One word? When seven would do…

Feeling a bit living dead today. I’m really tired due to having crap nights sleep with my tooth three nights in a row and having Tarly up aswell. Monday night she woke coughing at about 10pm, came and sat in the lounge with me until midnight and then I went to bed thinking she’d finally fallen asleep. She hadn’t and she followed me to bed about 10 minutes later where she stayed tossing and turning.

Last night was the same, she woke around 10.30pm, came in the lounge with me till around midnight and then I sat on her bedroom floor with her til 1am. Not terribly late for me I know but when my tooth is a constant nagging pain rising to a real throbbing agony for the last half hour while the painkillers wear off before I can take more and I’m having all sorts of weird hallucinagenic dreams when I do sleep I have that sort of tired exhaustedness I’ve only ever really had during very early parenthood when a newborn is waking me every hour and a half. Everything is all woolly. Fuck knows how I managed to blog last night’s post really – I imagine I’ll go back and reread it next week and it won’t have said anything like what I meant it to ;-).

Anyway, I have a dentist appointment for this afternoon so fingers crossed it will be on the way to ending the pain. I have a feeling it is infected and will require ABs and I’m not even sure if dentists can prescribe – which will be hideous as our doctors never give out appointments closer than 10 days after you are at deaths door so it could well be Christmas before I get any! I can actually feel a lump in my cheek / jaw which I am assuming is where it’s drained to. It’s truly horrid. And making me evil to spend time with – last night I was so nasty to Ady he seriously asked me if I wanted him to leave 😯 – so day three of the evening primrose capsules and no great change there yet ;-). I think it is utterly possible to go insane with pain. When I was pregnant with Tarly I got an ear infection. They were reluctant to give me anything really due to being only about 22 weeks pregnant but gradually upped my doses of painkillers and ABs until eventually they sent me to hospital where they sorted it out. I spent nights pacing the floor and burying screams in my pillow and days sitting crying in the doctors waiting room as yet another promised high dose of painkillers failed to touch the pain. At one point I told Ady that is someone said they could take away the pain if I gave them Davies I would have more than happily handed him over – it trumped childbirth pain from both labours combined. This is not on that scale but the relentlessness is bringing it close. I’d make a really crap long term ill person wouldn’t I? 😆 I’d be there trying to trade all my belongings and rights to my children in return for a bit of respite!

Yesterday morning I started on tidying up the playroom. Partially cos it looks like a tip, partially because I am still on an ebaying frenzy and looking for more loot to list and partially because although the children will not be adding much at all to the plastic mountain this Christmas it would still be nice to get shot of some of the stuff they never play with. In doing so I was reminded again of the excesses of my past – Davies and Scarlett do not have two sets of indulgent grandparents or any generous aunts and uncles – they only have my parents who are very sensible and give them one small token gift each Christmas and birthday and a very generous amount of premium bonds as a ‘real present’ which means they both have a fairly impressive ‘portfolio’ of them but all plastic stuff over the years has come from us. If I observe the childrens’ playing the only toys they would miss or we would pack up to take with us should we ever do our campervan world travel plan would be the geomags and the plastic animals. Scarlett actually cried in the car on the way to Chris and Helen’s last week because she didn’t want to go there, she wanted to come home and play with the geomags instead. And all the way home from their house she was singing a little geomags song to herself in anticipation :-). So I went through the boxes to try and trim the toys down a bit. We have a box of plasticine and playdough cutters and moulds – that gets used so we’ll keep that. I bought some Fimo which will go into that box after Christmas. In the same area is the magic maize and Happymais too. We’ve got a box of lego which sometimes gets played with, we had it out on Monday and built a house with it. There is room to add to that box and I think it will be a toy which gets played with more as they get older anyway. Next is a box of pretend money, an ELC cash till, some maths stuff like rods, some ELC scales where you balance numbers which add up to the same etc. and a calculator. I’m really tempted to sell the till on ebay – in the ELC catalogue this morning I noticed the new version of it was over £17! I don’t think it ever really gets played with and actually if they ever were to play pretend shops they could use a calculator. Similar to the box of pretend food – we’ve got tins, bottles, boxes, fruit, vegetables and morning goods. Oh and a couple of teasets. All of which has been played with over the years but actually when I was a child and used to play shops I’d raid the kitchen cupboards for real tins and packets, or make the food out of plasticine – that was sort of the fun of it really. The pretending to select food off the shelves and take it to the pretend till was the smallest part of the game. Oh and of course my children get to go real life food shopping with me every week anyway so pretending to do it at home has limited appeal really. We then have a couple of boxes of toys which I want them to have rather than they ever desired – things like wooden blocks (so nice, so timeless, so boring when stood in competition with an Xbox!), jigsaw puzzles of maps of the world and of the UK (too much land, too much sea, never stood a chance when there are Dora the explorer or dinosaur puzzles in the same cupboard!) and three different marble runs – these do get used but we could probably manage with just the one sort! And then we have shelves of games – connect four, snakes and ladders – they can stay, there is every chance the children will play with them more as they get older.

So I’m building up to a rant here really and of course it is only because there are people like me who covert and purchase these things for the children that the demand exists and therefore the shops are full of them so I take my responsibility for my part in this but looking through the catalogues of toys which have been arriving through the letterbox every morning this week in preparation for Christmas I can’t help feeling that we are ever increasingly taking away our childrens’ imagination and replacing it with plastic. There was a ‘toy office’ in one of the catalogues this morning FFS!

Anyway, I’ve pulled out another big chunky load of stuff which is ready for ebay and I’m going to talk to the children about getting rid of the pretend food and the pretend till, not that I think they’d notice if I just spirited them away anyway but as I’m making this U turn I think I’d like them to know about it. And I’m not getting all minimalist about toys, they are mostly getting X box games for Christmas 😉 so I’m hardly one to talk when I am saying they should leave behind the plastic food and immerse themselves in a cyber world. 🙄