Thorny

The return of this beautiful sunshine and people migrate en masse to the back garden.  I am one of these people.  I automatically turn into Charlie Dimmock and become at one with nature.  Well, I say nature.. as long as it doesn't consist of animals, insects, birds or any form of green growy stuff..

This week has been no exception.  I firstly had to paint the entire side fence.   It was a long arduous task but removing  the colour of bright orange and adding a classier muted brown  was a success in itself.   I now don't need sunglasses in the back garden when its raining.  It made me realise that I miss that god awful smell of creosote in the summer.  Back in the 80's that was a common summer smell.  The one that made your eyes stream and the skin on the back of your throat melt.  I miss that.  I also miss white dog poo.....

My back garden is mainly consistent of bushes with free ranging minds of their own that no amount of gun fire could ever stop.  Kinda like the Terminator , the buggers will not die....
What possesses a person to plant bushes with three inch diameter stalks and thorns galore.  Bushes that are neither attractive nor useful, just plain bloody ugly and more dangerous than Charles Manson.  I kid you not, I fought to bring these bushes down.  I battled until my palms were blistered and my arms bled.  It was an heroic action.  When the last bleeder was down I felt like I had won a mini war and awarded myself the Military Cross.

Now if bonfire making was an Olympic sport I would be up there with the bronze medalists.  I am really alright at it.  It stinks and makes your eyes water but it is the cremation of the bloody bushes and, as morbid as that sounds, its satisfying.  Very satisfying,  

The bushes are now all gone.  Although I will probably be burning them until 2015 they are no longer roaming the earth.   I am ensuring, that this year we can sit in the back garden in this weather with good quality family time without losing at least one of the children in the bloody jungle that was my back garden.

Now all I have to do is move the huge "feature" rocks that litter the garden.  They are nothing but a trampoline inspectors health and safety nightmare.... they are so heavy that the only way they can be removed is if I let the "Worlds Strongest Man" competition take place in my back garden.

Each to their own and all that but "taste" is something you either have or you don't,  And this rock suggests my house was owned previously be people with no taste at all.

Anyway, must get on.  Have an award winning bonfire to make....

Serious

I have had a rough couple of weeks of late with family issues.  (Well, I say "family"  but to be fair, that is a massive overstatement.   Family, to me, suggests togetherness and all that jazz so yes, "family" is a massive overstatement. )

It got me thinking, more so this weekend,  as it was my daughter, Skye's, 13th birthday.   We had a party for her at the local community centre where about 60 of her friends turned up and, quite hilariously, danced the night away.

I was dreading it.

Funny, how I organise such events and then decide that I would rather stick pins in my eyes than go through with it...but Skye had a fantastic time and for that reason alone it was sooooooo worth it.

One of my jobs as a mum is to provide her with great memories to take into her adulthood.  I do this the only way I know how.  I don't lavish massively on my children, finances simply won't allow it.  But, on special occasions I always try to go the extra mile.  This weekend was one of those special occasions.

I was chatting to Jurgen about this, this morning and he has no real special memories of his childhood.   He is not saying that they didn't happen, more that he doesn't remember anything specific.   That pains me greatly. I had a brilliant, loving childhood.  I grew up in a safe, secure household with lots of love and lots of laughter.   My world was rocked at aged 14 when I lost my dad to cancer, but those of us  remaining never lost that closeness we just learned to rebuild it with one massive part missing.  I am still very close to my mum now and she is more of a best friend than a mum and I thank her, mostly, for my parenting skills of today.

I idolise my children, and frequently tell them how much I love them.

 Jurgen and I deal with a lot of the parenting together and as much as we don't always get it right we try and try again until we do.  Jurgen is a step dad to my older two.  The hardest job in the world is being a step parent - he finds it difficult and sometimes a chore, but he tries so hard and in my eyes, is a success.   We instill time and time again that there will be no favouritism in this household.  There is no place for it among siblings and it a bad bad parenting trait if you favour one child over another, and as this is a subject close to Jurgens heart we simply have no place for it.    NEVER.

That aside  Jurgen isn't perfect, far from it.  And I am sure Jurgen's past will catch up with him in a Jeremy Kyle'esque fashion at some point.  We are ready for that and will deal with it head on.

Honesty is another of my compulsory traits.  And I always have taught my children you can lie all you like but you will get caught.  It may take days, months, years but you will always be caught.  End of.   That is not up for discussion.

My relationship with Jurgen is another learning tool for our children.   We are not some idealistic couple who only ever smile, skip everywhere,  and never say a cross word.  We argue, sometimes like cat and dog.   I have no qualms in standing up for something I believe in and neither does Jurgen and this sometimes involves disagreements.  I don't want my children to think that they cannot stand up for something they believe in.  There is nothing wrong in disagreeing with someone else's opinions.   Arguements do not equate to fights so what's the harm?  It is unrealisitic of me to expect my life to always be harmonious.  I am simply not built like that.  And I admire Jurgen for having the audacity to stand up to me!!   We are also demonstrative, but no overly so as to embarrass the children, but it is important to us to not be afraid to tell everyone we love them.

Parenting is a learning curve that never completely reaches its end.  Everyday I experience new challenges with my children and I don't always have the answers.   Sometimes its very trying and stressful but mostly its the most rewarding job in the world.  My older two have both suffered heartache at a young age when they lost their dad but we have worked on building them a future without him around as  best as we can.  And it seems to be working......

I love to laugh.   It's a predominant part of my personality.  I want to make others laugh and I like to be made to laugh.  Jurgen and I make each other laugh and that, together with our open lines of communication are what makes our realtionship rock solid.

But occasionally, like today,  I can be serious........

Flab

I have an abundance of this at the moment.  I have just had a baby but it is distressing carrying this excess weight about and I am uncomfortable with it.  Its a shame really that it should bother me at all but in today's "airbrushed" society you feel more of a pressure to look like Angelina Jolie whereas I am more on a par with Susan Boyle.....

I am also underwhelmed with this larger picture frame I have acquired for my face.  I call it a picture frame but I vaguely recall it being  referred to as a double chin in the fashion mags.

I don't own scales as I feel they are psychologically damaging.  And I never get how if you put them on carpet you weigh more but if you put them on a hard floor you weigh less.  I have spent hours wandering around the house finding the best position  where I weigh the least and pinpointing that place for future "weigh ins"  Even if it meant out in the back garden behind the rockery.  Surely weight is weight is weight?  How the bloody hell does a hard kitchen floor make you weigh 3 pounds less?   So, I have abandoned the scales and measure how well I am doing in the weight loss department by the size of  picture frame for face or  how loose my jeans are.

I exercise frequently.  I swim 3 miles a week.  And I cycle 6 miles a day.   Its addictive and one becomes obsessive.  I feel tetchy if I have to miss a day.  When I was at my weightiest I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without having a sit down and a fag half way up and now I get tetchy if I cant cycle 6 miles a day.....who'da thought it.....

 I recently invested in a new swimsuit.  Chlorine resistant, otherwise the arse falls out as the chlorine eats away at the fabric.  I bought the swimsuit in the size I wanted to be in my head.  There's a lot of "give"  in swimsuits so I thought that if was a bit too small it would stretch to accommodate and eventually it will fit once the flab has retreated.    I did think that it was a little tight over the hips when I tried it on AT THE POOL for the first time...I persevered and dragged it up the rest of my body, huffing and puffing  until it was finally on.   Looking down at myself I could tell  I looked the biz.  I strutted proudly to the pool  thinking Sharon Davies had nothing on me.  I swam my lengths.  Exiting the pool like Ursula Andress  of James Bond fame I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.   My bloody stomach was now hanging out of the back of the costume just under my arms.......the costume was so tight at the front my stomach had no where to go but out the back.....I looked like one of those mincing machines that squeezes meat out. It was horrific.

 That is why I don't want flab ......Its not cool and its certainly  not pretty.  It simply has no place in society.  It is a menace.   I for one am tired of kicking my stomach along in front of me.....it makes my ankles ache.

Forgetful

Get me....two posts in two days!!  Although it did take me 10 minutes to work out how to post.  And it make me think that with age certainly comes memory loss.

I am well aware that I can't remember my own name half the time.  It scares me at my age that I can start a sentence and genuinely forget half way through what the end of the sentence is.  Its alright when your talking to your children as they are not listening anyway,  but when its a work colleague or friend its mortifying.  Trying to scrape the cesspit of your memory to recall what it was you were actually talking about is painful.

I often wander aimlessly around the house knowing there was something I was supposed to do but failing miserably to remember what.  Looking around at inanimate objects hoping something, anything will trigger my memory.  It doesn't and I usually remember at 3 o'clock in the morning....

I lose my car keys daily.  Every time I lose them I swear that next time I will put them somewhere safe and the next time when I am searching for them  I think "next time I will put them somewhere safe".  And the cycle begins all over again....

My mum reckons that Sudoku will keep my brain active and due to this exercise my memory will stop failing but I bloody forget to do it.

I have five children and I am already calling all of them by every name but their own.  I have  been known to hold a conversation with one of the boys,  all the time calling him by the wrong name and not noticing it until the end of the conversation or until someone else points it out to me.  

During my whole pregnancy I blamed it all on the "baby brain" phenomenon that everyone talks about.  I got away with murder with that simple explanation but now there is no excuse.  I just don't remember.  Simple.

I can see myself sticking post it notes around the house just to gently remind myself what things are actually called.  And maybe I could get the children to wear name badges....

Its depressing really but there is no end in sight.  I have memory loss and its irreversible.

So, if I dont post for a few days you know that I have forgotten to.

Bloody hell

I have just read a friends blog on facebook and remembered this.  I had to google my blog title to remember which site I had set my account up on and being the techno phobe that I am it took me a good 20 minutes to remember by password. Another 20 minutes later and I had remembered  how to post!  

 I cannot believe I started this blog 16 months ago and only managed to post a handful of entries before life, yet again, got in the way.  

I am 37 now and have another baby!!  (Which surely gives me less time to blog so I am sure that this new found enthusiasm will only last for a day or two.)   Baby Arlo is 6 weeks old.    

He is gorgeous.   Parenting is a breeze when you have 5.  Nothing fazes me anymore and because of this  Arlo is so easy going.   He doesn't cry much and,  my theory is, that when you are confident as a parent your baby knows and the problems you experience with your first no longer exist.  

It helps massively having older children.  Connor and Skye are so good with him and help me when they can be arsed......Roman and Mattias tolerate him because they are now aware that he is staying and I am not sending him back to where ever it is they think he came from.

I am gonna try and blog again.  I really am.  I am also gonna have a bet with Jurgen to see how long this blogging malarkey will last.   He of little faith.  

I bet Jurgen wins.