Why do my children love plasters so much???
We have to put them on the most tiny, insignificant, barely visible to the human eye dot on their limbs. And of course they then need to be replaced post bath…….
I just came downstairs to find that dolly had some injuries, thankfully there was no blood……..
For this week’s Wicked Wednesday for Brummy Mummy of 2 I’ve gone retro – and back in time to summer 2010. I was heavily (very heavily as you can see!) pregnant with child number 3 – and the eldest was having a mahoosive strop because her brother had told her he didn’t like her!
Classic 18th birthday photo material…..
See other people’s Wicked Wednesdays here:
This week’s category over on The Photo Gallery on the Sticky Fingers blog is ‘family’ – now this should be really easy for me as loads of my posts concern family.
There’s the photo of me and my cousins here, the family on holiday here, the cross generational photos here and the slightly rubbish holiday selfie (minus one child) here.
So for this topic I decided to go with my original family ‘The Homers’ taken here at my 40th birthday party earlier this year (not sure where Mum’s looking but it’s the best one!)
Back at the Grammar school my sisters – and Mum – and I went to, ‘Homer’ meant Greek Iliad and Odyssey jokes – I suspect it would be more ‘doh’ now! This party was a fabulous night – from the speeches (where amazingly my husband didn’t offend anyone!) through the photobooth (I suspect the photos will feature in future weeks of The Gallery) through to the dance floor (obviously the Homer sisters were first on it!) it was just wonderful. Having lots of the people you love in one place for a celebration is amazing.
I remember that back at school a lot of my friends were slightly scared of my Mum – and this is one of her many personality traits I try to emulate! Everyone loves Dad – and his harmonising (particularly of Christmas carols) is legendary in my children’s educational establishments. My sisters are both wonderful – and my friends as well as my siblings. I shared a bedroom with my middle sister (I’m the eldest just in case that isn’t obvious – my youngest sister was gutted when someone asked if we were twins – there’s a 6 year age difference!!) and I don’t remember it being problematic at all. We had to sew coloured threads into our underwear and socks to avoid nicking each others – but other than that pretty plain sailing.
So – whilst I have a wonderful family now – this is the family that made me who I am today. #weeping
Do pop over to #thegallery to see what other people have posted for the family topic.
I have friends in high places who let me have top secret things. This makes me sound like Olivia Pope in Scandal – just without the amazing coats, shoes and sex with the President of the US!! (By the way, if you haven’t watched Scandal – then have a box set gorge – it is brilliant. In fact, it may have to have a blog post all to itself sometime soon!)
So – back to the top secret things. The aforementioned friend works in the book industry (more about her here) and so let me borrow a copy of a book not released until next month (blog post embargoed until October) and the sampler of a new book by Mhairi McFarlane ‘It’s Not Me It’s You’. It was only the first few chapters but I LOVED IT – this is what Amazon has to say about it so I’m not ruining any surprises:
“Delia Moss isn’t quite sure where she went wrong. Everything was going smoothly. Ok, she had a slightly rubbish job working for the council and she hadn’t seen her best friend Emma in god knows how long, but she’d been working up to proposing to Paul for months. This. Was. It.
But with one annoying little ‘beep beep’, Delia’s life is turned upside down and rather than stick around and commit GBH by punching her cheating scumbag boyfriend (who still wants to be with her) in the chops, she decides the best thing to do would be get some head space and leave for London.
But a new city is never going to be the answer, and with a dodgy new job in media PR, where a suspicious yet devastatingly handsome journalist seems to be sniffing around and endangering her job, Delia can’t run forever. Where did the old Delia go? And can she get her back?”
I literally CAN NOT WAIT until 6 November 2014 when it will wing it’s way to my Kindle.
Anyway – the secret sampler thing totally worked as marketing, as I obvs went and downloaded Mhairi McFarlane’s first book ‘You Had Me At Hello’ immediately – and I loved that too!!
It is written totally in the style I would love to write if I ever do brave the book writing thing, and as if the narrator (Rachel in this case) is chatting to you, the reader, as her mate. I guess the fact that I’m a similar age to the author (OK, just the other side of 40 to her!) means lots of similar reference points. It flicks between the present day and uni days with ease and is a fabulous mixture of romance / humour / good guys v bad guys and some real laugh out loud moments (where you accidentally wake your husband up when you’re reading in bed way too late!) There was a slightly ‘close to the bone’ moment for me when a character said that Rachel, having not seen her since uni, could be 15 stone and shouting at her 4 children – yep, anyone from the University of Southampton class of 1995 – that’s me now!!
It was a great read – and I’d love to know what happens to all of the characters next – which I think is always the sign of a good book – leave them wanting more (possibly the sign of a good ‘lost love’ too?!)
Oh – and you can be as lucky as me and read the first few chapters of ‘It’s Not Me It’s You’ as they are at the end of the Kindle edition of ‘You Had Me At Hello’!
This week we have grasped the nettle and decided to potty train our youngest. Obviously there are no actual nettles involved (well, not yet – but if she’s caught short on the school run later then a wee in a bush may have to occur!!)
All of her siblings are now at full time school – so she can have some undivided attention (for once, poor thing!) People ‘helpfully’ say things like ‘oh, it will be easy 4th time round, you know what you’re doing’ etc etc – but it’s first time round for the bladder in question – and all of the kids are so different. She has shown absolutely no desire to wear pants AT ALL – in fact when we’ve mentioned being a big girl and using the potty, or loo, before she’s just flat out refused and said she wants to keep wearing a nappy!
All of my older 3 have been relatively late – 2 and a half, to 2 and three quarters – but with this one hitting 3 in 6 weeks, the clock was ticking (she’d already been marked down at her 2 and a half year check because of it!!)
Our lovely nanny started the process yesterday – with mixed results! Lots of accidents first thing – a big chunk of the day ok – and then when I got home at 5pm accidents galore again.
So I removed the night time nappy with trepidation this morning!
As she was getting a chocolate button every time she managed to do a wee in the right place, I did wonder if I could have a gin at that point too?!? But it’s a good job I didn’t……..
Apart from one accident on a dining room chair this morning (I won’t reveal which one in case any future visitors are reading this!) she’s been BRILLIANT. We’ve had about a dozen wees on the toilet (it would appear we’re bypassing the lovely pink potty) and the last half dozen of those she’s requested herself, it hasn’t been me going ‘do you need another wee?’ every 5 minutes!! I think the excitement at bum wiping, flushing and hand washing is also proving a hit……
I am sure we won’t have totally cracked it (haven’t even considered the whole poo thing yet) but I am so proud of my littlest girl.
Maybe I should have a gin every time she has an accident………….
So – my first #wickedWednesdays post (and I am phobic of the spelling of Wed-nes-day too!) linking over with another more experienced blogging Brummy Mummy @brummymummyof2
Now if only Monarch could have parked the plane the other way round on our way back from Faro to BHX, we wouldn’t have all looked so squinty in the family selfie! (Oh, and one of the children is missing too – never good…….)
I was wondering what to write about for this week’s category over on The Sticky Fingers blog Photo Gallery for the topic of ‘8am’.
At the moment there isn’t really a typical 8am to photograph.
There’s 8am on a Saturday – when we’re willing the kids to sleep in, although often have an Ocado delivery scheduled for 8.30am – so won’t be sleeping for much longer….
There’s 8am on a Sunday – again willing a lie in before husband and oldest 2 head off to rugby for the morning (the sport, not the place, that would just be weird every Sunday!!)
On a Monday husband tends to do the station run for the eldest, so my 8am is chivvying the other 3 to get ready for the day – and I’m not sure quite how a photo can capture the nagging!!!
Tuesday through Friday I usually do the station run at 7.20am and then head straight to the office early doors, or back home. But piglet number 3 started reception last week – and me going home again before she heads off with the nanny tends to bring about a meltdown (much as having Daddy around on school mornings has often done the same when the older ones were little). Today I have a meeting at home at 8.30am – but the family don’t head off on the school run until 8.20am – so I have come to hide in Starbucks at the motorway services – with a plain porridge and skinny decaf latte! So this is a picture of 8am today.
Perfect – catching up with blogs / my book in peace!!
I’m going to pop across to The Gallery later to see if anyone has actually managed to encapsulate the nagging in a photo……..
As I’ve mentioned before, our eldest has started a new school and this has given me lots of time to wait around at the train station for her – and catch up on my reading. A Monday is the one day of the week when we have no childcare (4 children and running our own business means that a nanny is the best option – and she works Tuesday to Friday every week).
This morning husband did the train drop off. Today was the day the train was 25 minutes late. He will not have been reading a book (he doesn’t do reading – unless it’s work or rugby team related, or trying to find an edition of NCIS or one of the Bad Boys films on the Sky planner) but will have used that half an hour or so to start the days work – emails / calls aplenty. Now he was also supposed to do pick up – but the delay to the start of his day meant a later train back from London – so I had to take the 3 younger siblings to pick their big sister up.
They were INSISTENT that they should wait on the platform rather than in the comfort of the car – even the bribe of another viewing of Frozen on DVD would not entice them to remain in the vehicle.
Here they are waiting excitedly:
This was before:
a) a lady was struggling with a pushchair, and loads of commuters and teenagers just watched her – so I had the 2 year old in one arm and helped carry her pushchair up the stairs with the other
b) an overtired 4 year old (first full day at school) had a full on meltdown because she didn’t want to walk quickly up the stairs to go home once we’d rendezvous-ed with her big sister
c) the 2 year old stropped to be put down and proceeded to run off down the road in the opposite direction from the car
d) the 4 year old wouldn’t be strapped back in to her car seat unless it was moved from the middle row where I can easily do the seat belt to the back row by her brother
e) my phone started ringing with a problem at work
Roll on tomorrow when I can sit in the car on my own and read my book after a nice relaxing day in the office……………
My eldest starting a new school means quite a lot of kicking about at the train station waiting for her to get on the train in the morning (she’s only 11, I wait until she actually heads off, I am sure, given time, I will slow at the kerb for her to jump out of a moving vehicle!) and for her to arrive back in the afternoon – I have made VERY good use of this time by reading loads.
I was recommended ‘I Am Pilgrim’ on my Facebook page and in person by a number – and eclectic mix of friends – so I thought I would see what it was all about.
This is the publishers synopsis:
“Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn’t exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.
But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder – and Pilgrim wrote the book.
What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.”
And I have to say it is BRILLIANT!! It is very graphic – sexually at the beginning, but violently right through the book. At one point I was reading it through gritted teeth (and if I’d been watching it on TV would have covered my eyes!!) but this does not feel gratuitous, it is in keeping with the storylines.
The story is quite complex, jumping in terms of timezones and eras – and it feels very fast paced – so much so that you don’t want to put it down. It’s the writer’s first novel – and he has been a screenwriter – and you can feel that in the descriptive text he uses – this HAS to be made into a film. One of my friends has admitting to fancying Pilgrim – and I can see what she means (the casting for this film would have to be just right!)
I finished ‘I Am Pilgrim’ at 1am today (I Am Tired!!)
According to Wikipedia ‘A cousin is a relative with whom a person shares one or more common ancestors. In the general sense, cousins are two or more generations away from any common ancestor, thus distinguishing a cousin from an ancestor, descendant, sibling, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew. However in common parlance, “cousin” normally specifically means “first cousin”.’
And I am lucky that I have brilliant ones – seen here along with my sisters (well, one of my sisters and one sister’s arms!) at my ‘epic’ (well I’d say that if I was younger) 40th birthday party earlier this year.
And I love that my children and their cousins recreated this photo last Saturday at my Great Aunt’s 80th birthday party (although this photo, and party, was less booze and boob filled!!)
Having a big family is great – my parents went from no grandkids to 7 in 7 years – and then I had an extra couple for good measure! And whilst it’s noisy and chaotic when we’re all together – it’s also great fun. I wish we could do it more often – but geography doesn’t permit. So until next time cousins – ‘cheers’ x
This Price is Usually Right 