It’s Friday! 🙂 A whole day later than it should have been due to having been all Friday-ish with Ali yesterday but Friday nonetheless.
I was off being Nicola from 9-5. It’s slightly fraught at work at the moment for my direct boss, Yvonne. She is managing on herself and 3 established staff (of which I am one), two new staff, one of whom is clearly not going to work out and is therefore very hard work to be around, a full time vacancy which is being covered by a succession of relief staff all of whom come with their own training needs, a swap with a member of staff from another branch who is heavily pregnant and for H&S reasons is being shipped to our branch as her own has a spiral staircase which is hard for her to navigate and a member of staff who is fully trained but very moany and just hard work generally 🙁 . I do feel very sorry for her and am trying to be as supportive as I can be in the hours I am there, which I suspect makes it almost worse as she said to me today ‘if only you were here more…’ which possibly means I am just throwing the rest of the week into ever sharper relief for her :(. On the plus side it’s nice to feel valued ;).
I did the banking this morning which requires going to actually pay the cash in when the bank opens at 930am. I think I have said before how much I enjoy being in a town centre (albeit a small one) just as it starts to wake up and shops open. My Mum owned cafe / restuarants from when I was 7 to long after I left home and I worked in high street retail for several years myself so there is clearly something of the shopkeeper in me somewhere and I like that opening the doors ready for business, putting your wares out onto the street feeling, nodding to other shopkeepers doing the same as you go.
I did Baby Rhyme Time today too which went well. It is National Bookstart Day today and the theme this year is Pirates and we had a batch of song sheets, stickers, bookmarks and small books to give out so we did that and included a couple of the songs into rhyme time too. There are two sets of twins who come to rhymetime one of who are a year old next week. We also had another birthday for next week and a little girl who is one tomorrow so we sang Happy Birthday to all of them. The little girl turning one tomorrow was there with her Daddy who is on paternity leave, her Mummy and her one week old baby brother – now that’s getting all the childbirthing over in rapid succession!!! The Dad looked incredibly proud of his little family and was introducing everyone to his new son while the Mum looked amazingly well for someone who’d had a C-section a week ago and was a mother of two within a year.
I had a note in my tray asking if I would ring someone who had come into the library having just taken her four children out of school to HE them and seemed in need of some support, but she preempted that by coming in to see if I was working so I got called back from my lunchbreak to come and chat to her. I’ve promised to send her an email with some information (she’d never even heard of EO) and said I’d be happy to meet up too to chat. She seemed positively overwhelmed by the magnitude of what she’d done but quite nice so hopefully I can offer some support to her away from my library capacity.
Meanwhile back at home Ady was off this morning and my Mum was here this afternoon. Both the children have been a little ‘odd’ and Scarlett was very fragile on Wednesday after Mum had been here in the morning. After an 11pm chat with Davies I’ve got to the bottom of them not really being happy with being left with her twice this week. It would seem once a week is more of less tolerable but not ideal and twice a week is simply too much. She is in a fairly down frame of mind right now and is utterly incapable of pulling herself together infront of them so is just very depressed and negative to be around. Having spent my whole childhood trying to deal with that it is not something I am prepared to put Davies and Scarlett through. She’s pulled all sorts of tricks out of the bag with them from what I can gather including emotional blackmail, threatening stupid things, withdrawing affection and generally not acting like a responsible adult that they can feel safe in the care of. I am slightly over-dramatising in that to the casual observer perhaps none of this would have been apparent but I know from the reactions of my children and my own experience as her daughter she is not a suitable person to be in sole charge of them this frequently 🙁 . I am always very upfront and honest about how I am feeling around Davies and Scarlett but they get to see the whole picture and if I am being ranty or generally difficult to be around they are aware of why and see the conclusion and me moving onto being okay again. With my Mum they simply have not spend enough time in her company to be comfortable with her ‘down’ times. This is going to be a thorny one to navigate but I’ve promised Davies I’ll find a way to ensure she is not the one looking after them so often, certainly not twice a week.
So after work was rather characterised by clinginess from Davies and Scarlett for me. Ady didn’t quite get home in time for Rainbows so we took Davies along with us for the first 15 minutes or so until Ady collected him. They talked about emergencies and showed the Rainbows how to put someone in the recovery position and what to do in the situation of an adult being unconscious (phoning for an ambulance etc.) then they played games :). Scarlett – and Rebecca – were delightfully unbothered by the competitive element to the games and simply enjoyed them as fun :).
For show and tell Scarlett had taken an egg shell as our hen who was sitting on eggs hatched one out today. So she showed it round to everyone and told them we had another new chick at our house. There is a sleepover at the hall next week which Scarlett doesn’t want to stay at but will go along for the first hour of.
Home for stories and bed which was very prolonged indeed due to said clingyness. I am going away tomorrow overnight, up to London to meet friends which I am very much looking forward to but isn’t the greatest timing unfortunately :(. Still, I will aim to have fun, drink lots of wine and enjoy being with great friends anyway ;).