Every day I am pretty sure I do at least one thing wrong. Most days I do more. I used to think I was alone, until I talked to other parents who were honest. Here is a place for more parents to feel less alone, and more "good enough".

Wednesday 26 November 2014

Working on Wednesdays

Arghhhhhh! Now breath.
So today, the little man was wheezing and cuddly and just wanted to feed all night and morning. His Daddy was working and I needed to go to work and we are both on temporary contracts (his more than mine) so time off is rather frowned upon. My children have, due to this, begun getting sick on Wednesdays as they know this is the day we find hardest to get alternative childcare. We have foiled all their attempts to have a stay at home parent once more, so far only I have missed one Wednesday and that was last minute due to Tobys last ditch attempt and sudden escalation of cold to severe chest infection in 60 minutes flat.
Toby this week has been flitting between poorly and well roughly every half an hour (except at night when he is full on poorly and needs to feed or sleep on my chest pretty much for 8 hours). I took him to nursery, signed in a calpol sachet and his inhaler, told them to ring me not Dad if he got worse, and went to work feeling guilty. Then felt even more guilty when I read the nursery Christmas party invite and figured out we have nobody to take him and he is probably going to miss out. Then got to work and cried on a colleagues shoulder because I felt like a crap parent. But on the plus side I found my mobile in my bag whilst looking for a tissue , instead of it being lost somewhere in the house like I'd thought (and ran everywhere looking for before we set off).

So, work was fab and fun, no phonecalls from nursery, went to pick him up and he'd been fine, even eaten for the first time in 2 days, then slept solid for 2 hours 20 minutes. Next time he is ill, he'll be off to nursery to get better.

Went to pick the girl up from Grandad. She looked tired....uh oh. Trudged home, made it with no pleading/shouting/bribery/tears.....feel like superwoman. Then had a rather stressful 30 minutes sorting out a phonecall, a dvd rack emptying toddler, a 5 year old worrying about a dvd rack emptying toddler, and cooking a rather fiddly tea that got moved from Monday and will NEVER EVER be cooked on a Wednesday 'busy walking small children home and having Adam home for 20 minutes inbetween film club and scouts and getting pe kits washed very quickly' night EVER AGAIN.

But it tasted nice. To me and James. The children had a cold/lingering urine infection/cough/tiredness/general mistrust of food thing going on.
I ran up and down a few hundred times running a bath (the boy bombed on scouts to get better for school trip tomorrow), getting pjs, brushing hair, getting milk and weetabix and bourbon biscuits and more milk, writing a nativity cast list and basic walkthrough, changing the washer, finding thermals (in a carrier bag I sent up to his room in AUGUST for him to empty and put away), fixing a marble run, putting dvds away (twice), brushing teeth, reading a story about Tom and his elastic band and replacing batteries in a nightlight frog.

And now I am sat. Trying to figure out how to get my littlest man to his nursery Christmas party without feeling massively guilty that I am only 5 minutes up the road but can't be there so that he can be there. Hopefully I will figure something out, that's what superwoman do, after all ;)

Wednesday 22 October 2014

Grown-ups can apologise too.......and POPCORN!!!

I was a shouty mum tonight. After a busy day and planning lots of busy things coming up and lots of 'muuuumm' and not getting a second to do anything and 'im not going to sleep im not tired' etc, coming down to find a child and sofa covered in milk just pushed my buttons somewhat. Especially as it was already the second pair of pj bottoms of the evening.
So now she is in bed, we had cuddles and I apologised for shouting and explained why I had, but then she decided that she still wasn't tired and was going to push buttons further and I had to insist that actually, if she didn't lay down and attempt to sleep and stop shouting, then I wouldn't get any time to do jobs tonight so I would have to do them tomorrow evening and she would have to miss her disco instead of me going with her. She hasn't shouted for ten minutes so I think we may have a truce. Rather than bribery, I like to think of it as natural consequences, if she prevented me from using the time as needed then I wouldn't have time tomorrow to take her where she would like to go. But really if I'm honest I did just think it would be a good way to get her to sleep quickly and would've been gutted if I'd had to follow it through as I missed her last disco due to work.
It's ok, I think, to know when they have pushed your buttons and just need to figure out some way, any way, to get some peace to regain your balance. It's better than snapping anyways. I'm happy to apologise for shouting, hopefully she will learn that it's ok to make mistakes and that even grown-ups need to apologise, to me that is more important than needing to be infallible.
We have had an eventful week. I ended up in hospital last Thursday after a week of chest pains and a collapse outside nursery. My sister's baby is almost due, my brother had an accident at work and my eldest sister has a lot on also. I am often thinking hmmmm maybe one child would have been enough........only kidding, I wouldn't be without any of my three........although I do now have enough.
So currently I am on heart medications 'just in case' whilst I wait for more tests, and am trying to take it easier but also get the house sorted at the same time so we can all relax. My husband cleaned both yards and most of the attic Sunday and Monday........maybe I should go in an ambulance more often ;)
I have bought berocca, mixed nuts and little tubs to carry them around in, and am trying to drink more water and less caffeine. Life re-evaluation time and all that. In the meantime the children have speech therapy, hearing tests and an ear consultant, dietician, optician, asthma gp appointments and paediatric assessments to fit into my oh so empty diary. See the sarcasm there. The wallchart pretty much has a red dot (see diary) on the majority of the next two months.
I am trying to make sure the children get 'me' without losing 'me' to the children. It's not so simple. I'm contemplating the merits of a yoga class.
However, blue dots on the wallchart mean family time, all 5 of us family time. They are scarce in their occurence but there is a patch of them coming up, starting on Saturday. We have a wedding (although Jess is skiving out of some of it for an uber important 6 year old birthday party), a sleepover for the eldest two at Aunty Haleys, a couple of nights in Whitby AFTER payday *whoop*, and then a couple of days to go bowling/museum/cinema type things although the husband is back at work and I may leave my little Toby man at nursery for a day or two so we can actually do the bowling/museum/cinema type things.
On the cinema note, I made 'Neopolitan Popcorn' the other weekend as part of my 'make a treat from pinterest each week' list item. I didn't actually use a recipe from pinterest as they all had convoluted ingredients lists comprising of 'just what I had in my cupboards', that seemed to have been made by people who's kitchen cupboards back through on to about 5 different stores. So I got the idea from pinterest and made my own. Theotetically I should have used some of the 2 bags of popcorn kernels in my cupboard. In practice I used the bag of Cinema Sweet popcorn from Asda that my husband had bought so that we wouldn't need to make a mess in his clean kitchen. Then I found half a large bar of milk chocolate, melted it in the microwave and poured it over a third of the popcorn, stirring rapidly. I then went to the shop and bought 6 packets of Milky Bar buttons. I melted 3 packets, stirred in strawberry flavoured milkshake powder, then poured over a third of the popcorn, stirring rapidly. Then finally I melted the remaining buttons, stirred in banana flavoured milkshake powder, and poured over the remaining third of popcorn, stirring rapidly. Every single recipe said to spread out on a tray covered in tin foil and put in the fridge for 5 minutes. Firstly, we were out of tin foil so I used baking parchment. Secondly, 5 minutes is a load of rubbish. So is 10. In the end I put each tray in the FREEZER for approx 5-10 minutes, and even then the milk chocolate one was a bit 'melty' when I separated it up into the bowl. But it was fine. This was the result...
And when we added the Cool Runnings dvd this was the other end result...
And then Toby decided he liked the popcorn and stole it all and made his brother and sister take just one piece at a time......

The moral of this post? All that matters is the little things, the good moments xx.


Saturday 11 October 2014

The Life List

I just started writing a post. And my phone deleted it. This is why I haven't been on here in an age. My phone broke, I finally got a new one and then that has also broken before I got chance to download all our summer photos from it, which I had actually begun a really simple memory book for. Do you know when it feels like nothing works out?? It would be easier with a camera but that's never had chance to get fixed either. Sometimes it feels like this whole house is full of half finished jobs. There is a box in the hall with a small shed in for the garden so we can move outdoor toys from the attic, finish cleaning the attic from about a year ago and finally make Jess a bedroom up there so Toby can have her bedroom. But first we need to clean the garden up so the shed can go on it. There are things everywhere in the house, stuff stuffed all over, our ensuite is full of toys cleaned from the attic, and then because it's nearly Christmas and Toby's birthday we feel like we need to buy more toys that we don't have anywhere to put. I made a new Life List but Blogger deleted it. I'll try again anyway:

Sort the house out (this incorporates a list all of it's own that is too long to even be written down anywhere), whilst spending as little money as possible i.e. Stop buying more furniture for quick fixes

Do the 51 week Lego Challenge that I just found on pinterest, as a family

Fill the creative drawer and use it at least every weekend (shouldn't be hard to fill, attic is full of creative activity stuff)

Get outside - to the woods, the park, the glen - waterproofs, scarves and a flask, let the kids get muddy x.

Create more - knit, crochet, craft, and experiment with much more - selling items through The Creative Owl is just a sideline excuse for creating more ;)

Make Christmas more about fun, family and magic and less about money and more toys to pile with the other piles of toys

Try out one new meal and one new treat every week from my pinterest boards

Learn more about the things that really matter from my children and the two year olds I work with

Carve out more couple time - in the midst of having family time we need to remember that we need a solid centre for the family to branch from x.

And, as an added extra which makes most of this list seem rather pointless, I really need to quit trying to make life perfect and just enjoy the moments as they come xx.


Seeing as we've been absent for so long and you may have missed us, here is the chaos we live in.........crazy people have the best fun ;) 
The eldest child - not counting the husband who is clearly a lost cause in this photo - is absent due to getting older and not being as fond of crazy picture taking......