… in the fact that once you have time for your children, they aren’t too bothered about having time for you! I’m pretty much on top of things now, so i’m finally getting time to get ahead (almost) and certainly have time to “do” things – and so they’ve all got addicted to PlayMobil and haven’t wanted to look at me at all. In fact, they’ve had days this week with 3 adults on tap and we’ve had to beg for their attention!

I did a busy day at work yesterday and got lots of stupid jobs done, like filling in credit forms, sorting out images for window decals for the unit and a variety of other bits and bobs. Feeling very pleased to have paid all the stock bills, rent, loan, wages, postage costs, site work costs and put aside VAT and tax with a whole 4 days of the month left and some in hand. It has been a really tight month, so it is good to have managed it without too much juggling. If i could manage to have a decent last 4 days (but i’m not holding my breath) then it would end well. We are going to get absolutely down to the last day to see if we manage to hit £200k turnover for the year, so this weekend is absolute make or break. Then the books go off to the accountant and after that it should be time to go Limited.
I’ve been working really hard on search engine stuff for BM, because the PM gets a lot of work done on it next week and then i will want to give it plenty of attention and let BM tick over for a while. I’m managing to be quite disciplined about consistent work, which is good.

Last night Max and i went out for dinner, which was also great but as i’d worked in the day yesterday i was determined the kids were going to talk to me today, even if it did drag them away from their game. We actually had lots of fun; S did a lot of clock work with Maddy and Amelie, from worksheets to work with a clock to time telling snap and Fran and i did the division questions on Meleto. She still really likes that, though i can’t say it is much of a stretch for her, she just seems to be so quick at mental maths. She’s certainly quicker than me, because i just can’t hold numbers in my head at all. In fact, i signed myself up to the highest level of the adult classes (probably only GSCE level at most) today because i think i’m going to need to familiarise myself with some of what she’ll be doing quite soon. I can’t decide if that is dedicated of me or slightly ridiculous?

After that she and i looked at some EC Science and i moved her on to Yr 6 as apparently Yr 5 was boring. Various stuff about forces and states on that so she enjoyed it. Then she went and read to Fiver, having cleaned him out. She’s on Chp 14 of HP1 now and has loved it

Maddy and Amelie did the clock stuff and then read together with S. Maddy is confident enough to read Amelia Bedilia stories out loud now, so Amelie enjoyed listening. Must find a set of books to suit Ams actually, she needs me to give her more input on that. We had lunch and then we all played French Lotto together and after that i had to let them go back to their game.

Josie got an Penguin enclosure for PlayMobil as a little treat (all the others had some new clothes and Maddy is officially thrilled with the shipment of blue from Pumpkin Patch) and so her penguin addiction has got even more fuel added to it now! She has played PlayMobil even more thoroughly than the others; i think yesterday and today she did several 2-3 hour stints on her own, just chatting away to herself. However today she flagged a bit and so she and i curled up and watched March of the Penguins. She did keep asking when the penguins would start talking but she still liked it. So did i, though the cracked frozen egg was a bit sad and so was the mummy penguin driven to steal another chick after hers died Poor pinguinos

Such was my children’s’ lack of interest in me in the afternoon that i cleared out under my bed and then spent a long time playing with samples of a new product. I like it very much Yum yum fun.

Kids will be away for the weekend as Max and i have to stock take. Is there something very wrong with me if i say i am quite looking forward to doing that?

We don’t just have a water cooler in our unit (how big time?!?!?!?) we have a water cooler with its own Polar Bears!

We had snow (and the north wind) and hail etc etc etc. Quite a lot of sun. Weird weather all round in fact.

Trying to think what has gone on, though i think that it was mainly quite a lot of not very much. I could be wrong. We seem to have had a really lovely weekend together though, so that is good. I’ve slept an awful lot, in a sort of “oh my god, i have to lie down NOW just for 15 minutes” kind of a way that then involved me waking up 3 hours later. I’m sure i needed it. I resorted to taking Minadex once i started to wonder if it might be that i was running low on iron.

Friday i think i ran away to work and hid there for a lot of the day. We’ve got absolutely no recollection of what the children did on individual days at all but it has mainly involved playing in small amounts of snow, vast quantities of Club Penguin, vast amounts of racing 1950′s cars around computers, lots of DSing, a fair amount of playing board games, films, wii and playing playmobile. In fact, now i really can’t think where 4 days has gone at all. I stayed home saturday and sunday (we’d planned to go to my parents but the weather was so unpredictable we stayed home) and i worked today.

Josie and Amelie have been playing Monkey Ball and Pictochat on the DS’s – Amelie has taught Josie everything and Josie is very proud as she can download all on her own. (The baby is using a DS – whatever next?) They’ve played for hours, even curling up in bed together with them. Very cute. Maddy was allowed a Penguin and she and Fran have been shrieking “meet you in Sherbert!” or “Come for coffee and pizza!” across the house for a lot of the time. Fran is also a killer turn in a Jaguar apparently and i think Max is worried he may soon be outclassed around the track.

Trying to think what else? Oh yes, we did a selection of Easter Crafts from Tesco on Saturday, including various cards and lots of pre bought Foamie kits. Trying not be be irate at Tesco selling rectangles of felt fabric in a packet marked “felt SQUARES”. (Grumble.) That was fun, though i upset Maddy who was in full on ‘i know there is chocolate in the house so i can’t focus on anything’ mode. Ah well. Actually, that was Friday. We gave them chocolate on Saturday to suspend the suspense (!) Fran sewed me a felt Easter Egg

Maddy is reading for all she is worth because she wants (desperately) to read The Diddakoi for herself. Bless. We finished it (managed not to cry.. just…). Last night we watched the last Back to the Future film, which annoyingly stuck and gave up 2 minutes from the end; how irritating after 3 films?!??!?!!??!!? Nice though; i recokon if they all watch it another 30 times a fim, they might get the plot. Max and i watched Miss Potter – loved it – must visit lakes IMMEDIATELY!

Yesterday the elder 4 of us had a game of Settlers of Catan – Maddy was ruthless as ever (she would be a good pirate) but i won. Whooped them all. We do have a slight problem that everyone always seems to gang up on Max because we just assume he will win! Great game though, really enjoyed it. Fran has been playing Sid Meiers Pirates today (sure there is some geography and history in there somewhere) while the younger 3, who seem more of a pack now with Fran just seeming a little older, have PlayMobiled for 2 days solid, more or less.

Oh – and Fran, who read a huge Doctor Dolittle last week, has been staying up till gawd knows when reading Harry Potter. At last

The North Wind doth blow and we shall have snow,
And what will poor robin do then, poor thing?
He’ll sit in a barn and keep himself warm
and hide his head under his wing, poor thing.

Our mum used to say that poem to me (and no doubt to Greer and Rich too) a lot when i was little. It’s one of the things, along with thumb outline dog faces and 3 intertwined fish drawings that i think of when i think of being a very little girl, in the substantial handful of clear memories that i have of being an only child. I was an only child for quite a while, Greer didn’t come along till i was a little older than Josie is now and i can remember lots of trips out in my mum’s white Mini, visits to my Nana’s ‘Flower House”, days where we picked mum up from a locum at Anderson’s the Chemist. I can remember being taken into London by my Dad on days when he needed to go back into Fleet Street, being shown Dick Whittington’s House, looking up at the huge grey buildings of the City and absorbing the rush. I remember finding my Wendy House on Christmas morning in a dining room neither of my siblings ever saw (Greer was only months old when we left), being late back to my nursery class because me and Glenn had been at the wrong end of the field when the bell went. I remember missing lots of that early nursery year at school with terrible earaches that kept me tucked up on the settee waiting for doctor visits. I remember my black plastic doctor bag and my white nurses case.

I can clearly recall finding my mum had left me at playgroup for the first time, i know my first ever stage role was as Red Riding Hoods Granny when i was perhaps only 2. I can perfectly recollect the tunnel of trees across a road near Chelmsford that was between my grandparents house and our home, the sight and smell of the stubble burning at the end of the summer and the signs that warned of deer (which we saw for real only once) along the kerbside. I can picture that Essex landscape perfectly as a tiny girl in that tiny car and i know that it from then i remember it, not from revisiting my grandparents later on. There is a scar on my arm from the day the 2 big girls (of oooh, nearly 10 years old perhaps) took me to the field at the back and i cut my arm on barbed wire. Those girls had rabbits; my baby blanket still has a tiny footprint on it from a mark left by a baby rabbit. Actually, it probably isn’t that at all, but that is what i attributed the mark to for 30 years, till just now.

We lived in a road called Stocksfield and it had a set of stocks at the end of the road, just as they had been since whenever they stopped being used. My mum used to put me in them for fun when we walked home. Sometimes we visited Mrs Barnes up the road; an old, old lady even then, who made me Blue Bunny and Barney Rabbit and other odds and sods too. My mum kept in touch with her; she only died a few years ago. My whole life just a flicker at the end of her long years. She was a wise lady, i know my mum had a huge amount of time for her although i am not quite sure why. I’m tempted, now i know what it is like to have secrets from my children that are hidden in my heart, to ask why. Mrs Barnes and the stocks seem now to be bathed in perpetual Essex, straw coloured sunlight; for years after we left, when i was 4, i thought of them every time i reread (with relish) my books on 16th and 17th century history and the barbarisms they laced into everyday life. In those brief 2 years or so i had freedoms that i don’t think my childhood ever had again; i was so little and yet i played in the Mews, out of site of my house, with a gang of other children; Sarah the tomboy, Stuart the Barbarian, Carol and Jayne (?) the ‘big girls’ and Vicky, my soul mate and the girl who was my first Buttercup-like friend. i don’t think i was seen for hours at a time, but i know i was safe and happy. We collected (and dissected) caterpillars, explored, fought, gamed and cuddled animals and it was bliss.

Odd, until now i’ve almost forgotten it.

Mum and i planted a willow tree in the garden that was all mine, because i loved them, just as Fran used to love them. It grew for a couple of years and then we moved. When we went back to visit the neighbours, i climbed their slide and saw that my willow had been dug up and taken away. It seemed a very rude thing to have done. It was, after all, my tree.

The for sale sign went up; i remember a big blue sign “For Sale by Sail” because i know that one used to be everywhere, but apparently they didn’t sell our house. It was 1977 and i must have already been able to read because i knew exactly what that sign said and i was furious because no one had told me we were moving. I blamed it on my new baby sister. I wasn’t keen on her at all. People tell the story of the ambulance and the midwife who brought mum and her home; the midwife held out a bundle of blankets and said “your baby sister’s in here somewhere!” and i can remember thinking “SO?!?!?!?!” I was cross because she had a Benjamin Bunny baby blanket that had been bought specially for her and it was the same size as my Creamy Blnket but i wanted it too. I kept stealing it out of the cupboard in my mum and dad’s room and eventually mum had to sew it into red flowery material with a yellow trim to dim it’s tantalising brightness.

My sister never really hooked on to that blanket, or any cuddly like i did. She tried, with a pink and white sheet of which there were actually two. I treated her with contempt for not having proper passion for one special thing. Sorry about that Greerie I don’t think i quite forgave her for not at the very least loving that Benjamin Bunny blanket properly.

We moved and my mum started a job and a phD at Nottingham University and i went from a little school i liked to one where i was very unhappy – and Nottingham seemed to mainly be cold, grey and rainy – and there was this sister who kept getting bigger and in my space so i made her miserable by pushing her out of it. And mum got busier and was never a full time at home mum again (she went back to work when our brother was 2 weeks old!). There wasn’t so much time for poems or nursery rhymes and the phD turned into piles of paper on the kitchen worktop that cluttered all our space. And the exam papers and lecture preparation turned into long afternoons with my mum working by the living room fire in a living room with brown carpet and a tiny tv and a radiator to sit on in a big bay window. Everyone was busy and everyone seemed to have more fun that me; while i went to school, my brother and sister still seemed to be at home having fun with dad, going to playgroup and feeding the ducks and getting visits from “the egg man” who loved them. I had homework and a bully and a body i didn’t seem to fit inside and this weight of worry and sadness inside me that didn’t seem to go away. I never seemed to be good enough any more and all the sun and the freedom went away. I hid away in my bedroom, locked inside an imaginary world and shouted at the one person i could have relied on to be my friend. I feel bad about that now.

Inexorably, the pressure to pass those wretched 11+ exams mounted, with the entire fate of the family seeming to rest on what i did and how i performed; ultimately too in what choices i made. When i passed them all (and oh the pressure, hard to believe i was just Fran’s age), i chose Loughborough and we ALL moved. Mum worked in Leicester already so the family sold up, upped sticks and followed my choice, so ultimately i shaped everyone’s future in that one 10 year old’s decision, the fate of my parents and their future life choices and the schools, friends and lives of my siblings.
Our house now, the one we live in here, faces both North and South and sometimes has sun and sometimes has rain. The weather, mostly, seems to come from the south, running up the A1 and into our back window. I like it; we’re lucky to have open space and a panoramic view outside, lots of light and an ever changing scene. This week though, the wind has blown from the North and hail and wind and rain and snow has hurled itself down the channel of road in front of our house. I’ve been thinking, as it blew, that it is astonishing to look at a chain of events and see where they bring you. I drove passed this very spot several times a year, en route from Nottingham to Chelmsford, passed the sign for Normans Cross, passed a petrol station that looked like the Star Ship Enterprise, passed the sign for Barnack and Stilton and passed the sign for the village our local Post Office is now in. It always seemed to call out and now here i am, living here, in a house that was just a field at the time.

Had my mum not decided to better our lot and do that phD, had we not moved, i might not have been here. PNEU Springfield might have been a haven of friendship and happiness that PNEU Nottingham just never was; Stocksfield might have been my home till i was 18, when i went off and married an Essex boy. I might have grown up being taught to knit and sew and bake by Mrs Barnes and my Nan just down the road, i might never have had a brother. I might have had my babies in the hospital my sister was born in, i might be happily working in some theatre in London or shop in Brentwood.

Or would fate have blown me inexorably to Loughborough, as it seemed to be doing on the day when i suddenly felt the need to move back home and found myself meeting Max almost at once. Did the inadequacies of Peterborough Maternity Unit actually produce 4 babies that St James might have killed? Would a different bully have surfaced at my school in Essex to blight me, or would the one in Nottingham have turned on someone else and driven them deeper than she ever drove me? Would i be home educating, beadingmerrily and quietly letting my life choices consume me anyway?

Who knows?

I do hope, i truly do, that my children won’t remember me as someone always sad, always busy or always needing to do something else. I hope they know i adore being with them. The seem to have a more solid and compact relationship with each other than i let myself have with my sister and i’m grateful that that is so – i see now that it was very much my own failing. I do need my own space, always have, but there was no need to be mean about it. If nothing else, i hope i’ve corrected the balance in our life before it is too late, so even if they remember a harrassed, weepy, in-a-minute mummy when they were very young, they know she had been replaced by sunny, let’s-do-the-show-right-here mum by the time they were old enough to never forget it.

I think it might be a good idea if you told people who have linked to Craft Castle that it now redirects to an adult site!!!!!