One word? When seven would do…

One is good and one is a nightmare!

It’s been a crappy day generally here although not without highlights. I got another CV in the post (bring ’em on!) and Davies has been lovely and wonderful all day long. The sun shone although it has been cold and I got four loads of washing dry. We’ve got home made curry for dinner which I’m really looking forward to and it is Wednesday already tomorrow.

Scarlett has been, erm, challenging in her behaviour today. I won’t catalogue her crimes but they were many and varied. And yes she is only 3 and yes some of it was likely attention seeking and yes I am the parent and her behaviour is a reflection of my parenting and yes I am tired and feel crap so I probably over reacted to some things and placed high and unfair expectations on her and yes the law says that when one child is being lovely the other has to behave like devil spawn to compensate but really… I spent the day veering between wanting to stick her on Freecycle as free to collector and coming with many pink accessories and feeling like the biggest failure of a mother out. 🙄 Still not sure which one of us I blame really, it’ s a tie!

When they had already both been sent to their rooms for little more than just breathing and therefore irritating me, I was a sobbing heap on the sofa and it was not yet 11am Davies came back into the lounge having gathered up a selection of his cuddliest of cuddly toys and my pillow. He arranged the toys and my pillow around me, wiped a tear away and told me how much he loved me. He is so his father’s son that boy! 🙂 So I decided we could continue in the same vein or attempt to resuce the day.

We went to Blockbusters to get some films and some popcorn with the idea of just sitting on the sofa for the day cuddling and watching.

We were thinking of renting Corpse Bride but it is £3,75 for two nights or you could buy an ex rental copy for £5.99 so guess which we did? 😳 Then we chose 3 from their 3 dvds, 5 pounds, 7 nights range. Davies chose a Dr Seuss cartoon one (Horton hatches an egg, Daisy Head Mayzee and others), I talked them into Matilda and Scarlett was perilously close to a Barbie and Pegasus or other such twaddle so I steered her towards Alice in Wonderland which I have been reading to her recently and she dropped the pink one like a brick – hurrah! 🙂

We came home and had toasted muffins for lunch, followed by lots of popcorn and watched Corpse Bride and the Dr Seuss one. That was about 2.5 hours and by then Davies wanted to draw pictures of all the new characters he’d fallen for and Scarlett decided she’d sat still and been good for long enough and wanted to rampage and destruct some more. I had a very ambitious and frankly stupid idea that I might lie on the sofa for a restorative nap but that didn’t happen!

Scarlett was retrieved from her room for her tea which they both ate by which time Ady had returned home, also feeling crappy with the cold we all now have and fed up from a tiresome managers meeting.

Plan tomorrow is to go to a scrapstore in Portsmouth I have just joined with a local-ish HE group. We’re supposed to be taking Mum along too and then I would imagine we’ll have associated activties in the afternoon dependant on what we gather from said scrapstore.

Tired, fed up, feel pants, crap mother. Feel free to insert my name in brackets in the box below!

Happy Birthday to Kirsty 🙂

I’ve spent the last two days with really itchy eyes blaming early hayfever and this morning I woke with a runny nose and streaming eyes. I think I might be suffering with hayfever and the kids’ cold. 🙁 Oh and it’s mooncup time again too. Ace! 🙄 Have also been yawning all day despite having an OK night’s sleep (both kids dosed up on Medised made for 12 hour stretches of sleep for them both 🙂 ) I could have crawled back to bed at any point during the day and gone straight to sleep the instant I closed my eyes. So I think I will be doing just that very shortly.

First thing I got out a make up kit I’d had stashed away for Scarlett so she sat and did my make up for me and a construction puzzle kit thing for Davies which I sat on the floor and helped him with (while having lurid green eyeshadow and very pink blusher applied). It was excellent actually, made of a sort of plasticky cardboard which you pushed out and then followed numbered instructions to fold and slot together to make a digger truck. Then using a plastic screwdriver supplied you used plastic nuts and bolts to hold it together. He wanted cheerleading rather than actual help and I did plenty of ‘so what number did we look at last, what number should be do now? Which bit of it do you think that picture is representing?’. The kit only cost a quid and frankly the half an hour of making it was worth loads more than that but actually the digger itself is pretty good and of course he is very proud of it and has brought it everywhere with him today. 🙂 Must see if there are any more in the same range and get them. Ali and I were speculating abolut meccano for him the other day watching him create stuff with some giant brio meccano-a-like stuff Freya has . He likes k’nex and lego and stuff but the appeal of actually bolting stuff together seems to really do something for him and he loves either following instructions or using his own imagination to create something. Looked on ebay and it is still holding it’s price and I checked in Woolworths at it today – must keep an eye out at car boot sales.

I’d originally planned to go to Brighton today with Mum and the children for a Primark and H&M run. I had various clothes and shoes purchases I wanted to make. With our current financial situation it is actually easier to stick to our monthly budget by making a list of things we need prior to needing them and factoring in the purchases in advance. This coupled with the fact I still love shopping even if it is just for childrens pants and socks ;-). But they children are still fairly snotty and not on top form, Mum didn’t want to be too far from home so wasn’t up for Brighton so I decided to go to Worthing and she came with us in the end.

We had a really successful day. Davies got doodles, sandals (he’d had a meltdown about me putting some outgrown Spiderman shoes on ebay last week so I’d promised if we saw any more Spiderman shoes I’d get them for him and low and behold, there in Woollies were Spiderman sandals, hurrah!), cheapo black shoes for Badgers and then he asked for jelly shoes to wear in the beach / in the sea and cited Kessingland as the example for needing them. For £1.50 I thought his sales pitch was good enough (even without the PowerPoint stylee illustrations and plasticine models of himself wearing said jelly shoes I know he would have worked up to if I’d said no) so he got FOUR PAIRS of shoes today! 🙂 In fairness this was for the same price as a usual Clarks pair in total though, so not too scary, just watch him grow a shoe size in the next fortnight.

Edited to add – And I’ve just checked reciepts and realised there was a 3 for 2 on shoes so the jellies were actually free 🙂

Scarlett got doodles and sandals. She didn’t want jelly shoes as they only had blue ones in Woollies, she liked some pink ones in Mothercare but they were a fiver so I said we’ll look out for some for her over the next couple of months until the time she might actually need jelly shoes anyway. It was after all still snowing only about 2 weeks ago so we are possibly slightly premature in such comprehensive summer stocking up anyway 😉

They both got a pile of new pants and socks, Tarly got a couple of pairs of £2 each summer pjs and as they both already have sufficient shorts / lightweight trousers / skirts from last year which still fit them I got them both enough cheap T shirts to last the summer which completes their wardrobes until the Autumn. Oh and got Davies’ £3 black school trousers for Badgers too. I also sent Davies across from the clothing concession bit in the Co-op where I was buying T shirts to the normal tills to pay for a french stick. I could see him and he could see me, but he was still really bold and confident, chatting away to the checkout woman and being all polite and charming. I’m dead proud of that boy you know. :-).

While out we saw a poster for Joseph & the technicolour dreamcoat which Davies was asking about so we talked a bit about as much of the (Bible version) of the story as I could remember and promised to tell him the rest when I’d looked it up. This led to further debate on God and religious belief, which he then followed by seeing a poster of Elvis and saying ‘oh look, Elvis’ in a really casual way followed by saying ‘I look a bit like Shakin Stevens today Granny, I’m wearing a denim jacket and jeans’ out of nowhere, which he followed up with ‘actually I’m wearing jeans, Mummy’s wearing jeans, Scarlett’s wearing jeans and you’re wearing jeans too Granny. That’s a coincidence’ which just made us laugh loads. Strange boy with all his observations, combination of the very deep and the very inane and his little turns of phrase so far beyond his age!

Retail therapy, frugal shopping and new clothes for kids, sorted! 🙂 Came home and have piled up another batch of stuff ready for ebay too which I’ll try and get listed this week cos if I’m thinking about buying summer wear then I guess other people will be too – and I’m fired up on ebaying again having transfered £50 from paypal to my account from last weeks sales. 🙂

We went back to my parents for a late lunch, where Dad had arrived home too and I spent some time setting up a few bits on Mum’s new laptop for her. They have just had wireless broadband put in so she’s learning all sorts of new skills and I’ve trillianed and flickrd her up which she’s slowly starting to get to grips with. After about an hour the children, who it has to be said were not really on best behaviour all day started to get snapped at by my parents for various crimes such as trailing crumbs on carpet, banging doors and making ornaments wobble and getting their feet on the sofa (honestly – well where did you think my thing about indoor toys came from eh? 😉 ) so we came home.

We had a grand trying on session of all the new clothes and shoes, they had a big bowl of strawberries each for tea, I took reciept of a praisefilled email from CV lady about a particularly challenging one I’d completed yesterday (and another 3 arrived in the post this morning – keep ’em coming!) and I hastily and about 7 hours later than planned shoved a bolognaise sauce in the slow cooker (well it had a good 4 hours or so).

And now, I will retire for the evening.

Is what I’ve got. Davies has been developing his for at least two days but Scarlett has come through to an early lead with hers today. We had planned to spend the day with my parents but they rang early to say their cat who has been having some sort of seizures for a couple of weeks had taken a turn for the worse and they were going to the emergency vets with her. She is back home again now but I think her days are numbered, so all very sad over there. 🙁 So with poorly kids and worried grandparents we felt the mix would be a bad idea and stayed home instead.

I got some CVs done and made some choux buns, Ady did some child avoidance tactics until I had a mini-rant about spending more time with the children at the weekends and trying to build individual relationships with them both. He is an excellent father but still retains the sort of novelty value of a favourite uncle at times rather than a particular relationhip with each child. We had a bit of a chat about it and having taken on board some of what he said to me about being crap at letting him get on with it and not interfering they spent a lovely afternoon doing stuff like playing on websites together and generally talking. Result 🙂

I took Madagascar back to Blockbusters and popped in to see my parents to administer cuddles and choux buns for half an hour or so and then home again to get a roast dinner cooking. The children had a bath and an early night and we’re sitting watching Planet Earth.

It’s been a lovely Spring day here today, washing dried and the drive into town along the seafront was very cheer inspiring with the blue sky reflected in the sea and making the promise of Summer ever more imaginable.

*how* guilty would you all have felt! 🙂

Told Ady that within moments of posting it people had started to laugh at me for even trying to fool them and started to be all righteous about how seriously I must be taken as a Home Educator, how much people must hold me up as a model HE Mom, committed to my children, a paragon of the one try path to autonomy and childrearing and the epitomy of stay-at-home-ness and he just gave me one of his looks and said ‘A – they know you would never hold a job down and B – you could not possibly get up in the morning to get to work anyway’. So one way or another you all know me I guess 😉 😳

This morning the children were rather tired and emotional and for some odd reason wanted my company rather than Ady’s ? so although I wanted to get a couple of CVs done for a deadline tomorrow I couldn’t concentrate and gave up and watched Madagascar with them again instead while Ady cleaned the oven 🙄 but also :-). Then in an effort to carry out a cunning plan I hatched with Ali yesterday to make better use of our many ‘resources’ and toys instead of them playing with the same stuff day in day out I suggested they got out their toy animals and saw how many of the animals from the film they had. We were sadly lacking in anything other than a couple of giraffes, an out of proporionately small giraffe and a lion which had been a Happy Meal giveaway during the Narnia craze (so that’d be Alsan then).

Scarlett wanted to do painting so she did a picture of me and Davies drew a page of ever decreasing squares inside of each other in loads of different colours. He asked me what I thought it was and I said it reminded me of the staircases at Melrose when viewed from the top. We all agreed it was very like that but Davies then wanted to know how people would climb the steps when they were just squares. So I explained about how art is open to interpretation and that it is a representation of something rather than a carbon copy of it. I got him to bring me some paper and a green and yellow pen and drew some lines, triangles and squiggles and asked him what it was – he correctly guessed it was the vase of daffodils on the mantlepiece but also got what I meant when I said it was not an exact replica of them and if he’d drawn it then his picture would not have looked like mine. To further illustrate this I drew two rectangles, one with a rectangle topped by a triangle with a circle above and the other with a rectangle topped by a square with two more offset rectangles above it. I asked him what he though it was. He thought the first rectangle was a church with the sun above (precisely my intention as it happened) and the second reminded him of a ladder. What it actually was was the chimney breast with the fireplace and the clock above it, the TV cabinet, the TV and two pictures on the wall next to it. So we chatted about how that worked and how that was the beauty of art and as he showed quite a bit of interest in that theory we got out ‘Come Look With Me’ which has been on the shelf untouched since I decided at Melrose 2005 that we simply *must* have it. We looked at the first two pictures and talked about them a bit, including a question on how the poem under one of the pictures tells the prince how he should be like his father so in what was was Davies like his parents? He started to lose interest again at that point, mainly due to the Move It, Move It bit coming on the TV again on the film so we left it there, but I’m pretty sure a fair bit went in. 🙂

I left them all to it then to collect my watch which for the first time in nearly 2 weeks is going again – I’ve still worn it every day and have been surprised at how little I missed the telling the time aspect of it actually. On the very infrequent occassions I have neglected to put it on in the morning I have felt very lost without it but I am starting to think that is more the feeling of it on my wrist than the time telling use of it. Having an inherant feeling of what time it is is one of my skills along with knowing which direction we are headed (N, S, E or W) when travelling so maybe I should try and develop that further and lose the watch once a week or something.

I also popped into the Wizard store to get a few bits – some clothes pegs as I was lacking in those, (although I bought 100 wooden ones for a quid and they are shite so I probably need to not be frugal with clothes pegs actually as you seem to get what you pay for there) and some plastic sheets for the childen to do their plasticine / playdough / painting on so that Ady and the Ady Machine get a rest ;-), a couple of cheapo craft kits to bring out when the children need entertaining and a couple of sets of plastic zoo animals which contained same size zebras, lions, hippos and giraffes for recreation of Madagascar for the children.

Then on to Sainsburys where for the very first time ever I was under budget 🙂 Woo hoo! and then home. The children were suitably impressed with the animals although slighly disappointed that I didn’t produce penguins too (unusre whether to be flattered at their confidence in me to provide or irritated at their ungratefulness for the rest of the creatures!) and Ady suitably impressed with my frugalness. He was still cleaning and the children had assembled all the various bits of their lifecycle of a frog animals for me to inspect (frogspawn, tadpole, froglet, frog) and then we looked at the real tadpoles too for a bit.

We had lunch, I hung out loads more washing with my substandard wooden pegs and then we went over to Chris and Julie’s for the afternoon. Had a lovely time there; the children played in the garden with Chris and Ady reminsicing on their childhood and supervising them, while Julie and I chatted.

Tomorrow we are over at my parents for lunch and I will be mostly feeling smug for having got my deadline of tomorrow night CVs already emailed today so not having any work to do. 🙂

But OMG Tony Slattery is on Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes!!!!!!

I’ve just had a letter offering me a full time office based CV writing job. The money is enough to make serious in-roads into our debts and pay for full time wraparound care for Tarly before and after nursery and Davies before and after school. The local school has a Kids breakfast and after school club and the nursery for Tarly is onsite, so I’ll be contacting them first thing on Monday about starting both children after Easter.

Guess I won’t have time to read all those books after all!