am not being rude. (I would never be so insulting to his mother!). However, at the time we got together, K was living in the most horrideous shared flat in Chelmsford with three other boys. It was a shit hole. I had never seen anything like it before and I was a student living in a shared student house. According to K this wasn't even the worst place he had lived since leaving home which seemed impossible at the time but he later showed me the window over the sex shop which was his previous 'home', so he was clearly telling the truth. However, and it shocked me to learn, but there was a bit of me that rather liked slumming it. I went all Charlotte Church in her wild days and revelled in being able to smoke inside and not worry about spilling things and eating in bed.  In return for me 'feminising' the room (I bought a whole new set of sheets for the bed and other bits to prettify his room) and in return he taught me more about Mcdonalds, Burger Kind and KFC and took me to some clubs I wouldn't normally have chosen to frequent. I found myself loving it all. The best thing was returning to my very comfortable, daddy funded, student house, which had a beautiful and large room I had had re-carpeted as soon as I moved in. And that is why I find this Pulp song so amusing. It was very 'me' at the time, especially the line in the song about 'calling dad' to stop it all.

2. Yellow, Coldplay

The words aren't especially important in this one although I always 'thought' they were rather lovely, (see later) it is the song as a whole that is noteworthy. When K and I first moved to London we lived above a launderette on Battersea Park Road, which sounds more glamorous than it was, although one of the advantages was the beautiful park just behind the flat. The first November after we moved in, we went to watch the firework display they put on every year. One of the songs that accompanied the grand finale of the spectacular display was Yellow, and it was so lovely, being there with K, near our first home together, watching the fabulous fireworks (which I totally love) and it just felt like one of those 'magic moments' and so from then on it sort of stuck as 'our song'.  After we got engaged quietly at home in the very same flat a few months later, we decided to go to Asda and pick up some treats and bubbles to celebrate (we have always been terrifically classy) and as we walked through the aisles this song came over the tinny tannoy and I took that as a very clear 'sign'. Clearly this was the official stamp of approval for this to be 'our' song and the universe approved of our engagement. It was also, inevitably, the song we had our first dance to as man and wife at our wedding eleven years ago.  Sadly someone has recently told me that the meaning behind the song is not that nice and Chris Martin wrote the song as a sort of joke, but I have decided never to find out as I don't want it ruining the song for me and so I try and forget that piece of information and not imagine what sinister meaning the words have. Instead, I look at the stars and see how they 'shine for me' with no hidden meaning.

3. Nobody Does it Better, Carly Simon

Embarrassingly, I decided to sing this to K at our wedding reception. I can only blame the folly of youth for this. I was in my early 20s and had clearly not matured sufficiently to learn that singing along to a karaoke machine at my wedding reception was not a brilliant idea. Worse still was that it was filmed so there is a permanent record of my epic fail. Luckily I have only seen the video of it once and briefly at that - enough to understand why people on the X Factor are shocked to learn they cannot sing having previously assumed that they could. Also, on reflection, it sounds a bit saucy. I wasn't going for that angle I can assure you. It was meant to be sweet. Although I was a big fan of  karaoke at the time, I would raise an eyebrow or two if I went to a wedding with that as the evening entertainment now.  Although in my defence, it did come very late in the day, after a professional singer had had a 'go' and everyone had had quite a bit to drink, so it was quite popular and I wasn't the only one to get up and sing. But still, hindsight and all that. It still makes me cringe a bit whenever I hear the song, although obviously I still sing along. Naturally.

4. Fix You, Coldplay

As most of you will know, Gwyneth and I have more in common than our skinny frames, blonde hair and bank balances (only one of those is actually true and only half of that as I can't afford a whole head of highlights); we have also both lost our lovely Fathers. Regardless of who you are, if you have a good and loving relationship with your father and he dies, the pain is really unimaginable. (I am sure it is the same for either parent but I wouldn't know about mothers as 'luckily' mine is sitting in the same room and making terrifically annoying comments to the TV as she watches it.  I know it sounds disrespectful to those who have lost their mothers but if you were here you would entirely understand. People who have received awards from the Queen have suffered less.) Anyway, this song always makes me stop and think. K can't write songs and he was pretty useless at times, but there were many more times when he was entirely magnificent. This song makes me think of both him and my brilliant Father whom I still miss.

5. All That She Wants (Is Another Baby), Ace of Base

I'm not sure this needs much explanation. After the first one came along I pretty much constantly badgered K for the next. Each and every one has been at my request, although naturally K was happy (ish) to go along with them all. He was always keen to have children, which was part of his original allure, and he assures me that if we won the lottery we would have a few more, but for now, this part of our lives is very much in the past. I heard the song the other day and it made me chuckle as I finally don't want another one and K is safe. Although we are playing the lottery a lot more. Just in case we change our minds.

 B Side
(It was a short tape - no pricey 90 minutes for me)

6. I Won't Give Up,  Jason Mraz

Again, do not be alarmed. The words in this song are more important than the title. Eleven years has seen a lot; four pregnancies (I don't 'do' pregnancy that well), four crying babies, a death, a miscarriage, poverty, house renovation, redundancies, four demanding children, a house that isn't quite big enough for us all etc etc With all this going on, it is, I hope, not hard to imagine why K and I might, on occasion weekly, have an argument. We have, on occasion quite a lot in the early days had huge shouting ones with storming-out type of outcomes. It is quite easy on those occasions to feel sorry for oneself and despairing of one's life choices. In the very early days I assumed it meant we were ill matched and should quite clearly divorce. I think that when Bea was small and we were broke and the house was still unrenovated and K was temporarily unemployed, I may well have mentioned it to him, because I assumed 'happy marriages' were nothing like this. Mercifully we loved each other enough that this was never a real option and now we are this side of ten years, being married feels a whole lot easier and a whole lot more fun. Not that there wasn't any fun in the beginning, it was just that there was a lot more to work on in between the fun. We married relatively young and had to grow up together, and fairly quickly, with an awful lot going on in the background. But we did. And we carried on. The words of this song resonate with me and stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it. I don't 'do' soppy or gushy but I do think 'we're worth it'.

7. Lady Madonna - The Beatles

This is 'me' as far as I'm concerned. Children at my feet, baby at the breast (although mercifully not for the past few months) and never enough money. Not only is it my ring tone but I think it should be my theme tune.

8. Happy - Pharrell Williams

Because, not only do the children and I LOVE this song, but because on the whole, we are.

THE END
(It's a very short B side)
(Apologies for the two Coldplay songs btw - I know they aren't 'cool' but then I am not. If K were doing this tape there would be far more 'Absolute Radio' type tracks and Elvis and The Prodigy and Esser and Rage Against the Machine etc. We have incredibly different tastes in music. I don't want you judging him by association)


 

Sunday 16 March 2014

Things I don't Understand - Part 2

4.  Why I Can't Just Sit Down and Write

Almost everything in the world is more appealing than sitting and writing in the evening. I have no idea why. I meant to sit down and write this the day after I posted the last one. A month on it would appear I didn't quite hit my target.


5. February half term plagues

Every year the first half term is a total germ fest. This year was no exception. Ted began proceedings by turning totally white and demanding to sleep upon his return from swimming on the first Sunday. He seemed to have recovered slightly once we got to Mum's later that day but that was short lived and he spent most of the following week being incredibly ill. I enjoyed three visits to the doctors with varying waiting times and only one course of antibiotics to show for my troubles. I became ill on the Wednesday as did Bea and Cybil soon followed. Only G bucked the trend by staying decidedly well for the entire duration. I managed to venture out for three expeditions during the nine day break, other than to the doctors - once for an afternoon in to town so that Bea and George could spend some vouchers, once to the park and once to see the fabulous Lego Movie (I really didn't think I would enjoy it but it was a genius film and I highly recommend it). G was happy as Larry that he could spend almost the entire time in his pyjamas which is his idea of the perfect holiday. The Lazy Gene is strong in that one and the very idea of staying in your pyjamas for nine days is like a bespoke luxury holiday for him.  He was largely unaffected by the swathes of groaning people who occupied sofas and required almost constant medication. I took a tray of medicine bottles and syringes (the ones you give babies medicine with, not the needle ones) to bed every night - it looked like a calpol crack den on my bedside table. It was hard to find any joy in the half term really and Bea and I felt exceedingly cheated by the whole thing. We returned home and felt like we hadn't had a break at all. Me in particular.

6. Gendering Animals

This is odd. Cats are 'female', Horses tend to be 'female', Dinosaurs are 'male'  Crocodiles, foxes, monkeys etc are all male and happily adorn male t-shirts along with dogs, lizards and spiders etc but I have never seen a boy's top with a cat or a horse on it. WHY?  If you try to buy a cat outfit for a small boy it is quite hard to find one that doesn't have pink or sparkles or some reference to it being for a girl. I know because I tried for Ted last year. It bugged me then but I didn't think about it until Ted refused to call Charlie The Spider a 'he' because 'she' was small and cute and a kitten. He got quite angry when I insisted that he was wrong and that kittens come in both boy and girl categories and boy kittens are just as cute as girl kittens. This reminded me of the female cat outfit and I am now mystified as to why popular Animals are assigned to a particular gender.  Dog outfits are quite boyish and you rarely find them with pink sequins adorning the collar. Horsey toys are almost exclusively aimed at girls with potentially the exception of the hobby horse and rocking horse although even the rocking horse seems to be more for 'girls'. And obviously Dinosaurs belong in the 'male' category (although I have no idea why as I know a lot of girls who love them but you would never find any in the 'girl' aisle or pictured on 'girl' tops). Now, I don't want to jump on the bandwagon and the current zeitgeist for demanding non pink, gender neutral toy stuff - I 'get' that there are some over-the-top-crappy girl toys which are laughable and I understand that sometimes manufacturers take it too far (Early Learning Centre take note - a Till does not need to be produced in both a primary colours version and a pink version - girls will 'cope' with the primary colour version...) but on the whole I think girls prefer to pet and preen and mother their toys and boys are more physical and enjoy building and destroying and fighting and setting up 'battles' with their toys. On the WHOLE. Obviously having two of each I am well aware that Bea enjoyed playing Ben 10 with G as much as G enjoyed playing 'mums and dads' with her and they all like science and chemistry sets etc BUT animals? They all play vets, they all like/have liked dressing up as animals so why are cats only for girls and dogs mainly for boys? It doesn't make sense. Both animals come in both the female and male form or the species would clearly die out. Potentially the 'fe' in feline and the 'fe' in female are matches and therefore as a society we have dictated that cats, much like cupcakes, are female and dogs who are the messier, muddier, more simple species, are male. But I am not happy about it and I don't fully understand it. Ted shows a great deal of solidarity with my misunderstanding and proudly wears his cat pyjamas which were kindly handed down from a family with three daughters. And he still occasionally dresses up in the cat outfit I did find. With a purple collar.

7. How I can Be so Stupid

I am not entirely without sense or intelligence so sometimes I am entirely baffled by my own stupidity. On a recent shopping trip G decided he wanted a knitted weasel toy which was sadly not for sale so, instead I had to purchase the pattern and wool to knit it for him. I began in earnest after the worst of the half term illness had abated. I was excitedly about to cast off the main bulk of the knitting which had taken about five days to complete (fitted in and around the children during the day and in the evenings) only to realise that I had in fact, knitted the entire thing in the wrong colour wool. I had assumed, exceedingly wrongly, that I was knitting the underbody of the blasted weasel when in actual fact I was knitting the 'body back' as it CLEARLY STATES above all the instructions I had begun. So, I managed to correctly follow all the casting on, increasing, knitting, decreasing, alternative row this, that and other crap and yet I couldn't read the word 'beige'. Baffling.

Before half term I took Ted to a party at the wrong venue. Even though I absolutely knew it wasn't at the venue I took him to. I knew because the invite had been on the noticeboard for a month with the logo in large writing of the correct venue all across the invite - a place we had been for previous parties.  The invite had been on the notice board for around a month and discussions had taken place to ensure Ted's best friend would also be attending and whether we would make it in time for the party which followed not long after. And yet I managed to walk him down to entirely the wrong venue, much to the bemusement of the university hockey players who were trying to use the venue as it was intended and must have thought a woman pushing around a baby with an excited four year old in tow was a peculiar sight for a Sunday. There was then a mad dash for K to come down in the car and whisk poor Ted off to the actual venue which I knew was in Dulwich at exactly the same place as the last party with exactly the same invitation. I felt irrationally guilty that Ted missed half of the party and almost cried at my spectacularly stupidity.

I say very stupid things. A lot. A lot more than you would think. And then I worry about what I have said to people for weeks on end and sometimes even apologise to them and sometimes they have no idea what I am talking about. Or at least they pretend not to know.  For example, last week, when a lovely friend of mine said that her son really enjoyed babysitting for us (potentially this was the shock that put me in to such a silly frame of mind), she said that one of the reasons was because he felt like it was just like being at home, and for some reason I then GROANED and said 'Oh No - is it because it's so messy!'  WHY on earth would I say that. WHY? It is so rude and she was being so nice. There have been others but this was my worst of recent weeks. It haunts me. I have only ever been to her house when it was extremely tidy so it is mind boggling as to why I would say that.We were sadly cut off by the school spewing out children so I was left unable to rectify my mistake and don't want to bring it up again in case she is reminded of my rudeness. I also spent a good few drunken minutes at a party earlier in the month telling a heavily pregnant and therefore sober woman, how it made me feel sick just looking at her bump. NICE. I meant, because I am very over being pregnant and having babies and now the very idea of me ever having another one turns my stomach. I felt so bad about that one I did find her in the playground and apologise. I mean honestly, what the hell is wrong with me. Although my feelings on pregnancy are understandable because of Cybs. Which leads me on to number eight.

8. How I was cheated of an easy fourth

I was told that the fourth 'just fitted in' because they had to, that they were 'no trouble', that they practically 'raised themselves'. Somehow I have been cheated and given Cybs. As delightful as she can be at times, she is constant hard work from the minute she wakes up. If she is not having a horrible tantrum about something, then she is quietly emptying cupboards, bins, bags or bookshelves, packets of porridge oats ALL OVER THE FLOOR, the fridge of its contents or putting dirty things in the dishwasher full of clean things, or tearing up precious pieces of paper or eating tea bags and spitting the leaves EVERYWHERE  or various other many, many incredibly messy and irritating things. She makes the most amazing mess. And the tantrums are spectacular. She hates to get dressed in to her pyjamas at night. I usually have to hold her down with my elbow as she screams and struggles and fights to flee my grip. Ditto with tooth brushing. On any given day she can flip out about one or all of the following: waking up, going to sleep, getting in to the buggy, getting out of the buggy, having her nappy taken off, having a nappy put on, putting on clothes, taking off clothes, putting on shoes, taking off shoes, eating, not being given food, brushing her teeth (actually this happens every single day regardless), me going to the loo, me walking upstairs, me not allowing her to walk on a main road, me not letting her eat butter with a spoon etc etc.  Before half term I was quite keen to get rid of her and find someone else to bear the brunt. Post half term I only felt marginally less like that. Luckily last week I finally decided to take her for her inoculations which were long overdue and included the all important MMR. I have no idea what it does to other children but after a sleep on the way home from the doctors Cybs woke up and has been remarkably improved ever since. It is magic. She is finally bearable and has periods of being quite nice and vaguely charming in between the major tantrums. If you have a tricky toddler I thoroughly recommend overloading them with vaccines to major viruses. It works a treat.

9. How Bea is Coeliac

This is a total doozy. At 9 years old we have finally got the answer as to why Bea has suffered from tummy troubles for the last few years and why she has always had quite a pronounced tummy even though she is quite slim. It turns out that she is totally unable to tolerate Gluten and is now part of a very exclusive club. It has a society and everything and you can only join it once you are officially diagnosed which does make it feel quite elite.  Bea started suffering before Cybs was born but the problem became unbearable about a year ago when we went to our local Doctor and he prescribed some medicine which Bea has duly been taking daily ever since. The meds helped but without them the problem returned immediately. Every time we returned to see the Doctor, he just gave us a repeat prescription and told us to keep on going and watch her diet. So, after half term I decided that a year was long enough to be on a daily dose of medicine and to take advantage of the lovely private medical insurance we are lucky enough to benefit from courtesy of the late, great Mr T (my dad). Within a week we had seen a very nice Doctor in Blackheath and had the results to her blood test and it showed that she was most likely Coeliac. For confirmation we had to go through the drama of an Endoscopy and Colonoscopy under General Anaesthetic.

Luckily for Bea we got to do it at the Portland which was total luxury. We were showed to her room by a Concierge. A flipping Concierge. Imagine. There were touch screen TVs and nurses in abundance - we were vaguely excited, although Bea was also quite scared. Within an hour of our arrival I was crying and Bea was under (via the gas from a mask and not an injection which was also a blessing). Four hours after we arrived I got to half carry (she is surprisingly heavy considering she hasn't been fully absorbing her food) and half limp my first baby back to the car and take her home. She was sore and tired and desperate to see her daddy but surprisingly brave and brilliant. I was less so and found it so hard to see her in distress when she came round after the procedure. It took an hour for her to calm down properly and relax - mainly due to the cannula in her hand and the pain from her wrist where they had taken bloods (in her wrist? so odd) although there was some stomach pain from where they had taken two biopsies. I know that this made the lining of her stomach bleed because bizarrely enough - along with the lovely decor, ensuite bathroom, smart TVs, amazing cleanliness, abundance of attentive and friendly staff and unrivalled service all round - the private hospital experience also provides you with a DVD to take home. AND A PICTURE. We now have a lovely snap shot of Bea's insides as well as a film showing us the journey from her mouth to her stomach and what a biopsy looks like. The boys loved it. Poor Bea had to leave the room. K never entered the room. Still, it will make an interesting souvenir for her when she is older.

Bea is recovering well and even attempted her Street Dance exam the following day which was above and beyond - particularly as we didn't get home until 10pm. She managed to complete the rehearsals and the exam but came out and cried from the pain in her wrist which was upsetting, but I was immensely proud of her for going along and trying. She is an amazing dancer which is another thing I don't understand - I have no idea how I produced a person with rhythm and the ability to follow dance steps. I couldn't even manage to follow the short steps in Zumba. She is an anomaly. And now, to add to her long list of physical quirks - long sighted, glue ear, dyslexia and the alopecia she suffered at five, she now has confirmed Coeliac to boot.  She will no doubt be entirely fine with it all, as she has been with all her odd quirks, but it means that I have to be far more fastidious and not my usual laid back self in regards to food buying and preparation which is a total pain. It is just so not like me. Still, at least I can still eat every type of cake available which poor Bea can't so I shall put up and shut up and try to be anally retentive. I wonder if there is a course you can go on?

So there it is, the end of another one. I will leave you with this from my physically flawed daughter - as we half hobbled, half carried our way back to the car down the dark London Street, I remarked about something being magic and she asked me if 'Magic was just science we don't understand yet'.  9.15pm and groggy from a GA and in pain, even if she was just repeating something from one of her crappy American TV programmes, I thought it was just brilliant.