The Point of Stuff

We decided to finally decorate. 

Our front room looked like a student digs, bright pink and royal blue walls with miss-matched furniture. Odds & sods we'd found along the years.

WE decided to decorate but to get S to sit and go through colour schemes, or textures or anything remotely 'homely/shoppingy' was an uphill struggle to say the least.

In the end, after a week of trying to get him to give his opinion, (alternatives rather than one word negatives) he ranted, "it's all just sh!t!  It's just fcuking STUFF...none of it is IMPORTANT"!!!

I decided from that day on to just buy what I liked and the room looks so different now, so homely and grown up!  It still has quirks like a giant clay toadstool and a black & white photo of S looking startled, with his hair like Alfalfa from The Little Rascals...but, it all works.  It's a proper nest now.

Today, me and Marie (my good friend and fellow Mum) were talking in my new homely, grown up, quirky nest and she was saying how she sometimes thinks her life wasn't meant to turn out the way it has.  That she feels like she's just a mum and has lost her identity.  You know, that invisible feeling we all, men and women, feel from time to time.  And I was telling her about S's rant about 'stuff', when it dawned on me that although I have never really been materialistic and am quite rubbish and nonchalant about financial matters and so I do get that the stuff we purchase is non essential to the bigger picture, it is our stuff. 

When we chose to be parents, something changed.  We didn't choose to be explorers, inventors or scientists.  We have chosen to be mum's and dads and so, we are going to spend a lot of time in our homes.  A lot of time not doing anything exciting.  Just routine drudgery.  So, I now figure that if we are to be sat in our nests, we might as well accumulate stuff and if we can get nice stuff, surely that's better than not bothering.  Maybe, we, the Mum's and Dad's, who hate the boredom and consumerism, need to just embrace what's on offer and nest.

I painted this to add to our stuff...S loves it.

Daddy FC

I know I like to moan on about how bits drop off, get wobblier and fall out as I hurtle towards mid life....who am I kidding?  I'm nearly 39, so unless I'm still rattling around at 90, I am already middle aged! 

Well, today I realised that it's a bit of an issue for men too. 

S took part in a charity football match, (soccer).  He was really looking forward to it as it was for a very worthy cause and also meant he'd get to play on one of the local professional teams pitches.

For the last few days he's kept saying to me, "I hope I get even 20 minutes"... he needn't have worried for when we turned up, there were only 14 players and as it was a charity game, they'd all be playing the full 90 minutes. 

They all wandered into the changing rooms and the kids & I took a seat on the empty terrace.  J was getting very excited about watching his dad play football and actually, so was I.  S used to play a lot.  He's got trophy's for 'Top Goal Scorer' and 'Players Player', which are now in our son's bedroom.  S also got sponsored as a teenager and played in America, so he was a pretty good footballer.  He is also very competitive and expects others to 'PLAY THE GAME' too.

Suddenly, the other team trotted out, almost in slow motion, onto the pitch to warm up... for a whole 25 minutes!!! I looked in the programme and saw that they had brought their own physio! hahaha

They were semi pro's and averaging about 22 years of age.  S told me to add that a lot of them were well over 6 foot tall.

S and the other 'Rovers' played the full 90 minutes, pouring with sweat, getting 'nutmegged and being generally out paced by the youthful opponents but they did pull back three goals in the very very long second half to finish with a very respectable score of 3-6 to the amoeba's.

The most obvious observation I made was the huge aging effect that having children has on us all, for whenever any one of the spectating toddlers would shout, "HELLOOOO DADDYYYYY"!!!, nearly all our team would turn and wave wearily, knackered and sweating, whilst the other team would sprint past, without a responsibility, or care in the world.  Your time will come boys, your time will come. ;)

Wayne Rooney in a few years time?

Cakes, Bakes and Aches

I've been watching a show called The Great British Bake Off. 

The voice over is full of sympathetic statements such as, "Janet's got a soggy bottom', "Rob's spilt his fondant" and "Mary-Anne's macaroons have burnt".

It seems like a very English programme but could work in most countries.  It's a bit of a phenomenon as all ages and both sexes are tuning in, week after week, for whatever reason.

I've even got S watching it with me and not under duress but enthusiastically commenting and watching to see what each contestant will bake next.

I, like a lot of it's viewers, have caught the baking bug, which is not good as I have simultaneously lost the exercise bug - temporarily.  I have made a giant light sponge cake and fairy cakes which the kids decorated.  I then made gorgeous Bakewell tarts and a giant un-iced Bakewell sponge cake.  They were all delicious. 

Today I attempted a lemon drizzle cake. 

I promise you all that I pressed the cake and it sprung back. Then, just to be safe, I stuck a knife in it and it came out dry, so I took the cake out of the oven, let it cool for a very short while, then poured over the juice of two lemons mixed with icing sugar.  It was just after I'd done this that S came in from the pub and sneered as I heaved the heavy lump from baking tray to plate.

Now, I have been ferociously hormonal today.  And I mean, FEROCIOUS.  Team this with stomach cramps and a tearful, run ragged, anxious disposition and the sneer was not well received.

It's fcuking sh!t being a woman sometimes.  S is bloomin RUBBISH at dealing with the 'mentalness' of PMT.  Other women are a bit sh!t at dealing with others mood swings too.  Other women should be able to sense when their fellow females are struggling and should rally round offering hugs, space, conversation, silence, a helping hand and whatever conflicting necessities are deemed vital by the victim from one minute to the next.  I do feel for S and the kids for when I am bad, I am awful but I wish S would get it into his head that it's not personal, malicious, premeditated.  That any outbursts leave me racked with guilt and feelings of worthlessness.  That when I go and spend 17 quid on pills and potions to make me feel normal, it probably means I don't like feeling like the ovulating ogre I've become.

On the other hand, it doesn't mean that you have an excuse to make sarcastic comments, throw scornful, bemused looks and be generally loud & patronising for the entirety of RED WEEK.  Just because I'm on the blob, does not mean that you are right and I am 'not making any sense'.  I am in pain and you are obviously just being a tit. 

And so, back to my baking....I took Marzipan Biscuits out of the oven about 25 minutes ago and they have been cooling on the side whilst I've been typing this.  S, who does not have a sweet tooth at all and hates marzipan, came in, got OTT enthusiastic about my 'fantastic biscuits', snapped one in half, (didn't comment when the marzipan fell out in a caramelised lump) and chomped away, giving me the inane, awkward and nervous looking thumbs up. 

Hmmmmn.

Random Acts of Kindness

 

I haven't been to the gym in about 5 weeks.

I haven't checked my direct debit for the gym in ages, assuming no news is good news.

I decided to check through my Direct Debits nd there ws no sign of my gym one.

I rang the bank and they assured me that the DD was still set up and ready to go and that I'd always had sufficient funds,(just about).

The bank recommended that I ring my gym directly.

I worried.

I spoke to S and told him that I had used the service but not been billed for 8 months and wanted to ring them. 

S said he couldn't believe that I was going to ring someone and ask if I owed them money....he made me feel very silly.

I worried some more.

I rang Consumer Advice.  They recommended that I ring the gym and offer to make a payment plan. They agreed with me that I had used the service and would have to pay for it, even though they agreed that it was through no fault of mine.

AAAGGH!!

I rang Marie and Sarah.  They panicked on my behalf and confirmed that they would both bring it to the gyms attention.  They both said they hoped the gym wouldn't foot me with the lump sum for the last 8 months.

I felt sick and emailed the gym.

Ten minutes later, their reply appeared in my inbox. 

I had a horrible, anxious, sick feeling.

Can you believe that they apologised for any inconvenience that I'd been caused by their collection company making such an error and that they would not be charging me for the missed months???!  They also said that they hoped I'd continue enjoying their gym and fitness classes!!!

I was so happy and relieved that I could've ran exercising into the streets, like Richard Simmons! It's so rare these days to have such good customer service isn't it?  It's given me the boot up the jacksy to go back to the regular gym sessions too!

I might take them a massive tin of chocolates... low fat ones naturally!

;)

NO LAUGHING AT THE TABLE!

When I was little, the dinner table was an awkward, edgy hive of frowned upon sniggering and clips round the ear.

Me, my brother and my mum would eat at the table at the end of the through lounge, whilst Dad would usually sit in his chair, opposite the TV and occasionally shout at us to 'stop messing about'. 

On the weekends though, particularly Sundays, Dad would sit at the table with us as we'd all attempt to chew through one of my Mums Sunday roasts. 

For some reason, laughing at the table was a no no.  This would result in lots of suppressed sniggering and shoulders bouncing up and down, whilst me and my brother would try not to get eye contact, as this would result in one of us bursting into laughter and promptly getting shouted at.

Since my childhood memories of family dinner time are so charged with that 'being on eggshells' feeling, to this day, when I have to sit at a table with more than Me and S, I get a funny anxious feeling and if during the meal it goes so quiet that I can hear the gentle, subdued clanking of cutlery, well, I just fall to pieces.

We had our first family dinner time this afternoon.  Me, S, and our kids J & A. 

We've always squashed round a coffee table with A in her high chair but after purchasing our dining table, well, we are now a sophisticated, proper, grown up family.

For about the first 2 minutes, I did hear the gentle clanking of cutlery and polite chewing of sausage, mash & veg. 

Twenty minutes in and 4 yr old 'J' had stuck peas up his nostrils, 'A' was using a half eaten sausage as a rolling pin and was attempting to roll her face flat and 'S' literally cried with laughter, doubled over at the head of the table.  I stood taking pictures!

Peas up the nose



Laughing at The Dinner Table!

 No one got told off.

The dinner still got eaten. 

Afterwards I cleared the table & washed up, got a giant bar of Aero from the fridge and we all played Ludo.

The Italians have a saying, “A tavola non si invecchia mai roughly translated as, "No one grows old at the table.  I think it basically means that meal times should be relaxed, enjoyed, savoured and treasured. 

Talking of treasures, we trawled round another boot sale this morning and even though we had a serious discussion on the drive there, that we would not buy any rubbish and would not waste any pennies, we managed to come home with a couple of frivolous items...

A Skeleton Suit

"The Boys side is definitely cooler than the Girls side"!

Mask & wig : Worth 30 pence of any ones money...

And lastly, a cake made yesterday by Me & the kids, and a toadstool.  If eaten, one of these may kill you....

 

;)

Recycled Post from my old Blog...

Today I was showing mums best friend my blog and ended up visiting my old blog, http://invisiblewomanukblogspot.uk and reading through some of my old posts. 

This is a funny one about how uncool I was at school... thought you might like a laugh at my expense.

 

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

Too Cool For School?...

There’s a photo of me, aged 11/12, first year senior school, in the snowy playground, sort of ‘running’ towards the camera in a pathetic attempt to make the camera operator think I was gonna get them with the snowball (flake) that’s stuck to my cheap red gloved hand.  

I would’ve definitely missed, had I had the nerve to have thrown it.  

That photo, taken by my cool, confident friend Sarah, sort of summed me up at that age. 

A bit of a prat but nice enough in an annoying, groovy way.

Some people are just cool aren’t they? Some people have a swagger, or an aura that seems to draw other lesser folk to them. Some people would never have a photo that bad in their entire back catalogue.  Thank goodness for digital cameras eh?

It’s got to be confidence that makes these people stand out from the crowd but how do they become confident? What made them so self assured?

It’s not money necessarily, as there are a lot of seemingly cock-sure people who live in poor housing estates, just as there are sappy, unconfident kids attending our private schools.

So what is it?

I’ve done ok considering I was often one of the last to be picked during PE at school.

I remember at aged 7, standing in the playground, staring nervously at the basket of big orange net balls, thinking, “surely they’re gonna pick me before her, she stinks”… I remember being shocked and feeling like I’d been prodded in the solar plexus the one time I was second to last and all the ‘boffins’ had been picked before me! 

I was never a bully and I hate all that bitchiness but there is a definite hierarchy at school and you can’t help but think like that sometimes.

Actually, I hate to admit it but there were occasions when I stood by and laughed while others were bullied.  Not physical stuff but name calling.  And I participated in name calling and poking fun at one particular girl who I am ‘Facebook friends’ with now and has done very well for herself.  Sorry K!

Oh and I also shouted out ‘Jodie’s a wanker’!  in the queue for the tuck shop, as a dare.  She wasn’t a wanker at all actually.  Well, there was never any evidence to suggest she was.

I wonder what would have happened if I had been confident enough to say something to the bullies.

Until I was 12, my Mum chose my clothes.  I wasn’t sporty either and so Mum dressing me as a nerd, (before nerds were ironically cool), with a pageboy haircut and ‘pear collars’ on my shirts was where I was at.  

I was also only allowed two pairs of Clarks, or Startrite shoes a year - navy T bar flats in the summer and brown T bar flats in the winter. 

I once spent an entire day demanding that my poor Mum, ‘get me some open toed shoes’!  It must’ve been a Friday for that afternoon, my Dad Stanley-knifed the front of my shoes off and made me wear them all weekend!  I was mortified.

I thought open toed shoes would make me cool. 

Another thing that 7 year old me thought would aid my rise to the rank of ‘trendy and popular’ was getting my ears pierced. 

I remember crying and screaming, again at my poor Mum, that, “everyone in my school had their ears pierced…at least twice”! But my Dad used to come home from work and bark, “You can do what you like when you’re 18”! And, “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”!

Do-gooders be calm!  My Dad is a fantastic father and there is no cause for concern. ;)

So, it wasn’t til I was 12 years old that my Mum actually decided that a pair of ‘small gold studs’ might actually look rather sweet and I remember posing in a photo booth with her afterwards…modelling a Lady Diana flick and a denim waistcoat, beaming like a Cheshire cat.

It didn’t make me cool though.  I am just not like that.  It has to be inbuilt.

I loved watching Sandra Dee’s transformation into Sandy, in Grease.  I loved it so much I watched that film right from Betamax, through VHS and again later on DVD.

There are things that I think help you to be cool, accepted and popular.

Being good at a sport for example.  Not table tennis or chess.  These don’t become cool until you’re a parent, or an auntie/uncle and can show off exaggerated below-average skills to young relatives who have just found out about these past times.  Random memory alert - an old, eccentric Dutch guy called Herman taught me how to play chess, on his speed boat in the Canary Islands.  No… just chess!

Some kids used to just naturally make cool choices even with something as trivial as crisps.…  how they reacted when asked for one.  I remember most kids used to grimace when asked to share a ‘Ringo’ and they’d separate just half a crisp at the top of the packet and grip the bag tightly so there’d be no chance any more would be taken.  Sarah was too cool for that sort of nonsense and probably had a mountain of crisps anyway, so, as long as you had clean fingernails, she’d just casually offer them.  You could even have a second one!

Bags were another area to show how cool you were.  Which carrier bag would you be carrying your school books in?  Benetton, or Next were good.  Iceland, or Bejam were not and DEFINITELY NO ‘FASHION HOUSE’ BAGS!

A year or two after the carrier bag trend had really taken off, Sarah came in with a proper draw string bag with a clock on it! Well, you just couldn’t compete with that kind of style could you?

Although I did well by becoming friends with someone so cool, it also showed up just how un-cool I was in comparison.  Like the time we walked to her home from school and I fell over.  She laughed a lot but nowhere near as much as I’d have laughed had it been the other way around.  Anyway, I picked myself up and scurried behind her confident strides, resembling Baldrick & Black Adder.

Sarahs parents home is beautiful and was very trendy, the kitchen in particular was like something out of a magazine.  Pristine and crisp.  I walked in and politely said ‘Hello’ to her Mum and threw my bag on the white kitchen work top.

A few seconds passed and Sarah’s mum sniffed and turned her nose up, “ooh yuk can you smell something girls”?  We all sniffed the air and agreed there was a nasty pooey pong.  “Oh what’s that!?!!” cried her Mum, looking at my bag.  Sure enough, when I’d fallen, my bag had landed in dog shit, which I’d then flung over my shoulder and up my coat and then all over their lovely clean surfaces.

It wasn’t long after that episode that their pet Doberman attacked me, ripping my one pair of royal blue, Benetton cords.  Maybe she could still smell the shit and thought I was trying to mark her territory!

Anyway, I think I got on alright coz I wasn’t particularly nasty.  I was clean, (B.O is definite bully bait) and I read quite a bit so I was fairly articulate which helped when I was trying to make the cooler kids laugh.  Laughter is a passport to anywhere.

Aww, I will chat more on school days as there’s such a lot to be said about them.  I hope yours weren’t too uncomfortable and I hope they make you smile when you think back to them.

 

The Squirts.

Unfortunately I'm not referring to my kids here, no, I have had a dreadful bout of the Trotsky's. 

On day one I joked about how diarrhoea will finally help me to lose weight but oh dear, by day three I thought I'd never get better.  Just awful,

I was advised by docs to avoid dairy,(obvious) but also meat, fish and eggs.  She said to stick to uncomplicated food, like rice, porridge oats, dry toast etc.  I lived like Howard Hughes for a week. A reclusive, shrunken, manic wreckage of my former self, covering everything I touched or breathed near with disinfectant.   Anyway, it's finally gone now and I had sausage, mash and veg for dinner, mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnn

Me and S had a shared day off today which is unusual during the week.  It felt like a mini weekend which is bloody lovely as it'll really break the working week up. 

We had the home visit from our son's teachers this morning. I think it's a new thing for reception class age, (just starting school), and I think it's a fantastic idea,  seeing as the likes of Social Services miss so much due to being short staffed, desensitised, managed wrong, whatever... I reckon all teachers should make regular visits...three times a year or something.  J loved it and seemed really proud of his home & family which was lovely to see.  Both kids came across as articulate, sociable, bright, interested little angels.

They fought as soon as the teachers had left though so we went out.

First we went to the shop to buy J's first ever school trousers, then we went to a great charitable organisation who go and collect decent furniture that people are throwing out and they sell it from this big warehouse for such a cheap price and it's for charity which is great. 

We went there hoping to find a table and chairs that'd fit in the small kitchen, to enable us to eat together as a family for once.  Well, we found a large round pine table that can extend to a huge oval and then we rummaged a bit more and I found four really classic solid wooden chairs.  The great thing is, the chairs need the dark old varnish sanding off them and maybe some light wax on them, so they should go well with the table.  Plus, the seats are the old fashioned type that just lift out, so I am looking forward to finding some groovy material and recovering them.  In total, the four chairs and large table cost us £30.  Fantastic!

When we got home, I cooked dinner and we all watched Diary of a Wimpy Kid.   What a great film! It's about two young boys who start 'middle school' (American term that I think means like Junior school, so for about 9/10 yr olds?)  Just a simple little story about how when you're at school, the most pathetic things mean the world and how the minutest action can effect your popularity for your entire school life but in the end, being yourself and being a good friend is the most important thing.  Sounds cliched and dull but it really was laugh out loud funny in a lot of places; the whole, 'cheese touch' storyline in particular.

Anyhoo, I'm only posting when I feel like it now.  I was trying to post every day but it began to feel like a chore as inside my head is not that interesting at the moment!

I'm enjoying reading others blogs and am trying to get into the book, One Day, that's just been made into a film.  Ho hum, hope you're all very well ;)