The ballard of Nic Goddard

The lyrics of the Ballard Of Lucy Jordan seem very wrong as I hit the Age of 37. I wonder is it like the Age of Not Believing but for grown ups?

I shall not be cleaning the house for hours or rearranging the flowers, the kids shall not be off to school and in a matter off weeks the husband will not be off to work. Funnily enough I’d totally forgotten that song until I sat down to write a blog post and then suddenly had ‘at the age of 37…’ running through my head so went to find the song.

Maybe it’s written for a reason though, maybe it’s some sort of pre mid life crisis 😉

Anyway. My age of 37 commenced with home made cards from my babies – Scarlett’s adorned with many kisses and love hearts and a picture of a horse, Davies’ illustrated with his made up character ‘Day’ carrying a huge birthday cake with help from (made up character) friends. My gifts were a huge selection of chocolates – liqueurs, white toblerone, Thorntons etc., some fancy bubble bath, a Thornton’s birthday cake and a book. My main gift is my amber which is yet to come but I quite like the idea of a gift still travelling towards me to look forward to. Both children stuffed cash from their Christmas money into their cards and both were thanked very much but had the cash returned to them.

We breakfasted on cinnamon rolls which I am considering a birthday gift from LovelyEm as she gave me the recipe and they were so delicious I feel the need to bestow gift status upon them. Both children made me cups of tea throughout the day and at this stage of the evening I am prepared to overlook the level of sibling squabbling (should that be called squibbling? I think so. Will henceforth call it thus) and remember everything fondly with rose tinted birthday glow about it.

The kids played with geomags, I made paracord bracelets for everyone using some stuff that had arrived from ebay and included some very cool clasps with survival whistles built in.

I was born at 10:10am and at least one parent always rings me at that time on my birthday (I was clearly very sociable, my children were born at 4:35am – Davies and 1:51am – Scarlett which is far less acceptable a time to be calling them when they are adults. Maybe I should encourage them to move to a different time zone…) so the kids and I were placing bets on which parent it would be and when the phone rang at 10:09 I picked it up without checking caller ID. It turned out to be Julie 😆 She was aware it was my birthday so wished me Happy Birthday and then proceeded to chat for 25 minutes while my poor Mum was frantically trying to get hold of me, in the end ringing my mobile and speaking to Davies intead 😆

The rest of the day passed fairly quietly. I had a few more phonecalls, lots of texts and well wishes which all made me feel very loved and special 🙂 We ate more cinnamon rolls for lunch as we loved them so much.

Ady arrived home and we did our good, bad, learnt today stuff:

Davies – Bad: no PSP, Good: Going out for dinner, Learnt: about static electricity

Scarlett – Bad: DVD on that I didn’t want to watch, Good: loved the cinnamon buns, Learnt: that horses can bite their own tongues

Ady – Bad: getting work colleague into trouble inadvertantly, Good: upheaval a work, another colleague leaving, Learnt: How to change font size on PC

Nic – Bad: the PSP incident, Good: lots of birthday wishes from friends, home made cards from kids and thoughtful presents made me feel loved, Learnt: how to make paracord bracelets from kit.

The PSP incident is Davies being caught at 130am this morning as I went to bed, still playing on his PSP, that he isn’t allowed to play on it bed in the first place. I took it off him, gave him a right roasting and went to bed in a right strop 🙁 . We have discussed it at length and I will probably let him have it back tomorrow. I hate rewards and punishments and would never remove it for an unrelated ‘crime’ and actually just knowing how angry and diasppointed I am is sufficient ‘punishment’ for Davies who is very much a ‘pleaser’, particularly of me but I suspect it’s done no harm on this occassion.

We all got ready to go out and then met my parents and Frazer at a nearby steakhouse. We’ve only been there once before the food is excellent and we had a lovely meal there. While chatting we were reminiscing about a restaurant we used to eat in in Manchester and we mentioned we are going up to stay with Lynda & Stuart next weekend. The suggestion was made than my parents come up with us and book into a nearby hotel so we rang them, got a recommendation for one close by and arranged for that to happen which wil be lovely :).

Back home again for cake and fizz. We lit the candles about 5 times so various people could have a go at blowing them out 🙂

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and then I was invited up to Davies’ room where D&S put on a Birthday Show for me. We finished up creating 3 and 7 in honour of my new age 🙂

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I suspect I have long since blown any hope of being remembered as sane, sensible or otherwise normal as a parent 😉

Scarlett had a bit of a wobble as she sometimes does at the end of a period of very disturbed and late nights so I sat with her and talked it out. Everyone else said goodnight and left or went to bed.

I had a lovely day, I have now seen both ends of it and quite aside from the meaningless flurry of emails I got from places I must have given my date of birth to over the years I have felt very touched by the texts, emails, facebook and friendfeed messsages, my gifts from family are perfect, my day with kisses and cuddles on tap from my babies has been wonderful and whilst none of my plans for the age of 37 involve driving in open topped cars through Paris I am utterly confident that this year of my life will have plenty of adventure, thrills, spills (year of the spillage), laughs and love woven through every day.