Month: September 2007

Oil and primroses

It’s been quite fulfilling in the garden the last couple of days 🙂

We bought a large table and two benches in the Focus sale a while ago (reduced by 75% and then a further 10% off thanks to our homemover card 😀 ) but hadn’t yet put them up, mostly due to time and weather not coinciding. One of the things we bought from Ikea on Sunday (shhh – we don’t do Sunday shopping really!) was a bottle of oil for treating outdoor furniture, so this week Bob has put the benches and table together and the children and I have treated them. It’s so easy! Nice to be using something the children can help with, too. While we were at it we did a children’s bench my dad got for the boys a few years ago – and it was unbelievably thirsty 😯 Must remember to do these things a bit more often!

Also this week we weeded one of the trugs (easy to do when you know nothing should be growing in it 😉 ) and planted it up with primroses brought back from Monster’s party (thanks Nic and Adey), using some amazing expanding compost we got from Wilkinson’s – fun in itself 😆 There are a few more left to plant, so I think another trug needs doing – a job for today before we head off to French.

Ups and downs

It feels like ages since I blogged properly (okay, it is ages since I blogged properly 😳 ) so I’m going to make a new start and get cracking, even if it feels I have nothing to say…

It’s been a long and fairly tough few months, what with having a baby, moving house, assembling costume, doing Kentwell, paddling at Muddlepuddle, having various friends to stay (making the most of now having space to put them in!) and squeezing in all the parties, trips and outings which seemed to come along, like buses, all at once. Much of it has been great fun, but it has not all been easy.

Our new house is great, but we’re still only half unpacked (if that) and now that I theoretically have time to get on with it A has decided it’s time to be clingy, toothy and permanently starving, so nothing much is getting done 🙁 The cake is marzipanned but not yet iced, the gown is here but not yet embroidered – although I do have the thread ready – or at least I did, if I can find it again… Still need to find the pink bow for the neck, or make another, since it currently has a blue one from SIL’s little boy’s christening.

We started term with a bit of a HE sort-out and a return to the use of individual trays for the children’s Maths and English books, which is great because on a good day they come down, have breakfast and then get cracking of their own accord 🙂 leaving the rest of the day free for whatever we all feel like doing next 😀 On a bad day, this takes until nearly teatime *sigh* and there is precious little rest of the day 🙁

The biggest challenge at the moment is clothes; we have piles of:
a) clothes which fit but need putting away,
b) clothes which don’t fit just now but will soon,
c) clothes which won’t fit for a while but are worth hanging onto until they do,
d) clothes which don’t fit anybody but get snuck back into the pile if anyone notices I’ve taken them out,
e) clothes to go to charity shop (which have to be smuggled out quietly to avoid creeping into category d))
f) clothes I haven’t even got round to looking at and categorising yet.

It doesn’t help that pile a) keeps getting larger – some of the things in there will probably need to go to b), c) or d) by the time we get to them! It’s all a bit overwhelming, so we tend to fling them into the spare room (no bed, so I guess we could reclassify it as a wardrobe 😉 ) and shut the door. I guess that’s fine while we can still shut the door… 😯

My personal demon just now is the internet. I’m sinking again (mostly tiredness, I hope) and it’s coming out in aimless drifting from site to site, telling myself I’m doing worthwhile things and finding out useful info, when really I’d be better off either in the real world or better still in bed. I think it’s a way of escaping – but things are still here when I drag myself back and then I’m just left frustrated and angry with myself for wasting yet more time. Even if I can’t do much just now, thanks to permanently feeding baby, I could be catching up on rest and reading, or even planning things for the next day – resolution for next week is to treat myself like the children and limit my PC time.

Ironically, just as I’m feeling like rubbish mum #1, I get a phone call from a woman I met at P&T a few weeks ago when it was doubling as a slingmeet. I demonstrated back carrying in a wrap and then lent her my purple waves (I had been thinking of selling it, but I’ve *missed* that wrap!) and haven’t heard a peep since, so the call was a relief but a bit unexpected. She was asking about returning the wrap (yay!) and then, obviously rather embarrassed, said “This might sound a bit odd, as I hardly know you, but I wanted to ask you something.” I made encouraging noises and she said “You seem to have a parenting style that’s like the one I aspire to, but I’m finding it really hard. Can I talk to you about it?” I didn’t know what to say! We talked AP a bit and I recommended Cosy Nostra (since hunnybeez has gone down the tubes), suggested she come along to P&T again, as I think over 50% of the mums there are distinctly AP, and offered to meet up whenever she likes, but I’m not entirely sure what she wants. I don’t think she‘s entirely sure what she wants – although I think the main thing she needs is a huge dose of self confidence (and I should know!)

Presumably, even when I feel I’m doing it all wrong, there’s something which looks right 😕 A few months ago the organiser of B-a-R asked me if I had thought of writing a book about parenting – hah! Me a parenting guru? I think not 😆
I guess that has to count as an up though? 😀

Essential life skills, number 43

Home education is all about equipping your children with essential skills to get them through life. Katy suggested that I turn a round of hot chocolates into a learning opportunity, which is how the children were initiated into the ways of the Tim Tam Slam. As we didn’t have Tim Tams we substituted Penguins, so J thought it ought to be called the Penguin Pumper. It was a good job that we did it outside, as chocolate was unconfined. Photographic evidence on Flickr.

I take my chips with salt, vinegar and a squirt of sonic screwdriver

L has a new Bilibo, which is good for spinning around in and doing all sorts of other fun things with. It is of course pink, and is a nice accessory to one of her dresses – see Flickr. Katy and I have both read the last Harry Potter book and so no longer have to live with the shame of having not read it. We were going to wait till it came out in paperback, but someone who’d finished her copy of the hardback gave us her copy as, unlike us, she isn’t a hoarder. It wasn’t the best book I’d ever read, but worth the effort.

This weekend was Monster’s birthday darn sarf (even relative to us) – there’s not much sarfer than the MonsterTeenies though. Despite an acute lack of sleep all round and hence bouts of raging grumpiness on Sunday it was a very nice trip away. Thanks to Nic and Ady for their hospitality and amazing party preparations, Monster for giving us his bedroom for the night, Babs for the loan of cash for chips (we still owe you), T-Bird for lovely flapjack and everyone else for nice company.

Flickr should give you a better idea of the fab Doctor Who cakes and biscuits, life-size papier-mâché Dalek, the kind donation of so much paper and colour printer ink from Ady’s work, children running about like loons enjoying themselves, amazing face painting and general nice time had by all. Monster looked dashing and grown-up as Doctor Who.

After the party we retired to Nic and Ady’s with most of the other guests. More children and adults than most people would consider feasible squashed into their front room and ate X + chips, unexpectedly successfully given how many small people there were around and the large potential for wine / ketchup / vinegar related accidents or squabbles over unfair distribution of fried food. When the boys were supposedly sleeping up in Monster’s room, L came and cuddled me on the sofa and we both fell asleep. After a bit I woke up, took her upstairs and fetched our grown-up sleeping bags from the car without waking up too much, so that I could go to bed too. I left Katy and A downstairs with the rest of the adults, who eventually came to bed really rather late indeed.

On the way down we popped in to see some of A’s godparents (like the others, she has two sets) for a too brief but much needed cup of tea / feed / play on the computer / play with Barbies. On the way back J’s wobbly tooth finally came out and we stopped for a late lunch at Ikea. (Lateness partly due to me forgetting a bag of stuff and so having to return to Nic and Ady’s :oops:) This turned into shopping and by the time we got to the queue to pay it was gone 4 o’clock. I waited in the queue for at least half an hour with very tired but still just about acceptably behaved children, and by the time we were through the check out and organising things ready for carting to the car they closed the bits beyond the check outs that sell ice-cream and boxes of biscuits. This caused fairly universal sense of humour failure – it was actually a couple of minutes before 5 o’clock (Sunday closing time). The people still in the queues would be handing over their money at the tills after 5 o’clock by the time they got to them, so it was weird that we couldn’t do the same in the food bit. Grrrr… Grumpy email will be sent.

Work bits and bobs

Before I blog about Monster’s party, here’s a random set of things to do with my work that might be interesting to at least some of our vast readership.

We are finally moving to our new office – my section is one of the last to go, in early October. So we had a ‘goodbye to the old office’ party a few weeks ago and a ‘hello to the new office’ party last Friday. I think that the move date was due to be between the two, but slipped a lot and then they couldn’t move the party dates. The summer party was hijacked to be the hello party, and the goodbye party came out of move expenses :). The hello party had the same stuff from previous years (a hog roast, bouncy castle, booze) plus a novelty for this year: an ice cream van whose contents were all free! Hurrah 🙂 .

We got to look in through the windows of the new place – it’s still a building site so we couldn’t go in. It’s all very swanky, although probably won’t be quite as swanky as the office we already have across the car park from the new place as customers visit them their whereas we’re an ivory tower and *gasp* don’t wear suits.

The phone system is going to be VOIP, so may or may not work OK. (Talking to our colleagues in India is sometimes tricky because of technical problems with the VOIP they have – something to do with compression and bandwidth throttling we’ve been told.) The phone on our desks will plug into the data network (and not phone system, as they’ll be the same), and also draw power over the network lead. We’ll then plug our PC’s network lead into the phone, which will act as a mini router – seems weird but I expect we’ll get used to it.

There’s a toy that you can get for a bit of extra money – a USB headset and program for your computer. If you have these and then go to e.g. our office in Germany, when you connect to the network there the program grabs hold of your phone connection so that someone ringing my desk phone back at my office would magically ring my laptop in Germany! This would also work if you’re in a hotel and using the VPN to talk to the company network.

WARNING: Geek content alert! Feel free to stop reading here as this paragraph contains more geekiness than average. One of my colleagues wants to find out where all the data structure definitions are actually being used in a very large lump of C code – structures that contain pointers to other structures and so on. He thought for a bit and then realised that there’s already a program that understands all this stuff – the compiler. We use gcc among a few others, so he read through the source code, found the bit where it deals with dereferencing pointers and added in some code of his own. Not surprisingly (given how clever he is) it worked. Genius.

Feeble watches

I think K wishes he was like Hiro Nakamura. Last night while we were getting him ready for bed he said “My friend insert name here at Greenbelt had a stop watch. You couldn’t stop everything, just the time on the watch.”

In other news, Katy is using the start of the academic year to re-organise home ed. things. Some furniture shuffling to get things into useful places, getting the workbooks sorted, plus a variation on the previous timetable. Getting your English and Maths done in the morning now means that you can choose what other subject you do in the afternoon, although this is subject to trips out and taking it in turns to choose.

A’s teething has stopped for now. The molars have decided they weren’t ready yet and so have dropped down again. We’ve got her an amber necklace which may or may not be helping too, and looks nice regardless. So far she has been unable to swallow it or strangle herself with it, which is nice. 🙂