Another Christmas Gone

Well, you spend so long preparing for it and in the blink of an eye Christmas is over.  Stuffed to the hilt with food (which is good), square eyes from watching the television and a living room that looks like a rubbish tip.  Yep, good old Christmas.

It’s great having children around to celebrate Christmas.  Mine were delighted at the little ‘taster’ presents left at the end of their beds, the additional decorations Santa had put up, the letters to each of them from Santa thanking them for the food and drink and of course the pile of present he leaves each one of them.

The first hour of waking is the most magical, the oohs and aahs before they even get downstairs.  It’s what Christmas is all about and makes all the effort well worth it.

They notice everything though.  Normally Santa wraps each child’s presents in different paper and one type only. 

This year he had used 2 different types of wrapping paper and they had picked up on it!  The attention to detail is so important and very essential.

I shall continue trying to reclaim the living room back (or at least some of the floor space).  It’s that fine line between trying to tidy a bit while leaving some of the new presents out to play with. 

As long as we can walk the length of the living room without treading on anything and hurting ourselves in the process then I’ve done my job!

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Be on Time - Never!

I think I mentioned in a previous posting that I sometimes leave the house with my brain behind.  Today was another day like that.

I had arranged to meet a friend who I haven’t seen for over 6 months (there’s another story at all the attempts we’ve made and failed).  As we both have children we opted for McDonalds (personally don’t like it, but hey ho the children do) in a town half way between both of us.

I knew I needed to get some cash out, but with three children to get ready, time ran out plus I had a visitor at home just before I was getting ready.  No problem I thought, I’ll get the cash in the town we’re meeting at.

So as I approached the town heading towards the car park I suddenly realised that the car parks were pay and display.  I had the sum total of 13p in my purse.  My dilemma was how was I going to get cash to pay for the car parking when the town is pedestrianised.

On our way in we saw a garage up ahead with a cash machine displayed.  Great I thought.  I gave my son my mobile phone, gave him the hurriedly scribbled down mobile number of my friend and asked him to phone her to tell her what we were doing, as at this point we were late.

He did this while I queued in the traffic but realised that the mobile number I had for my friend was no longer valid.  She had changed her number, but I didn’t have it.  I just hoped she wouldn’t think we weren’t coming.

I pulled into the garage forecourt away from the petrol pumps and headed towards the cash machine to find that it was out of order.  Damn.

Plan B then.  I opted to drive past McDonalds and get my son to run in to my friend and grab some change off her.  We drove down the high street, before it becomes pedestrianised and there in the window was my friend.  I bibbed the horn and thankfully she saw us, so at least she knew we were around.

However, I couldn’t pull over because of other cars and there was a pedestrian crossing right outside McDonalds.  Oh well, at least my friend knew we were here.  I drove round to the car park found a space.  I now had two choices.  I could leave a note in the window saying I’d gone for cash, but would it be believed or I could pull my damsel in distress card.

I did the latter.  There was a man sitting in his van near us and I knocked on his window and asked if he would mind giving me 20p.  With my measly 10p I could afford half an hour to get cash out and take the children down to my friend while I came back to the car park.

This is what I did.  Luckily it all worked out and I even put the money back on the man’s window for him for when he came back.  The only thing is instead of costing me £1.20 in parking it ended up being £2.50 as the machine didn’t give change and I only had a 50p to give back to the kind man.  Small price to pay for reducing stress levels.

So to the man in the van, a big thank you and I hope you have a win on the lottery for being so nice.

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Pink Champagne and Apple Juice by Anne Brooke

I just knew I was going to love this book even before reading it.  Why?  I’ve met Anne, the writer of this book through MySpace and she writes some really funny articles in her blog section.  

When I saw that she had just brought out this book, I knew I had to get a copy and I wasn’t disappointed.  My measure of a good read is how fast I get through it.  By that, if I’ve read it within a few days, it was because I couldn’t put it down.  Well, I’d read this book cover to cover in two days!

So why was it so good?  It has a brilliant mixture of humour, characters and a very different storyline. I was able to visualise all the characters, even down to how the buildings would look. So I’d better not be disappointed when they make it into a film!!

The storyline is about Angie who flees from her very loving home to make her mark in the world.  She looks up her Uncle John who she hasn’t seen for many years and turns up unannounced.

Maybe Angie should have had some hints that all would not be as it seems, when she asks for directions and is met with ‘you want where?’.  Her first meeting with Uncle John is a memorable one and the story of why Uncle John has not been around for years unfolds with interesting reasons. 

Mixed in with this are the people who work for Uncle John and the entangled love interests.

To find out why you’ll just have to read the book.   If you want a taster then you can read the first chapter by clicking here. You’ll be hooked.

 www.annebrooke.com

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Merry Christmas

I can’t believe Christmas is next week.  I find wrapping presents such a chore now, maybe it’s just years of doing it, or maybe it’s because lack of time means getting them wrapped as quickly as possible.

I still have that childlike want for a perfect Christmas day.  That must stem from my own childhood, the anticipation, not knowing what presents we were going to get, the Dandy and Beano Annuals, which my own children still read.  We used to have a coal fire that my mom would bank up the night before to make sure it was still glowing enough in the morning to carry on burning. 

I stay up late on Christmas Eve to make sure the living room is ready for Santa.  In our house Santa has normally decorated around the house even more than before.  One year this happened after my friend’s dad had decorated our hall, stairs and landing for us.  My youngest son woke up the next morning and said Brian had been round and done it! 

I so love children’s innocence. When do we grow up and become cynical about life, or is that just me?  Maybe that’s why I love Christmas day so much.  It’s the day for forgetting everything else and putting family first.  No rushing around (apart from in the kitchen), no shops open and knowing that you only have to concentrate on trying to have the best day you can.

May I take this opportunity to wish you all a magical Christmas day, however you celebrate it and a healthy and happy 2007. 

Here’s to us all.

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Week 2

On the recycling front this week:

*  Vegetable peelings as usual.

*  Two more bags of clothes given away.

*  1 glass bottle.

*  Paper, junk mail and all other non-confidential paper.

*  Reusing a cardboard set of drawers.  Two drawers used for filing trays and the box  that held the drawers, turned on it’s side and used as a magazine rack.

*  Took an old bathroom suite, wood and metal up to the local waste disposal and duly put things in the correct containers.

Also found a really useful site on recycling called www.recycle-more.co.uk .  On there they have a really good little diary which you can print off to organise your recycling.  If you click here it will take you directly to the page.

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Clippity Clop

Another week of illness, now getting pretty fed up of it.  Maybe I should just go around the whole house spraying anti-bacterial disinfectant everywhere! 

I wouldn’t mind but it’s not even like we’re passing the bugs to each other, each illness is a new one.  My son came home from school with a rash over his body.  I took him to the doctors for one of the emergency appointments to be told, it’s a virus and it’s infectious.  NICE!

Where on earth that came from, goodness knows.  The local schools have had chicken pox and a rumour of measles doing the rounds, so I can only assume it was a derivative of one of those.

Oh well, my son didn’t mind being told he couldn’t go to school, especially when he didn’t feel ill with it.

Still haven’t had my cardboarding slide yet.  The nearest to a bit of fun I had this week was clip clopping around a department store with my daughter, much to her delight.  You know when you put your heel down first, then slap the rest of your shoe down, especially on wooden floors.

Plus, we were walking slow, then fast and making tunes with our feet.  Good, silly, free, fun that nobody seemed to mind.

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Why Women Can’t Read Maps . . . Allan & Barbara Pease

This is a great little book, of the pocket variety (119 pages in total).  It’s full title is Why Women Can’t Read Maps and Won’t Stop Talking.

It shows how men and women are different.  It’s full of commonsense advice and scientific facts that are both powerful and humorous. For example:

"Males use only three tones of voice when speaking, compared to a woman’s five tones.  That’s why men often can’t follow womens’ conversations and women say, "Don’t use that tone of voice with me!" when arguing."

It really makes sense of some of the things that we don’t understand between the sexes.  Allan and Barbara Pease are masters of communication and body language and have years of writing experience behind them.

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What’s It All About Then?

There is so much focus on recycling lately that as a bit of an exercise I decided to look at what we do as a family.  I really dislike being told what we must and musn’t do, I would rather do something because I have an interest in it.

I didn’t think that we recycled very much, but I rather surprised myself when I had a look around.  We live in an area that has normal rubbish collected, garden rubbish and paper recycling bags, so anything else has to be done by us ie take items to the waste bins or local tip.

Week 1

We have milk delivered, so for starters it’s a really good method of recycling as, apart from the occasional broken bottle, all the bottles go back to the dairy for re-using. 

We only had 2 glass bottles in the house but I duly washed them out, took off the labels and put them in a box in the garage ready for taking to the local bottle bank.

I have magazines passed on to me. So after having read them, I cut out any useful articles and they go straight into the recycle bags provided by the council, along with any of the freebie newspapers we get, junk mail and all other non-confidential paper.

I have a composter up the garden, so the majority of vegetable peelings go in there.

I gave away two bags of children’s clothes.

I have also sorted out all old shoes that are in a bag ready to go to the recycle bins.

So, all in all, not a bad start.

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31

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it."

Henry Ford

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Leaf the Work Alone!

Well I haven’t had my slide yet, the weather has not been in my favour - never mind, it will happen.  Plus a further week of illness amongst the family has meant not moving very far from the house.

However, we did the next best wintery thing and made a huge pile of leaves in the garden and jumped in them.  Did we bag them up and leave the garden all nice and tidy.  What do you think?Well we had to have an excuse to get back in the garden, didn’t we?

I took this picture, because I was stunned at the number of colours in amongst the leaves and as it was wet, they looked really shimmery and pretty in the half light of last weekend’s bright but rainy weather.

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