stuff

More pics

This is a fab picture showing that although Puggs was not drunk he was still being a silly bugger. This was my birthday do at the Rene where the lovely Polly did a few songs on the Open Mike night and then was offered a payed weekly slot by the manager.



School uniform; I'm not a fan of conformist clothing but he does look mighty cute.

More pics

Me in the forest of Dean



Showing off how great it is to carry my baby






Leon and Solomon being cute naked babies



He's toooooooo cute



Yeah, I love this man!

Fab things from Osiris

O : "I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, a maths teacher, a doctor or a fireman"
Me : "well, don't worry, you don't have to decide now, you've got the whole world ahead of you"
O : ~thinks hard~ "But I have some of the world behind me?"

Also we were having a debate about the merits of a packed lunch vs. school dinners. A lot of his friends have a packed lunch but I really want him to have school dinners, not only because they are free but also that they are really healthy, he gets to choose what he likes and he keeps surprising me by choosing the vegetarian options that I really wouldn't have guessed he wanted. So I was trying to put him off a packed lunched but also trying not to lay down the law because that is not the way we do stuff concerning food (I know too well the price of being told you cannot eat something you want as a child - binging on it as an adult!). I was saying things like "Do you want a boring cheese sandwich, that is all soggy, everyday or an exciting dinner that you can choose?" and he thought very hard and said "I would like to have a packed lunch but maybe not at school". The boy had come up with a solution where I hadn't! So we bought a lunch box and he now has sandwiches in it at home.

On the helpline

I am now on the BFN supporterline talking to women about their nipples. Well, not always about nipples; also babies and stuff.
I started on Thursday and managed to reach a state of high panic at the end of my three hour shift. It was not that I couldn't cope when I did get a call, it was that it was up to me, I might be the one to fuck up. At a breastfeeding group there are lots of people there and although I am the Specialist Worker I am there to support other women supporting the poor woman who's got the bleeding nipples. I felt very alone on the support line and it made me realize how much we work as a team in the groups. I am the one who gets to ponce around with a badge on and pretend she knows loads but actually now I am questioning that. C, you will be reading this and I don't know if you will be tutting at my lack of confidence or nodding because you know how I feel. Am I really the person who should be at the end of a help line? I've got no choice at the moment because I have to do a certain number of hours on the lines before I can stop being a probationary Supporter and start being a full one.
ARGH! angst angst

Johnathan Ross's beard

WHY????!!!!?????

Being pragmatic about the broccoli

I planted some broccoli seeds way back in the beginning of spring and they have now grown into beautiful tall plants that I hope will put forth flowers next spring - yum. I was admiring my plants when I realized that they had a kind of lace effect - one could even say they were holey. Then I realized that they were surrounded by beautiful butterflies, loads of them in fact, loads of cabbage whites! I put two and two together and realized that their gentle flitting was in fact them going from leaf to leaf laying eggs. On further inspection I could see loads of yellow eggs clustered all over the place. I turned a leaf over gently to discover HOARDS of caterpillars munching on my lovely broccoli plants!
OK... I sat back and thought about this. First I thought about picking them all off, then I thought about pesticides and then I thought about all the rows of cabbages on the supermarket shelves that must have been grown in fields covered in pesticides, then I thought about the birds that eat the caterpillars, then I thought about the terrible weather we have had this year and how badly the British wildlife has suffered.
PING! The solution to the problem; let the butterflies have the plants, they need them more than I do. My vegetable patch is now my wildlife patch and you never know, I might still get a few flowers in the spring, but better still, I might get to watch a caterpillar spin it's cocoon, or a butterfly emerge!

Off to school

I still haven't got used to my little man running off with his school friends in the morning. He seems so grown up and so confident. He can't get enough of anything to do with numbers (thanks to Numberjacks!) and he keeps asking me to set him questions with numbers. "More maths!" He keeps yelling. It's a good job I have been honing my brain using Brain Training on the DS. I'm working my way up to 'rocket speed' on everything - I'm sure it's all a ploy of the game designers to make you feel good about yourself so that you buy Brain Training 2; well, it's working! It's also turned me into a suduko addict which is vaguely annoying.
I'm so pleased that Osiris is not scared of numbers. If I can fill him with a love of reading then I feel that my work as a mother has been going well. If you can do simple maths and read then you have the whole world at your fingertips!

This made me chuckle

Camel foots

I have mentioned in a post below that I attended a party recently held by a sixteen year old girl to celebrate her GCSE results. I don't make a habit of hanging out with people half my age but she was a daughter and sister of some very good friends of mine and the party was a kind of collective thingy. She set the theme to the party as 'PIMPS 'n' HOS' ......mmmmm lovely!!
It used to be 'Vicars and Tarts' didn't it? The sellers and the buyers of sex. Now 'pimps 'n' hos' is the sellers and the sellers of the sellers of sex.
Needless to say it was a reason for all the girls to be stripping down to their bare essentials and 'finally showing how beautiful and desirable they really were' or the porno version of 'scrubbing up well' a little bit like the way at any Halloween party you will find hoards of woman dressed in Lycra cat suits being witch's cats, also the same for 'school days' parties where 40 year old women dress as Britteny Spears ala 'Hit me baby one more time'.
The point of this post is that it is remarkable how quickly women jump into the costume of their oppression. This is not our fault, it is the constant judgments made on our value as fuckable objects and our ability to perform the standard porno behavior to our male viewers/patrons/judges.
I did see plenty of camel foot pants and even a thirteen (!!!) year old who spent the party giving foot massages to a series of boys. I suppose it was this sort of stuff and the fact that I felt so unbelievably old that drove me to drink so much that I passed out in a heap.
One fun thing though, myself and the mother of the girl who's party it was changed into police vice-squad outfits at midnight and busted them, taking beer and joints of under-ages. Hee hee.

On motherhood

Motherhood is a strange state; a swing between madness and joy in one moment. I have been having some nice times with my children but a little while ago I felt as if the whole thing was slipping through my fingers.
I found a quote whilst reading Subject Woman by Anne Oakley (a fine read if you are interested in research papers) and it struck a cord with me. It struck so deeply that I cried; here was someone who understood the exact emotions that I was feeling. I want to share it with you but I have to say that it seems rather depressing re-reading it now. As well as the emotions expressed in this quote I also feel the wonderful highs of my children's company but these are often expressed and expected of mothers whereas the darker emotions are hidden and it is at these moments when we are most alone.

"My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence; the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings towards these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance. Thier voices wear away at my nerves, and their constant needs, above all thier need for simplicity and patience, fill me with despair at my own failures, despair too at my fate, which is to serve a function for which I was not fitted. And I am weak sometimes from held-in rage. There are times when I feel only death will free us from one another...."

Back to the Blog

Some how the days have slipped by and all of a sudden I realize this blog has become terribly out of date. A few things have happened since my last post

• Rob has started collage. He is studying a ND in Graphic design
  
• Osiris has started school
• I have considered going back to collage to study a Law A Level but at the last minute decided to do it next year because Solomon is too small to be put into nursery, even if it would only be 5 hours a week.
• We had an inspection by our landlady and have totally redecorated our downstairs room
• Some family problems outside of our relationship that I can't talk about but it is enough to say it's put a few people though the emotional mill and is ongoing....blah blah blah...hard to explain without saying what it is but y'know...?
• I've been getting out quite a lot. I saw Diane Cluck play in Bath with the Staple crew (that was so fab) and passed out in a garden after drinking A LOT of beer (it was all going ok until I found the hidden box of wine, then I can't remember anything!)

But, most importantly of all, it is my birthday in a weeks time. I will be 34.
ALSO I am doing a 'firewalk' for charity! Yes, I am walking over hot coals to raise money for the local Breastfeeding groups. I have to have lots of sponsors, so if you know me in real life, or even if you don't, can you sponsor me????? It's all happening on the 20th of October and people can come along to watch me burn my feet!

So there you go, things I have been up to or a list of reasons I have not been blogging...excuses, if you will, but I have decided that I need to start blogging a bit more as my writing skills are not improving by playing Brain Training on the DS and I've got a new plan to write a novel soon (well, no that soon, when Solomon goes to school). It's going to be a terribly tacky airport novel with lots of lesbian sex in....nice!

So I will write a bit more but for now I have to go and give the clammering hoards a boobie to calm them.