Why am I telling you this?

Nairn tells me I’m beautiful all the time. He tells me that he loves Greer but not Erica because Erica annoys him, steals his toys and hurts him, until I tell him that it makes me sad that he doesn’t love his sister then he changes his perspective to make me happy. When I’m grumpy, he calls my name until I look at him and then he flashes his amazing big grin, winks and blows me a kiss. He asked me a few months ago what planet my brother lives on and I laughed so hard that now if he thinks I’m upset he asks me again, to make me laugh. He is so loving and so conscientious.

But last week I read this article and sat with my mouth agape, a brick plummeting slowly from my breast to the pit of my stomach as I identified Nairn’s behaviour in every word written by another Mother. Some of you might remember that around the time of my breakdown Nairn’s issues were so bad that I’d called in Social Services to help us. Their solution was to fire us onto a positive parenting class that I was extremely reticent about. I was so against the idea of Nairn’s issues being down to our parenting that I went along, certain they’d tell me nothing I didn’t already know but I was very pleasantly surprised. Armed with new tactics, we set about challenging Nairn’s tantrums with reward charts and different reactions and to a point it worked. We thought we’d solved our issues until his assessment for early entry to school.

In Scotland if a child turns five years old by February 28th they start school the preceding August. January & February babies can defer entry for a year, March-July birthdays can apply for early admission but the child must complete a test to see if they are ready. One of the tests Nairn had to do was to sort a number of building blocks by colour – a task I know he could do with his eyes shut – but as it was such a boring task, he elected instead to build a rather impressive transformer with his blocks. Let me remind you again here that Nairn turned four years old in March. Lego is his ‘thing’ and it amazes me the grasp he clearly has on engineering. Nairn is a little Lego professor and that scares me.

With Bob being diagnosed as severely dyslexic (which he writes about under this tag, work from the bottom up) – the second top ‘band’ of dyslexia – we were made aware that our children could have a genetic predisposition towards it. Dyslexia is a spectrum disorder.

I have fought and lost when it comes to having Nairn assessed because I am as certain as I can be that something is not quite right with the way he processes his feelings. He simply cannot relate to other people on an emotional level and hence the tantrums and certainty that he is hated whenever he has a falling out with a friend or sibling.

I wish I knew what to do. With Bob having fallen through the cracks in such a spectacular manner I am quite terrified that Nairn will be written off as a child with a neurotic mother rather than a child with possible support requirements.

I wasn’t really that surprised when almost every invitee to Erica’s party turned up. On the days when she goes to nursery there’s usually a gaggle of excited toddlers waving and shouting to her at the window and before she moved up to the pre-preschool room a few weeks ago (she is now officially a Cheeky Chimp) her toddler room-mates would chatter excitedly to me when I dropped her off. When we go to the park she always makes a friend no matter how dreich the weather and when we first met Amanda and Bron it took a matter of seconds for her to race off with her similarly-aged counterparts. She’s exuberant, effervescent and extremely high maintenance but is the most sociable of all my children. I wouldn’t say she’s more popular than the boys – they have a firm group of friends which tends to be close knit – but her circle of friends is wide and fluid. From my perspective of being distinctly unpopular as a schoolie, I’m enthused by the demand for her friendship but if course, this demand leads to supply issues.

In other words the dreaded birthday party.

Over the last 8 weeks Erica has been invited to no less than six birthday parties, all of which have been held at (an admittedly better-than-usual) soft play centre in a local pub. I should be honest here and say that soft play is an anathema to me – witnessing my children mutate from reasonably polite if excitable dwarves to puce-faced sweaty hulks sustained by chicken nuggets and fruit shoots is not my idea of fun – but they absolutely love it. Therein lies my first ‘concern’. If the kids have been invited to a softplay party, how should they be dressed? Party dresses simply cramp your style when you’re trying to clamber up wipe-clean plastic mountains, but on the few occasions that I’ve dressed Erica in a long tshirt and leggings she’s looked distinctly out of place. How do other parents do it?

Added to that there’s the financial obligation too. Erica was gifted some beautiful presents at her birthday party in May but since Bob & I have been self-employed since the turn of the year we simply don’t have any disposable income right now. As you can imagine, six birthday parties in eight weeks really hits the pocket. I don’t feel comfortable turning down invitations and so I try to stick within a budget of £10 for the gift with a card & wrapping paper on top.

This is where my dilemma lies. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I have some idiosyncracies when it comes to gifts being bought with hard-earned money. There’s nothing that angers me more than my kids breaking something they’ve been bought as a gift because I can remember all too well how long I could eat for if I had £10 while I was a single parent. For someone to spend almost two hours-worth of wages on something means a great deal to me and I want my kids to appreciate that, but I also want anyone I’m buying for to appreciate it too. Hence, I really begrudge buying crappy pointless toys as gifts no matter how much my kids beg me to. We all know the kind of toys I’m referring to – Gogo’s crazy bones are top of my ‘Vonnie hates these’ list, along with those revolting aliens in a plastic tub of slime which Nairn particularly adores – and so I usually resort to books or crafting kits to encourage parent & child to spend time together. BUT THEN I have the guilt for pushing my parenting ideals onto others.

I decided recently to let Erica pick the present for her friend, but that backfired spectacularly when she – who has a new-found love of gardening – decided that her friend J REALLY needed a massive strawberry planter from B&Q. I bought it since it was clearly a gift from the heart then bought a kite as an apology to his parents for handing over a bucket of mud to look after.

There’s got to be a happy medium, surely? Do other parents stick to a birthday budget? Do you have a policy about the kind of gift you’ll buy? Most importantly, what are your fashion principles?

I can tell you where I was. I was in the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre of the Southern General hospital with Bob. The night before, I’d been admitted to hospital with cramps so bad I was bent double and unable to stand up. Then I started bleeding. The Doctors said nothing with their words but everything with their eyes. They were 90% certain I was having an ectopic pregnancy and wanted to monitor me until 10am when I would have a scan.

I refused to stay in the hospital. It was so cold, so clinical and they wanted to admit me onto the maternity ward. The cruelty of this act stays with me even now, to be surrounded with new life when we were sure I was carrying death was just too much. We went home and attempted to sleep in between the tears and sadness, clinging to each other and resigned to our loss.

Early in the morning we made our way back to the hospital in silence, to that waiting room in the department of no hope. We sat in the most uncomfortable chairs huddled together already in mourning and watched the news of the bombings unfold on the tiny television. Slowly and quietly the visitors and staff crowded around us, silently hoping and praying that nobody had been badly hurt whilst our own troubles were put to the side until we were called into the ultrasound room.

It’s the longest walk, that walk from the waiting room to the ultrasound room. Every step produced more waves of nausea, fear and anxiety. In truth it was less than 20 seconds but I remember at the time absorbing the hospital smell, the ambience and the desperation of the other patients. Into the darkened room with the monitor turned away from the patient to save them from seeing the nothingness we went, and I lay on the bed. Hours and hours passed in less than a minute when the nurse silently turned the monitor towards me and pointed.

The pain, the bleeding – caused by a rampant kidney infection that had developed from an unchecked UTI. The baby? Well, he turned out to be just fine.

I’ve never forgotten how we felt that day when we thought we were going to lose the baby we’d only known about for 3 weeks and how our joy & relief was mingled with empathy for the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons & daughters and friends who lost loved ones that day. Five years and I can only imagine their pain but I hope each and every person affected by actions that day is surrounded by love, support and memories of happier times.

But – and there’s always a but, isn’t there? – about 15 minutes after we got off the ferry at Portsmouth, Erica barfed all over the car. I’ve never seen anything like it, there was no warning, no, “Mummy my not very well”*, nothing. Just Erica calling for Huey, Dewie and Louie as she performed the technocolour yawn from one end of the car to the other. Did I mention that we were 15 minutes into a 438 mile trip? Poor Erica, we ceremoniously stripped her in a layby as she proudly exclaimed, “My done a good sick!” – and oh, dear reader she had. I’m not going to elaborate because I’m sure that you’ve all been party to a vomit-in-car incident and we were lucky enough that she only got herself, her seatbelt, Bob’s backpack and the PVC weekend bag so it was fairly easily cleaned up.

We’d just got off an 8 hour ferry trip – during which I had accidentally given Erica a carton of fruit juice containing pineapple which she’s allergic to – so we assumed that she was either having an allergic reaction or she was travel sick. We thought nothing else of it and she was absolutely fine after that so as far as we were concerned, that was that.

We got back to our house at 2.30am with me having consumed several quad-shot lattes along the route. The kids were dumped in their beds and next morning were shipped off to school and nursery to give me a chance to catch up on my work and sleep. No dice – an hour later we were phoned by the nursery and asked to pick Greer up as she’d had a couple of incidences of dire rear. Diarrhoea at nursery = not allowed back for 48 hours. Ho hum. I assumed again that it was just a dodgy tummy because of all the travelling but by Thursday Greer had started blowing chunks too and wasn’t managing to keep down any liquids, so off we went to our local hospital for a night of observation.

Yesterday Greer perked up, managed to keep down quarter of a banana and drink some dioralyte. We put her to bed and ROOKIE MISTAKE gave her a bottle of milk. This morning, Bob said her cot was like that scene from Trainspotting. We all know the one I mean.

So today started just beautifully. I decided that I didn’t have the energy to have a shower so ran a bath and after bathing Greer and handing her out to Bob, I propped my laptop up on the table beside me (What?! I’m not the only person who does this, right?!) only to hear Nairn crying and shouting, “My MOUTH! My MOUTH!” which such panic and upset that I assumed he’d bitten his tongue. Bob – who bear in mind was clutching a just-bathed Greer – said, “Nairn come here and let me see” and he did. He walked over to about a foot away from Bob, opened his mouth and chundered in projectile fashion à la Exorcist all over Bob, Greer, the sofa, my CLEAN LAUNDRY and the floor. There was a veritable Lake Spew created in the middle of my living room. Again we hark back to Trainspotting.

And do you know how I reacted when I heard Bob going, “Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!” and Greer screaming? I leapt out of the bath, ran downstairs naked and soaking wet, stood in the doorway of the living room and laughed for a good 30 seconds solid. Howled. It would appear that I’ve developed quite the streak for inappropriate laughter, eh? Incidentally I should  mention that this is not the first time that one of my children has vomited on another. When the three eldest shared a room for a little while, Erica stood up in her cot and blew chunks over the bar. It just so happened that Nairn had decided he was sleeping on the floor that night and even now, a good two years on, I’m giggling away at the memory of his wee sleepy puke-covered head looking around in bewilderment trying to work out what the hell just happened.

I haven’t mentioned the third P – pee – but ONE of my allegedly continent children has peed through every pair of pants she owns and leaves me a little puddle on the bathroom floor every morning. Luckily the dog licks that up so I don’t have to worry about slipping in it. I think I might go barf myself.

I think we should start a list of things that nobody warns you about pre-children. What do you think? If you’ve got a post, add it into the Linky below and we’ll see how far we get. Bagsy not doing lochea!

*”Mummy, my not very well” accompanied by the saddest puppy-dog eyes you ever did see is Erica’s standard retort when you ask her to do something she has no interest in, like have a shower or go to bed.

**I hope you’re impressed at how many different ways to describe being sick I managed to wheedle in to this blog entry!

Findlay’s teacher at school this year has been an absolute godsend. Findlay’s Primary 3 experience was quite negative and I was extremely anxious about his future schooling but his teacher this year is experienced, kind and encouraging whilst managing to maintain a class of over 30 children. No mean feat! I haven’t ever done the end-of-year teacher gift before but this year I felt that I really needed to. But what to give? Long-term readers may remember my musings on handmade versus shopbought – I have always doubted my homemade gifts as being ‘sub-par’ in comparison to shop bought presents – but to be honest as we’ve had no income for 7 months I can’t justify spending money that we don’t have right now. So, handmade & homemade was the way forward.

With lots of teacher friends (like Kirsty) I’m well aware of things to avoid: bath products, chocolate etc are very thoughtful but my friend Fiona who is a teacher told me that one year she didn’t need to buy any bath products at all because she’d been gifted so many by her pupils. Mrs Lindsay has made such an impact on our family that I felt it only right to put some effort and thought into a gift for her and eventually came up with Smitten Kitchen’s Watermelon Lemonade. I trotted down to Ikea to collect some of their really nice Slom bottles, went into one of my favourite fruit shops in Pollokshields to grab a bag of lemons and a watermelon and set to work. Findlay came into the kitchen just as I was getting started and we had a pleasant time just chattering and squeezing the juice – time which I hold very dear, knowing full well that he is not going to be a child forever – so this really was the gift that kept giving.

In the recipe, Deb suggests swapping out some of the water with sodawater or sparking mineral water. Now I live in Scotland – a country blessed with the most pleasant-tasting clean fresh water in copious quantities – and the very concept of bottled water enrages me. The waste aspect of all that plastic really upsets my green thinking but recently we acquired this baby:

A sodastream! When I was a kid we had one and I remember it had three different sized bottles when we got it, all of which were subsequently lost in packed lunch boxes or under beds and so my Mum put it away. I loved the sodastream and was asking my Mum if she knew where it was recently when I discovered that they’re still being sold AND they actually look quite sleek and sexy these days too! With the amount of fizzy juice that we go through in a week, the sodastream pays for itself and I love the green credentials from using the concentrate instead of buying big 2l bottles. (Argos are selling the white one for £29.99 just now. The one we have is £49.99).

So anyway, I changed half of the water for sodastream-enhanced fizzy water and this is absolutely amazing. I made a bottle for Findlay’s teacher and a bottle for my pregnant sister who celebrates her birthday tomorrow.

Because I made so much, I’ve posted the quantities I used here and this made just over 1.5 litres.

8 fl oz freshly squeezed lemon juice (this was 4 lemons for me)
16 fl oz fresh watermelon puree, pushed through a sieve
Roughly 7 fl oz sugar syrup*
12 fl oz tap water
12 fl oz fizzy water

Mix it up and it’s good to go!
*sugar syrup – also called gomme – is easily made by mixing equal parts of sugar and water then heating until all the sugar has dissolved.

It just so happened that I had completed Greer’s online application a few months ago when we were still planning to go away so I had the forms. A wealth of friends stepped forward and volunteered to countersign the application for us. All that was needed was the photograph and being of the stingy and penny-conscious variety, we decided we could do it ourselves. We borrowed a cream-coloured bedsheet from Hot Neighbour, got Greer dressed and took a BEAUTIFUL photo.

Bob resized it on his computer so that when it printed, it would print at the perfect size and all would be good in the world. Then we hit our first snag. The photo needed to be printed at a professional printer, I had developed a phenomenal case of Labyrinthitis thus couldn’t drive, Bob hasn’t passed his test, it was Sunday and we live in Outer Mongolia as far as buses are concerned BUT luckily Greer’s Godmother Kat was popping over to see us and kindly ran Bob up to the shop. Using the Boots print-your-own service, Bob printed off the photo and we were cooking with gas. Something ridiculous like 39p and we’d saved a fortune…

…except the photos didn’t print off at the right size and by the time Bob got home and fixed it, Boots was closed for the evening so we had to resort to the photobooth effort. The first shots didn’t come out because Greer was looking at the floor so ANOTHER FOUR QUID to get a decent shot. I can totally understand how these photobooths bring in a profit!

Luckily the new photograph was just as nice (although Bob had neglected to remove Greer’s bib but I can forgive that now that I’ve got over the wrong-size-photo incident!) and she looked so beautiful that even the passport office dude commented on it and he must see hundreds of babies every week [/smug mummy alert] so I just have to sit on my hands now and HOPE that the blooming thing arrives soon.

Still. It is a really cute photograph to tuck into my purse.

Let’s rewind back to August 2000. I was living with not-yet-born-Findlay’s Dad and majorly obsessed with guinea pigs and one day we went to East Kilbride to visit a guinea pig breeder whose parents also kept Jack Russells. It just so happened that they had puppies there ready to leave and even though in hindsight it was the WORST IDEA EVER, Alan & I fell in love with this litter of puppies. We picked out the weirdest looking Jack Russell you’ve ever seen in your life – she was almost exclusively brown & black brindle with a white chest and socks – and brought her home with us. We named her Penny.
Time marched on and a year after we brought Penny home, we brought Findlay home. Right from the off she was very patient with him and quickly became his greatest guardian after Alan & I. When Alan and I split up Penny stayed with me while Alan moved back to his parents house where he was prohibited from keeping a dog by the Factors in charge of the flats. Penny never wavered and was the shining star she always had been but with one single flaw – she was so protective that taking her for a walk with Findlay in the pram was impossible. Impossible. If anyone came near the pram, she’d go for them – never biting, but a dog of that size can bark extremely loudly and it’s intimidating. One warm spring day she did this to a young girl of maybe 7 or 8, wouldn’t come back to me and a passer-by remarked that if I couldn’t control the dog I shouldn’t have her. And he was right. Penny went to live with my friend and I never saw her again…

Roll on seven years to last week. I happened to mention on Facebook that I needed a filing cabinet and one of my friends suggested Gumtree. I’ve never really got into Gumtree but decided to have a look for myself, lo and behold the first advert I saw was this one. I nearly died. i was absolutely – absolutely – convinced it was Penny. I emailed Alan and asked him what he thought – he said he wasn’t sure but sent me this photo of Penny as a puppy:

I then sent an email to the advertiser explaining the story and to cut a long story short, we picked her up the next day. People keep asking me, “How do you know it’s her?” and I try to explain by pointing out her colour similarities, the fact that her age ties in with what the SSPCA estimated when they checked her over, how you simply don’t get Jack Russells with her colouring but above all – I just know. She’s gone grey around her muzzle and behind her ears, she’s older and a bit slower – but it’s her.

Photos from our trip to Calderglen park last night:

I can’t pretend that the timing was anything other than terrible for us to get a dog but as Bob conceded, knowing that Penny could be out there and not doing anything about it would have broken my heart. I count my blessings every day that I have such a wonderful husband who tolerates my whims, he is a wonderful man and I am very grateful to him for sticking around for this long!

I think I’ve babbled enough for just now anyway, I will be back tomorrow with a giveaway so make sure you pop back in

So! Firstly, Greer celebrated her first birthday on Monday which has just blown my mind. I’m quietly resigned to the fact that I will never have a newborn of my own again and I’m not sure if that’s why Greer turning one has seemed like such a big deal to me. She celebrated her birthday in style by sharing a party with Erica and having lots of cake and plenty of playtime with her best friend Luke and surprised us all by taking four steps across her Gran & Granda’s living room.

At her party (why yes, she DOES have bunches in her hair!)

Getting her cake on her birthday (bonus shot of my funky new hair!)

Enjoying her cake (can you see why she has no clothes on?!)

In other news, Erica was thrilled to receive a copy of Jackson’s Garden (by Bath-based author & artist Gillian Carson) recently and it was just so beautiful I felt I had to share it with you lot. The story goes that a snail visits Jackson’s Garden and starts to eat the fruits (or vegetables!) of his labour so Jackson works out a mutually-beneficial plan. It’s a nice little story that not only encouraged the kids to go and plant some seeds, but I liked the underlying message about being kind to all wee beasties. Despite being a massive fan of the handmade & homemade movement it would never have occured to me to buy a book like this, so I’m glad I had the opportunity to see this and share it with you lot.

Anyway, the book arrived packaged up beautifully and with a packet of lettuce seeds attached (seeds only posted within Europe, outside of Europe purchases will be sent a set of cute stickers instead) which got Erica SO EXCITED that Bob & I took the kids outside to our sadly neglected front garden and spent the evening clearing the weeds, levelling the ground and planting the lettuce. I’m hoping that this will be the start of our family gardening adventure so I’ll update again when the lettuce starts to poke through. A brilliant book for encouraging your little ones into the garden and away from the TV.

Erica with her new book

Look how amazing this is!

As if that wasn’t cool enough, Gillian keeps a blog which is extremely informative for the novice gardener – go check her out!

I do have loads and loads more for you – including the amazing story of how I got my dog back after seven years which is like something out of Homeward Bound, a brooch tutorial and maybe a giveaway or two – so make sure you come back over the weekend.

Have a good one!

3

How is that even possible?

Was it really only three years ago that you were born, dear Erica? Three years? It doesn’t seem possible after your first year which was so terrifying that I wasn’t sure you’d make it to three.

You were so sick that this was your default expression for the first six months of your life:

This is you a week after your first birthday. You weighed just under 15lbs and had finally managed to double your birthweight. At the time it was daunting but looking back at old photographs of you it’s terrifying to see how tiny you were:

You didn’t walk until you were 15 months. You had no teeth or hair until after that, all as a result of your body prioritising your growth above everything else and yet you were always so happy. So cheerful. So pleased to see your brothers, Daddy and me. Then of course not two weeks after your second birthday we made you a big sister. What really struck me when we cuddled Greer into you for her first sisterly cuddle was your hands – how all of a sudden, you’d grown. That moment took my breath away because it was the moment that cemented for me that you were going to be just fine:

For you, this has been the year of making friends. At nursery you have a merry band who excitedly shout as they see you coming to the door in the morning. You are blessed with a beautiful smile & the ability to make friends almost immediately which makes us ever so happy, just as you always seem to be. It is an honour and a privilege to share our lives with you and we wish you many happy returns today on your 3rd birthday.

Happy birthday, darling girl x