I know, my attention span is very limited 🙂 Am also feeling bad that although I know what I want to do it is way beyond my ability to set up (and I have done a bit of very wobbly research on this, looking at WP help and forums and got scared and ran away from them again) which means I have to lean on the only person I know who can do it and she is otherwise very busy dealing with everyone else’s web safety paranoia, updating WPresses hither and thither and has a big day herself tomorrow (will be thinking of you Jax!). So for now I will carry on as normal – restricting what I write would mean I would rather not blog at all and find a different outlet – I don’t have the energy or time to do both – and wait until one of the more techie minded folk amoung you come up with the solution then copy you 😉
My final word on the subject is the one I touched upon yesterday about the kids feelings on the whole thing. Blogging as we all know is the new black, everyone’s doing it. It’s been featured in parenting mags, top 10 blog lists have been printed in broadsheets and some people even have T shirts referring to it 🙂 I bet it is even an acceptable hobby and interest to list on your CV nowadays. I have always said I would never like to be a celebrity or have fame in any way as I would not like my private life picked to pieces by the media. I would hate for ex boyfriends from years back to sell torrid stories about ‘I knew here when…’ or photos of me as a drunken teenager being in the papers. I have no dreadful past secrets but everything I did in the past should stay where it firmly belongs – in the past. I always wonder why people who go on Big Brother are shocked when inevitably their whole previous life is splashed across the papers while they are safely in the house leaving their friends and family to either deal with it, or join in and sell their stories too.
I don’t know what the kids will want to do or be when they grow up. But I do know that in the same way teenagers hate their parents bringing out the baby photos of them naked on their changing mat when they bring their first suitor home the kids of today will probably be faced with the embarrassment of their friends tracking down their equivalent ‘baby blogs’ in 10 years time. Not at all sure my two with their unusal names and photographic evidence will want to be associated with details of the time their Mum was called a ‘Big fat lady’ in Sainsburys, how some LI set their parents up for the day or concerns over their Daddy’s testicular health. Yes I probably should have thought about that before blogging it, I am probably speculating on stuff which will never happen and yes I probably am cut out for a career as a tabloid hack with all these suspicious ideas of digging up dirt on people but if I can think like this then I bet others can too. The end!
Didn’t come back later last night as experimented in being sociable and wifely – that failed! He watched football and when I said ‘well laptop back out again tomorrow then’ he said I should have drawn his attention to it and he would have turned the TV off and talked to me. Not entirely sure I need to ask for an appointment to talk, and also don’t really feel we need to schedule ‘talking’ into our day – I quite like being in the lounge companionably on my laptop while he chooses what to watch on TV with occassionally chatter or comments. TBH I think he probably does too but feels honour bound to make some sort of point sometimes to show he is the bloke! 😉 Once he has cooked dinner, washed up and hoovered of course!
Watched that Driving Mum and Dad wild last night (normally watch Desperate Housewives at 10 but staying up late with S last week meant I already watched this week’s on E4) . What a sad programme that is. I’m not sure whether I felt sadder for the kids or the parents – with a couple of exceptions of people who couldn’t train a dog let alone raise a child! The single mother really hit a chord – she *was* me at the end of a very bad day – except she was like it all the time – just at breaking point and it makes me wonder yet again how single parents cope without anyone to take over at times or simply be there. Ady does a hell of a lot and more than his fair share during bad nights with the kids – if I was doing it all I don’t think I would have even considered the option of HE (I mean mentally not financially or otherwise) and I could see how spiralling into that sort of existance would be quite a small step.
Yesterday Jenny and I made the decision to cancel the hall for our group and just post a weekly meet up arrangement somewhere locally on our yahoo group. We have already tried going fortnightly but have simply had to ask people to commit to paying in advance to protect us from ending up paying for the whole hall ourselves. This is not a business, we are not aiming to make any money from it so we don’t feel we should be putting anything up either. It has taken up a lot of time, thought and love from both of us over the last several months and while we both still believe it could have worked for whatever undefined reason it has not. I hope that over the summer we can build it back up again to a larger group meeting regularly out and about and perhaps look at hall hire again in the Autumn. I feel sad and even sadder for Jen as she is also dealing with her children who really enjoyed it being upset. D & S liked it but won’t necessarily miss it and will probably be just as happy to got to soft play or wherever. They mainly played with their cousins there anyway and were not involved in the larger group yet. So some more ((((Jenny)))) if you’re reading and chin up – we’ll carry on and this will work somehow xxx
Supposed to be seeing Mum today although not sure what we are going to do – the kids really need to get out and about – would consider swimming as a good one if I didn’t know that my mother would feel totally obliged to make loud comments about my swimsuit clad appearance to everyone at the pool (yes she does it from her mother – luckily as I am larger Scarlett will be saved from that one – guess I might end up criticising her slimness – are you sure you are eating properly darling? or similar!) wonder if she could be persuaded to come to Brighton or somewhere like that with me for shop browsing…
Texas has been trackback spamming me very high volume which is also frustrating as I am getting loads of emails and they are all from him. Need to reassure Ady he is not Dwight using an assumed name 🙂
I had a long conversation with ex boss lady last night, we were supposed to be going to stay with her this weekend but due to pox potential and dreadful weather conditions in her part of the country (she is even HEing her privately schooled DD today and tomorrow as they are snowed in – she thought it was hilarious!!). She is still wanting me to work for her on some level and at last we have come to the conclusion that we need to agree a certain amount of hours per week and that is what she will pay me for. One of those conversations you really need to sit down and thrash out so we have arranged to meet midway for a day in London sometime soon. Quite excited at the prospect of doing some paid work again actually – and hopefully the motivation of doing that will spur me on in a couple of other areas too.
Yeah, I’m bored of it too. tbh although I like having the discussion and making sure I’m thoughtful about it, I don’t think I’m actually going to change what I do in terms of blogging. So there! Happy playing with my WP1.5 (although not actually using it for security purposes which is what I thought I would do!) and watching other people make changes to their blogs! Hope my kids won’t kill me for it in the future!
Comment by Sarah — 24 February 2005 @ 10:29 am
i decided I was happy with things on my blog too. i guess one of the reasons I was unsettled was that having met a lot of the bloggers at melrose, and got a better sense of them, it seemed that the blogring was about to implode.
As for the truman show thing. i wish my family were diary keepers, and i would love to have the chance to read how my mum and dad felt when we were growing up good and bad. Aslo those voices that are silent except in family remembrance. Think how fantastic that would be to hear my grandad agian on the larks he had as a lad, or the stories of my wild great grandad as told in his own voice, rather through my late grandad or my nanny? [my great grandad lived untl I was at uni]
i hope that my blog, and its comments, however short the period i keep it for, will give my children and theirs the possibility of getting something about me and chris and how the day to day worked, rather than the anecdotes and family oral history. [though not to replace the oral history.]
Therefore I have renerwed my vows to blogging!
Comment by helen and chris F — 24 February 2005 @ 4:12 pm
yep, that’s something I’m conscious of too, Helen. My kids might not like what I write but as Merry said, at least they’ll know I was here and I cared. As someone who has practically nothing around from her early childhood due to the death of a parent it is especially important to me that if I’m not here, my kids have a way of remembering what life was like.
Anyway, Nic, thanks for the details. Pleased to be included 🙂
Comment by Sarah — 24 February 2005 @ 5:12 pm
:~)
Comment by Merry — 24 February 2005 @ 5:42 pm
The blogging thing doesn’t worry me – the girls will quite often *ask* me to put stuff in my blog, such a sthe picture of Tilda’s fancy hair. I just want to have the odd private conversation too 🙂
Comment by Alison — 24 February 2005 @ 8:25 pm
You don’t need to write a blog to show you care….do you?
TBH, if my mum had blogged about my childhood, online for the whole world to see (her friends, her colleagues, my relatives), in the detail that we do, I’d have been really pissed off and would have felt my privacy was being invaded. Probably not at the age of 5, but almost certainly by the age of 10. Hence the reason that my blog is not about the kids so much.
Comment by Chris — 24 February 2005 @ 8:33 pm