General

Motherhood – it’s written in my stars.

March 13, 2015 by Merry 1 Comment

“Can you just write a note in my log book?”

“Is there anything for our lunches?”

“Need milk.”

“Have you booked my blood test yet?

“Will you be back to spend the day with me or are you at work all day?”

“Have you paid for my trip deposit?”

“When am I going to the dentist?”

“Neeeeeeeeeeeed milk!!!!”

Most of this – and probably 20 other questions, demands or queries – had happened before 8am this morning, while I was trying to justify myself in a text conversation to some one else, get 4 people and myself ready to leave the house, find my purse and laptop and not cry about the death of my favourite author.

By 10am I had delivered a sobbing toddler to nursery (cue enormous guilt), taken 2 to one school and 1 for a blood test and then to school, had a fairly serious and significant conversation to a governing body, been to work, rescued 50% of my laptop from somewhere I had left it and cried 3 times.

And that’s after a decent night of sleep, not something I get very often. Not something I’ve HAD very often in the last 17 years.

If I could have read my future way back then, I’m sorry to say I might have seen the current state of affairs and been a large step beyond daunted. I think we might have stopped several children earlier. Most days are an assault course of issues to be managed and problems to be solved, challenges that require a hugely speedy gear change from ‘older teen with quiet common sense’ to ‘younger teen with no sense at all’ to ‘toddler tantrum’ mode, time and time again. Most days I get to 10pm and I’m simply exhausted, mentally more than physically. This week I had 31 things on my to do list on Wednesday, mostly work but perhaps 12 or 13 small but time consuming things that needed doing to keep my not so small family running.

One lesson I’ve learned is that while a crowd of small children is physically wearing, teens are much more mentally exhausting, even if, by and large, they are good kids. And all of ours are. The pressures on them build up into pressures at home and mothering it is hard going, a mental agility game with regular hormonal sideswipes coming at you unexpectedly.

It leaves very little time for other concerns; one skill I’ve learned is to think on my feet quickly and try to make the best possible compromise decision that I can but I have to accept that a) that means I won’t always have a spot on perfect answer and b) I have very little tolerance for people with lots of time to ruminate and chew the cud.

I often tell people that I was truly hopeless as a parent when I first became one. My heart was in the right place but my skills were severely lacking. I’ve had to learn to control a temper that is fiery at best and an emotional side that requires me to learn to breathe in and out a lot. I’ve had to learn to be less selfish (and consistently too… 17 years of putting other people first and 15 still to go) and more flexible. I’ve had to learn not to live my life through my kids and let them take their own path and I’ve had to grow considerably in terms of my ability to lead by example and accept they might go a different way. And I’d say I still have a fair way to go.

I’d say I’ve learned most of the selflessness that mothering requires at the side of hospital beds. It’s then that you truly find yourself confronted with what unconditional love is. It strips away everything and leaves you stood opposite Death and all his potential and it strips you naked too. I’d bargain my soul for the life of one of my children and that isn’t something I understood until the moment I first held a child in my arms.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t give £50 for them all to go away and stop asking me things at 7.32am 😉 But the times that are great, watching them grow and achieve and mature, the times we have fun and laugh and love the moment? They make it all worth while.

This is a collaborative post.

Don’t Write Bollocks.

March 1, 2015 by Merry Leave a Comment

You wouldn’t think it would be a difficult rule to follow, really, the one in the title. The internet makes us all writers, gives us all an audience, provides us with endless opportunities to read, learn, digest. It’s hard not to inhale information when Facebook is filled with links, videos, rants, shares and the like. And if you move your face from Facebook (clue is in the name), my word, you could learn a lot.

Let us not forget that in only a few hundred years we’ve come from not even being allowed to read the book we were supposed to live by in our own language, right through ‘the holy grail is a job being allowed to write for a newspaper or get a book deal’ to ‘open laptop and splurge opinion out to several hundred people at once’. And audience. A community. The ability to inform and be informed.

With that information dissemination blessing comes responsibility of course.

For the love of goodness, don’t press share until you’ve checked it is real. Snopes, my friends, Snopes.
For the love of sanity, don’t share repetitive, needy memes. If it starts “it occurs to me”… it needs deleting.
Don’t write something unless you are happy to stand by it (and that includes passive aggressive Facebook updates).
Learn fast: if you use Google as your doctor, you’ll be dead 6 times by dinner.

But Google. We could blame a lot on Google. If you are old enough to remember life before a decent search engine, you’ll know that once upon a time, when you searched for something you got, by and large, a useful page written by someone with a passion who knew something about the subject matter. Or, you know, possibly you would get drivel with the most important word in the article written 55 times in white text at the bottom of the page. But still, mostly you got somewhere real.

And then came ‘content’, regular updated content, which is a whole different thing to ‘words on the virtual page that someone really wanted to write’. Meaningful keywords and meta descriptions and all that jazz to keep websites fresh and lovely and churning over in the Google machine. And of course, so came blogs and all the wonder that is what blogging which can do. Which is great, really great. I love blogging. The world is made better by blogging. MY world is made better by blogging. Infinitely.

But if Google was a cupboard under the stairs, it would have a serious date with a 40 day declutter.

And I’m far from guilt-free. I make part of my living writing copy for websites, trying to put together something half way meaningful from facts gleaned off the internet, a few nuggets of opinion and ideas of my own and a healthy smattering of keywords and useful phrases. It’s not perfect but I do it a whole lot better than some people who also get paid not very much at all to assemble words on a production line. And of course there are the times when trying to write for money, on my blog or elsewhere, squeezes out every last individual thought I have and all the energy for writing something worth saying.

It happens. It’s not pretty and it’s self-defeating in the end, but it happens. Possibly as self-defeating as raging against your own industry.

The thing is, in amongst all these words and all the splurging of beautiful and boorish writing, of eloquence and assaults on grammar, come headlines like this:-

“Practical Tips for Thoughtful Self Gifting”.

It’s like something from the feverish dreams of a copywriter; charged with the creation of a mail-out sales spiel to remind humans, in the ever growing scream of cacophonous void that is the internet, to come and buy… come and buy.

“Here is help on how to buy something you want, for yourself”.

Really? Has the world improved for this? Are humans so dumb now that we need help – practical help – on buying something nice for ourselves?

If this is sales and content, we need a new ploy. We are filling the universe sized space of the internet with an ever decreasing circle of meaningless nonsense; once that headline gets past an editor, are we lost?

It’s an amazing thing, being able to find words, hear words, create words. It’s the ultimate liberty, to have the right to write and the right to read and hear. And the internet is made better by the raw outpourings and connections of words like these, the raging rant of the grateful mother, pulled under by the every day ordinariness that most of us don’t ‘Facebook’ for fear of either being sectioned, seen as less than perfect, or deemed needy.

My lovely friend Josie, who lives a life making a living much as I do, with words (only I fear, rather more connected to her soul as she does so) wrote about losing her voice online. I know I have; somewhere in the fear of accidentally plagiarising, being unoriginal, speaking words spoken yesterday or being shot down for daring to voice and opinion, I lost my words. I lost them – most of all – because I wrote with such brutal honesty after Freddie died – and nothing I write will ever be as good again.

But if we all think like that, soon the internet will be full of nothing but the cud of redigested copy.

I’ve taken a leaf from Josie’s book – grabbed a notebook and started hunting, in private, for my voice.

Review: Now TV

January 28, 2015 by Merry Leave a Comment

There is nothing quite like a family film to bring the Merrily family together. We get precious few evenings all in the house at the same time, so when we do, it’s lovely to just curl up under the large heap of crochet blankets we own and hunker down together with treats and great TV.

We’ve had the opportunity to try out a number of different tv services over the last year; being skinflints, we don’t subscribe to anything and our children have to put up with no more than Freeview. Our internet connection is appalling and even streaming iPlayer through a normal laptop is next to impossible and we’d long ago given up on catch up TV without a paid for service to streamline them.

In steps NowTV, with a box of goodies, a NowTV box, a month of their movie package and a large quantity of onesies!

I’d like to say that getting my teens to dress up in Christmas Pudding outfits was hard, but frankly, they’ll do anything for a good film and a lot of chocolate.

Did I mention the onesies??

Josie – being an elf – and trying out some of the craft ideas we were sent.

The very cute small boy one… (and his reindeer).

Our first task was to enjoy the delights of the Muppets Most Wanted film, which was a special showing for us to enjoy along with our treats and a Twitter part. This was a bit of a revelation for me; I didn’t realise that services like Now did ‘live tv’ too. I’m not totally sure why exactly, since live tv almost seems to belong to the past but it certainly was fun to sit down to something we had to ‘wait’ for – what a novel concept! (Of course, it was also available on demand, so we had the double delight of making ourselves wait 😉 )

The film itself entertained us enormously, as did the online chatter about it with @NowTV and other bloggers who were partaking too. You can’t beat a Muppets film for sheer outrageous ‘awful but good’-ness. (The end was a bit weird actually, somehow slightly beyond comically macabre…)

Anyway.

That left us with a month to enjoy recent and otherwise unavailable to them films on tv, an opportunity my children threw themselves into with relish. What they loved even more however, was the classics: Mary Poppins, West Side Story, Grease and a host of Disney with The Aristocats a top favourite. There are films that have not made it back out of our garage for Bene because of time or space and the convenience of Youtube that they wanted to introduce him to and the convenience of the Now box let us do that. Plus we were able to play it through the Apple TV box when the remote went missing, which was a major advantage. Registering a second device is easy – you can do 2 in total in your first month – and then another one a month with a maximum of 4.

Max and I indulged in some films we would not otherwise have watched – Batman for one – and really enjoyed revisiting Pleasantville, which I really think is one of the best films ever.

I’ve been a bit of a meanie since our free month ran out and not reapplied the £10 charge to add the movie package back in. I quite fancy trying out the entertainment package at £7 a month, though we are less people who watch casual tv than we are film and series watches; I can see a few ‘boxed sets’ I fancy though (funny to call them that when they so totally aren’t!) and I suspect I’ll be treating the kids to a half term film sub so we can do some family films nights again. I really like that the Now box allows us to use iplayer on our tv, which the AppleTV doesn’t, so that is a huge plus for me and the selection of films was good. We had a tiny bit more trouble with it hanging on our bad internet connection over Xmas than other services we’ve tried but it was minimal and only at peak times. At a £10 set up cost for the box, you can’t beat it really.

Thumbs up from us 🙂

Disclosure: we were sent a NowTV box and goodies for this review. Since we had to dress up as Christmas puddings to earn that right, all views are most certainly our own.

Review: Teen Parcels That Make Periods Better.

November 19, 2014 by Merry 2 Comments

I’m a mum of 4 girls and 2 of them have now gone through that moment where a mum blogger suddenly realises that it is time to STOP.SHARING.

You just can’t blog a period. You did teeth and potty training and the time they fell in the toy box and how they felt when a tooth fell out and what sending them to school did to you. And then periods come and you think…

Um. No. Probably best not. Not a blog post they will want their friends to find.

Possibly not going to thank you for the hashtag on Twitter.

Best leave it.

We are a very open household. I keep my sanitary requirements on show and Max is perfectly happy to go out and buy them for me. Since the older girls have needed supplies, I’ve encouraged them to ask him to get them like they are a normal item. Which they are. Over dinner the other week we ended up talking about this, and how it took me years before I felt comfortable to ask him to get them for me (Why? I have no idea. He watched me give birth so really….) and both big girls said that actually they felt really uncomfortable asking him even now. Max looked on blankly, completely unable to understand why it would be an issue.

“Should I be embarrassed asking you to get me shaving foam?” he asked.

But the truth is – and the nervous giggling of daughter number 2 made it clear that this is so – periods are embarrassing and intimate and a huge rite of passage (excuse the pun) and they manage to carry with them a notion of – and I hesitate to use the word dirty – something unsavoury and secret. Even here, where we don’t in any way ask for Victorian discretion, they’ve imbibed that outdated behaviour.

One problem with being a 3rd daughter – and a bolshy, savvy one at that – is that your mum does tend to forget that you haven’t necessarily had all the carefully considered education the first daughters got. I agonised over how to make sure I broached babies and periods and birth with 1 and 2 but Amelie has been an accessory to those conversations so often that I forgot she hadn’t had them in her own right.

The arrival of a Teen Parcel to review this week was an ideal opportunity to redress this. For once the obvious candidates got passed over and DD3 and I opened the parcel together and took a look inside. It’s suitably pink and all discreetly parcelled up, perfect for 12 year olds who haven’t yet got the hang of yelling “Can you get me some REALLY huge tampons…..?” at the back of a departing bloke with the front door open and on the phone to his rugby mate.

Our pack had a little cloth bag to tuck a tampon/pad supply in your bag and a set of pink parcels, 2 of which contained 25 tampons from the Tampax range and one was stuffed with face cleansers, sparkly nail polish, spot cream, sweeties, a hot chocolate deluxe style drink and a little phone charm.

So we opened it all up and took a good look. We discussed why face stuff might be in there (make you feel good, keep a handle on changing skin which deserves some tlc when hormones rage) and (going against all my frugal efforts) broke into a tampon, popped it out of the applicator, did a demo (through my fingers!) and discussed comfort, angle and reason for use. I explained pubic bones. Go me.

DD3 thought it was marvellous. The bling and indulgence of the whole thing suited her down to the ground and the idea of getting the equivalent of a Graze box for hormones tickled her (quite literally) pink. She loved opening up the little ‘presents’ and I think found it a really nice opportunity to discuss something with me that I hadn’t realised we had missed out on.

I think it is a lovely idea, particularly for a girl either a little intimidated or over anxious about an impending period or for a mum who needs to find a way to broach the subject with a tween girl. At £6 for the first box (and £10 thereafter) it isn’t overpriced (a box of 20 Tampax being about £3 and the associated goodies decent value too, probably less than I could spend on a hormonal chocolate binge 😉 ) and the cost includes p&p. The box itself is designed to be letterbox size so you aren’t inconvenienced by collecting it from the sorting office and the contents are tailored to your needs through the sign up process – you can choose from Lil Lets, Tampax, Kotex and Always pads and the tampon boxes are multi- absorbancy for different days. Pad boxes have night towels included. For the sake of a treat and not having to dash out for supplies, I might even sign up myself 😉 The amount this house currently spends on these things and the associated chocolate might well make it worth it 😉

You can take a look at the product on their website at Pink Parcel – Teen Parcels are described on a tab at the top. In particular I found the FAQ page very helpful.

On Thursday 20th November there will be a Twitter Party about “around building girls’ self-confidence, and preparing girls for the start of their periods, and all the changes that come along with this part of life” – you can join in using hashtag #**********

Here are my tips.

Don’t be anxious about the period talk; speak openly about them from when they are young, with boys as well as girls. My experience is that youngsters are neither embarrassed or afraid and it prepares the ground for later discussion.
Put together a bag of all different types of sanitary protection and make time to open one of each, discuss them and handle them together.
Make sure important male members of the house know the subject has come up and are ready to ‘be nonchalant and open’ about the subject too. It’s just as normal as him shaving.
Make sure there are bins in the bathrooms they can use discreetly and encourage them to be part of the emptying and cleaning of them. Also have conversations about leaving toilets etc tidy for other members of the house. It can be messy and my experience is they need quietly letting know if they need to be more thoughtful.
Make sure you have a plan for knickers that need dealing with and neither parent particularly wants to encounter in a handful of washing.
Talk through the other changes of puberty and sex (hopefully less scarily than school seems to!) and lay down markers to help them prepare such as chatting through things like pain being a precursor to things getting ready to start and moodiness or growing breasts and hair. Make ‘it’s normal and we all know it is happening’ your mantra and encourage them to acknowledge the signs.
“Yeah. You are moody. Yes, it’s your hormones. Yes, it IS normal. No, you are not allowed to make everyone else’s life a living hell because of it.” I use this line a lot 😉

15 Practical Skills to Learn Before Leaving Home.

October 6, 2014 by Merry 1 Comment

The other week I wrote about preparing our kids for leaving home, having the emotional maturity to deal with being responsible for themselves and their actions and shaping themselves into a person who makes sensible choices and knows their path – or at least knows a way to point while they work out what path to be on. I loved Sally’s post on all the ‘other’ stuff a child needs to learn and our responsibilities to help them achieve those. But in my post I glossed over the practical elements of life outside the family nest in one quick point and an interesting twitter chat developed last week about things you really do need to know before setting off into the big wide world. Things that, until recently, didn’t feature in the school curriculum at all and probably still are learned by costly mistakes as much as by experience.

So what would it be really great to know how to do before you packed up and headed for the hills (or uni halls) of the big wide world?

How to cook. If you’ve been part of a medium or large family, cooking for one – and on a budget at that – is going to be a surprise. Invest time in teaching your teens to bake a potato, boil pasta, make bubble n’squeak and follow a recipe. Being able to create a balanced menu, incorporate food groups and vegetable and all the vitamins they need is a bonus. Luckily, there is a website for this 🙂
How to go shopping. I don’t do the food shopping in our house and even basic staple food prices catch me out. Learning to shop with someone wise, who looks for deals and special offers is useful, as is knowing not to buy the 3 for 2 if you’ll only eat 1 and the other 2 will go to waste.
How to make lists. Helping a child to recognise their personal organisational style (with its strengths and failings) is a skill that will stand them in good stead. Whether they use it for their shopping, uni work or paying bills on time, making sure they know a method that suits them, will really help.
How to budget and pay bills. Knowing how not to blow everything on payday, learning to put aside enough for all the bills and an emergency fund and planning out how to make wages or student loans last the time they need to is tricky. Perhaps the most important lesson is knowing how to solve a financial problem before it escalates. Talk through balancing bills in order of most critical for tight months, how to approach a bank for help, what debt management options are available and the implications and how to analyse the real cost of a loan or credit card. In particular, make sure they truly understand the reality of payday loans.
How to use Microsoft Office. (Or similar). Learning to use the main programmes within an Office-type suite is useful for life as well as how employable they are. Just for the budgeting alone, being able to make Excel sing is hugely helpful. Find an online course or make sure they’ve had access to them as kids, via a student licence if possible (to save you money).
How to clean their house. Our kids are messy but they do know how clean a bathroom, vacuum a room, throw out the rubbish & polish a table and what to use to do so. They also know the danger of obsessive disinfecting and the benefits of healthy dirt. Getting them to do it all is more of a challenge.
How to use white goods. Washing machines are terrifying 🙄 . Knowing the hard reality of washing a delicate top on an ordinary cycle, a wool jumper on hot and a white shirt with a red flannel is no bad thing. Being able to fix the problems that can be fixed (or make something with the felted jumper!) with appropriate products is handy. Understanding the care symbols on a clothing label is helpful. Being able to iron won’t do them any harm.
Basic mending skills. The days of being able to darn a sock heel are probably over but knowing how to mend a seam so it stays strong, sew a button back on, have a mending kit somewhere handy and thread a sewing machine if you have one are all good skills to have.
Basic car maintenance. Know how to de-ice a car, check and top up the oil, check tyre pressure and treads, refill windscreen wiper washers and fill a car with the RIGHT fuel (and know the implications of the wrong one being put in). Know what warning lights can’t be ignored at all, how to tax and MOT a car and when not to risk driving.
Learn to use a map. Google Maps is all very well but it doesn’t work on a walk across a moor with no network coverage or a drive across parts of Scotland. Being able to use a map properly, with a compass, might even save your life.
Talk on the phone. Learning to have adult, professional conversations on the phone with hospitals, doctors, or banks can be really daunting. Building up to that by taking small steps in late childhood is good practice.
Be savvy online and in the real world. Teach them to question the settings on their phone and keep up to date with online good practice. Learn good safety habits for being out and about alone and know the value of being realistic but sensible.
Plan a trip. Whether it is learning to read a train timetable and getting to London and back safely or plan an excursion to Australia, knowing how to plan a trip is great practice for taking responsibility for yourself. Managing connecting transport, keeping control of luggage and dealing with unexpected issues is tricky and part of life. Starting small and early helps build confidence for teen and parent.
Change a light bulb and a plug. There is a time and a place for messing with electricity and both of those are one where you can and should. Make sure they know basic safety for dealing with electric appliances and when not to try.
First Aid. Make them do a course. No further words needed. You just never know when they might need it.

And last of all, one of the greatest skills you can learn is knowing when to ask for help. Whether it is time to call Dad because the driver is drunk, or time to call Mum because you just tried to move a bookcase on your own and it fell on your face or when you are suddenly not sure if the car is safe to drive or maybe you can smell something funny near the boiler, knowing when to say “I just don’t know, I need someone to help me” is vital. Maybe the greatest gift you can give a child, as you try to build their independence and confidence is to give them the strength to put their hand up and say “I’m out of my depth; help me.” It might be a professional need for help, or it might be that they feel sad and alone and know that’s not good for them, but making sure they can say those words is a great gift.

What skills do you think a parent should make sure a child has before they leave home? This linky is jointly hosted with NotSupermum following a Twitter chat. Why not write a post and link up 🙂