Intolerant Monday

I’ve not been in the mood for being anything today; wife, mother, friend, cat or chicken owner. Nothing!

I had booked a collection of a parcel today which I’d not yet wrapped but was due for collecting any time between 9am and 5pm so I had to be up early enough to have drunk sufficient tea to have it wrapped ready for 9am. Just as well I did as the delivery man was ringing the doorbell at 910am.

Once that was done we all decided we felt blah today and not in the mood for our half-planned meeting up with Tasha so I sent her a message to say we’d leave it for today as we were all coldy and rough. We’re seeing them later this week anyway so it probably was not bad thing as I’m keen to avoid overkill of seeing them having done that with friends in the past and lived to regret it when the children tire of each others’ company too quickly.

I have a pile of documentary type dvds I’ve brought home from work so we looked at them and decided to watch one about The Solar Eclipse of 1999. It was quite good but lasted nearly an hour and had a lot of information about why and how solar eclipses happen, at great length by Patrick Moore, some of which was factual but rather technically explained and some of which was PM going into one of his great poetic monologues about them so bits of it were hardgoing. We saw it through and talked about where Ady and I had watched it from (work, both of us, me at Bhs, standing infront of the store in Worthing high street watching along with fellow staff and shoppers, Ady at a garden centre with fellow staff and shoppers) and as the film mentioned the next total eclipse for the UK was 2090 we talked about how old they’d be and why Ady and I wouldn’t be around to see that one (probably!).

They played with the geomags then and I went to do some baking. I had some leftover puff pastry from yesterday so I made some pin wheel things with some cheese and marmite for lunch with that. Davies had been moaning about not having had one of the halloweeny spider cupcakes I’d made last week to take to Ali’s (well maybe if he’d looked up from his DS once to eat one he might have done! 😉 ) so I’d said I’d make some more and he’d requested ‘firework cupcakes’. He’s all about the seasonal tie-in that boy! 😆 I made some cupcakes using my new sillicone cupcake cases which I am very (irrationally!) excited about and then decorated them with black buttercream and coloured sprinkles to look like night sky with fireworks, then chopped up some fizzy laces and added those to have a ‘firework on your tongue’ effect for him.

We had the cheesey things and although it was dark, grey and drizzling outside I decided we’d all feel better for some fresh air and exercise so we gathered up a load of read books, watched dvds and listened to audiobooks and headed for a walk to the library. It’s only about 15 minutes, maybe a bit more at childpace. Davies has more or less mastered tying his shoelaces (he has purple DMs with gold and silver stars on them which are so cool they are worth the hassle of shoelaces!) which is quite a big deal for him. He really is very uncoodinated with all things fiddly with his hands and always has been. He gets by for things he wants to do but always looks so very awkward bless him. His pen control has been great from an early age but his pen grip is a long way from the ‘accepted technique’, he has only just started using scissors one handed (previously he had this odd two handed style with one hand in each hoop of the handles) he is just ‘all fingers and thumbs’ but today he pulled it off. 🙂

On the walk he was talking about how practise makes perfect but he was pondering how you’d prioritise which things which require practise so we talked about things which were essential and things which were simply desireable. We decided some things were essential for humans: breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping and then most of the rest were on the desireable spectrum according to personal preference. We decided you could live without ever learning to tie shoelaces but it would be a convenient skills to have acquired and talked about other times you may wish to tie a bow.

I had told Davies about E at work over the weekend and he had asked me to tell Scarlett so that came up and we talked about that for the rest of the walk. We discussed depression, reasons for feeling sad and feeling sad just because you were depressed and what the difference was. We talked about feeling good about yourself and how important that is, how your own self opinion is worth more than what others thinks of you and that if other people make you feel bad about yourself then you should reconsider whether they are your friends or not. Stuff like this comes up a lot with us and while I’m sure a lot of it is regurgitated propadanda that I have ‘fed’ them over the years I can but hope that leading by example with positive self image, encouraging them to like themselves and have positive self worth and feel good about the things they do well will all help them on their way to happiness.

We talked a bit about wealth, celebrity and fame (quite possibly a hangover from watching X Factor at the weekend with all those desperate teens claiming this was all they ever wanted, their lifes ambition and they would just ‘die’ if it all ended now) and then got to talking about mistakes and how making them, fairly regularly is what makes us human. We discussed whether children or adults made more mistakes and concluded that perhaps children make more but adults make bigger ones 😆 By which point we’d arrived at the library.

We sat and read some books in there (mostly heavy ones I didn’t want to carry home) but still managed to bring a bigger pile out than the fairly large pile we went in with. We had a quick look in Woolworths where I got cross about Nim’s Island being wrongly priced up and them refusing to sell it to me at that price and bought a cake tin for my Christmas cake only to come home and realise I still have 3 chocolate tins which are the exact same size and would have done the job. Grr.

Scarlett had picked up Mist on dvd at the library so they watched that and we all had hot chocolate and a firework cake each.

Things then degenerated a little when they failed to tidy up the geomags properly and due to running around Scarlett managed to drop a whole bowl of pesto pasta on the lounge floor :(. I lost my rag, ranted lots, threatened all sorts of dreadful things and then went to make her some more. I must be really unconvincing in my rants though as they still kept coming to tell me they loved me even when anyone else would have realised talking to me at all would be a bad idea. Ady managed to ring in the middle of it all so he got an earful too!

I recovered sufficiently to read some bedtime stories before they went off to bed and then Ady ran me a bath and cooked me dinner and did the hoovering :). He knows my threats have gravity! 😆
I can’t decide if I have a cold or not, I’ve been suffering with sneezes since last week and last night had a very sore throat but all of that seems to have cleared up and now I just feel shattered and keep waking at about 430am unable to get back to sleep. I think actually I probably just felt whingey today and children are far too self absorbed to be arsed listening to adults whinging. And rightly so, but maybe I just needed an outlet to stamp my feet!