Home Educating the Puddle Girls…

Bed hair, wonky wings and a crumpled halo. What HAS she been doing?

Weekend is a bit blurry, don’t think i did much other than play with whichever child came to ask. Did some Fimo with various ones of them, cleaned my bathroom and did the odd bit of online shopping; must make a list or will fall into the “oops, bought too much” trap again. One main present is safely sorted, 2 others ordered and one child is dithering to the point she is likely to end up getting socks instead! They all played loads of gamecube, Fran read lots of history books (Henry VIII, Captain Cook and someone i forget now being popular) and gave everyone lots of instruction on the Henry wives. Amelie currently obsessed by Jane Seymour. Must make an effort, Fran was doing her Henry project at that age Maddy did loads of drawing and writing and generally it was a very pleasant weekend. We collected a new desk from Kate, who doesn’t have space for it now she needs nursery space (oh i am so excited about that baby!) and set that up so that we now have real, proper office space, on a real, proper desk, tucked nicely in behind the living room door. Looks lovely and makes it all so much easier. Max’s step mother and dad also came over to help me set up a new accounting system and we had a very pleasant day together; it isn’t something we tend to do anymore, but i do enjoy the very easy company they are. Back in the old days, i spent almost every weekend with them when Max was living there; it all seems like a different life now.

Weather was appauling, so we didn’t move from the house, but everyone coped.

This week has also been good so far; Monday we pottered in the morning, doing some crafts, bit of class tv, gamecube and chatting while we weighed up parcels and shifted them about so we could move (just the 60 on monday morning!) and then some HE friends came over to buy some jars of Hama Beads to have by as birthday part presents and we had tea and a chat. Then i chivvied the children through some work, got a shock (and i do mean a shock) when a certain someone announced with a flounce that she “hated herself” (oh i am so not looking forward to teen years) and later in the afternoon Michelle and Chloe arrived.

That was pretty much the last we saw of the kids; they all got on well, particularly while playing with Lincoln Logs and Fran and Chloe especially hit it off this time. Which left Michelle and i plenty of time to chat (i do love a new friend who can walk in the door on only her first proper visit and say “make me tea, now!”) and just for fun we rearranged the living room We now have the sofa under the window and it all feels much more homely somehow, plus there is space for a christmas tree I kind of like the fact that i have a lot of friends who turn up and immediately start organising me (Michelle even made boxes for me - and vacuumed! - before she left!) - it’s like a skill swap - you come, you work, you leave having purchased goods (well, okay, not such a swap!) Wonder what Alison will do… “hello Merry, i’ll just do you a pretty coloured Excel sheet while i’m here…” - mind you, Alison does have the knack of leaving goods free, something others haven’t yet mastered

Michelle and Chloe also left clutching Fimo angels they’d made (i do give good craft!), which were really very good and we’re looking forward to seeing them both (people not angels) again soon

Weather truly awful that night; rain woke up several of the girls and i think Max nearly drowned on the way in on Tuesday.

***Bit maudlin***
Tuesday was mainly taken up with playing with Aunty Sue while i went for my penultimate counselling session. Left me feeling utterly wrung out and sad for the rest of the day. I’ve come a long way, but i’m still so sad and i know the next 2 weeks, leading up to when i would have been due are going to be hard. I’m really struggling with endless dreams that just break my heart on a pretty much daily basis, though they have changed in the last couple of weeks and mainly include a baby, rather than gory, nameless horror. Very tough though, very hard to shake off in the mornings, very hard not to punish myself over and over again. I’ve learned a lot of things about myself this year and one of them is that it is hardwired into me to be hard on myself, blame myself and see my failings, dwell on things and be hurt by things.

I’ve learned that i see myself through other peoples eyes all the time and i trust those words, good or bad, more than my internal voice, unless i’m very careful. I recognise now that i can’t change that totally, it is my nature for whatever reason, but i can manage it and to do that i need to evolve some mechanisms for coping with that side of my personality, so that it doesn’t actually stop me from enjoying my life.

A couple of days ago i was reading something and it asked a question that has its roots in The Matrix. Now i’ve never watched this film, so i may have it wrong, but whatever the film is about, the question was this. “If someone plucked you out of your life and gave you two options, which would you choose? The options are ‘take the blue pill and all the bad things that have happened will still have happened but you won’t know about them’ or ‘take the red pill and go back down with the all the hurt but all the knowledge it has brought’.”

I’m amazed, i can hardly believe it, but the moment i read it, i knew i wouldn’t take the blue pill. However much it all hurts, however much the scars are still red and sore, i’d choose to carry on. If i can’t actually alter the past then i’d rather acknowledge it and learn from it than obliviate it, i owe that baby that much at least. I’m not glad about what has happened, but i’m fairly sure i’ll end up a better person because of it. I feel better; i feel a bit more self-possessed from what i’ve been through this year, i feel more “this is me and if you don’t like it you can **** off” and i think that probably amounts to a slightly thicker skin.

There are days when i feel a bit like Frodo at the end of LOTRs, home and content but “wounded with knife, sting and tooth, and a long burden” and i know none of that will ever really go. But also, the dread that has circled around me since my friend died when i was 18, that something terrible was coming and that everything bad that happened was just a warning, one step to the side of me, has gone. I don’t fear the future anymore, i feel like i have dealt with utter and total tragedy for all of us and i’m not frightened anymore. I know bad and terrible things might still happen, but i’m not waiting for them.

The next month is going to be really hard; i’d have been due on the 14th and i’m dreading it. I know it will just be another day, i know it wouldn’t have come then, it would have come by section a week earlier, or sometime over Christmas, but even so, December feels utterly horrid at the moment. It will be the end of 2006, the year i have long dreaded as the year the pattern would be broken. I wish i wasn’t leaving my babies making days behind and i wish i wasn’t leaving them like this, broken-hearted because i wasn’t sensible enough to take more care. And i daresay i’ll do things and say things over the next month that people won’t approve of, or perhaps will sneer at, but you know what? I don’t give a ****. And that’s progress.

… an ebayer has just asked me if HappyMais is gluten free.

I’m not entirely sure how to answer!

Despite how it felt, it wasn’t all parcels! (Although, i’ve just printed out my end of week report and i sent 182! )

Tuesday we had a visit from H and co - finally, the kids all seemed to relax with each other and we barely saw them as they were too busy hurtling about in witch outfits, playing gamecube and various other slightly insane pursuits. This did mean that h and i got lovely chatting time, aside from trying to stop the only boy in residence from flinging himself down the stairs. At some point Kate turned up (i measured her all round last night… 44 inches round at 31 weeks!) and we gossiped more. Josie chose this moment to choke; upended her quickly to see a geomag and ball fall out of her mouth so put her back down, only for her to carry on choking and beginning to turn blue Much back banging, fighting her as she frantically tried to cuddle me and eventually the full on heimlich manoeuvre (thank god i learned that at the age of 12) got the other geoball up that must have gone quite a long way down before it got stuck

I wouldn’t mind, but she was right in front of me; i’d mind even less if she’d learned from it but that evening i heard her going up the stairs with a mouth full of the balls! We’ve put them away for now; in a house of 4 kids and 3 floors, i really can’t risk her choking somewhere i can’t see her. When my brother was 9 months or so, he choked on a 1/2p piece and was blue and floopy when the 5 year old friend who was round dragged him into where my mum was. It was horrible and i’d rather be excused the experience!

As it was, all credit to the happy pills because my heartbeat didn’t even increase; i don’t think H or Kate could quite believe how unphased i was!

Tuesday ended up with me banning going to dancing because they had scattered al ltheir stuff, lost their hairbrushes and didn’t get ready despite being asked several times and frankly, i’m not going to spend my blood pressure on shrieking at them about it.

Wednesday was somewhat hampered by the whole late delivery thing but it didn’t seem to bother the girls; after a period of being very antzy with one another, they’ve rebonded lately and are playing beautifully. Lots of gamecube, some reading, some EdCity, lots of fimo-ing - they’ve got much better at just “getting on” with stuff.

In the afternoon we went out to That Painting Place. my 3 seem to respond pretty well to being “taught”, although Fran did get a bit stressed by trying to paint thin lines, but she did stick at it and imprive and all of them did nice mugs. Amelie’s was gorgeous, she has almost more patience than anyone else! I’m really looking forward to seeing it.

We’re giving swimming a miss for a bit, though i will try to take them on Sunday nights; i want to reorganise our week a bit and between now and Xmas, i could just use the break from the onslaught of evening rushing about. Maddy has requested more HE groups though, so i must investigate going to the eo group again. I’ve been such a hermit this year, i’m amazed anyone can remember who i am!

Thursday was good; we did a bit of a clear up then they spent a lot of the day doing Fimo, while i read to them. We read about Christopher Columbus and had the globe out so we could look at all the places; covered lots of geography including various seas and oceans, the Panama and Suez canals, Cuba and the Cuban Crisis, what a continent is, the difference between the Arctic and Antarctic and what to do if you ever happen to be stood on the Arctic on the day it melts (!!!) and of course the actual point of the story too. Linked up Ferdinand and Isabella with Katharine of Aragon, discussed some European History (luckily the subject of my A Level History, some of which i can even remember!) and talked about the disease exchange between Europeans and Natives, discussed the gold/no gold issue and a variety of shipping terms and ideas (back to mapping there!). Finished it in 2 days, since this was pretty much Fridays educational doodah too and the kids really liked it. Decided that as we’d done quite a few famous people/explorers this year we’d keep on with that and do some on the Sonlight American core i bought (in our own way, of course!)

Thursday also meant a family trip to Fran’s Brownie show which was erm.. exquisite torture. Lots of embarrassed dancing in the first half, but then a rather lovely campfire singing session as the second half. Fran does seem a bit lost there at times, but did love the campfire stuff, especially when Josie decided that she wasn’t going to be left out and went and plonked herself on Frans lap. That wasn’t so bad, but towards then end she decided to pretend to be a dog and started crawling around doing big puppy eyes and licking knees By that time though, i’d given up trying to control her as she already made Max and i roll our eyes at each other by shrieking “I finished that side mummy.. i want other side boob!!!!” for all to hear!!!

I am thinking of geting involved with Brownes though, when Maddym oves up, because then the timing will be better and i can leave the little ones with Max. I’d like to be a brown Owl one day i think

And i’ll leave you with this comment from Fran…

“I like the way you home educate us mummy, but when i home educate my children, i’m going to teach them to read when they are little and then just give them loads of history books and let them have quiet time to read them every day.”

:wall: :wall: :wall: :wall: :wall: :wall: :wall: :wall:

I’m splitting this into 2 parts because business plays such a major part of life these days that i want to be enjoying documenting it but also, more relevantly, writing it out and keeping a close check on how the days go is going to be really important in making sure i keep adjusting the balances.

So - to get the business bit out of the way… the 38 order day hasn’t been repeated in volume but everything is ticking along very nicely. I’m mainly working till 1-2am on things, to keep the mornings clear but it is having an impact on family life, though i’m trying to keep it to a minimum. Had a stressful day on Wednesday when a delivery didn’t materialise on time and Lucy and i ended up working till gone midnight on the backlog and putting it away. Gotta love people who’ll help like that. Max has been a star at stockman duties, tea bringing, printing orders and making up boxes to send out. He’s really buying into it and it makes it all so much so bearable really, because i feel so supported.

The kids, fortunately, find it all really exciting and are helping out loads with things. We talked more on production lines (while sticking on labels) all about strong shapes and profit margins (while discussing why i send out in boxes now) customer service (after i phoned up to complain about my collection driver) done a bit of geometry (working out how to put different shaped boxes sensibly into postal bags and why rectangles and squares fit so nicely) and the effect of lack of sleep on the brain (why mummy was grumpy after working till 2am!) We’ve also covered loads on averages (packet post means i pay an average weight per parcel rather than weighing each separately) and weights in general (why 90000g of post cost more to sen that 17000 but i don’t pay much different per parcel) and the different types of weight measures on my scales.

Lol… so much for splitting out work and education. That’s how it should be i suppose

Anyway, big news on the business front also… Lucy is now working far more from home than here and has taken over all the admin. My big thing for taking on Lucy and outsourcing this stuff was that i wanted time to work on my Google ratings and try to get BM organically on to the front page of google, as opposed to just because i pay - and yesterday it happened. Google being what it is, that will undoubtedly change a bit - and i still want to be in the top results not the bottom half - but it gives me the flexibility to start laying with my advert costs a bit. I am SO blooming chuffed about it. If i can get to a point where i knock out my adwords, i’ll be saving up to £300 a month! So looks like the Lucy decision is working out. I also got Meg, who i heartily recommend for website design, to redesign the shop a bit and make the added value content buttons more visible. I think it looks really good.

Oh yes, my whinge of the week is my blooming collection driver, 1 of 3 i get on a rolling basis, who i told clearly on Wednesday when i only gave him 8 parcels, that the day after would be extremely heavy volume as i already had 50 parcels upstairs waiting for 1 item each. I WARNED him and he muttered and walked away from me, hardly listening. So yesterday, when he arrived to find 72 parcels waiting for him, he got progressively more sour faced about it and then moaned i should have phoned for a relief collection. I pointed out that a) i had warned him but he hadn’t bothered to listen properly and b) no one had ever mentioned this option and c) i’d just put £235 worth of stamps on parcles that pay his wages and i was blessed if i wanted to be told off at my doorstep - and then phoned his line manager to complain. Bloody cheek.

And finally, for this bit, last night i summoned up all my courage and added a contribution for my site - all on my own! Jax held my hand for the database bit (thank you again) but i actually did it (and even came up with a way round an error message on my own too!) and then i replaced all the required files (having even backed them up first, which is not my normal style!) and IT WORKED!!!! I was loathed to pay to for it, because essentially it is just a back office bit of fluff, but in fact it works really well and will really help my insight into how customers are shopping.

More importantly though, i was brave enough to do something i was frightened of - hurrah for me!

Back later, do actually have interesting HE stuff to write too.

… i’ve just had to email my next door neighbour to ask if she knows where my oven tray is. Tickled me, did that!

Tomorrow. 1pm. Prime your children for winter mug painting… £8.50 a head.
Be there or… be more relaxed at home eating jaffa cakes.

… or in Josie world, it was Jan who was kissing him.

and shortly after, Jonathan came along and knocked him down.

Oh how i laughed (But then stood on Alison!)

And this is my living room.

I think we might have to move.

Max did double the RAM in my laptop though, which means it has now recovered itself to a point where i can actually use it. Wonder if he could do that with my head… i think i need a duo core processor in my brain….

… that considering Josie walks around naked all day, i haven’t stood in a puddle for a long time. I think she must be using the toilet!!!!
(I’m such a bad mother… honestly!)

You get a blog! I can’t actually cope; i’ve looked at it all carefully and i can’t quite believe what has happened and therefore i think i might just ignore it. 38 orders (and 8 ebay ones) in one day. Mindblowing. I took well over £1000; i only took £1600 in the whole of last December!

So anyway; here are my daughters in “Little House on the Showground” mode…

and here is what we did today.

One HappyMais Tropical Island…

Some mapping activities…

A first try; both girls drew it the opposite way to how it actually was, so then we added compasses to it all and figured out that none of it was very helpful. So we had another go, including a bit of conversation on how to accurately copy shapes and then fibnally Fran and i worked on using a ruler and grid to produce a reasonably well scaled version.

Personally, i love Maddy’s boatman with fish head popping up from the water.

Actually what the kids mostly did today was rehearse and eventually perform a song from The Little mermaid. Maddy was Sebastian (rather wonderfully), Amelie was Ariel and Fran was an add on Mermaid/prompter. they put loads of effort into it and the set, really got Amelie and Josie involved and did a great job. In fact, if i can figure out YouTube, i might try a video tomorrow.

They also did some rather cute Fimo models and um… gosh, no idea. But they were busy all day and eventually all fell asleep on the floor in a fleece tent.

Okay, back to the parcels then!

I have just seen a goal fulfilled that i’ve had as a benchmark aim since the day Jax put my shop live, just under 2 years ago. I just filled an entire order summary page in the admin section with orders from one day - i’ve had 20 orders through the site today. I am SO chuffed!!!!!!!!!!!

Hurrah for special offers!!!!! Hurrah for Christmas! Hurrah for retail!!!!!!

… I am REALLY looking forward to Melrose this year. Feel more excited about it than any MP thing in ages.

So much for my plans… children didn’t need me!

The kids are really self-sufficient these days, which is quite bizarre really. Such a big change from really not so long ago and definitely one of the big deals about this house; one of the massive upsides of more space and more room to spread out and do their own thing has been a greater degree of opportunity for autonomy. It fascinates me to increasingly hear my children engaged in conversation and projects around me; i find someone immersed in a pile of books behind a sofa, a pile of emergent writing on a table, a model built by someone left on a baking tray ready for me to cook. If they want something they know what they can help themselves to from my stock room, they feed the rabbits themselves (if not unprompted!)

This weekend has had a lot of gamecubing in it, mostly Mario Party (can’t buy Gamecube games in Game anymore. HUH!!!!!) but lovely co-operative play with teams and Josie being included and adding stars on for Amelie so she doesn’t get left behind. Amelie and Maddy made some amazing Fimo Nintendo characters, which sadly Josie mangled. Lots of Playmobil got played, some snuggly film watching all together. The girls rehearsed a Little Mermaid show (Amanda, MUST send yours back to you! Remind me!) Life feels an awful lot easier now and i’m kind of miserable to admit that i’m glad it won’t be getting harder again anytime soon. Really, business is just so busy and the Christmas rush is just all i can manage. I can take in 3 days now as much as i took in the whole of last December!

Yesterday was another huge business breakthrough day; i took over £500 (actually nearly £600) in one day. I’ve applied for a credit card machine at home now, which will give me other options and Max and i have written a business plan (well, the start of one!) that draws out what we need to do to both be employed by the business and living in our dream area within 3 years. It is more than slightly terrifying when you get to talking about those figures. More terrifying is that i actually think it might be possible to achieve. I can hardly believe that something that started in 6 plastic crates with £300 actually might end up being our livelihood. If we could achieve that within 3 years… well… how fantastic to have both of us at home with the kids. Fran would only be 12, she’d still have so much of her childhood to enjoy without having one parent out of the home all day. Yes, we’d both have to work hard still, but the plan included employees and still living and working from one place. It might just be do-able.

***navel gazing from here in***

So yes, the future is opening up a little again. Oh i so want this year to be over, i so want to feel free again. Just now i feel an awful lot like my laptop; distinctly short on processing power. I need more RAM. One bit of my brain is running a program that i can’t shift; it has crashed and i can’t get that stupid little box to close and shut it down. 30% of my brain is just running one constant process that drains and exhausts me and won’t go away. 30% is directed at the children and the house, 30% at business. The last little 10% is trying to put me back together, slightly hampered by the 30% that wants me to send an error report in to Microsoft. There isn’t room for forward planning, or recovery or working out who i am anymore because i just don’t have the available resources to do it. I end up sitting up late at night, crying and crying and trying to make sense of the utterly endless dreams and nightmares and flashbacks and reactions that are utterly out of proportion to my life as i want it. And then i can’t sleep, because i’m too wound up and alone - and then i’m tired - and then my processor just has to wait till i hold down a key long enough for my whole system to reset.

It’s exhausting.

However, i have managed to put together a few thoughts which are effectively a few bricks in the wall that i’ll end up sat back on top of. I’m slowly running a defrag (oh how i wish that sorting out one’s brain was as simple as getting PCWorld to courier over more RAM) Anyway… a few of the things that are gradually getting kicked out into the line up of my life, courtesy of the very helpful way i’m learning to think at counselling, are as follows…..

*You can’t second guess life; sometimes “what seems best at the time” is just that - and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the split is so close to 50/50 that you are stuck with just making a judgement call and living with the fallout. So, for example (not that this is my primary bit of thought on this, tbh)… i could keep BM small and minimise the impact on the next 3 years - or i could risk the fact that it might be a tough 3 years on us all, that it might even eventually mean the kids spend sometime in school or nursery, but that in 3 years time we get a fresh start - and hope the previous 3 years haven’t actually redirected that goal too far off course. Or… for another example… i could insist and demand that i’m allowed another baby in 6 months or so and hope i can juggle everything and that that baby allows me to heal - or i could live with not being allowed that and just vaguely hope that if the 3 year plan comes off, either i won’t want one anymore or i can have one then. And that it is okay and makes me feel better. Not that i’m even close to being ready to have another. Not that i even think it would be right now, or indeed ever. But you know, plans and dreams…

*Having options isn’t always the same as having real choice. I can apply this to about 85% of my life at the moment, including how i feel about the way i want the children to be educated. I’m keen to get to a place, very soon, that enables them to have real choice about their day, not just options to choose from. Equally, i’m beginning to accept that when things go wrong, it isn’t always my fault, that i’m not always a total failure in everything i do and that sometimes the blame lies either nowhere, or with someone else. I’m SO embracing the “other peoples baggage” concept. And i’m completely shaking off the boringly British notion of “making a bed and lying in it” -yes i choose to be a WAHM and an HEer and be busy and give up on being Mrs MP and yes i chose to have 4 children close together (seemed like a good idea at the time!) - but sometimes i still want stop the world and get off for a while.

I am also beginning to live with the idea that how other people perceive my life doesn’t actually have to have any bearing on how i see it. I’ve been utterly astonished as my counselling has gone on, to realise how much i view myself in terms of what other people think of me. If i do something good and someone criticises it, i lose all sense of pride. If i have a rough time and someone else’s baggage invalidates my feelings, i stop giving myself any right to recovery. If someone else has a different personality trait, a different set of life experiences that means their reactions are different, that doesn’t mean i reacted wrongly.

What is it with me that means that 10 loving, gentle people can be kind and accepting and want to help and support and then one person is venomous and damaging and i listen to them the most? Where did i learn that? Well, actually i probably know - but quite frankly, 32 is too old to be living life lessons learned at 7. Baggage, baggage, baggage….. off the bridge, into the water, floating away down the river. Bye bye, thank you and goodnight.

There is a perfect Elton John line for this (wouldn’t want to disappoint Nic, if anyone actually made it this far) “Some of us sail through our troubles and some have to live with the scars.” Time to stop picking the scabs and poking them with poisoned sticks. I’m not going to come out of the otherside without some white scars, but i am going to come out the otherside.