So said Scarlett to Ady today! Actually both of them have been told off a fair bit by Ady today, even I told him to stop shouting at Scarlett after she fell over (he had just spent ages telling them not to run on the concrete or they would fall over and then she ran off and did just so ๐ )
Was quite amusing to hear her say it to him although I am not sure whether it was simply classic 2yo wisdom, a sad state of the wrongness of Ady’s work / home life balance or indicative of the amount of telling off and shouting I seem to do to them. Ady has spent most of his day today fielding calls on his work mobile, he has been leaving the house at 6am every morning and rarely getting home much before 7pm. Allegedly this is ‘the season’ and after a very short 2/3 month period of frantic busyness it all dies down and returns to a normal pace again. Only time will tell whether this is true and indeed whether that is sufficient consolation to put up with the crappy weeks.
He is not really enjoying the job anyway at the moment – aside from the huge amounts of time he is spending in his car sat mainly on the M25 and the usual office politics he is getting let down by relying on other people not performing having a knock on effect on his own success which is always tricky to deal with. I am trying really hard to be supportive of the long hours, smile sympathetically as the phone rings today for the 20th time and listen to his work woes and know when to offer advice, when to shut up and get him a beer and when to do the ‘come on Darling, don’t take this crap, get in there and tell them this, this and this’ pep talk (which had previously always been the way I ‘helped’) but I am feeling increasingly removed and distant from the world of work – I really struggle to imagine having to split my life in half like that and having two different personas. But then again maybe that’s what sits a little uncomfortably about my current life. Ady and I were talking the other night (in one of those intimate chats about nothing in particular where you suddenly end up articulating something you didn’t even know was bothering you until you mentioned it) about how different we are as people now we have the children, and it struck me, actually that he is not that different really, but I am. Totally. Many of my friends, and certainly my closest ones are as a result of either having the children, or the choices I have made since having them (a case in point being my Blog Chums – who I count amoung my very best friends now but are only in my life as a result of a) having the kids and b) choosing to HE). I do think that previous to having the kids I was always searching for that next big challenge and while having the children has not fulfilled me totally it is certainly aiding in the challenge search! I also firmly believe that opportunities always present themselves if you just have the courage to look for them and then recognise them when you see them. I think that at this stage in my life I am supposed to be doing what I am doing with the children as I am growing and learning as much as they are, and that soon, when the time is right the next opportunity for ME will come along and that it will probably be something to do with the life choices we have made up to now (like connected with HE in some way or something similar) – trouble is, I’m getting impatient ๐
Anyway, where I was going with this was that Ady’s balance is wrong and I think having been home in Sussex a year today (where did that go eh?) has shown us we are ready for the next thing and that we are striving for a specific sort of life which we are currently not living and unless the one we are living now is in some way working towards the one we want then we need to change track.
This week I am finally going to take the plunge and try and sort our finances out. This will mean the scary process of working out exactly how much we owe, how much we can genuinely afford to be paying each month and going to the bank to remortgage accordingly. We also want to do some serious stuff to the house which is going to take funds which we might as well try and drum up now in readiness. If that doesn’t sound grim enough once done I will need to make the serious life change of sorting out my personal spending habits once and for all so that the remortgage is a permanent solution as opposed to a patch cover on something which will need sorting out again at a point in the future – toughie!
The other option is to sell up this place and go and find somewhere bigger and cheaper else where in the country – which is quite appealing as a concept but as nothing has happened to push us in that direction and it would involve finding a house, employment and a total new circle of friends – too much change all at once with small children and no real support network, we need to have at least one area of certainty before such a leap of faith…. Like I say, I have faith that the right door is about to open somewhere sometime soon.
So that was all a bit philosophical wasn’t it!
Had a nice day today, my lie in ๐ Then we all went to Tescos which despite being madder than the maddest place in all of mad town (full of people, some old folk pushing trolleys with no sense of direction, screaming children and that odd contingent of people who seem to take it into their minds to go to the busiest place possible, without any need to actually buy anything from it and then *browse*!!!!) was quite nice to do as a family, then over to Dad’s.
We had lunch, then Ady helped Dad do something with a hedge, then we all sat in the garden around the pond. Ate strawberries and cream in the sunshine and came home to get kids to sleep super early so we could watch Dr Who. Kids are both snotty, have not had enough sleep and have been quite horrid all day (which does not really bode well for tomorrow ๐ ) so Ady has been giving them a bit of a hard time, which no doubt he will feel bad about when he disappears back off for another week’s work on Monday – must try and keep harmony tomorrow.
Also doing some low level panicking about HESFes in the one free corner of my mind. Not about being there or feeling shy (I have off site accomodation and I don’t really do shy!), more about choosing to be away from Ady (yes, I know, but we just don’t do being apart very well!), one about being with the children night and day all alone (again, yes I know I won’t be all alone, but I will certainly be doing the bulk of everything) and finally wondering whether any of us will get much out of it. Both the kids will be too young and too little to do any going off by themselves, I will be too busy being with them to attend any of the talks etc and I wonder whether dragging two small people along with me everywhere will prevent me from doing much catching up with friends and meeting new people type stuff. Also whether being off site (although comforting both on the escaping if it’s horrid and the whole not having to do a tent basis too) will mean we are out of the loop too much anyway. I dunno, I was all angsty before Melrose and Ady was coming to that which negated lots of my worries but so many people have made comments about not going until the children are older etc. Someone tell me it’ll be good and fun and ok!
